The hostility of England to the United States during our rebellion was not so much real as it was apparent.
—Ulysses S. Grant
Santo Domingo was freely offered to us, not only by the administration, but by all the people, almost without price.
—Ulysses S. Grant
GENERAL GRANT’S CIVIL WAR was, of course, the great event of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency; the absence of civil and international war was the greatest of Ulysses Grant’s. With the major exception of the warfare against the Indian peoples on the plains, no military conflict occurred during Grant’s administration, and most historians would consider the settlement of a major controversy with Great Britain without resort to arms as the prime accomplishment of his presidency. In point of fact, however, he scarcely gave the settlement with England the time of day, but complained bitterly for the rest of his life that he had been unable to annex the Dominican Republic and thereby consummate an energetic effort in Caribbean imperialism.
Grant’s two major international diplomatic enterprises differed strikingly in style. One resulted in an exemplary resolution of a family quarrel by the most gentlemanly means; it has served as a beacon of enlightened diplomacy ever since. The other is customarily pictured as a cheap effort to buy a bit of Caribbean real estate. What was more, the purchase seemed to have been attempted without the slightest regard for the wishes of the people who lived on the island, but with intense regard for the pocketbooks of the brokers of the deal, one of whom lived in the White House. The first of these diplomatic enterprises was the successful settlement of the Alabama claims against Great Britain. The second was the unsuccessful attempt to annex the Dominican Republic—or Santo Domingo, as Grant called it.
As in the matter of Black Friday, one needs to consider style critically. It is easy to be swept along by a cast headed by Sir Edward this, Sir John that, and an Adams or two, through three acts of a comedy of mild irascibility and impeccable good manners, culminating in an uncritical burst of Anglo-American self-applause. What of the substance of the agreement? Some very rich bankers got richer because of the settlement of the Alabama claims without a war. (Once, in a cabinet meeting, on being advised that the position of the United States government would be strengthened by employment of the house of Morton & Rose as disbursing agent in London, Grant sardonically asked Secretary of State Hamilton Fish if Morton’s firm might perhaps be strong because of the government’s patronage rather than the other way around.) The bankers deserve praise for helping avoid war—they were not the only beneficiaries of peace—but are they to be seen as selfless men of virtue, while the men, no more and no less acquisitive, who failed to take over Santo Domingo are castigated? Is the Santo Domingo matter fairly understood as an aging, steamy, little out-of-date production, peopled with Sidney Greenstreets and Peter Lorres and individuals carrying not very clearly remembered Latin American names?
After all, Charles Sumner tried to wreck both deals, and that alone makes one want to take a close look at both. President Grant himself could never appear interested in the Alabama-claims matter—except to tell Fish to get it settled before the next election—and yet it is called the greatest feather in his peacetime cap. On the other hand, he cared greatly about the annexation of Santo Domingo, and he made his claim for this annexation on the grounds of the highest of policy. He saw it as a vital part of the solution of the nation’s race problem. One can doubt not only the practicality but also the wisdom of establishing an all-black American state to which discontented former slaves would be invited to migrate; but one cannot, in the face of Grant’s definition of the annexation in such terms, dismiss the effort to achieve it simply as corrupt money grubbing.
To take handsome matters first, the Alabama claims covered a host of disputes between Great Britain and the United States. There was the eternal question of fishing rights on the banks off the coast of New England, the question of the unfixed boundary in the coastal bays between the United States and British Columbia, and the problem of Great Britain’s unwillingness to recognize as American citizens those former subjects who had emigrated and been naturalized (including people of Irish ancestry who, on returning to the old sod, might find useful the protection of their American citizenship). But the focus of the controversy was the damage done American shipping and the American cause during the Civil War by five ships—the Florida, the Georgia, the Rappahannock, the Shenandoah, and most famously, the Alabama—that had been built in British dockyards and used by the Confederacy. These vessels destroyed Union ships, disrupted the blockade, and terrorized Northern commercial shippers. Insurance rates went up, and 750 American ships were transferred to foreign flags.
Charles Francis Adams, the wartime minister to London, had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the British government to make retribution with a monetary settlement. After Adams was recalled in 1868, Andrew Johnson’s next minister, Reverdy Johnson, worked out a moderate compromise with Lord Clarendon, the British foreign secretary. But Reverdy Johnson was out of favor with the Republicans in the Senate. They detested him for his cordiality to Confederate sympathizers in England and saw him as the discredited envoy of a discredited president. Shortly after Grant’s inauguration, on April 13, 1869, the Johnson-Clarendon Convention was rejected by the Senate.
Things were going from bad to worse, and it was Charles Sumner who was carrying them there. The magnificent defender of the equality of humankind in general and of black Americans in particular was, nonetheless, a man of unpredictable enthusiasms. Ulysses Grant got along less well with that handsome, vain, lonely, and ambitious man than with any other person he encountered in his entire life. As the conscience of the party and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner expected the new president to defer to him. Or rather, he expected to be asked to be secretary of state. Grant had learned to dislike Sumner long before he chose a cabinet. He not only passed him by for the post but did not ask his advice about whom he should appoint. It was bad enough for Sumner when Grant appointed Washburne, a bumpkin whom the Harvard man could scorn (and could anticipate dominating); it was still worse when Grant beat Sumner at his own game by naming Hamilton Fish, an aristocratic gentleman from New York. Before Grant could do so, Sumner had sought to define the lines of American international policy. He made the Alabama-claims issue his own in the Senate debate over the Johnson-Clarendon Convention and gave expression to his odd, vitriolic anglophobia in a demand for a huge payment—amounting to $2,500,000,000—for the “indirect” damage done the American cause by the ships built in Great Britain, instead of payment for direct losses, which Hamilton Fish calculated at $48,000,000. The smaller amount—subject to compromise—was not too large a price for peace. Insistence on the larger sum would mean war. Sumner did not seem to mind that this was where he was leading the nation. Charles Francis Adams thought his difficult friend took this bellicose position out of a perverse want of “virility.” It was a kind of wild will to self-destruction. Sumner was asking for enough money to obstruct any peaceful settlement, and he was doing so in a way that would undermine everyone’s confidence in his ability to provide the leadership for the attainment of that settlement, or any other policy objective of the Grant administration.1
Like William Henry Seward and Hamilton Fish, Sumner had in mind that Canada would be a convenient substitute for the money sought for wartime damages to the United States. In addition, Sumner was determined that England admit its guilt. Massachusetts people like to get other people to do this. To Sumner, a tidy commercial sum would not express sufficient contrition. Only a huge payment—a vast settlement—would fully signify acceptance of a “moral debt.” Sumner’s way of speaking was so extreme that it made moderates who were demanding some recompense sound like apologists for England. It foreclosed useful public debate on the issue and forced Fish and Edward Thornton, the British minister in Washington, to negotiate in private.
