PBA Galleries

Autograph Letter Signed (with indecipherable initials). 2 pp. + original mailing envelope.

To “Oscar” (D.O. Cleveland, Broadalbin, NY): “…We have about completed the organization of the ‘Chemical Gold and Film Ore Reducing Co.’ at 64 Broadway and I am its Genl. Agent…I am in hope to get a place for you by July. So go into your Office of Census Taker. It will help a little. The Gov. has damaged me much. I would have had $25,000 stock in the Underground if he had signed the Bill. I hope he will yet sign the Baggage Bill. If so I will get something yet.” One month after Lee’s surrender, the “Chemical Gold and Silver Ore Reducing Company” was incorporated in New York, with a $5 million capitalization and, as President, Benjamin Franklin Butler – the Massachusetts politician and former Union General who had so offended the citizens of New Orleans that he gained the epithet “Beast” Butler. After begin relieved of command by General Grant, Butler appeared briefly at the helm of this company, which intended to manufacture and market a “newly discovered invention” for separating silver and gold from their ores, leaving the precious metals “free for amalgamation” – a process which the Company promised could save California and Nevada mine owners $5,000 a day. While Butler knew nothing about mining, neither did the four other Republican politicians who were company trustees (including the first wartime Commissioner of Internal Revenue, later Secretary of the Treasury, and the US Senator from silver-rich Nevada) – nor did the company’s “General Agent”, who wrote this letter while keeping an eye on political profit to be made from construction of New York City’s “Underground Railway”.