After serving two years in the General Assembly, Jenkins ran in the general election of 1868 as the Republican candidate for State Treasurer and became the first State Treasurer elected statewide. Reflecting his astuteness as a politician, he immediately employed his predecessor and his opponent, Kemp Battle, as an advisor. He hired another Democrat, Donald Bain, as chief clerk. Bain would become Treasurer himself in a decade.
Jenkins served as North Carolina's Treasurer during a time of great despair. The Civil War had taken the lives of 40,000 of the State's best men and thousands of others returned home minus an arm, an eye, a leg, or maimed in yet another serious way. More than $200 million of the State's wealth had been wiped out with the abolition of slavery. 1
All of North Carolina's surplus funds had been consumed by the war. Some $10 million in Confederate taxes, according to historian Hugh T. Lefler, had been consumed in the losing cause. The war left North Carolina with many of its best young men dead, its treasury empty and its government in shambles.
Jenkins was re-elected in 1872. His tenure as Treasurer coincided with one of the stormiest and most scandal-ridden periods in the State's history. During Reconstruction, North Carolina was governed by a Republican coalition of former union sympathizers, native blacks and "carpetbaggers." The "carpetbaggers" were mostly Yankees who came South after the war, carrying all their earthly belongings in carpetbags, thus their unaffectionate nickname. It was during this time the greatest financial scandal in the history of the State occurred. The Republican legislatures of 1868 and 1869 issued a total of $27.8 million in railroad bonds which were discovered to be embroiled in widespread fraud. Railroad officials had given or "loaned" more than a quarter of a million dollars to key legislators in exchange for their support in issuing the bonds. Huge sums from the bond proceeds went into the pockets of lawyers, legislators, top railroad officials and even one judge was accused of accepting a payoff. 2
When Democrats regained control of the General Assembly one of their first acts was to repudiate the fraudulent railroad bonds. Although neither Treasurer Jenkins nor Governor W. W. Holden was personally implicated in the scandal or charged with receiving any of the stolen proceeds, they would have had to be naive not to know what was going on around them. Jenkins was regarded as honest and respectable by his contemporaries, and his opponents; however, he resigned before the end of his last term. 3
1 Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, The History of a Southern State, North Carolina Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 448.
2 Lefler and Newsome, The History of a Southern State, 465.
3 William S. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, Vol. III (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 227.
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