by Ron Chernow
Once the joint resolution cleared Congress, Grant tapped three figures of unimpeachable integrity for the commission: Andrew White, the president of Cornell University; Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, who had done excellent work for the blind; and Benjamin F. Wade, the former Ohio senator and Radical Republican. Grant had chosen impartial men of high character and didn’t stack the deck in favor of annexation; White and Howe actually opposed it. Grant also chose Howe because he was a longtime abolitionist, married to the poet Julia Ward Howe, and a Bostonian friend of Sumner, who would be outflanked if Howe opted for annexation. Emotions didn’t cool down between Grant and Sumner. When intermediaries proposed that the abolitionist Gerrit Smith act as peacemaker between them, Grant replied, according to Sumner, that if he weren’t president he “should demand personal satisfaction of Mr. Sumner”—in other words, a duel. Sumner, playing the innocent, professed complete ignorance as to why Grant was so upset with him: “I have done nothing but my duty;—nor have I ever made any personal impeachment of him.”18
Stealing the moral high ground, Grant summoned to the White House Frederick Douglass, who agreed to become secretary to the commission. When it sailed to the Caribbean on January 18, the group also included a State Department geologist, a government botanist, and a New York Times photographer. On the eve of Douglas’s departure, a friend described him as “enchanted at the prospect of visiting a tropical island.”19 At Grant’s behest, he enjoyed every courtesy extended to the three commissioners, joining them for meals in the admiral’s cabin. At a time when this was hardly taken for granted, Douglass marveled at his equal treatment, commenting that “while all the fools are not dead yet, the American people are rapidly outgrowing their slavery-engendered prejudices, and will one day wonder how they could have so long lived under its degrading spell.”20 Douglass’s assignment was yet another example of Grant’s appointing African Americans in far greater numbers than any previous president.
Grant hoped that if the commission filed an unfavorable report on Santo Domingo, it would put the entire matter to rest. Some observers saw the commission as a charade, a face-saving way for Grant to disengage from a failed initiative. “The commission was intended merely to let the administration down ‘easy,’” wrote former attorney general Hoar. “It cannot report in season to do anything in this Congress—and the next will be strong against it.”21 On the other hand, Grant hoped that if the commissioners arrived at a favorable conclusion, annexation might ensue. In fact, the commissioners reacted ecstatically to the island nation. “There is no more fruitful Country on Earth,” Benjamin Wade wrote, “and they are so far all without exception crazy to be annexed—All that Grant said about it is true—all that Sumner said is false.”22
With the commissioners away, the marathon feud between Grant and Sumner redoubled in fury. Relations had also deteriorated between Sumner and Hamilton Fish, whom Sumner anointed “Mephistopheles.”23 Fish not only thought Sumner “bitterly vindictive and hostile,” but believed he suffered from “mental derangement,” succumbing to wild, paranoid delusions that Grant and Orville Babcock had threatened to assault him.24 Boutwell thought Sumner’s days as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee were numbered “when he declined to have any intercourse with the Secretary of State outside of official business.”25 The State Department kept sending minor treaties to Sumner, who then sat on them for months, and watched as the senator pompously issued instructions to foreign diplomats in Washington.
In February, after Sumner strove to thwart confirmation of Grant’s brother-in-law Michael John Cramer as minister to Denmark, the president despaired of any improvement in the situation and threw his considerable weight behind efforts, spearheaded by Senators Morton, Conkling, and Chandler, to oust Sumner as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee when Congress convened in early March. In a momentous shift, Grant made common cause with party bosses, who increasingly formed the backbone of his support on Capitol Hill.
