PRIVATE SECRETARY TO ULYSSES S. GRANT, WHISKEY RINGLEADER
1835–1884
Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia
Orville Elias Babcock graduated third in his class from West Point in 1861, just in time to start fighting in the Civil War. He first worked to fortify Washington, D.C., against attack, then helped build a strategic pontoon bridge at Harpers Ferry. After proving himself as an engineer, he moved around the country in various roles and theaters, eventually becoming General Ulysses Grant’s top aide.
After the war, he resigned his commission, and when Grant became president he acted as his personal secretary and advisor. In 1869, Grant sent Babcock on a secret mission to Santo Domingo, with an unusual plan to annex the Dominican Republic (then known as Santo Domingo) and create a “Negro state” there, or at least alleviate some tension between blacks and whites during Reconstruction by offering territory in an American protectorate. The plan failed.
Soon after, Babcock became embroiled in a scandal in which a group of revenue agents, working with distillers, rectifiers, gaugers, and functionaries in the revenue and Treasury department, bribed and stole millions of dollars from the federal government. The idea was to pay less tax on whiskey produced, which they achieved through a variety of means including labeling whiskey as vinegar, falsifying proof statements, and running the distilleries illegally at night. Five men in the revenue office were the ringleaders, pocketing the cash and creating a political slush fund for western Republicans. Distilleries that refused to participate were slapped with fines and penalties for minor infractions of production regulations. Babcock seems to have been a willing participant. According to the historian Peter Krass, his “immoderate appetites for clothing, drink, and fornication—all to be satisfied at the cost of the public treasury—led him to ever more brazen adventures and needless risks.” Babcock wore a diamond shirt stud worth twenty-four hundred dollars, and one imagines he might not have been able to afford it on a White House administrative salary.
Only when Benjamin Bristow was appointed secretary of the Treasury, and worked with secret agents and Attorney General Edward Pierrepont (a cousin of Hezekiah’s; see this page), was the ring exposed. Bristow, a Kentuckian, would later say only one-third of the tax due would actually make its way to the U.S. Treasury; this at a time when alcohol tax made more than 50 percent of the federal revenue. President Grant was willing to testify in Babcock’s defense (though in the end he merely gave a deposition), and Babcock was exonerated. In 1876, Babcock was indicted again in a complicated case where a group of contractors, on trial for graft, used dynamite to fake a burglary in the safe of a district attorney and then planted documents supposedly taken from the safe in the home of Columbus Alexander, a witness for the prosecution against the contractors and a critic of the Grant administration. The ruse fell apart when the hired burglars turned against the contractors and Babcock was again implicated. His involvement wasn’t proven, but by now Grant had to get him out of the White House.
After the scandal, Babcock went back to the Army Corps of Engineers and was sent to help finish construction on the Mosquito Inlet Lighthouse, near Daytona Beach. When he arrived, the boat that was to bring him to the site capsized, and Babcock drowned. He and his boat mates were found onshore, buried in sand, their legs bitten off by sharks.