Those negotiations would have made a fine Trollope novel. In January, in order to improve Anglo-American relations, Thornton—he became Sir Edward in 1870—urged Fish to get Grant to attend a dinner in honor of Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s nineteen-year-old son, then visiting the United States. The president could not understand why a grown man should be respectful of a boy; he was as unenthusiastic as he was to be nine years later when he refused to demean himself before the boy emperor of China. He was not going to any dinners for visiting children. In London, one of the male old ladies in the American minister’s office approved of Grant’s refusal, remembering that the queen had been willing to receive former President Fillmore only after President Buchanan had insisted. In Washington, Baron Gerolt of Prussia called on Fish to protest Grant’s discourtesy. Would the queen call on Grant’s twenty-year-old son? asked Fish, when the ambassador complained of Grant’s rudeness. Teacups were rattling, but a resolution was reached that did not require unwilling men and boys to sit down together. Grant and Fish, standing, received the prince in the Blue Room of the White House; Julia and her father were in the Red Room, where “the Prince and suite were presented.” At Thornton’s dinner for the cabinet and the vice-president, the prince gratefully toasted the secretary of state for his tactful and safe handling of the Fenians—the Irish-Americans who had threatened an invasion of Canada and a return to Ireland to gain its independence. Fish replied with fitting modesty. The Grants agreed to appear at the ball for the prince, once again standing, and old protocolist Benjamin Brown French, ever alert to his social duties, waited till he saw the president’s carriage, then hurried up the stairs to bring the prince down to greet the head of state.2
“I could have wished the President had been more courteous,” complained Thornton to Clarendon: “But the President is naturally the most uncouth man I have ever met with, and has on this occasion intentionally endeavored to show by his conduct to the Prince that the people of the U.S. consider themselves aggrieved by us.” More negotiations were clearly needed, and with His Royal Highness still in Washington, Fish and Thornton proceeded. The secretary of state, now with his own version of claims for “indirect” damages, asked when Britain would pay its $200,000,000. Thornton responded by talking of $25,000,000, and said, “You would not expect us to pay more than you would yourselves.” “Certainly we do—we expect liberality from you,” retorted Fish playfully. Thornton replied, “What of that oppressed, tax-ridden, down-trodden monarchy.” Fish recorded this exchange in his diary, including the fact that he and his friend were soon laughing. Thornton ended the conversation by saying that America’s debt was its own protective wealth because the instruments of that debt, American bonds, were in many a London portfolio: “What would an Englishman think himself worth, without a large bundle of ‘Consols’.”3
It was all good clubmen’s talk. And many other commercial gentlemen—commercial, but decidedly gentlemen—joined in. The international bankers did not want a war, instead they wanted an easy flow of commerce, the trading in securities that represented British investment in American and Canadian economic development. Rising quickly in that immense investment field were Levi P. Morton of New York and John Rose, a Scotsman who had made a fortune in Canada and returned to London to enjoy it. The firm of Morton & Rose replaced Baring Brothers as disbursing agent for the United States government in Great Britain, and both Morton (who, not incidentally, had contributed liberally to the Grant campaign) and Rose worked tirelessly and effectively to get the claims issue settled peaceably, and for a sensible sum.
The negotiations needed to be pressed. From London, on January 29, 1870, Benjamin Moran, an official in the American ministry, wrote his intimate friend Adam Badeau that “John Bull is getting into a bad temper with us.” The radical politician John Bright, a consistent friend of the North during the war, was ill, and Moran worried about the effect of his absence from public affairs on America’s chances for a peaceful settlement. On the other hand, Moran found that the reminiscences of the aged Earl Russell contained admissions helpful to the American cause. Russell, whom Moran thought “as sapless as Charles Francis Adams,” had been foreign secretary at the time the ships were fitted out, and now he acknowledged the British government’s complicity. Fish, heartened by this admission, went right on, in his courtly way, talking to Thornton. His hope was that the English would prove careless about Canada and agree to let it become independent or perhaps join the United States, as many Americans assumed it inevitably would. The independence or annexation of Canada would settle differences with America; it would be in the natural order of things. Moran said that “we should get Canada while Gladstone is in power.” He had the Bahamas in mind, as well. The territorial grabbing that was in the air was distinctly disconcerting to the English.4
While the gentlemanly negotiations of the Alabama claims were slowly proceeding, Grant was occupied with another undertaking—the effort to annex Santo Domingo. The president never saw the two matters in contrast. He was a man of simple logic. If it made sense to settle a quarrel with the English to avoid war, encourage commerce, and further the economic development of the American empire, then it made sense to annex Santo Domingo to encourage commerce in the Caribbean. There America would find a new frontier region with mineral resources as well as space into which troubled black people, harassed by the Klan, could move. They would then be among fellow blacks, but would still be Americans.
For the rest of his life, Grant did not waver from this belief. He did not take a racist view of foreign affairs, but others did. In its account of Grant’s New Year’s Day reception in 1870, the New York Herald, under the heading “A Gorgeous Nigger,” told of the arrival of the Haitian minister, General Alexander Tate, in a swallow-tailed coat with elaborate gold braid on its collar and lapels. Grant was cordial as he shook his hand, but other diplomats snubbed Tate; Postmaster General Creswell, noticing this, went over and had an amiable conversation with him. (United States citizens fared less well; the Herald reported that in the line of people waiting to be received, the blacks had been sent to the rear. This was done, the paper explained, “on account of the odor that might have troubled…the white ladies and gentlemen….”) Buenaventura Báez, the president of the Dominican Republic, at the other end of Tate’s island, was a mulatto—in North American terms black, because his mother was black—but this made little difference in Grant’s thinking about annexation. Others, then and now, have made a distinction between the character of the negotiations with white gentlemen over the Alabama claims and those with black opportunists about the Dominican annexation. Grant did not; to him both John Rose, in the former case, and Báez, in the latter, were perfectly respectable speculators out to make themselves richer. To be sure, Báez was shameless in his pursuit of the goal of relinquishing his country’s independence in favor of its merger with a great power, but the subsequent unhappy history of his nation does not argue that his logic was totally flawed. Americans who eschew separatism do not like the image of black Americans going off to a black state in the Caribbean which they prefer to the unsatisfactory black-and-white world of other states. One wishes that Grant had solved the racial problems within the continental United States instead of espousing a latter-day colonizationist scheme. As things stood, some black Americans, disappointed by the failure of Reconstruction in their own South, went north and west into Kansas and Oklahoma. Migration is, after all, the classic American way of trying to solve a problem, and whatever one thinks of a segregated settlement, the proposal to annex Santo Domingo is not evidence that Grant was applying unrealistic logic to the harsh situation that the freedmen faced.5
The Santo Domingo story began before Grant became president. William Henry Seward, secretary of state under Lincoln and Johnson, was an ardent expansionist; he thought he had found the ideal peaceful route to achieve America’s manifest destiny: in the Age of Capital he would buy that which he would possess. He purchased Alaska, tried to buy the Danish West Indies, and had negotiated for the Dominican Republic during the Johnson administration. These negotiations were reopened early in the Grant administration by Colonel J. W. Fabens and General William Cazneau (ranks courtesy of the Republic of Texas). These two cagey operators enlisted as an ally Orville E. Babcock, who, living in the White House, could easily communicate his enthusiasms to the president. And Babcock was soon immensely enthusiastic about Santo Domingo.
Orville Babcock was another of those totally unexceptional men whom Grant trusted. Born in 1835 in a small town in northern Vermont, he graduated from West Point in 1861 and was assigned to the corps of engineers and sent to the front, where he served ably in various commands. During the Chattanooga campaign, he was placed in charge of building bridges critical to the defense of Knoxville. It was there that Grant met the slight, dark-eyed, forthright officer. Grant brought him onto his staff in 1864, and Babcock was soon given assignments that involved the general’s intimate concerns. It was Babcock who was sent by Grant to see how Sherman fared in Georgia in 1864, and who on several occasions was sent to convey Grant’s wishes to Stanton. After the death of John Rawlins in 1869, Babcock was Grant’s closest friend. Except for Daniel Ammen, with whom he maintained a rather remote relationship, Grant had no lifelong friends. One by one he separated from all of his wartime associates; he let go of Babcock not because he was the crook that the whole country believed the man to be, but because he had lied to Grant. Only as Babcock was banished from the White House did he, too, drift out of Grant’s life.
