Babcock was acquitted, with the aid of a deposition by General Grant, and only a few weeks before this trial was promoted to a colonelcy.
Only four months before the indictment and trial of Babcock, Secretary Belknap, a member of President Grant's Cabinet, was impeached and put on trial before the Senate at Washington. During the trial the late George F. Hoar, one of the Republican Senators from Massachusetts, addressed the Senate, and closed his discourse with the following fearful arraignment of the administration during the Presidency of Grant, and gave a transparent exposure of the reasons why the satellites of the President were determined to shrink from no crime necessary to prevent the inauguration at Washington of a President who had become famous by the havoc he had already made of the Tweed Ring plunderers in New York and the Canal Ring plunderers at Albany, and whose advent to Washington would put to flight the horde of miscreants who then infested both ends of the capitol:
"My own public life has been a very brief and insignificant one, extending little beyond the duration of a single term of Senatorial office, but in that brief period I have seen five judges of a high court of the United States driven from office by threats of impeachment for corruption or maladministration. I have heard the taunt from friendliest lips, that when the United States presented herself in the East to take part with the civilized world in generous competition in the arts of life, the only product of her institutions in which she surpassed all others beyond question was her corruption. I have seen in the State in the Union foremost in power and wealth four judges of her courts impeached for corruption, and the political administration of her chief city become a disgrace and a by-word throughout the world. I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House, now a distinguished member of this court, rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official privilege of selecting the youths to be educated at our great military school. When the greatest railroad of the world, binding together the continent and uniting the two great seas which wash our shores, was finished, I have seen our national triumph and exaltation turned to bitterness and shame by the unanimous reports of three committees of Congress, two of the House, and one here, that every step of that mighty enterprise had been taken in fraud. I have heard in highest places the shameless doctrine avowed by men grown old in public office that the true way by which power should be gained in the republic is to bribe the people with the offices created for their service, and the true end for which it should be used when gained is the promotion of selfish ambition and the gratification of personal revenge. I have heard that suspicion haunts the footsteps of the trusted companions of the President. These things have passed into history. The Hallam, or the Tacitus, or the Sismondi, or the Macaulay who writes the annals of our time will record them with his inexorable pen; and now, when a high Cabinet officer, the constitutional adviser of the Executive, flees from office before charges of corruption, shall the historian add that the Senate treated the demand of the people for its judgment of condemnation as a farce, and laid down its high functions before the sophistries and jeers of the criminal lawyer? Shall he speculate about the petty political calculations as to the effect of one party or the other which induced his judges to connive at the escape of the great public criminal; or, on the other hand, shall he close the chapter by narrating how these things were detected, reformed, and punished by constitutional processes which the wisdom of our fathers devised for us, and the virtue and purity of the people found their vindication in the justice of the Senate?"