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

[960] Secretary of the Treasury that is true. The Secretary of the Treasury has no time to attend to any such thing. He has an immense department wherein all the money received and all the money paid out by the United States must be taken care of by one man. It might be possible for him to do that, but still I think there ought to be two secretaries of the treasury, one to take care that the government gets all the money that it ought to get and to take care that it is paid into the treasury, and the other to take care of all the money that is paid out and to see that the government does not pay out anything it ought not to. But the difficulty with a single Secretary of the Treasury is that he has an immense collection of officers under him, and has the virtual appointment of them all; and there is not an honest Secretary of the Treasury that will not say that more of his time is taken up in discussion about offices, in signing commissions, and examinations into their action and in removing them, especially when there is any change in administration, than in all the rest of the business of the treasury.

Such a system of terminal annuities could be carried on very simply, without any complications whatever, and with no opportunity of loss to the government, and with immense gain to our people. It is not half as complicated or exposed to danger and loss as is the money-order system of the post-office department, and yet a few years ago it was thought impossible for that to be done by the government. Here and now is no place to argue these propositions, but simply to state the facts of the advantages of the system, so that, attention being called to them, it may help to work its way to being established.

The other great question which occupied my attention was that of reconstruction. With the radical Republicans of my party I held the proposition that I had before enunciated, namely, that the rebel States should be held as Territories under military government until all possibility of a race war or race dissensions between white and black should be obliterated, and that then those Territories might be admitted into the Union as States when the negro had learned how to be a citizen, and the white man had learned how to be a loyal one.

Slavery had been abolished by the thirteenth article of amendment to the Constitution. Although I finally agreed to this amendment,