Babcock had none of the fire and moral force of Rawlins. Rather, he was an agreeable man, friendly, convivial, and shrewd. He had a knack for knowing when and where Grant’s attention was focused and an ability to articulate Grant’s enthusiasms. Babcock’s was a voice in the White House saying yes in language that was neither obsequious nor condescending. That he was never threatening to Grant was not the least of the reasons why he commanded a loyalty from his chief that no other man achieved.
Babcock early took hold of the Santo Domingo negotiations; he and Grant were at one in their eagerness to annex that beautiful but troubled island. Despite his anti-imperialist reactions to the American invasion of Mexico, Grant began his presidency with expansionist enthusiasms. His friend John Rawlins had wanted to help the Cubans in their bitter struggle with Spain, and Babcock’s eager reports from Santo Domingo were to strike a similar note, though never with the humanitarian reverberations that Rawlins added.
Hamilton Fish wanted to hear nothing of either Caribbean adventure. As early as April 1869, in a cabinet meeting, he tried to stay Grant’s eagerness with the comment that Congress would not have time to get to the matter of Santo Domingo. Babcock, on the other hand, had every intention of getting to it. In July, carrying a letter of credence signed by Grant and a passport signed reluctantly by Fish, identifying him as a “special agent” of the United States, Babcock went off on his steamy pursuit of empire. At the end of the month, he wrote his bride, more comfortably situated in East Hampton, Long Island, that he had declined an invitation from President Báez to stay in the presidential palace but was not totally wanting for comfort—he had brought his own bathing tub on the Tybee. He thought Santo Domingo a “dull country,” rather like an army post. He had done a bit of exploring and had attended a “performance” of mass in the cathedral. The young man found the seventy-year-old American consul in the city of Santo Domingo “perfectly unfit for the place,” and he did not think any more of those whom he intended to make his countrymen: “The people are indolent and ignorant. The best class of people are the American Negroes who have come here from time to time.”6
In August, still in Santo Domingo, he gave orders to a navy ship, the Tuscora, to move in to deflect a “pirate” ship, the Telegrafo, that was harassing President Báez. The Telegrafo was in the service of a rebel citizen of the Dominican Republic, Gregorio Luperon, who was quite likely the most trustworthy exponent of the wishes of the Dominicans. A black man, he identified himself not with the exploiting upper classes on the island, but with the people. Later, two other navy ships were sent by Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson, to protect Báez’s government from invaders from Haiti and to intimidate dissidents led by Luperon in the republic itself. The American navy kept Grant’s Dominican allies in power while the annexation negotiations progressed.7
Back in the United States in September 1869, Babcock wrote Cazneau that he had given Grant his report recommending annexation, and asked Cazneau to see Báez and make sure that he did not obtain a loan from the British. Babcock did not want any other power to beat him to the draw. There was, however, one major problem, which he discussed in the letter: “The question of ‘State’ as used in the confidential communication caused some consternation. I assured the President that we had discussed the question and that President Baez…understood St. Domingo could not be admitted as a state, but that she would have to be treated as a territory until she had conformed to the requirements of the United States for admission as a state.”8
Those like Benjamin Moran who dreamed of “an American front, representing the two continents from Cape Prince of Wales to Cape Horn” welcomed the negotiations with men like Báez. Moran, in London, tired of English snobbery—at least some of it—wrote his friend Adam Badeau, “I notice with unfeigned pleasure what you say about the President’s feeling towards the South American and Central American Republics.” The people who came from them were not universally welcome in England: “The representatives here complain much and justly of the cold treatment they receive…here, none of them ever having been invited to Marlborough House, and not one to Windsor for years.” Moran was not afraid of including some Spanish-speaking cousins in an American hemispheric family. Other observers, however, saw only black, black, black, when they thought of the possible inclusion of Santo Domingo among the United States. Orville Babcock was one of the band of Reconstruction men who were nicely color-blind—who saw the postwar world as fresh and new and were eager to seize its opportunities. Unfortunately, this spirit often became clouded with an opportunism that ignored ethical values in the pursuit of personal gain, as Babcock demonstrated in his eager efforts to obtain the annexation of Santo Domingo. In the fall of 1869 he returned to the republic’s capital city, this time accompanied by another of Grant’s old friends, General Rufus Ingalls.9
While they negotiated in Santo Domingo, the president attempted to do the cause some good in Washington. On Sunday, January 2, 1870, Ulysses Grant set out to pay a call. It was early evening, and he walked out of the White House and across Lafayette Square to the home of Senator Charles Sumner. The butler was undaunted at seeing the president of the United States and was about to refuse the caller, because the senator was at a meal, when Sumner heard Grant’s voice and went to the door. Flattered but not flustered, he invited Grant to join him at the table, where he was dining with two newspapermen, John W. Forney and Ben Perley Poole, and Grant kindly obliged.
Protocol had been shattered. Grant had done, in Bancroft Davis’s words, “what probably no President ever did before under the same circumstances.” He had come hat in hand to ask the powerful senator to support the annexation of Santo Domingo. Sumner himself said, “Never before have I known a President to take any such interest in a treaty.” Grant had left a conference with Vice-President Colfax and Secretary Fish, at which he had allowed himself, not for the first time, to vent his rage at Sumner by storming about the senator’s friend John Lothrop Motley, whom Grant had been cajoled into sending to Great Britain as minister. Then, coolly, he had set out to seek Sumner’s support for his annexation treaty. Grant assumed that Sumner would give this support once the worth of Santo Domingo to black Americans had been made clear to him. But Sumner, wanting black men treated as equals within the United States, did not want to besmirch the republic by making strange foreign territories part of it. In places such as Santo Domingo black men were not schooled in Anglo-American values. To Sumner, the proper man of color was represented by his colleague in the present session of Congress, Hiram R. Revels, the dignified new senator from Mississippi—not by Buenaventura Báez. Sumner did not like Grant’s Santo Domingo scheme, but he did not miss the fact that Grant knew he needed help and had come seeking it. Grant did not like Sumner, but he was willing to pay court to him to get Santo Domingo.10
Instead of being asked what he had on his mind, Grant, sitting at Sumner’s table, had to hear the others discuss the woes of James M. Ashley, a pro-impeachment man, who had been fired as governor of the Montana Territory and whom Sumner wanted reinstated. Grant was not very polite about Ashley or any other subject not related to the purpose of his call, and he doggedly brought the talk around to Santo Domingo as, dinner over, the party moved into the library. In the years that followed, Grant insisted that Sumner agreed that evening to support annexation, and went back on his word when he vehemently opposed it. Admirers of Sumner claimed he turned the conversation to Montana and Ashley in a cunning move to avoid discussing Santo Domingo. But Grant recalled the talk of Ashley as a bid by Sumner for a patronage quid pro quo—an offer to support annexation in return for Ashley’s restoration as governor. Some individuals, fascinated by the thought of a president calling on a senator, said, predictably, that he was drunk. Without doubt, Grant was determined to make Santo Domingo part of the United States. As commanding general he had been able to stroll over to the tent of another general, give his instructions, and, regardless of cordiality or lack of it, assume that he would be obeyed. Now he was doing more than he had been willing to do when General Joseph Hooker had expected him to call on him on the way to Chattanooga. On that occasion, Grant had said that Hooker could do the calling, and Hooker did. Sumner had been lofty since preinaugural days but had never demonstrated disobedience to Grant. Now Grant had gone to the extraordinary length of asking a Republican captain for support; it did not occur to him that the officer might prove directly insubordinate.