When Congress came back into session, in a rare spectacle of a mighty senator being humbled by his peers, the Republican caucus voted to depose Sumner as head of the Foreign Relations Committee. The full Senate approved by a 33 to 9 vote, with twenty-five senators abstaining. Even though Schurz defended Sumner and John Logan objected to intrusive executive power, the will of the body had turned unmistakably against Sumner, who was replaced by Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, a Grant supporter. By now well schooled in Washington intrigue, the president had shown he would not be pushed around by an arrogant senator. He insisted he had nothing to do with Sumner’s dismissal, but admitted he “was glad when I heard that he was put off, because he stood in the way of even routine business, like ordinary treaties with small countries . . . It was a sad sight to find a Senate with the large majority of its members in sympathy with the administration, and with its chairman of the Foreign Committee in direct opposition to the foreign policy of the administration.”26 Like many shy, reserved men, Grant was slow to take offense, but once provoked he could be implacable in his bitterness. Walking past Sumner’s house with Grant after the senator’s removal, George Hoar was flabbergasted to see the president shake a fist at his window and manifest his anger. “The man who lives up there has abused me in a way I have never suffered from any other man living!”27 Most of the time, Grant was a tactful, forgiving man, but there were limits to his patience.
The self-righteous Sumner absolved himself of all responsibility for what had happened. “The Pres[iden]t has such relations with me as he chooses,” he explained smugly. “I have never declined to see him or confer with him. If there is a quarrel it is all on his side.”28 On March 27, Sumner spewed forth another three-hour speech against Grant, accusing him of trampling senatorial rights and even likening him to a Klan wizard, saying it was “difficult to see how we can condemn . . . our own domestic Ku Klux with its fearful outrages while the President puts himself at the head of a powerful and costly Ku Klux operating abroad.”29 Even those who sympathized with Grant worried about the impact Sumner’s expulsion would have on Republican unity, an early sign of the schism that would split the party in the 1872 election.
By the time the commissioners returned from Santo Domingo in late March, they were convinced the Dominican people wanted annexation and were surprised to concur with Grant about the wisdom of that policy. The final leg of their journey aboard a Potomac mail packet was marred by a racial incident when the captain refused to admit Douglass into the dining room with the three commissioners. Andrew White was irate that “a man who had dined with the foremost statesmen and scholars of our Northern States and of Europe” was banished from the table. In protest he refused to touch his food and stormed from the dining room with Samuel Gridley Howe. Later on, Sumner tried to smear Grant with the incident, saying that “almost within sight of the Executive Mansion,” Douglass had been rejected from the white man’s table. Thus “was the African race insulted, and their equal rights denied but the President . . . neither did nor said anything to right this wrong.”30 The insult was compounded, according to Grant’s critics, when the president invited the three commissioners to dine at the White House on March 30 and excluded Douglass.
There’s only one problem with the story of the supposed presidential snub: the man who most conspicuously defended Grant’s behavior was the man allegedly victimized. “There is something so ridiculous about this dinner affair,” Douglass told a friend, noting that Grant was well within his rights not to invite him.31 Douglass made many good points to disarm critics. He pointed out that Grant had “never withheld any social courtesy” from the Haitian ambassador, “a man of my own complexion.” Every day for ten weeks, Douglass had dined with the commissioners “and this doubtless by the President’s special direction.” Finally, he thought the public misunderstood the circumstances of the dinner. Messrs. White, Howe, and Wade had called on the president, who invited them on the spot to dine with him. “Had I been in company with the Commissioners,”
Douglass wrote, “I have no question but that an invitation would have been extended to me as freely as to any of the gentlemen of the Commission.”32 Not only had Grant been uniformly cordial to him, but “after Lincoln and Sumner no man in his intercourse with me gave evidence of more freedom from vulgar prejudice.”33 Douglass did believe, however, that Grant had thrown away a splendid opportunity to rebuke the ship captain who had snubbed him by welcoming him to a White House dinner.
