It was under such circumstances that the aid of banks and bankers became important for the furtherance of subscriptions, in view of the fact that they could give personal service of a nature not possible in the case of salaried officers of the Government, nor compatible with their daily duties.
It is not easy, in this age of comparative freedom and power in financial affairs, to comprehend that in the year 1871 the long established bankers of New York, Amsterdam, and London, either declined or neglected the opportunity to negotiate the five per cent coin bonds of the United States upon the basis of their par value. It may not be out of place for me to mention Mr. Morton, of the house of Morton, Bliss & Co., as an exception, to the bankers of Europe and the United States.
It was in the same months of 1871 that I recommended the issue of a four per cent fifty-year bond as the basis of the currency to be issued by the national banks. This proposition, which would have been advantageous to the banks, in an increasing ratio as the value of money diminished, was defeated by the organized opposition of the banks through an effective lobby that was assembled in the city of Washington. Such was the public sentiment in the year 1871, even in the presence of these important facts, that in the month of December I was able to say in my annual report that the debt had been diminished during the next preceding year in the sum of ninety-four million dollars, and that the total decrease from March 1, 1869 to December 1, 1871, was over two hundred and seventy-seven million dollars.
It was in this situation of affairs that Messrs. Jay Cooke & Co. proposed to undertake the sale in London, by subscription, of one hundred and thirty-four million five per cent bonds then unsold. Authority was given to Cooke & Co. to proceed with the undertaking, and when the books were closed, September 1, I was informed that the loan had been taken in full. By the terms prescribed by Cooke & Co., the subscribers deposited five per cent as security for the validity of their subscriptions. The bonds were to be delivered the first day of December.
Upon the receipt of the information that the undertaking had been a success, the bonds were prepared, and the Hon. William A. Richardson, then an assistant secretary of the Treasury, was designated as the agent of the department for the delivery of the bonds. The bonds were placed in safes, on each of which there were three locks. The clerks were sent over in different vessels, and the keys were so distributed among them, that there were not keys in any one vessel by which any one of the safes could be opened.