Grant’s Tea Pot dome comes to mind.
Look at Lincoln’s cabinet. Oligarchs with pure lust for power, competition with Lincoln, and eyes on Western development.
Chase
Seward
Stanton
http://www.mrlincolnandfriends.org/inside.asp?pageID=7&subjectID=7
This is why I look at the Civil War as THE power play for federal-and oligarchical-control of US development. Steel magnates, rail magnates, the lot of them, came out winners. If you look, you see that the transportation-canals and rail lines-went their way only. Small farmers and resource-rich land that had been settled were almost entirely ignored.
Yes, slavery was involved. I look, however, to the Missouri Compromise as the bellweather. That vote had to foretell which way the country would go from then on, and that there would be NO MORE COMPROMISE.
New England and its magnates won, and so we have that ethos in American politics to this day.
Often US Policy appears to be just whatever helps this power block get richer.