University of Virginia Library

BOUNTY-SWINDLING AS ONE OF THE
FINE ARTS.

ITS ORIGIN AND OFFICERS IN THE DAYS OF KING
HENRY IV.

[From the New York Herald, Dec. 25th, 1864.]

To say that many of the public men and most
of the newspapers of the day are great nincompoops,
would be merely to state a truism with
which every intelligent American is already as
familiar as with his creed. We have an illustration
of this in regard to the fuss that is being
everywhere made about “bounty swindling,” as
if it were “a new crime,” a “heretofore unheard
of atrocity,” which was born within the last
year and a half, and received its first pap
within the precincts of a New York drinking-house.

Now the fact is, that we first hear of “bounty-swindling
as one of the fine arts” in the reign of
King Henry IV. of England, the headquarters in
which it originated being those of Brigadier-General
Sir John Falstaff, and their location the tavern
of “mine hostess Quickly,” in Cheapside, London,

and not in the headquarters of Brigadier-General
F. B. Spinola at Lafayette Hall in the city of New
York. The facts of this interesting historical case
are about as follows:—Jefferson Hotspur had
raised an insurrection in the Northern counties of
England, as Jefferson Davis has since raised an
insurrection in the Southern States of our country.
Jeff. Hotspur expected help from Owen Glendower,
of Wales, from Northumberland, France,
and various other foreign and domestic potentates,
just as Jeff. Davis recently expected help from
France, England, and the domestic Longs, Voorheeses
and Vallandighams of the great North-west.
Both the Jeffs. were disappointed, and in both cases
the regular powers of their respective governments
proceeded to “seize, occupy, and repossess”
the revolted strongholds and regions.

King Henry IV., however, did not fall into the
error of believing that “it wouldn't be much of a
shower after all;” nor did his Secretary of State,
the Earl of Westmoreland, give any note of hand
for “peace within ninety days.” These matters
are not so stated in the chronicles; but we infer
them from the fact that there was no call for “three
months' men” on the first breaking out of the Jeff.
Hotspur insurrection. The order was to call out
men, and call them out immediately, their term
of service to extend “for life or during the
war.”

Matters being thus, the Prince of Wales, a gay,
young, rollicking buck—who had keen perceptions
of the ludicrous, and knew how to use all
ranks and classes of men in their proper sphere—
determined to employ the well-known tavern
popularity of a lewd old knight named Sir John
Falstaff for the purpose of raising a brigade. Sir
John immediately saw it was “a big thing,” and
accepted accordingly. He at once opened his
recruiting depôt in the tavern of Mrs. Quickly,
Cheapside; and there were employed under him, as
sub-brokers, runners, and “shanghaers,” a choice
party, consisting of Captains Pistol, Bardolph, Gadshill,
Poins, and their associates, most of these being
highwaymen, baggage-smashers, pickpockets, and
plug-uglies—precisely the same class that we find
employed in the same business on this side of the
Atlantic.

It nowhere appears that Sir John Falstaff was
court-martialed, as General Spinola has been, although
we know that he was finally sent to the
Tower—the Fort Lafayette of those days—under
a summary order from the Lord Chief-Justice of
England, who declared a suspension of the habeas
corpus in his case. The only evidence, therefore,
that we can hope for as to the modus operandi of
this ancient knight in the matter of “bounty-swindling
as one of the fine arts,” we must take
from his own volunteered confession, in Scene II.

Act IV., of the veracious chronicles of the reign
of King Henry IV., as handed down to us by one
William Shakespeare—a rather able journalist of
those days—who wrote for an evening newspaper
called The Globe Theatre, which was the New York
Associated Press of that benighted age.

