When President Abraham Lincoln approved the plan of the Reverend William B. Carter, to burn the railroad bridges in East Tennessee, a sum of money was provided to Reverend Carter to carry out the project. That money, in cash or gold, is thought to have been taken by Carter, with him to Camp Dick Robinson, Kentucky, where the mission was planned It is presumed that Carter then carried the money with him to East Tennessee, to pay the bridge-burners. The actual amount of the cash has never been accurately determined. The amounts mentioned have ranged from $2500, to $25,000.Several stories have been told down through the years, about what happened to the money, but none can be proven. They are thought provoking however, as the money did exist.

One story that has endured in Greene County, said that the elderly son of one of the executed bridge-burners, exchanged a large amount of gold coins at a local bank, when the Federal Government recalled all gold held by citizens, in 1933. He is reputed to have carried the coins into the bank in an "eight pound lard bucket". It was said that the family had kept the gold hidden for over seventy years. If true, they certainly earned it.

It appears that the whereabouts of the missing money furnished by the U.S. Government to pay the other bridge-burners, has been under discussion almost from the time that the bridges were destroyed. An article published in a Jonesborough, Tennessee newspaper, on October 5, 1866 (only five years after the bridge-burning) accused the Reverend William B. Carter of keeping the money. The article was carried in THE EAST TENNESSEE UNION FLAG, but was picked-up from a story in the Knoxville Whig, which had been the newspaper of "Parson" Brownlow. The article is shown here as follows:

"Reverend! W.B. Carter, one of the orators of the late Johnson meeting in this city, is a very dark-skinned man. He has always been called "Black Bill Carter." But for the straightness of his hair he would pass anywhere for a negro. No mulatto or half-breed in the South is darker than "Black Bill Carter." In his speech here he complained that "though an original Union man, he was disfranchised under the laws of Tennessee, while Judge George Brown, who was a rebel, could vote." He added that his only consolation and hope of being permitted to vote, was that "his skin was black." He thought this would pass him with the Radicals. We can tell the Reverend!! gentleman he is mistaken. His black skin will not be a passport with Tennessee Radicals, because they know his heart is blacker than his skin, or that of any negro in the State. Radicals in Tennessee know he now has in his possession some twenty-two thousand dollars BLOODY-MONEY --money he received to remunerate the patriots who burned the bridges in 1861--money intended to be paid the widows and orphans of these men who died in rebel prisons and upon rebel scaffolds---money upon which the GREAT THIEF Bill Carter is living in affluence, while the widows and orphans of Haun and others who are entitled to it, are begging bread. Carter Calls the Governor "King Brownlow." Says he is "opposed to Brownlow having absolute power." Well he may be. If Governor B had "absolute power", Carter would now be in the penitentiary, with a striped suit on, breaking rock, where he should be for stealing thousands from widows and orphans of martyred patriots It was not greater sacrilege in John A. Murrel to exercise the functions of a minister than in this THIEF, COWARD, and VILLIAN, William Blount Carter alias Widow-Orphan-Robber, "Black Bill Carter."

"If the black men of African descent, were as black-hearted and hypocritical as this fellow Carter, there would be no advocates of negro suffrage."

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