When I was a reporter covering Congress in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the regular assignments was to write a “letter from Washington” highlighting some revealing aspect of the city’s life.

The idea was not new. Explaining and decoding the political culture of the nation’s capital has been the pastime of journalists since correspondents perched in the Capitol. In the years after the Civil War, as Washington took on increasing importance and newspapers were capable of covering events with new speed thanks to the telegraph, interest in the byways and business of Washington increased enormously.

Authors stepped in to meet the demand with books that were part travelogue and part political commentary. Their work shared a common theme. There was much about which to be proud in the nation’s capital – and much cause for shame. The Credit Mobilier scandal figures prominently in two of these volumes.

“The pet child of the Republic, Washington City, is unknown to the majority of the American people,” Dr. John B. Ellis declares in the introduction to his The Sights and Secrets of the Nation’s Capital, published in 1869. In 512 pages, Ellis set out to remedy that situation with chapters covering everything from the architecture of the U.S. Capitol to the Smithsonian and Cabinet departments.

Ellis holds up Pennsylvania Avenue, the boulevard linking the Capitol and the White House, as a model urban thoroughfare. “It is handsomely built up, and contains some building which would do credit in any city,” he gushed.

But Ellis did not confine himself to landmarks and important institutions. Washington was a “paradise” for gamblers and filled with “houses of ill fame,” he notes with disdain. The city’s politically powerful numbered among the patrons in both establishments. And his scorn for lobbyists comes through in his description of the hotels where they congregated.

“The halls, sitting-rooms and parlors are crowded to excess with a noisy, boisterous crowd, all talking at the same time, and producing a very Babel of sounds,” Ellis says. “The air is hazy with tobacco smoke, and the floors are slippery with tobacco juice.”

Four years later, as Washington reeled from the tawdry dealings revealed in the Credit Mobilier investigations on Capitol Hill, two more books – cast with the same template used by Ellis – rolled off the presses to satisfy the nation’s curiosity about its capital.

Edward Winslow Martin’s Behind the Scenes in Washington appeared in 1873. In addition to detailed descriptions of the city’s landmarks and history, it covers Credit Mobilier in some detail. The scandal’s major personalities – Oakes Ames, Schuyler Colfax, James A. Garfield, among others – are profiled. But the verbatim republication of a long New York Herald story about the scandal reveals the hasty manner in which the book was put together.

Of far more interest is George Alfred Townsend’s Washington Outside and Inside, also published in 1873. Townsend was a prominent Washington correspondent whose work appeared in newspapers under the byline “GATH.” In addition to the detailed (and frankly tedious) review of the city’s historic sites, Townsend recounts the journey he took across the northern Virginia to the site of First and Second Bull Run in Manassas.

Like Martin, Townsend reviews the Credit Mobilier scandal in some detail, but his perspective is of far more interest since he actually covered it. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Townsend traveled to Philadelphia to retrace the steps of the New York Sun correspondent who broke the story and concluded that Democratic super-lawyer Jeremiah S. Black was behind it.

Townsend republished his piece and reviews the cases against each of the lawmakers implicated in the scandal, absolving Garfield and Henry Dawes of wrongdoing in spite of the fact that the House committee investigating the scandal concluded they both bought and profited from their investments in Credit Mobilier.

Even though he gave Garfield and Dawes a pass, Townsend is far from satisfied with the manner in which Congress conducts business. The last-minute passage of the retroactive pay raise that came to known as the “salary grab” comes in for particular scorn.

“This most scandalous action was worthy of a body of men which has become diseased and corrupt by the advantages of war, and has wholly lost its own self-respect and the confidence of the country.”

In the spring of 1873, two authors put the finishing touches on a different kind of book about Washington. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner concocted a sprawling novel full of humor and Victorian melodrama to tell the story of one family’s futile pursuit of riches.

Credit Mobilier is never mentioned but informs the characters and much of the humor. It mocks the failure of the House to expel Ames when one of the characters asks after the failure to punish a congressman named “Fairoaks” if Congress “could convict the devil of anything if he were a member?”

The relatively gentle humor of the book left the literary critic of the Washington Evening Star unimpressed. “There are good parts in it, but no real merriment,” the critic sniffed. “The essence of comedy is wanting.”

The title of the novel: The Gilded Age: a Tale of To-Day.

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The normally feisty editorial page of Charles A. Dana’s New York Sun seemed unusually downcast.

It was Nov. 29, 1872. Horace Greeley, the great editor of the New York Tribune who had once employed Dana as his managing editor, lay at death’s door. Greeley died later that day – bringing an end to one of the most remarkable careers in the history of American journalism – only weeks after voters overwhelmingly rejected his quixotic bid for the White House.