Five months later, when Sumner flatly defied Grant, John W. Forney told Orville Babcock that he distinctly remembered hearing Sumner say he was for annexation. Grant left the house assuming that Sumner’s grand parting words signified support. Sumner had said, “Mr. President, I am an Administration man, and whatever you do will always find in me the most careful and candid consideration.” The misunderstanding on the occasion of Grant’s call was “destined to be,” in David Herbert Donald’s judgment, “the turning point in Grant’s administration and in Sumner’s career as well.” But Grant did not know this as he walked back to the White House. He thought he had Sumner’s vote.11
The time for annexation was now. One of Babcock’s men, still in the republic, wrote in January 1870 that an invasion by Haiti was expected and emphatically urged Babcock to rush the treaty through. The informant also attempted to draw on State Department funds to pay those who had given him this information, but Bancroft Davis, the assistant secretary of state, starchily forwarded the informant’s expense voucher to Babcock, at the White House. “My dear General,” he wrote, “I believe that this budget belongs to you”; and he added, “I fear there is no hope that the treaty will make its way through the Senate. If there ever was a ghost of a chance the Davis Hatch case will kill it.”12
Davis Hatch was probably no less a buccaneer than any of the other Captain Hooks who were interested in Santo Domingo. He was an American citizen and a businessman; he favored annexation, but he did not want it to come about to the benefit of Buenaventura Báez. Indeed, his opposition to Báez landed him in jail, and the opponents to annexation made excellent use of his plight, pointing out that by holding Hatch without trial and threatening him with execution, Báez made a mockery of the claims of Babcock and other supporters of the treaty that they were bringing into the Union a territory, ultimately to become a state, with the finest of governors. The Dominican Senate changed Hatch’s sentence from death to banishment, but President Báez held him in jail nevertheless, because, it was alleged, his return to the United States would work against Báez and the pending treaty. Once he was released, Hatch brought formal charges against the United States government for not protecting him.13
In Washington, the maneuvering was considerable. On March 10, Charles Sumner, in his imperial manner, wrote Babcock that he hoped it would “be convenient for you to meet [tomorrow] the Committee on Foreign Relations…with regard to Dominica.” The hearings were brief, and the next week Sumner permitted the treaty to come to the floor of the Senate, but five of the committee members disapproved of annexation, and only two, Oliver P. Morton and James Harland, sustained Grant’s position. Edward Thornton, the British minister, writing to Lord Clarendon, reported that “Genl Badeau, who is very intimate with Grant,” had stated that the president was “much disappointed and a good deal amazed at the prospect of the Santo Domingo Treaty.” Grant was particularly “angry with Sumner, because when he first spoke with him, he promised to support it.” Santo Domingo, or San Domingo (it was never granted an appellation that was comfortable within the American language) was not much wanted. Babcock, however, would not let the president give up, and in early April, Grant walked over to the Fishes’ to talk about the endangered treaty with the secretary of state. He was troubled that Senator Lot M. Morrill of Maine had, that morning, urged him not to press for the annexation and certainly not for statehood. He judged correctly that he needed better support from the State Department if he was to convince enough senators to agree to annexation. To gain that support he went twice to Capitol Hill.14
One of Babcock’s cohorts on the island had told him that if the consul then in Santo Domingo, John Somers Smith, could be promised a lucrative job at home, he could be counted on to break with the anti-Báez party—and to cease giving the State Department ammunition against annexation. Hamilton Fish probably never knew about this proposed bit of bribery, but he did know that Babcock was arranging for Colonel Fabens to see Grant directly. In the cabinet he suggested that such aggressive deportment by the annexationists would “down” the proposal in the Senate. Others in Washington were also curious about the aggressive lobbying. Edward Thornton reported to Lord Clarendon, “I cannot discover if Grant has any personal interest in the matter, tho’ it is strange that he should be so tenacious with regard to its acceptance.”15
On May 6, 1870, Fish loyally conferred with Senators Morton and William E. Chandler to ensure their enthusiastic support, but a week later Senator Carl Schurz called on the secretary to show him the results of a canvass he had made of 72 senators: with 32 opposed to annexation, the administration appeared far short of the required two-thirds vote. Grant was on a cruise on the Potomac; Fish, both impressed by the canvass and in agreement with Schurz’s conclusion, could not get to the president. He told Bancroft Davis to see if the question of statehood could not be left moot. If annexation was to be gotten through the Senate, it would have to be with as few commitments as possible about the future of the island and its people.16
On June 1, with the cause of annexation in great trouble in the Senate, the State Department, which had its own sources of news, got a report from Santo Domingo denouncing Colonel Fabens as corrupt and calling Babcock a “damed rascal.” That rascality was soon made a matter of public record; in June 1870, the Senate held public hearings into the Davis Hatch case. It was a wonderfully colorful proceeding complete with the details of a lurid shipboard murder. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Raymond H. Perry, the consul who had succeeded John Somers Smith. Perry, who was related to Commodore Oliver H. Perry, had been acquitted of repeated charges of being a mule thief during the war; his credentials for diplomacy had been established on the Texas frontier with General Philip H. Sheridan. His testimony at the committee meeting began with the following exchange with the chairman:
