e robbing of
our government was a novelty. The very man who showed me where to find
the documents for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of
thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the
effort to procure a subsidy for the company--a fact which was a long time
in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent
Congressional investigation.]

This is history. It is not a wild extravaganza, like "John Wilson
Mackenzie's Great Beef Contract," but is a plain statement of facts and
circumstances with which the Congress of the United States has interested
itself from time to time during the long period of half a century.

I will not call this matter of George Fisher's a great deathless and
unrelenting swindle upon the government and people of the United States
--for it has never been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and
solemn wrong for a writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the
case--but will simply present the evidence and let the reader deduce his
own verdict. Then we shall do nobody injustice, and our consciences
shall be clear.

On or about the 1st day of September, 1813, the Creek war being then in
progress in Florida, the crops, herds, and houses of Mr. George Fisher,
a citizen, were destroyed, either by the Indians or by the United States
troops in pursuit of them. By the terms of the law, if the Indians
destroyed the property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the troops
destroyed it, the Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher
for the amount involved.

George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the
property, because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not
appear to have ever made any claim upon the government.

In the course of time Fisher died, and his widow married again.
And by and by, nearly twenty years after that dimly remembered raid upon
Fisher's corn-fields, the widow Fisher's new husband petitioned Congress
for pay for the property, and backed up the petition with many
depositions and affidavits which purported to prove that the troops,
and not the Indians, destroyed the property; that the troops, for some
inscrutable reason, deliberately burned down "houses" (or cabins) valued
at $600, the same belonging to a peaceable private citizen, and also
destroyed various other property belonging to the same citizen. But
Congress declined to believe that the troops were such idiots (