In the midst of the presidential campaign, the Sun – which backed Greeley and was an outspoken critic of President Ulysses S. Grant – published an explosive story detailing sweetheart stock deals involving members of Congress and a lucrative subsidiary of the Union Pacific.

Oakes Ames, a financier heavily invested in the Union Pacific and a Republican member of Congress from Massachusetts, sold the shares in the company – Credit Mobilier – to Republican colleagues with the expectation that ownership of the stock would make them more inclined to support the interests of the railroad. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames indiscreetly confided to Henry S. McComb, a Credit investor who would later sue him.

The story implicated many of the biggest names in Washington, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax; his successor, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts; James A. Garfield and John Bingham of Ohio, Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, and William “Pig Iron” Kelley of Pennsylvania. The Sun also named House Speaker James G. Blaine and Treasury secretary George Boutwell as Credit Mobilier purchasers, although no evidence would emerge to implicate them.

The Sun’s scoop attracted considerable attention but ultimately made no difference in the outcome of the campaign. Grant carried all but six states and led Republicans to a massive majorities in the House.

Now, as Dana’s mentor lay dying weeks after voters seemed to have shrugged off the Credit Mobilier story, the Sun raised the white flag. A “thorough and honest investigation of the Credit Mobilier is not to be expected at the hands of this Congress,” the Sun predicted. The Sun endorsed the call by the liberal Springfield Republican for the expulsion of Ames even as it cast doubt on its likelihood.

“But is it probable that Mr. Ames would consent to be expelled without attempting to defend himself?” the Sun asked. “And would not the mischief done to prominent members of both parties, and especially of the Republican party, by such a defense be greater than any possible harm that might come from ignoring the whole subject and letting Ames remain quietly in his place for the few months remaining to the present Congress?”

It turned out that Dana’s pessimism was premature. Before spring returned to Washington, no fewer than three congressional committees were investigating Credit Mobilier’s business practices and reach on Capitol Hill.

The Sun’s editorial rested on sound, if cynical, political logic – and raises one of the great questions surrounding the story of the Credit Mobilier scandal: why would Republicans pursue an investigation into a scandal when there were powerful incentives to ignore it?

In fact, there were several reasons, involving politics and principle, for congressional Republicans to get to the bottom of the affair.

For one thing, there had long been unease about Credit Mobilier among Republicans and blue-stocking opinion leaders. In 1869, Republican Representative Cadwallader C. Washburn of Wisconsin denounced Credit Mobilier (named after a prominent French banking house) for inflating railroad construction costs to allow its stockholders – who were also Union Pacific investors – to fraudulently enrich themselves.

Through Credit Mobilier, Washburn charged in a House speech, the Union Pacific “practically contracts with itself to build the road, and that the enormous figures they exhibit as representing the cost of the road are absolutely fictitious.”

Washburn’s speech followed a scathing article about railroad finance by Charles Francis Adams Jr. in the North American Review that took direct aim at Credit Mobilier. Government-backed railroad construction threatened the honest operation of government, Adams warned, and Credit Mobilier exemplified why. “The members of it are in Congress,” Adams wrote of Credit Mobilier. In “Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the Plains they expend them, and in the Credit Mobilier they divide them.”

Republicans like Washburn who represented the farm states of the Old Northwest were also well aware of the rising anger with monopolistic railroad practices. Membership in the nominally apolitical Patrons of Husbandry – known more commonly as the Grange – spread like wildfire in the Mississippi Valley and South in 1872 and into 1873, fueled by disenchantment with railroads.

The Grange was not a partisan organization, but that did not mean its members were disinterested in politics. When it came to politicians, Grangers wanted to know one thing, a Nebraska newspaper noted: “Is he liable to be bought by the railroads? In other words, is he the staunch loyal friend of the husbandman?”

Republicans also realized that the scandal – by detailing the tawdry eagerness of elected representatives to pocket a tidy sum from a shady business – cast a dark cloud over Congress. Republican Representative George McCrary of Iowa, a member of one of the committees that investigated Credit Mobilier, noted that respect for law depended on respect for those who wrote the law. McCrary’s chairman, Republican Luke Potter Poland of Vermont, warned his colleagues that they needed to act vigorously to convince the public that they were not in thrall to the “money power” of wealthy corporations and speculators.

Perhaps no one exemplified Republican concern about Credit Mobilier more than Garfield. Even though he was implicated in the scandal – and would later be found to have bought Credit Mobilier shares, despite his denials under oath – Garfield met with Blaine to urge an investigation.

It was a risky move, but Garfield had been advised by Jeremiah S. Black, an influential Democratic lawyer who was representing Henry S. McComb in his suit against Ames, that he had nothing to fear. Ames may have intended the sweetheart sale as a bribe, Black reasoned, but since Garfield did not know the motives for the sale, he was not guilty of taking a bribe.