Q. Are you armed now?
A. Always.
Q. With what?
A. A revolver.
When the investigation had been completed, the majority report, by Republican loyalists, dismissed Hatch’s claim for damages and exonerated Grant’s men, but Carl Schurz’s relentless and revealing interrogation of Generals Babcock and Ingalls, as well as of Davis Hatch and the two American consuls, Smith and Perry, suggested that Babcock and Ingalls had been given land on the Bay of Samaná which would greatly appreciate in value if either the whole Dominican Republic or just the bay area was acquired by the United States. And what was worse, as Schurz and two colleagues revealed in a damning report, Babcock had worked actively to keep Báez in power in order to accomplish the annexation, ordering the dispatch of navy vessels that prevented Luperon from carrying out a revolt, and acquiescing in the imprisonment of Hatch, under sentence of death, because he was a partisan of one of Báez’s rivals. Carl Schurz, the nineteenth-century liberal par excellence, exposed Babcock’s activities with respect to Santo Domingo in a way that was humiliating to Ulysses Grant. And Grant did not forget that he had done so. Schurz, claiming he had to stay within the mandate of the Senate to investigate only matters relating to Hatch, obviously did not stay there at all. He presented clear and conclusive evidence that Báez, Cazneau, Fabens, and Babcock were, from the time of Babcock’s first visit in July 1869, so committed to annexation as to have no regard for any opponents, whether Dominican citizens or American citizens. However, Grant accepted the exoneration of Babcock by loyal senators, ignoring Schurz’s allegations about him. Indeed, Grant regarded as directed at himself the attack Schurz seemed to him to be making on Babcock. As if to say he would take no such treatment from anyone, he set Babcock immovably in place. The damaging inquiry resulted not in Babcock’s removal, but in his becoming entrenched more powerfully than ever as Grant’s trusted aide who decided who would be admitted to the president’s private office.17
Ulysses Grant was being made a fool of. “I never saw father so grimly angry” Jesse recalled, “as at that time.” Intellectuals and polished gentlemen would not listen to his reasons for wanting to annex Santo Domingo and, instead, insisted on connecting disreputable men to the idea. They were, it seemed to him, trying to make him out to be one of those disreputable men. Taking their advice to abandon both annexation and Orville Babcock would have been an admission that they were right—and he refused to make that admission. Quite the contrary, his loyalty to his man Babcock was a statement of faith in himself. Underlying Grant’s “extraordinary” and, to the British minister, “unaccountable” interest in annexation were his doubts about his ability to succeed in the world of negotiations. He stuck doggedly to both annexation and Babcock, hoping that determination would bring the treaty home and vindicate not so much Babcock’s judgment as his own.18
Meanwhile, his assistant secretary of state, Bancroft Davis, was secretly undercutting the president by feeding Senator Sumner information on the corruption of the negotiators of the annexation and on details of the Davis Hatch case. Davis’s immediate chief, Hamilton Fish, was not much more enthusiastic than Davis and Sumner about Santo Domingo, but “vexed” with his old friend Sumner, Fish stayed loyal, publicly, to Grant. Determined to keep the country out of a war with Spain over Cuba, the secretary of state paid the price for Grant’s reluctant support of a neutrality proclamation; he agreed to support annexation of Santo Domingo. On June 13, the day Grant issued the proclamation on Cuba, Fish and Grant had a long talk about Santo Domingo. Grant was distressed that his party was divided over annexation—not only in the Senate but in his cabinet, which, he said, “is not sustaining me.” Boutwell was explicitly opposed; Hoar, Grant declared, “sneers” at the treaty; and Cox did “not open his mouth—not a word in favor of it.”19
General Grant was being beaten in the first major campaign of his presidency, and he resented it profoundly. A man he thought effeminate, Charles Sumner, was outmaneuvering him, and unable to remove this very real opponent, Grant was reduced to impotent rage. He saw or thought he saw disloyalty within his own cabinet. One morning, Hamilton Fish asked Grant if he included him among the enemy. Grant paused for a long time before saying no. As they were talking, Rockwood Hoar came in; Grant looked at him and left for breakfast. Hoar felt the chill and remarked to Fish that the Santo Domingo question was in the way of all other matters before the nation, and was dividing the men in Grant’s cabinet.20
Not in the cabinet room, but in his office in the White House, Babcock sat with Raymond H. Perry and urged him not to defend Hatch and spoil the prospects for annexation, but Perry was determined to tell the president all that had been going on in Santo Domingo. Perry, who had originally been in league with Babcock, was biased and brash, but he was also the kind of man who can sometimes blurt out the truth. When he went to the president’s office, Grant was too busy to see him, but, persisting, he said he would return the next day. It was not an interview Grant enjoyed: “I wanted the President to understand the whole matter…. I did not think the President liked to hear these things, and he got up and told me he had to go out to dinner, and he went out of the room.” One more enemy was trying to brand Babcock and sabotage Grant’s advance on Santo Domingo.21
Jesse Grant recalled later how deeply troubled his father had been during the “strangely tense days” when the annexation was being debated. The only time he remembered being barred from his father’s office was when Fish and Daniel Ammen came to confer urgently with the president on the matter. Grant’s pressure on loyal senators was intense. On June 28, Senator Adelbert Ames of Mississippi was sick in bed, so sick that his friends were worried about him. At 10:00 A.M. he received a note from Babcock saying that an attempt would be made at noon to vote an executive session, in order to move to a vote on annexing Santo Domingo, and asking Ames to be there for the vote. “I would have been here,” Ames wrote, “had it even been necessary to get out of my coffin.” But he was Lazarus to no avail: “At about one we voted ourselves into Executive Session…. In a quarter of an hour we were voted out again and my work being over I came back to bed again.” There was, Ames concluded, “not a very flattering prospect for ratification of the treaty.”22
Charles Sumner could not be pushed out of his obdurate place, but Grant could at least rid himself of those he saw as Sumner’s friends. He told Orville Babcock that he wanted to dismiss John Lothrop Motley as minister to Great Britain. Babcock quickly leaked a rumor of the resignation to the press, so that, having become public, it would be difficult to revoke, and so that senators whose votes or influence were essential to the ratification of the treaty would know that a major patronage plum was available. When the New York Tribune carried a story that Fish would be sent to London to replace Motley, Grant quickly called the secretary of state to the White House “to explain to you precisely what may have…given rise to [the story].” Grant’s Santo Domingo allies in the Senate, Oliver P. Morton, Zachariah Chandler, and Matthew H. Carpenter had been in, complaining of a dearth of patronage. (Chandler, “a man of very rough manners and with a great love of Whisky,” or so the British foreign office was told, had a particular ax to grind. When in London, Motley had refused him introductions the senator felt he deserved.) The senators were irritated that they, Grant loyalists, had had no post to offer equal to that which Grant’s enemy Sumner had bestowed on Motley. It had chafed that Sumner, the chief opponent of annexation, had his man Motley in London. If that fact troubled the senators, it irritated Grant still more, and he cheerfully joined them in toying with other possibilities. First he proposed Edwards Pierrepont for London, but Chandler had a still better idea; Grant could make Pierrepont secretary of state and get rid of cautious, conservative Hamilton Fish by sending him to London. In reporting this conversation to Fish, Grant said he did not want Pierrepont as secretary of state, but Fish added, “Whether he…made this remark to Chandler or [only] to me, I was not sure.”23
In his diary, Fish took a lofty tone about the opposition of those “who could not use me,” and he wondered if Grant was, indeed, going to dismiss him. At one point the president did ask the secretary of state if he yearned for London, and Fish replied that he did not. More reassuring was Grant’s request, as the two went through one of their regular minuets over resignation, that Fish stay on at least until fall and that he promise not to schedule any cabinet meetings that summer, as he had the previous year. Fish consented readily. He preferred the Hudson Valley to the Potomac in August, and thought there was no need to govern in the summer; after all, “President [Jackson] was absent for months at a time and this before telegraphy.” Grant, for his part, would “come in occasionally from Long Branch, more for appearance…than for any necessity.” Returning to the struggle over Santo Domingo, Fish urged Grant not to “hit Motley for Sumner’s sin.” The advice was not heeded. The Senate rejected the annexation treaty on June 30; on July 1, in a cabinet meeting a sullen Ulysses Grant talked not of Santo Domingo, but of the historian serving as minister in London. “I will not allow Mr. Sumner to ride over me,” he growled. “But,” said Fish, “it is not Mr. Sumner, but Mr. Motley, whom you are striking.” “It is the same thing,” said Grant, with finality.24
When Hamilton Fish was again mentioned as a possible replacement for Motley, he went to Grant to find out whether or not to pack his bags. The president, who was testing Fish’s loyalty, explained that he had let the rumor circulate in order to avoid having to talk about the numerous other claimants. Fish himself had an interesting candidate for the post—Charles Sumner. But Grant, however eager he was to remove Sumner from Washington, was unwilling to reward him in any way, and Fish might well have wondered if sending the outspoken critic of England to London would foster a settlement of the claims questions.
