Communication From Major General Dix Relative to the Arrest of Hawley D Clapp Transmitted Legislature April 13, 1864 Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Communication From Major General Dix: Relative to the Arrest of Hawley D. Clapp; Transmitted Legislature April 13, 1864

As the money was paid into his hands, I consider him responsible for it; and I have deemed it my duty, whenever a clear case of fraud was made out, to see the soldier redressed, if possible.

It is only by the summary process of a military arrest, that these fraudulent transactions can be reached. If they are brought into the civil courts, all remedy is hopeless. The recruits are the only witnesses, and the exigencies of the country will not permit them to be kept from the field.

The only alternatives, therefore, were to allow these stupendous frauds to go unredressed, to let the patriotic men, who are offering their lives on the altar of their country, be robbed of the provision which their fellow citizens have made for their families, and to suffer the plunderers to escape with their ill-gotten gains, or to take, as I have done, some of the principal agents in these frauds into custody, to be held till they make restitution.

The amount of which recruits were defrauded at Lafayette Hall, where and while Mr. Clapp was chief broker, cannot fall short of $400,000. I have succeeded in recovering about $20,000, and am not without hope of adding largely to the amount.

I am fully aware of the responsibility I have taken in these cases, and that the exercise of the power of arrest is only warranted by the circumstances in which the country is placed, and the special facts which my report to the Secretary of War discloses. It has been exerted in a few cases only, and with the confident assurance in each, that I should be sustained by the Government, and by the public judgment.

Although it is technically true, as Mr. Clapp states in his petition to the Legislature, that "he has not held at any time office under the Government, or had any contracts with the Government" itself, he stood in his capacity as bounty broker, in relation to the military service, of which he seems to appreciate neither the scope nor the force.

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