Of the seven presidents during the Age of Lincoln, only Ulysses Grant expended ample time and thought on Indian policy and sought genuine reforms grounded on humanitarianism, efficiency, and justice. He did so because he sympathized with the Indians’ plight and deplored past federal policies of conquest. In his first address to Congress, he condemned the “wars of extermination” against hostile tribes as “demoralizing and wicked. Our superiority should make us lenient toward the Indian.”12 In his second inaugural address, he issued this challenge to the nation: “Can not the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society? If the effort is made in good faith, we will stand better before the civilized nations of the earth and our own consciences for having made it.”13
Grant acted on his principles. His first step was to free Indian policy from the corruption and incompetence of those who implemented it. To oversee his Peace Policy, he appointed a board of commissioners of ten prominent humanitarians, mostly Quakers. On May 27 he met with that board, along with Interior Secretary Jacob Cox and Indian Affairs Commissioner Ely Parker, himself a Seneca, at the White House. After explaining his policy, he empowered those men to reform the system through investigating, hiring, and firing, backed, if need be, by Justice Department subpoenas and prosecutions.14
Grant’s Peace Policy was innovative in its quest to purge corruption from Indian policy and to uphold existing treaties. Unfortunately, Grant’s efforts failed. Allegations of a corrupt “Indian Ring” forced the resignations of Interior Secretary Cox in 1870 and Indian Affairs Commissioner Parker in 1871, although a congressional investigation later exonerated Parker. This scandal was hardly the only failing of Grant’s policy. He also unwittingly set in motion a conflict that would explode into the bloodiest Indian war west of the Mississippi River.
With the Civil War over, the nation’s diplomatic, military, and business elite could once again devote themselves to expanding American wealth and power around the world. During the Johnson administration, Secretary of State William Seward and Senate Foreign Relations Chair Charles Sumner worked together to devise policies to protect or enhance specific national interests overseas.15
The most pressing problem was how to get a French army and regime out of Mexico. In 1861 France, along with Britain and Spain, had sent troops to Mexico to force its government to resume its debt payments. After the Mexicans did so, the British and Spanish withdrew their contingents. French emperor Napoleon III, however, took advantage of the civil wars raging in both Mexico and the United States to send an army to the capital and install in power his distant cousin Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as his puppet emperor. Until 1865 concerned Americans could only glare angrily at such blatant French imperialism just beyond their southern border. Now, with the Confederacy destroyed and a million troops in its army, the United States could act. President Johnson sent fifty-two thousand troops to the Rio Grande and military aid to Benito Juarez, the rightful president, who held out with an army in northern Mexico. Over time, Mexican troops and guerrillas won back more of their country. In 1867 Napoleon III finally cut his losses and ordered his troops back to France. Shorn of this support, Emperor Maximilian’s government collapsed and he was executed.
While Secretary of State Seward played a secondary role in these events, he was crucial in forging a deal that greatly enhanced American power. On April 9, 1867, he signed a treaty whereby the United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. The Senate ratified the treaty despite criticism of it as “Seward’s folly” and “Seward’s icebox.” For the first time the United States had taken land beyond its immediate territory.
Later that year Seward signed a treaty whereby the United States would pay Denmark $7.5 million for its Virgin Islands territory of St. Thomas and St. John in the Caribbean. The timing could not have been worse. A hurricane and tidal wave wrecked those islands, while President Johnson faced impeachment charges. Seward tabled the treaty until a more opportune political moment arose to present it to the Senate for ratification. The result was a very long wait. The United States eventually acquired part of the Virgin Islands, but not until 1917.