On July 14, 1870, Grant sent Fish a note asking him to draw up papers naming a former senator from New Jersey, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, minister to London. Although he did not have any particular objection to his wife’s “unexceptional” cousin, Fish was unenthusiastic. So was the British minister. He wrote the foreign secretary that “Frelinghuysen looks just like a Methodist parson, is rigid in matters of religion and dry; I don’t think you will get much out of him”; however, for an American, he was not “bad hearted.” Fish pointed out to Grant that the state of New Jersey was small and Democratic. Furthermore, a New Jersey man—Joseph P. Bradley—had just been appointed to the Supreme Court. Grant, usually sensitive to the necessity for state-balancing and for rewarding of Republican constituencies, did not this time listen to his secretary of state. When he returned to the capital for the annual ceremony of signing bills as Congress adjourned for the summer, he signed the nomination of Frelinghuysen. But Frelinghuysen declined the offer. Meanwhile, Motley was refusing to resign. The secretary of state, on vacation at Garrison, was in an embarrassing position. He tried to persuade Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois to take the post: “I do not know that we are on the eve of a settlement of great questions with Great Britain but there are reasons to justify the hope that very important questions may be adjusted [during the term of the next minister].” But a diplomatic mission, however important, had no attraction for the able senator, and he declined.25
Back in Washington in September, Fish was without a minister to Britain at a critical point in his Alabama-claims negotiations, and he was not in any way sanguine about the progress of these talks. When he and Thornton chatted one Sunday after church—both went to St. John’s—the secretary of state did “not find much in the tone…of his conversation today to encourage the idea of…a settlement.” Fish could not get agreement on the claims, and he could not even get a minister to send to London. After Trumbull declined the appointment, Senators Lot M. Morrill and George F. Edmunds also did so. Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana accepted, but then withdrew when the state’s voters elected a legislature that would have sent a Democrat to the Senate in his place. Fish recorded that after a cabinet meeting in October, Grant suggested Senator George H. Williams of Oregon, “saying at the same time ‘he is hardly big enough for the Place.’” To this view Fish added his “assent.” Fish’s Garrison neighbor Edwards Pierrepont thought himself of sufficient stature for the ministry or any other good post Grant might offer and, from his town address, wrote a most charming note to Mrs. Grant telling her he was sure Grant would be re-elected two years hence and inviting her and the general to stop with them when next in the city.26
Grant too had that election in mind. He was exasperated with the whole English business, and casually, but with great point, he told Fish in November 1870 that he wanted it settled before the next presidential election. Furthermore, he told Fish to abandon hope of getting Canada joined to the United States through the negotiations. This critical decision was, perhaps, the turning point that led to the settlement. Grant thought no more now of the expansionism directed at Canada than he had in 1846 of the expansionism threatening Mexico. His silence amid the heady public talk of annexation did much to awaken a great number of Americans from the dream that Canada would, one day, inevitably be made part of a continental American union. And, privately, his lack of jingoism could be cited by Fish to help allay the fears of the British. Now they could negotiate without thinking that a grab for Canada lay behind every American move.
Meanwhile, the question of who would be minister to London was at last on its way to an inelegant solution. Robert C. Schenck, a Civil War general and past master at poker who as a congressman from Ohio had been a leader of the attack on Andrew Johnson, had not been re-elected to his seat in the House. Schenck needed work, and he got it; indeed, although some have come close to him in this respect, there has never been a man more unabashed in his ability to exploit familiarity with government circles in his quest for a private dollar. His behavior was so outrageous as to take on a certain charm. As a former congressman, he was able to lobby effectively. His services were anxiously sought, and he was eager to provide them. One entrepreneur, Max Woodhull, asked him to represent the Northern Pacific Railway in Washington, suggesting that his efforts would result in “Congressional grants” that would quickly allow Schenck to “earn from $200,000 to $500,000.” Schenck could then advantageously invest these earnings in land along the railroad that should be worth four million dollars in ten years. Woodhull, urging Schenck to join him in Philadelphia for a conference with Jay Cooke, engagingly asked, “Will you take the tide of the flood?”27
The waters carried the good general from New York, through Philadelphia, to Washington. There Schenck tried the old maneuver of trying to make two men critical to his appointment each think the other favored it. He called promptly on President Grant to ask if Fish had mentioned him for the post of minister to Great Britain. Grant was noncommittal. Schenck then called on Fish, who took a while to get the point; it “appeared” Fish reported in his diary, “when we parted, he called expecting me to ‘pump him’ on the subject of the British Mission. He said the President requested him to call.” On checking with the president, Fish found that Grant did indeed like the idea of sending Schenck to London. The next day, Woodhull enthusiastically wrote in a note to Schenck that the “papers say you had yesterday a two hour interview with the President.” Able to add two and two, Woodhull told Schenck that the deal with Cooke and the Northern Pacific was all set, and that he could do his work as representative of the interests of the railroad with his former colleagues in Congress before leaving for Great Britain. Woodhull closed his little note, “aff. yrs. Max W.”28
Dining with Fish the next evening, Schenck told him that he was “anxious to go to England,” but hesitated because he was “offered the confidential counsel-ship of the Northern Pacific RR (Jay Cooke’s) at a salary of $20,000” and “other compensations are available also with other businessmen.” Fish called him to his country’s cause. “Perhaps these can be held open till after [your] service in London is up,” he murmured as they left the fine table. Schenck, for his part, wanted to be sure that the Alabama-claims negotiations would be entrusted to him. Fish told him they would be “if [the] Pres. so desired.” Grant, wanting no more embarrassment, told Fish that the appointment was not to be made public until it was certain that Schenck would accept. The news went out on the wires on December 10.29
On December 20, on his way home from a dinner at Postmaster General Creswell’s, Fish took advantage of a private moment with Grant to ask if Schenck was truly to be entrusted with the Alabama-claims negotiations. He anticipated that British officials in London would try, in their early conversations with Schenck, to learn what the change in envoys meant to them. Grant said that Schenck’s instructions should be the same as Motley’s had been. But Fish pointed out that Motley had been told to stall if pushed to state a position, and that since the United States had rejected the Johnson-Clarendon Convention it was, perhaps, now up to the United States to start a new phase in the negotiations. Grant agreed that Schenck should do so.30
Schenck did not leave the country hungry. New York gentlemen raced to give dinners in honor of his departure. That tireless lawyer Edwards Pierrepont got there first; he was followed quickly by the banker—now collector of the port—Moses Grinnell, who submerged his own hopes for the appointment in his generosity toward the man from Ohio. On January 13, Harris C. Fahnestock, whose family had forsaken the communal life of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, for the worldlier ways of Gotham, wrote, “I can give you an intensely respectable bankers dinner, or make it ‘cheerful’ as you may prefer.” Fahnestock’s more devout partner, Jay Cooke, had already provided for Schenck in another way. On December 27, Schenck deposited in Cooke’s bank a check for $25,000—the proceeds of a note secured by a $25,000 bond of none other than the Northern Pacific Railroad. In February, Benjamin F. Wade very graciously agreed to act for Mr. Cooke until Mr. Schenck returned from London.31
