possibly practice." When Babcock was indicted, however, for
complicity to defraud the Government, the President did not
hesitate to say on oath that he had never seen anything in
Babcock's behavior which indicated that he was in any way
interested in the Whiskey Ring and that he had always had "great
confidence in his integrity and efficiency." In other ways the
President displayed his eagerness to defend his private
secretary. The jury acquitted Babcock, but the public did not. He
was compelled to resign under pressure of public condemnation,
and was afterwards indicted for conspiracy to rob a safe of
documents of an incriminating character. But Grant seems never to
have lost faith in him. Three of the men sent to prison for their
complicity in the whiskey fraud were pardoned after six months.
McDonald, the chieftain of the gang, served but one year of his
term.

The exposure of the Whiskey Ring was followed by an even more
startling humiliation. The House Committee on Expenditures in the
War Department recommended that General William W. Belknap,
Secretary of War, be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors
while in office," and the House unanimously adopted the
recommendation. The evidence upon which the committee based its
drastic recommendation disclosed the most sordid division of
spoils between the Secretary and his wife and two rascals who
held in succession the valuable post of trader at Fort Sill in
the Indian Territory.

The committee's report was read about three o'clock in the
afternoon of March 2, 1876. In the forenoon of the same day
Belknap had sent his resignation to the President, who had