Upon becoming president in March 1869, Ulysses Grant continued the policy of acquiring available foreign lands with economic and strategic importance. Yet this policy conflicted with his own principle: “I do not believe that the Creator ever placed the different races on this earth with a view of having the strong exert all his energies in exterminating the weak.”16
Hamilton Fish, Grant’s secretary of state, proved to be as able as Seward.17 He was the quintessential northeastern elitist, with old-money ancestry, an Ivy League degree, and the experience of a Grand Tour of Europe, and atop that he was fluent in four languages. To foreign policy he brought intelligence, knowledge, sophistication, and a clear view of just what American national interests were and how best to realize them. Although Grant and Fish could not have differed more in their respective backgrounds, they worked well together. Fish was Grant’s only department chief to keep his job all eight years.
Cuba was the Grant administration’s first foreign policy challenge. Cuban nationalists revolted against Spanish rule in 1868 and their exile groups in the United States lobbied for American intervention on their behalf. They backed their appeals to America’s moral and economic interests in a free Cuba by distributing to influential politicians, financiers, and newspaper editors millions of dollars of Cuban bonds that could be redeemed only by a sovereign Cuban government. This had the desired effect of provoking a national debate over whether Washington should support the rebellion.
The United States clearly had economic and humanitarian interests in an independent Cuba. Exporters and investors sought to end Spanish rule in order to gain access to Cuba’s markets, while liberals envisioned the liberation of half a million slaves. In reply, realists urged restraint, pointing out that the rebels had no government, army to speak of, or large following and thus had little chance of success. The United States would have to defeat Spain in war and drive its forces from Cuba, at a high cost in American lives and money. And if Cuba were free, what then? Many prominent voices argued that Cubans were no fitter to rule themselves than other Latin Americans, whose wars of independence earlier that century had resulted not in democracy and development but in a political seesaw of despotism and anarchy amid worsening poverty.18
The political balance leaned toward intervention. On April 29, 1869, a majority in the House of Representatives voted for a resolution to support the rebels and President Grant if he called for intervention. The Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ organization, declared its willingness to fight for Cuban freedom.
Like the nation, Grant’s cabinet split over what to do. War Secretary John Rawlins, Treasury Secretary George Boutwell, Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar, Interior Secretary Jacob Cox, and Postmaster General John Creswell called for intervention; Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and Navy Secretary Adolph Borie argued that asserting military power would harm rather than enhance American interests. Grant himself was divided; he sympathized with the rebels but questioned whether their cause was worth the vast human and financial cost of winning their liberation. A pecuniary interest appears to have fixed the position of at least one of those secretaries; Rawlins, who died later that year, was discovered to have received $28,000 in Cuban bonds.
Grant embraced Fish’s arguments that Spain’s corrupt, inept, and brutal rule would eventually collapse beneath its own dead weight, and then Americans would be welcomed to assist in Cuba’s political and economic development. The United States could accelerate this process by offering to help negotiate an armistice between Spain and the rebels, then pay off Madrid to relinquish its colony. Upon receiving this offer in July, Spain’s government debated its merits until October, when it finally rejected the proposal and instead exerted more resources to crush the rebellion. This rejection might have provoked the Grant White House and Congress to intervene had their attention not shifted to another trouble
d country in the Caribbean basin.19
The Dominican Republic had been independent since 1821, but increasing numbers of its people recognized that sovereignty was anything but a panacea for their nation’s worsening array of political, economic, and social problems. The country had dissolved into anarchy and various rebel groups threatened to topple the government. To save themselves, the elite clinging to the shards of power took a desperate option—they called for annexation by the United States. By a vote of 63 to 110 in January 1869, the House of Representatives rejected a resolution that would have accepted the plea.20
Upon entering the White House two months later, Grant was eager to grasp that opportunity. His primary motives were strategic and racial rather than economic or humanitarian. Located on the Dominican Republic’s northeastern coast, Samana Bay was among the world’s best anchorages, and Grant sought the American navy’s exclusive control of it, fearing that if the United States did not take it, another great power would. But he also valued the island as a place where black Americans could emigrate and thus dilute racial tensions within the United States.