The president invited Douglass to the executive mansion to deliver his personal views on the mission. Sumner had reproached annexation on the ground that despotic Dominicans threatened black Haitian republicans. Douglass stood this argument on its head, stating that “the Dominicans are a far superior people to the Haitians; that there is no republicanism whatever in Haiti, and that the Government there is an absolute despotism of the most oppressive character,” a reporter jotted down. Douglass thought Santo Domingo annexation would “strike a blow” at tropical slavery and raise the “world’s opinion of the mental and moral possibilities of the colored race.”34 Douglass hoped Sumner would soften his opposition, fearing it would tear apart the Republican Party. If Sumner persisted, Douglass regretted, “I shall . . . regard him as the worst foe the colored race has on this continent.”35
On April 5, Grant submitted the commissioners’ report to the Senate and happily observed that the findings sustained his views on annexation. No less important, it refuted corruption charges and “fully vindicates the purity of the motives and action of those who represented the United States in the negotiation.”36 Grant had privately bemoaned the “insinuations of fraud, corruption, crime” attributed to those negotiating the treaty and he yearned for this vindication.37 For Grant the controversy had become a matter of honor as well as duty, a means to reestablish his personal reputation for incorruptibility. He didn’t ask for congressional action on the report and merely requested that it be printed and disseminated, which would end “all personal solicitude upon the subject.”38 Thumbing his nose at Sumner, Grant ended by saying that a faithful public servant, when sustained by his own conscience, “can bear with patience the censure of disappointed men.”39
If Grant thought the report might salvage the treaty, he was sorely mistaken. A public consensus had already coalesced against annexation. “The Pres. . . . is as stubborn as ever, and seems determined to risk his all upon that one card,” Schurz observed. “He seems to have a genius for suicide.”40 Many annexation foes still exploited racist and xenophobic fears and Sumner fulminated against the treaty at every opportunity. “Nothing has aroused me more since the Fug[itive] Sl[ave] Bill & the outrages in Kansas,” he swore.41
Usually circumspect in comments about people, Grant found it hard to be politic about Sumner, whose betrayal brought strong, censored feelings bubbling to the surface. Eight months after Sumner was toppled as Foreign Relations chairman, Grant refused to heal the breach, telling Senator Henry Wilson:
Mr. Sumner has been unreasonable, cowardly, slanderous, unblushing false. I should require of him an acknowledgment to this effect, from his seat in the Senate, before I would consent to meet him socially. He has not the manliness ever to admit an error. I feel a greater contempt for him than for any other man in the Senate. Schurz is an ungrateful man . . . and one who can render much greater service to the party he does not belong to than the one he pretends to have attachment for.42
Nor was Sumner in a forgiving mood. To embarrass Grant, he introduced a Senate resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to limit presidents to a single term. Although it didn’t apply to the current occupant, it was clearly meant as a slap at Grant. On the Senate floor, to rousing cheers, Roscoe Conkling said that despite attacks from “presses and demagogues,” Grant remained “secure, as no predecessor for forty years has been secure, against detraction and defeat.”43 The proposed amendment faded away, along with Grant’s treaty for annexing Santo Domingo.
The treaty debate had been a bruising lesson in Washington power politics for Grant. He had been subjected to unconscionable attacks by Sumner, but had also made the mistake of personalizing the issue and matching the senator’s animus. As Julia Grant once said of her husband, he had “lots of friends and no enemies until political ones came on.”44 This was not quite true, for he had enemies during the war who tried to injure him. But the politicians now plotting his downfall were craftier and more ruthless and had played the game far longer than he had. Grant lacked the normal human quota of cynicism and had paid for it. Some people thought he had mishandled his relationship with the vain Sumner. The senator himself complained that Grant “may have sought my vote, which I did not promise; but he never sought ‘advice & counsel.’”45 Sumner had demanded a show of deference, a bend of the knee, which Grant refused to give. The president, of course, could point to his unprecedented stroll over to Sumner’s house to talk about the treaty, a novel show of deference that had clearly backfired.
