Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 4

[506] There was also a departure from the law in the matter of inspection and notice, which were conditions of a private sale. The only excuse for this illegality was that it was committed with good intent and beneficial results, and under ‘rather a soldier's than a lawyer's construction of the statute.’ Some discrepancies in accounts of sales between the accounts of the war and treasury departments, and between the accounts of our departments and those of the French government, which at first invited suspicion, were satisfactorily explained; so also a reported resolution of inquiry in the French Assembly was found to have been forged.

There were suspicions at the time that officials of the war department or persons of political influence outside who were urging the sales had profited by the transactions. Sumner was thoroughly convinced that there was wrong-doing somewhere. It was difficult on any other theory to explain why the show of neutrality was kept up without its substance; why, after a formal refusal to sell to the Remingtons, business relations were still kept up with them through ‘a man of straw.’ A telegraphic despatch in French cipher sent to Remington, then in France, by his son-in-law and agent in New York, a few days before the sales to his firm were stopped, was in these words: ‘We have the strongest influences working for us, which will use all their efforts to succeed.’ The promoters of the inquiry remained always of the conviction that there was illegitimate money-making at the bottom of the business; but they were unable to penetrate the veil with which astute men know how to cover such transactions. The character of Belknap himself, as subsequently developed in later evidence, is confirmatory of their view.

The person at Washington who first drew attention to the sale of arms to France was the Marquis de Chambrun,¹ then legal counsel of the French embassy at Washington, who took an interest in the trial of one Place, formerly French consul at New York, and accused after his return to his country of misconduct in connection with the purchase of arms. The French government was at the time inquiring how it was that it had paid more for the arms than our government had received. The marquis in the spring of 1871 brought the subject to the attention of Senator Patterson, asking that his committee on retrenchment investigate the subject, and saying that ‘undoubtedly ’