Grant had his secretary, Orville Babcock, negotiate a treaty of annexation with the Dominican government. Babcock signed a treaty on November 29, 1869, whereby the United States took the Dominican Republic in exchange for assuming its debt of $1.5 million, and it leased Samana Bay for a $150,000 annual payment. Upon receiving this treaty on January 2, 1870, Grant promptly walked it over to the nearby home of Charles Sumner, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Although the two men despised each other, they kept up a public decorum. Sumner, who was presiding over a dinner party, extended the platitude that he backed his administration. Grant left, believing that Sumner intended to work for the treaty’s approval. Instead, on March 15, 1870, the Senate committee rejected the treaty by a five to two vote. Sumner and other opponents cited the financial and political costs of trying to integrate such an alien culture and economy into the United States.
Grant was stunned. He vowed not only to get his treaty approved but to punish Sumner for his betrayal. He succeeded in one of these goals. He devoted most of his State of the Union address in December 1870 to arguments for annexation. He advanced the treaty a step and got even with Sumner when, in March 1871, the Republican caucus voted twenty-six to twenty-one to eject Sumner from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In April 1870 a commission reported that annexation was in American interests, given the Dominican Republic’s fertile soil, Samana Bay’s strategic importance, and the people’s overwhelming desire to become part of the United States. In May the Committee on Foreign Relations voted to submit the treaty to the Senate. Yet, despite winning this string of minor victories, Grant lost his campaign. On June 30, 1871, the Senate rejected the treaty by a twenty-eight to twenty-eight vote, far short of the required two-thirds majority.
One foreign policy success of the Grant administration was finally to resolve the issue of British aid to rebel commerce raiders during the Civil War. Charles Sumner reignited this issue during a Senate speech in April 1869, when he asserted that Britain’s policy had cost the United States $2 billion and that America should take Canada as compensation. War hawks loudly echoed the call.
These belligerent demands promptly got the attention of policy makers on both side of the Atlantic. Prime Minister William Gladstone called for mutual concessions on not just the claims case but other festering issues, including the San Juan Islands boundary, trade, fisheries, and access to Great Lakes canals. President Grant agreed. A joint commission was set up in Washington in February 1871.
The result was the Treaty of Washington, signed on May 8, 1871, whereby the Americans and British agreed to split the difference on the boundary, trade, and fisheries issues, open the Great Lakes canals to both nationalities, and submit the claims cases to a binding five-person arbitration committee to be established in Geneva, Switzerland. The Senate approved the treaty by fifty to twelve on May 24. The arbitration committee ruled in December 1872 that Britain owed the United States an indemnity of $15.5 million for damages inflicted by rebel raiders.21
A crisis erupted in 1873 that brought the United States and Spain to war’s brink over Cuba. The Spanish navy intercepted a ship carrying volunteers, arms, and munitions for the Cuban rebels. Several Americans were among the fifty-three men that Spanish authorities ordered shot for piracy. Secretary of State Fish demanded an apology and indemnity. The Spaniards faced a tough choice. Defending their pride and right of self-defense would likely lead to war with the United States. If that happened, Spain would lose both the war and Cuba. This catastrophe could be averted if they swallowed their pride and right. Madrid eventually agreed to extend an apology and pay an $80,000 indemnity to the United States.
Fish’s last important assertion of American interests was a treaty in 1875 whereby the United States asserted a protectorate over the Hawaiian Islands. That treaty recognized a power relationship that had developed over decades. The first American vessels had dropped anchor in that kingdom, then known as the Sandwich Islands, as early as the 1790s, to buy sandalwood and replenish food and water in their circuit through the global trade network. Over time more Americans stayed to invest in sugarcane plantations, cattle ranches, and other enterprises. As the American community’s economic power grew, it increasingly intervened blatantly in Hawaiian politics. As early as 1842, President Tyler publicly declared that America’s economic and strategic interests in Hawaii had reached the point where they were worth fighting for against any foreign nation that threatened them. Subsequent presidents upheld the Tyler Doctrine whenever complaints reached Washington of British or French meddling in Hawaiian affairs. Despite these interests and policies, the Senate failed to ratify the treaty. It would be nearly another quarter century until, in 1898, the United States finally annexed Hawaii.