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THE DEMOTION OF CHARLES SUMNER and the dismissal of John Lothrop Motley greatly simplified Grant’s task in negotiating an end to the controversial Alabama claims. Their settlement took a dramatic leap forward in autumn 1870 when Sir Edward Thornton, Britain’s ambassador, went to Fish’s house for a friendly chat. Thornton surmised that Grant was eager to reach a settlement to advance his reelection prospects and that Fish, too, craved a touch of diplomatic glory. Over cigars in his study, Fish made two statements that transformed the discussion. First, he said Washington would drop its insistence upon Canadian independence if Great Britain made satisfactory concessions on other issues. Second, instead of a timid, piecemeal approach, he proposed a far grander solution with all outstanding disputes between the United States and Great Britain, including fisheries, boundaries, and tariffs, negotiated at once.
One evening in early November, Grant dropped by Fish’s house and the two conversed for a couple of hours. Fish persuaded Grant that it was futile to pursue Canadian annexation. Many Britons ascribed to Grant a deep-seated hostility toward them, and he indeed later wrote that the British ruling class had “shown an indecent haste in their recognition of a southern confederacy.”46 Still, he retained a fondness for Anglo-Saxon culture, telling a friend, “It has always been my desire to cultivate the best of feeling between the two English speaking Nations . . . the most enterprising as well as freest Nations of the world.”47 By late December, he had given Fish his blessing to hammer out an Alabama settlement with the British.
Fish had already received notice from Sir John Rose, a Canadian diplomat, that the other side was ready to bargain. In late January, the cabinet endorsed negotiations with the caveat that Great Britain “admit her liability for the losses sustained by the acts of the Alabama,” Fish noted.48 In his annual message in December, Grant expressed his “firm and unalterable” conviction that the British should admit their guilt.49 Fish knew they would consent to no such confession and that insistence on this would only wreck the discussions. Toward the end of January, Grant and Fish responded warmly to a proposal from Sir Edward Thornton for a joint commission that would arbitrate the differences between the two nations, heralding a peaceful new way of solving international disputes.
At the time, Charles Sumner still chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and made preposterous demands upon the English. Not only did he want all of Canada but a total British withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere, including its Caribbean islands and the Falkland Islands off the Argentine coast. Circumventing Sumner, Fish lobbied other committee members and secured their support for a joint commission. On February 9, Grant announced its creation to iron out differences with England.
By the end of the month, the British-American Joint High Commission held its first meeting on the State Department premises, with five representatives from each side. Grant and Fish had scored a major breakthrough in bringing the British to the table: their participation tacitly admitted guilt that they could not publicly avow.
It also meant the administration had prevailed over Sumner, Ben Butler, and other Republicans hankering for a collision with Great Britain. Acting on Fish’s suggestion that his commission appointments show a bipartisan spirit, Grant included Samuel Nelson, an associate justice of the Supreme Court and a Democrat. For the next nine weeks, Grant and Fish, who served as an American commissioner, crisscrossed Lafayette Square innumerable times to consult each other. The commission sessions proceeded amicably, and the British were pleasantly surprised to find the Americans “a very gentlemanly good set of fellows socially” and Fish “quite English in manner and appearance.”50 One British commissioner thought Grant’s reelection “the mainspring of the whole machine of the Commission.”51 While the diplomats deliberated, Sumner was ousted as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, markedly improving the prospects for treaty ratification.
While not admitting guilt over the Alabama, the British commissioners conceded that, as a neutral government, they should have used “due diligence” to ensure that British-built vessels weren’t armed for combat against another nation. When they confessed to negligence and regret, Grant and Fish were satisfied. The British also agreed to submit damages claimed by the United States to binding arbitration. The Joint High Commission recommended the creation of a five-man arbitration tribunal, based in Geneva, with members chosen by a cluster of world dignitaries: President Grant, Queen Victoria, the king of Italy, the president of the Swiss Confederation, and the emperor of Brazil. On May 8, the British and American commissioners gathered in a flower-bedecked room at the State Department and affixed their signatures to the Treaty of Washington. One British commissioner dropped scalding sealing wax on the fingers of a harried clerk preparing the final treaty document, leading the latter to burst into tears. With this mishap safely resolved, the commissioners celebrated their achievement over plates of strawberries and ice cream.52
