Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Diary of Gideon Welles: Wednesday, August 9, 1865

I yesterday wrote a letter to Paul S. Forbes, returning an impertinent and insolent letter of his lawyer, Dickerson, and also wrote to Gardner, who claims to be his agent, and mentioned that the trial of the Algonquin was to be made by engineers selected by the Secretary of the Navy pursuant to contract. These letters I modified to-day and more carefully worded, for there is an obvious intention on the part of Dickerson, the patent lawyer, to have a controversy.

J. Z. Goodrich, Collector at Boston, called on me to-day. An effort is making — an intrigue, he says to displace him and appoint some other person. Ex-Vice-President Hamlin has been one of the persons named to succeed him, Assistant Postmaster-General McClellan another; the last person named is Gooch, the Representative. From the facts stated by Goodrich, I have little doubt that Mr. Representative Hooper has been active in this matter, probably the instigator. Gooch is doubtless in complicity with him. But Hooper is a man of equivocal character from these representations, and has connived at a fraud, was exposed and defeated by Goodrich, and now seeks to get Goodrich displaced from his position.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 356-7

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