America as a distinct culture began to evolve from the first settlements in the early seventeenth century. With time more Americans creatively expressed themselves and, in doing so, their culture, and these expressions became more refined and profound. Cultural icons that reflected the American experience proliferated.
The first great wave of American art emerged during the late 1820s, with writers and painters inspired by the philosophy of transcendentalism, the belief that humanity and nature are inseparable and divine. The synergy between painters and writers was best portrayed by Asher Durand’s 1849 painting Kindred Spirits, which showed the poet William Cullen Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole reveling in a sublime wilderness setting.
The expression of transcendentalism through painting was initiated with Cole’s first landscapes in 1825. He and other landscape painters were called the Hudson River school, as that region inspired many of their greatest works, while seascape painters were known as luminists. Although Cole passed away in 1848, a growing fraternity of painters like Durand, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford Gifford, John Kensett, Robert Salmon, Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Heade, Worthington Wittredge, George Inness, and most vividly of all, Frederick Church, continued to create magnificent landscapes and seascapes inspired by transcendentalist ideals.
Outstanding painters in other genres emerged during the mid-nineteenth century. George Caleb Bingham depicted the tumultuous, practical, land-hungry, money-making, power-seeking world of Jacksonian democracy at odds with transcendentalism through such paintings as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1852), The County Election (1852), Canvassing for a Vote (1852), Stump Speaking (1854), Verdict of the People (1854), and The Jolly Flatboatmen (1857). Although Henry Inman and William Sidney Mount were actually more skilled artists who painted more intimate scenes of rural life, perhaps only Mount’s Eel Spearing at Setauket (1845) nears the iconic status of Bingham’s half-dozen best-known paintings.
The Far West was a subject for many artists, although together they neither constituted a school nor were explicitly inspired by transcendentalism. Alfred Jacob Miller and Ge
orge Catlin journeyed with trading expeditions to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains during the 1830s and realistically captured the heyday of the mountain man era. During the 1840s and 1850s a more refined group of artists, including Charles Wimar, John Stanley, William Ranney, Seth Eastman, Arthur Tait, and most powerfully, Charles Deas, made their own western excursions and memorable paintings. The two finest painters of Far West scenes were Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, who joined army exploring expeditions in 1858 and 1871, respectively, then returned to New York City to convert scores of sketches into magnificent paintings. Of all the works created by these artists, the most iconic ones of America’s westward movement are Miller’s Trapper’s Bride (1845), Deas’s Long Jakes (1844) and Death Struggle (1845), Ranney’s Advice on the Prairie (1853), and Bierstadt’s Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867). As for American icons, Emmanuel Leutze painted two of the most popular, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) and his 1861 mural for the Capitol, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.
The Civil War became a watershed in painting, along with so much else in American life. Three great artists—James Whistler, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer—emerged during the 1860s and reached heights of skill and style during the 1870s. Whistler was the most innovative; his The White Girl (1862), Arrangement in Grey and Black (1871), better known as Whistler’s Mother, and Nocturne in Blue and Gold (1875) anticipated impressionism and pointed the way to abstract expressionism. Stylistically Eakins went in the opposite direction. His early paintings, like Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871) and Sailboats Racing on the Delaware (1874), verged on impressionism, but from his The Gross Clinic (1875), he switched to a hard-edged realism. No painter better depicted the Civil War and its aftermath than Homer, especially his Veteran in a New Field (1865) and Prisoners from the Front (1866). But during the 1870s he turned to creating landscapes and seascapes like Snap the Whip (1872) and Breezing Up (1876) with haunting psychological dimensions that exuded exhilaration at the brink of danger.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 32