Meanwhile, John Lothrop Motley had been loath to leave London. When he finally agreed to go, he issued an “End of Mission” statement. The dignity of its tone and protestations of accomplishment evoked the idea that Grant had removed him simply out of anger with Sumner for denying him Santo Domingo. On January 2, 1871, Grant called his cabinet to the White House to hear Fish’s draft of a reply to Motley. The secretary of state was now furious with both his old friends, Sumner and Motley, and Schuyler Colfax had to urge him to delete a reference to the date of Motley’s removal, the day after the defeat of the Santo Domingo treaty. Colfax, who presided in the Senate, had been tactfully trying to mollify Sumner, and he knew Fish’s remarks to Motley would infuriate Sumner. Grant knew this too; he told Fish to leave the rebuke to Motley (and Sumner) exactly as it was.32
Grant had already resumed his campaign for Santo Domingo. In his second State of the Union address, on December 5, 1870, he had stated his case powerfully. Santo Domingo, he said, was a “weak power, numbering probably less than 120,000 souls, and yet possessing one of the richest territories under the sun, capable of supporting a population of 10,000,000 people in luxury.” (A hundred years later, 5,300,000 people live there in poverty.) Grant, like Sumner, expected these people to be black, but the president saw the future in terms not of independent black republics, but of a vast new black American frontier. He anticipated Frederick Jackson Turner’s view of the frontier as a safety valve that allowed conflict to escape, harmlessly, away from older settled areas. “San Domingo, with a stable government, under which her immense resources can be developed, will give remunerative wages to tens of thousands of laborers not now upon the island.” Annexation would solve immense problems. Santo Domingo would “become a large consumer of the products of Northern farms and manufactories,” and “Porto Rico and Cuba [would] have to abolish slavery, as a measure of self-preservation, to retain their laborers.” He predicted that even Brazil would have to eliminate slavery and that somehow the annexation would force an end to the “exterminating” war in Cuba. Grant was cautious about recommending the emigration of laborers from his own country, but the idea that among the 10,000,000 might soon be some of the more seriously disillusioned of the 4,000,000 freedmen of the South was implicit in his message. He concluded that bringing Santo Domingo into the United States would be “a rapid stride toward that greatness [to] which the intelligence, industry, and enterprise of the citizens of the United States” entitles them.33
Grant sent an investigating commission of distinguished citizens to Santo Domingo to bring him an objective report. It was hoped that these men would recommend annexation and that the Senate would then concur. This more dignified procedure was coupled with efforts by Senator Lyman Trumbull, one of the wisest men in Washington, to effect a reconciliation between Grant and Senators Sumner and Carl Schurz (whom Sumner had now placed on the Foreign Relations Committee). Trumbull thought his chances were better with Schurz and approached him first. Schurz knew that his opposition to Babcock had made him unwelcome at the White House and was reluctant to call there, but Trumbull insisted that paying a call upon returning to the capital was a “matter of respect to the office, and it has been the practice of even members of the opposition to call on their arrival here.” With some trepidation, Schurz went to the White House, but to no avail. “I think it was unfortunate that Grant should have been unable to see Schurz when he called,” wrote Trumbull to an astute political friend. “Wrong inferences will be drawn from it.”34
Inferences, wrong or right, were indeed being drawn about Grant; the president, it appeared, was no longer willing to court his senatorial enemies. As George S. Boutwell and Hamilton Fish walked downstairs after a cabinet meeting on December 23, 1870, they talked of Charles Sumner’s vitriolic insinuations in the Senate two days earlier. Sumner, responding furiously to newspaper accounts that he had been insulting to Grant—so insulting that, one paper said, “[General Babcock] is reported to have gone so far as to declare that if he were not officially connected with the Executive he would subject Senator Sumner to personal violence”—had called on his old friends the secretaries of the treasury and of state to be witnesses to the fact that he had never been other than courteous. Boutwell and Fish were not prepared to accommodate him. During their conversation on December 23, Boutwell told Sumner’s old friend Fish that on several occasions the senator had made “charges against the President so outrageous and violent” that he was unwilling to repeat them. Fish responded, “Sumner is ‘crazy,’ a monomaniac upon all matters relating to his own importance and his relations toward the President.” Boutwell told Fish that the senator “more than once, in speaking of the President’s interview with him last winter at Sumner’s house, about San Domingo, had said that Grant was drunk.” According to Boutwell, Sumner cited as proof of Grant’s condition the fact that the president “called [him] Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.” Boutwell (who Fish thought had been present at the interview) went on to remark, “He was no more drunk, or excited than he was when we left him upstairs five minutes since—no more than Sumner himself.”35
While Grant defended annexation on the ground of the usefulness of the “island of San Domingo” to black citizens of the United States, Charles Sumner attacked it because it would mean the dissolution of the Dominican Republic—one of the world’s two black republics. Grant, calling for the purchase of the Bay of Samaná area, predicted that “a great commercial city [would] spring up” and argued that it would be “folly” to reject such “a prize.” To Sumner, America’s embarking on such an “imperial system” would be a “dance of blood.” He drew a contrast: “There you have it…President Grant, speaking with the voice of forty million, and this other president who has only eight hundred thousand people, all black.” Sumner regarded such behavior as bullying, and Ulysses Grant never forgave the insinuation that he was a bully.36
Grant’s break with Sumner was complete. The senator had protested loudly and publicly about the abominable treatment of Motley. Grant, for his part, began insisting that Sumner be replaced as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. This he accomplished, but at no gain to the cause of annexing Santo Domingo. Sumner, in reviewing his disagreement with Grant over Santo Domingo, told the New York Tribune that “when he came to the serious consideration of the project, he was most concerned as to its relations to the future of the African race. He thought it all important to that race that a republic created by it should be maintained in this hemisphere as an example and inspiration and that the extinction of Santo Domingo was sure to involve at the next step the extinction of the other black republic [Haiti] occupying a part of the same island.” To Sumner, the image of Toussaint L’Ouverture still stood for the rights of man. For the last senator of the enlightenment there was “injustice” in “impairing the predominance of the colored race in the West Indies.” He was quoted as having said in secret Senate debate, “To the African belongs the equatorial belt.”37
In his speech in the Senate on December 21, Sumner had likened the annexation agreement to the Lecompton Constitution in Kansas, “which was sought to subject a distant Territory to slavery”; he mocked the diplomacy of “young” Orville Babcock, an “aide-de-camp of his Excellency General Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States”; and he called Buenaventura Báez a “political jackal.” He implied that Grant did not know what was in the documents he had submitted. Name calling aside, there were no inaccuracies in his denunciation of the annexation proposal. But Sumner could not stop the approval of Grant’s plan to send a commission to the island to weigh the merits of annexation, and he lamented the willingness of Frederick Douglass to accompany the mission as a consultant. The presence of the great editor would do much to counter the suggestion that Grant’s plan was not in the best interest of people of African descent in the hemisphere. There was consolation for Sumner in a letter of support from William Lloyd Garrison, but it was scarcely enough to compensate for the concerted effort undertaken by Grant’s men, led by Senators Morton and Conkling, to remove Sumner from his post as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. That effort can be dated from this speech of Sumner’s; its goal was achieved when the Forty-second Congress was organized in March 1871.38
Grant had won his battle with a rival captain, but this time at the cost of the war. Sumner was gone, but so was the possibility of annexing Santo Domingo. A favorable report by the investigating commissioners was not enough to counteract the powerful arguments that Sumner had presented. In the spring of 1871, Grant’s men could not get the two-thirds majority in the Senate needed to approve an annexation treaty. Neither would Congress pass a joint resolution which would permit Ulysses Grant to have his island in the sun. He never forgot that it had been denied him.
