Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

“My letter upon such a subject would be simply referred to the Secretary of the Navy, so your matter wouldn't go along any faster on that account. How much money do you want, Admiral?”

He said he needed fifty thousand dollars in gold.

“Well, I have six or seven millions of gold subject to my order, it is hard if this necessity of yours cannot be relieved. Tell your purser to draw on me for fifty thousand dollars and you endorse the draft for the payment of your crew, and I will answer the requisition.”

“But,” said the admiral, “I can never pay this money, General.”

“Never you mind that, Admiral; I never expect you will; but it will be a voucher to me when I am called upon to settle my accounts with the Treasury Department that the money has gone for public service.”

The troops were being paid in greenbacks, and that made a difficulty because there were no greenbacks in New Orleans with which to pay them. The “secretary of the treasury” of my imperium was puzzled what to do, but at last he devised this financial expedient: The troops who were paid sent home to their families by Adams Express a very considerable part of the sums received, and the oldest troops were paid first, in greenbacks brought by the paymaster when he came. Now, if we could get those greenbacks which were to be sent back by express, we could get enough to pay the remaining troops. Therefore, I made an arrangement with the Adams Express Company that they should return to my paymaster all the greenbacks that the troops gave them to be sent home to New York and Boston, and that they were to answer for the amount as if the greenbacks had been carried there; and I gave them my personal draft for the amount. The arrangement was beneficial to the express company, because if the troops could not get their pay then, they could not send anything home, and the express company could not make its profit. So we kept using those greenbacks in paying, over and over, until all my troops were paid. The drafts were answered, and the express company was reimbursed.

No other such correspondence was ever had by a commanding general acting as his own secretary of the treasury, showing transactions by which crews of a fleet and soldiers could be paid where they had been left without pay. This condition of affairs was