abama River, ............. 3,500

Total, .............18,104

That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the "full value of the property
destroyed by the troops."

He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH INTEREST FROM
1813. From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers
were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty
thousand dollars) was handed to then and again they retired to Florida in
a condition of temporary tranquillity. Their ancestor's farm had now
yielded them altogether nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash.

6. Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it? Does he suppose
those diffident Fishers we: satisfied? Let the evidence show. The
Fishers were quiet just two years. Then they came swarming up out of the
fertile swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged
Congress once more. Congress capitulated on the 1st of June, 1860, and
instructed Mr. Floyd to overhaul those papers again, and pay that bill.
A Treasury clerk was ordered to go through those papers and report to Mr.
Floyd what amount was still due the emaciated Fishers. This clerk (I can
produce him whenever he is wanted) discovered what was apparently a
glaring and recent forgery in the paper; whereby a witness's testimony as
to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to name double the
amount which that witness had originally specified as the price! The
clerk not only called his superior's attention to this thing, but in
making up his brief of the case called particular attention to it in
writing. That part of the brief never got before Congress, nor has
Congress ever yet had a hint of forgery existing among the Fisher papers.
Nevertheless, on the basis of the double prices (and totally ignoring the
clerk's assertion that the figures were manifestly and unquestionably a
recent forgery), Mr. Floyd remarks in his new report that "the testimony,
particularly in regard to the corn crops, DEMANDS A MUCH HIGHER ALLOWANCE
than any heretofore made by the Auditor or myself." So he estimates the
crop at sixty bushels to the acre (double what Florida acres produce),
and then virtuously allows pay for only half the crop, but allows two
dollars and a half a bushel for that half, when there are rusty old books
and documents in the Congressional library to show just what the Fisher
testimony showed before the forgery--viz., that in the