Word: littlefield
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...wife. Some $16 million in bonds, three mansions, a railroad, and countless acres of timberland passed through his hands; but the day came when he was jailed for skipping out on a $94 hotel bill. This contradictory, little-known figure of U.S. history was Union General Milton Smith Littlefield. In this book, North Carolina Author (A Southerner Discovers the South) and Editor (Raleigh News and Observer) Jonathan Daniels offers a tantalizing answer to the question of what Littlefield was really like...
...three inches torn from the left shoulder of his coat, by a ball from the enemy." General Sherman made him a lieutenant colonel and assistant provost marshal of Memphis, where, even in 1862, blockaded cotton was being feverishly and profitably traded to Northern mills. At Lincoln's command, Littlefield later organized one of the first Negro regiments. By war's end. General Littlefield's character, as well as his uniform, was still nearly "as immaculate...
What changed him Biographer Daniels does not know, and he refuses to guess. Perhaps the general simply could not confine his venturesome ego to a small Philadelphia lumber business and a placid, happy marriage. Backed by capital that may or may not have come from Wall Street, Littlefield went back to the South in 1867 with a bold scheme that was tactically watertight-and morally as leaky as a sieve. The plan was to buy up defaulted North Carolina railroad bonds for pennies, lobby or bribe the legislature into redeeming them, and sell on the rise. Littlefield found a ready...
With his smartly clipped beard, fawn-colored trousers and "killing cravat," Littlefield was a kind of one-man giveaway show. As one admirer put it: "With money he was as free as water, and when he had no money was just as free with checks." All through the late 1860s, he had the money, shelled out as much as $241,000 at a session to get the legislation he and his associates wanted. Eventually, the Swepson-Littlefield interests floated their own bonds for railroad lines they never built. They snapped up land at distress sales, bought state-owned cotton...
Ironically, Littlefield had just decided that he really wanted to run his honest-to-goodness railroad when all his loans began to slip their bonds. In the panic of '73, his empire fell. But before that his pal Swepson had disowned him and declared himself insolvent, although he subsequently died a millionaire, to be buried under the epitaph "Trusting in Jesus for Salvation." Little eld's great and good friend Mrs. Ann Cavarly, the wife of an associate, played the self-appointed blabbermouth before investigating committees, while Democratic journalists howled for the staunchly Republican general's head...