Matters were more businesslike in the negotiations with the British. Sir John Rose—he had recently been knighted—arrived in Washington, ostensibly to see the secretary of the treasury about the marketing in London of a new United States bond issue by Morton & Rose, but also to discuss the related matter of the Alabama claims with Secretary of State Fish. Rose had the blessing of Lord Granville (the new foreign secretary) and of Prime Minister William E. Gladstone, as well as that of the British minister in Washington, for his effort to see what settlement might be effected. At the home of Bancroft Davis for dinner, Rose and Fish reached in private an accord that eighteen months later was completed in public. The United States would drop attempts to link the annexation of Canada to the settlement and would drop as well the determination to force England to acknowledge its guilt by paying for huge “indirect” damages—costs of the prolonged war. A commission would meet in Washington to settle the issues unrelated to the war: the border dispute in the northwest, the question of British fishing rights in the waters off New England, and the matter of British recognition of the United States citizenship of former subjects who had emigrated to this country and been naturalized. The issues related to the war would then be submitted to an international board of arbitration.39
In a cabinet meeting on January 17, 1871, Grant himself took a critical part in the establishment of a diplomatic strategy. It was suggested that the United States set as one of the conditions for going ahead with negotiations a demand that Great Britain promise not to press claims for the value of any Confederate bonds purchased by British subjects. Grant rejected this proposal because, in his view, it would suggest that Americans were not confident enough to hold firm once the negotiations actually began. And so, without strings, the trading began. Thornton, the British minister, was optimistic: “The President, Mr. Fish, and Mr. Boutwell are extremely anxious to come to a settlement; the first because he thinks it will help his re-election; Fish, because he wishes the honour before he leaves office which he is anxious to do; and Boutwell because he believes it will help if not be indispensable to the placing of his new 5 per cent Bonds, of which Rose’s bank and the Barings are to be principal agents.”40
There now were intense confidential discussions in the cabinet and among leaders in Congress. For public consumption, many politicians went on record as supporting a tough stand with England, and initially Grant hoped that Schenck could make a deal better than the one Rose proposed. Fish, consulting Schenck, found that the new minister had plunged enthusiastically into peace-making efforts and that he agreed with the Rose proposals, including the one calling for the negotiation of certain issues in Washington. At home, most congressional leaders were privately relieved that the matter was on its way to resolution, but once again, Charles Sumner was a possible stumbling block. Feeling exceedingly uncomfortable, Hamilton Fish called on his former friend; to his surprise, he found Sumner frosty but not antagonistic. Sumner “declaimed” against England but in the end was noncommittal. Sir John also called on Senator Sumner, and was treated to a lesson on the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny. If the British would “haul down the flag”—the flag of their empire—everywhere in the Western Hemisphere, all would be well. Rose passed a report of this outburst along to Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, as documentation for the need to get the negotiations going. (When Fish heard of Sumner’s strong words, he caustically remarked on the senator’s advocacy that America take up British holdings in North America and the Caribbean, “but not Santo Domingo.”) Sumner’s desire for Canada was very real, but the British negotiator Sir Stafford Northcote found him “distinctly friendly,” and Prime Minister Gladstone was happy that his “red hot” anti-English rhetoric did not impair negotiations.41
The British commissioners who had arrived in Washington in March for the negotiations discovered that their business was not separate from American domestic politics. The critical question was whether Grant would be re-elected. Northcote, one of the ablest of the diplomats, thought that “the Presidential election was the mainspring of the whole machine of the Commission.” From the start, the British were determined that Hamilton Fish not press claims for “indirect” losses—those connected to, but not directly a result of, the ships’ activities. On April 10, the Americans accepted the British “expression of regret” for their “misdeeds,” and by May 6 the long bargaining sessions had produced an agreement in accordance with Rose’s and Fish’s discussions. Northcote was fascinated by the five red and blue ribbons pulled through each copy of the treaty as it was prepared for signing and sealing: “Something like the mode for assigning partners in the cotillion.”42
The morning of May 8, 1871, was “brilliant.” At ten, the British and American commissioners met at the State Department. All of the department staff were present, in a room full of flowers, as the seals were fixed on the treaty—“a slow process,” one signatory noted, “as the unfortunate clerk who prepared them was awkward and nervous.” One of the British commissioners, Lord Tenterden, “did not help to put him at ease by dropping quantities of burning sealing-wax on his fingers,” and “the poor man…burst into tears at the conclusion of the affair.” Reconciliation came with the serving of an abundance of strawberries and ice cream.43
It was a great day for Hamilton Fish. He reported in his diary that Lord de Grey, the most able of the British diplomats, had said to him, “This is the proudest day of my life, I congratulate you, & myself, & our two Countries.” On a lighter note, Fish wrote, “When Sir John MacDonald was about to sign, while having the pen in his hand, he said to me (in a half whisper) ‘well here go the fisheries!’” Fish noted that “Thornton…was much moved & holding my hand said ‘this is a great result, you & I have worked hard for this, & have done what those [other] gentlemen do not know to bring it about; we have worked for two years.’” After the photographs were taken and the ceremony ended, Fish, alone, was reminded of the feeling of anticlimax in his college days when, after “a laborious preparation for Examination, when striking for the Honors of the College,” he had taken the test but did not yet know its result. There was a “feeling of want of something to do, & of the absence of the excitement under which the labor has been sustained.”44
The ratification of the treaty by the Senate and its acceptance in Parliament was not an easy achievement, but in both countries heads of state were a help. Queen Victoria, in a succinct and unequivocal message, which was seen as carrying her personal commitment, called for acquiescence to certain qualifications the Senate had made in the treaty. Toward the same goal, Grant had Fish send a cable to Schenck telling him that the United States would not enter “indirect” claims at Geneva. The minister quickly took the message to Westminster, where it was given to the aged Earl Russell. After reading it, he made his way into the House of Lords and withdrew a motion he had made that would have blocked the arbitration plan. The Treaty of Washington was accepted in London, while in Washington, strenuous and successful efforts were made by Grant and Fish to bring the necessary two-thirds of the senators to vote for ratification.
Under the treaty, the war-related claims were submitted to an international board of arbitration. The American member was Charles Francis Adams, whom Grant accepted with much reluctance—he disliked all Adamses. The British representative was Sir Alexander Cockburn. The other arbitrators were a Swiss statesman, an Italian count, and a Brazilian baron. Internationalists all, they bargained at Geneva, but American politics were not totally remote. Sir Edward Thornton, in Washington, worried for a time lest Grant, in the “fever” of the election campaign, resurrect the claims for “indirect” damages under a patriotic banner. But eventually Thornton was able to inform the foreign office that Grant had put out “feelers” to see if obstinacy would help renomination and had decided that it would not. He was heartened when, at a party, Mrs. George M. Robeson, the wife of the secretary of the navy, told a member of his legation that she was “happy to hear we are not going to scratch each others’ eyes out.” Grant and his cabinet had decided not to press the matter of “indirect” damages, and Thornton welcomed the president’s probable re-election: “Grant has the best chance, and miserable as he is, I believe he is not so bad, as far as we are concerned, as many others might be.” As the campaign proceeded, Adams quietly dropped, for good, the business of “indirect” damages, and England agreed to pay for direct losses to the tune of $15,000,000.45
The great schoolmasters of nineteenth-century liberalism, Great Britain and the United States, taught by example. Two major powers could resolve serious differences without going to war. Critics of their pedagogy have made light of the accomplishment: “Twentieth-century power politics showed up the vague and rose-spectacled visions of nineteenth-century liberalism for what they were. Arbitration can only be employed to settle a dispute where nations genuinely want a just solution.” Fair enough. Sir John Rose, Levi P. Morton, and a host of other bankers in both countries did indeed want not war, but a chance to exploit the great opportunities for growth investment in North_America. Not selfless, of course, the agreement was nevertheless a great accomplishment. Both countries have gone to war over smaller matters, and with the future of Canada in the balance, the questions at issue were not trivial. Arbitration has come to seem a quaint relic of nineteenth-century thinking, but the accomplishment of Adams and his fellow negotiators was not minor. The accord was signed in September 1872. The Grant administration had kept the peace, and had done so in time for the election of 1872.46