Now let us hear Sir John:—He confesses, after
his brigade has been raised, that he has “misused
the king's press,” i.e. the right of conscription—
“damnably.” “I have pressed me,” says he,
“none but good householders, yeomen's sons;
inquired me out contracted bachelors, such as had
been asked twice on the bans; such a commodity
of warm slaves, as had as lief hear the devil as a
drum; such as fear the report of a culverin worse
than a struck fowl or a hurt wild duck. I pressed
me none but such toasts and butter, with hearts
in their bellies no bigger than pins' heads; and
they have bought out their services! And now,
my whole charge consists of ancients, corporals,
slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth,
where the glutton's dogs licked his sores; and
such as indeed were never soldiers, but discarded
unjust serving men, revolted tapsters and ostlers
trade-fallen—the cankers of a calm world and a
long peace; ten times more dishonorably ragged
than an old-faced ancient; and such have I to fill
up the room of them that have bought out their
services, that you would think that I had a hundred

and fifty tattered prodigals lately come from
swine-keeping—from eating draff and husks! A
mad fellow met me on the way, and told me I had
unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead
bodies! No eye hath seen such scare-crows.”
Now, let the examining surgeons on our own
Hart's and Riker's islands and elsewhere be consulted
as to whether the foregoing be not an exact
and striking picture of the kind of recruits who
were submitted to their inspection as the results
of our own “bounty-swindling” system in this
country and city?

But not only was the ancient knight thus making,
in the words of our beloved and classical
president, a “big thing” out of the price paid by
those whom he exempted, but it would also seem
that he had a bounty of over two pounds in gold
for each man thus drafted—a bounty which he
seems to have absorbed altogether, and which, as
gold was then, and as greenbacks are now, must
be considered fully equal to the three hundred
dollars county bounty of the present day. “I
have got,” says he, referring to the Supervisors'
Committee of that remote age, “I have got, in
exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers, three
hundred and odd pounds sterling;” these hundred
and fifty men being the same from whom he subsequently
drew a double profit by allowing them
to “buy out their time.”

But the parallel does not end here. In fact,
there is no branch of the “bounty-swindling”
system of to-day which will not find in the operations
of Sir John Falstaff, of his Britannic Majesty's
Volunteers, a precise archetype and master-sample.
We know that much of the recruiting
now carried on is through the agency of our
police officers and justices, who place before all
arrested criminals in our city—save those arrested
for crimes too heinous and notorious to be suppressed—the
alternative either of enlisting and
allowing their bounties to go somewhere, or of
going themselves to the penitentiary or State prison.
Now, in this mode of “filling up the ranks
of the gallant defenders of our country,” and filling
their own pockets at the same time, these gentlemen
may think themselves original; but let
them now hear the great master of “bounty-swindling
as one of the fine arts” on this subject:—

We have seen that Sir John Falstaff first
allowed the good and decent men drafted to “buy
out their time,” himself pocketing the bribes. We
have seen, also, that he pocketed the whole of
their “county bounties” for the use of himself
and his associate sub-brokers, Messrs. Pistol, Bardolph
and Company. How then did he induce
the “scare-crows” to enlist under him without
money and without price? Why, obviously by

just the same means that are employed to-day by
our policemen and police justices; he gave them
the alternative of remaining in jail or “marching
to the music of the Union.” If you doubt it
just consult his words:—“Nay, and the villains
march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves
on; for, indeed, I had the most of them out of
prison.” That he knew them to be all thieves, or
most of them, at least, is further evidenced by the
fact, that he consoles himself for their having
“but a shirt and a half” in the whole brigade by
the reflection: “But that's all one; they'll find
linen enough on every hedge.” How they appeared
to the eye of an experienced commander
may be judged from the exclamation of Prince
Henry who passed them on the road as he hurried
forward to battle: “I never did see such
pitiful rascals;” to which Sir John Falstaff
promptly replied: “Tush, tush! they are good
enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder;
they will fill a pit as well as better—” thus
illustrating precisely the value which certain of
our modern knights, who only entered the service
apparently to make money, are apt to place both
on the lives of their men and the true service of
their government. But of course in none of the
foregoing remarks must we be misunderstood as in
the slightest degree reflecting on any of the pure,
patriotic, and disinterested officers who recently
did business at Lafayette Hall, previous to the
closing of that disgrace to our country by the
action of Maj.-Gen. Dix and the minor ministrations
of Private Miles O'Reilly.