But things did not go according to plan. Pressure from newspapers forced the closed-door proceedings to open to the public. Members of Congress who denied buying shares from Ames were shown to have lied when Ames produced proof of their transactions. The committee led by Poland focused on the motives of Ames and a leading House Democrat, James Brooks of New York, but made no attempt to examine how the stock sales may have affected the actions of those who bought the shares. In the end, only Ames and Brooks were sanctioned by the House, and their punishment — censure — was less severe than the expulsion recommended by Poland and his colleagues.

The political melodrama transfixed Washington and the rest of the country. One Garfield ally advised the lawmaker that back home, “People have been asking, whereunto shall this thing grow?”

The failings of the House investigation into the scandal infuriated the public and contributed to voter anger with Republicans in 1873 and 1874. The well-intended plan of party leaders was overshadowed by unhappiness with the outcome. In the end, Republicans paid a high price for Credit Mobilier – not for ignoring the scandal, which Dana predicted and would have made short-term political sense, but because they botched the job.

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In a scandal featuring personalities Oakes Ames himself said were perceived as “scoundrels and swindlers,” perhaps it was inevitable that Ben Butler would get involved.

As Congress weighed what to do about the Credit Mobilier scandal in the early months of 1873, the Massachusetts Republican emerged as Ames’s chief defender in the House.

With the possible exception of Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York, few figures on Capitol Hill were more controversial, colorful – or unusual. A droopy eye, receding hairline and prodigious paunch gave Butler a decidedly un-heroic appearance. One observer likened his gait to a “bass walking on its tail.” He often wrapped himself in a cape as he strode onto the House floor.

Despite — or perhaps because of — his idiosyncrasies, Butler was a valuable ally for the embattled Ames. After weeks of hearings and testimony, a House investigative committee led by Luke Potter Poland of Vermont called for the expulsion of Ames and Representative James Brooks of New York for their role in the scandal involving the lucrative construction subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad.

Butler seemed attracted to controversy much as a moth is drawn to flame. In 1860, he was a Democrat who attended the party’s convention in Charleston and supported the nomination of a Mississippi senator named Jefferson Davis. After the fall of Fort Sumter, he rallied to the Stars and Stripes and rose to become one of Lincoln’s “political generals” – officers who earned their rank through clout or influence rather than merit.

Butler was widely regarded – particularly below the Mason-Dixon Line – as a villain and a thief. As the Union commander in New Orleans, he enraged Confederates for ordering that any woman who showed contempt to occupying U.S. soldiers was to be “treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.”  His brother “was getting rich on confiscated cotton,” Shelby Foote writes, and Butler received the nickname “Spoons” for his alleged habit of pilfering silverware.

But the South had another reason for hating him. In the early days of the war he refused to return runaway slaves to their former owners. Butler declared they were “contraband of war” and allowed them to remain behind Northern lines. Congress endorsed the policy – “a signal,” James McPherson notes, “that if the conflict became an antislavery war it would become a Republican war.”

After the war, he became a leading Radical Republican who led the unsuccessful efforts to impeach President Andrew Johnson. In February, 1873 he rallied to the defense of Ames.

Butler spoke on Ames’s behalf during the second day of the expulsion debate. His much-anticipated speech packed the House gallery.  “Gen. Butler was not eloquent, but he was savage – as savage as a meat ax,” Representative Julian Burrows would recall after Butler’s death in 1893. “It was not what he said that made the House listen to him, but the expectation of what he was going to say. He was like a volcano – always smoking and always giving a hint of an impending eruption.”

Butler offered a characteristically impassioned defense of his Massachusetts colleague. Ames was not a scoundrel, but a hero whose support of the Union Pacific warranted praise, not condemnation. His transactions with his colleagues were not bribes but business deals. The whole controversy, Butler declared, was concocted by scurrilous newspaper reporters and their editors who acted as if they, not the elected representatives of the people, understood best what Congress should do.

Butler’s “eruption,” to employ Burrow’s simile, played well in the House, where lawmakers were already inclined not to expel Ames or Brooks. “Everybody hung intently on his words,” the New York Tribune reported. “He made his hearers shout with laughter.”

In the end, the House voted to censure Ames rather than expel him. Butler, however, was not done. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass a retroactive pay raise at the end of the session. The ill-advised measure proved politically toxic and became, with Credit Mobilier and the aftershocks of a brutal stock market crash in September, 1873, another political liability for congressional Republicans.

In 1874, voters rendered their verdict on Credit Mobilier, the economy, and what became known as the “salary grab” when Democrats went from a 110-seat minority in the House to a 60-seat majority. It was the biggest partisan swing of the nineteenth century – and one of the Republicans who went down to defeat was Butler.

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