by Ron Chernow
Although one thousand blacks had emigrated to Liberia in 1866 and 1867 under the aegis of the American Colonization Society, the idea of such emigration lost support among many blacks during Reconstruction as they gained full rights to citizenship. This progress limited, but by no means eliminated, black support for annexing Santo Domingo. Still, Grant’s policy contained a substantial element of wishful thinking. A black asylum in the Caribbean could create an incentive for whites to expel blacks from the continental United States, while Caribbean states with all-black constituencies might not fare very well in the domestic political arena.
As Santo Domingo emerged as a potent political issue, its supporters issued a stream of articles presenting it as a tropical paradise—“the garden of the Antilles” and the “finest part of the whole West Indies.”41 A steady drumbeat of criticism arose from those who spied a huge boondoggle being foisted on the country by unscrupulous speculators. “The signs are,” warned the New York World, “that there is a powerful combination in this country to annex the [West Indian] islands by some hook or crook, not from any considerations of public advantage, but merely as a large speculation in real estate and colonial debts.”42 There also emerged sotto voce grumbling against a Caribbean country where Spanish was spoken, many people were of mixed race, Roman Catholicism was practiced, and there was no history of American-style democracy.
In July 1869, Grant took a decisive step that moved Santo Domingo from theoretical question to practical reality. Meeting his cabinet, he “casually remarked that the navy people seemed so anxious to have the bay of Samana as a coaling station that he thought he would send Colonel [Orville] Babcock down to examine it and report upon it as an engineer,” wrote Secretary of the Interior Cox.43 Babcock, with his background as a military engineer, seemed a logical choice for the assignment. Even those opposed to the trip didn’t object vociferously and Babcock slipped away without publicity. On July 13, Grant wrote to President Báez apropos of Babcock: “I have entire confidence in his integrity and intelligence, and I commend him to your excellency accordingly.”44
Before Babcock sailed, Grant startled his cabinet by announcing that a group of New York merchants who traded with Santo Domingo had offered him free passage on one of their ships. When Fish objected to such a flagrant conflict of interest, Grant backed down and agreed that a naval vessel should carry him to the Caribbean instead. With that conversation, the cabinet began to suspect that unseen business forces were operating upon Grant and that he had established a series of back channels to Santo Domingo. Traveling there without special diplomatic authority from Fish, Babcock was only authorized to gather information, but Grant gave him orders to sound out Báez on annexation and Babcock happily complied.
When Babcock arrived in Santo Domingo in late July, his hand strengthened by an escort of American warships, he found local denizens “ignorant but not indolent.”45 When he posed the question of annexation, not everyone greeted the idea, but he thought they would reverse course once the first steps were undertaken. Babcock ended up grossly exceeding his authority, negotiating a full-dress agreement instead of merely gathering facts. On September 4, President Báez signed a treaty by which the United States would annex Santo Domingo and assume its public debt of $1.5 million or else purchase Samaná Bay outright for $2 million. It included an understanding that Grant would apply all his power to lobby the treaty in Congress in a secretive atmosphere. Santo Domingo would be admitted as a U.S. territory, then eventually as a state.
When Babcock returned to Washington, bearing this unexpected document, the news elicited a shocked reaction from Grant’s cabinet and Fish was horrified that Babcock had exceeded his directions. “What do you think!” he exclaimed to Cox privately. “Babcock is back, and has actually brought a treaty for the cession of San Domingo; yet I pledge you my word he had no more diplomatic authority than any other casual visitor to the island!”46 According to Cox, an exasperated Fish wished to bury the whole matter in “oblivion as a state secret.”47
When secretaries arrived at the next cabinet meeting, they discovered that Babcock had laid out mineral samples from the island, openly advertising its wares. Fish and Cox had expected Grant to repudiate the treaty, but he endorsed it instead. “I suppose it is not formal,” he confessed, Babcock having “had no diplomatic powers; but we can easily cure that. We can send back the treaty, and have Perry, the consular agent, sign it; and as he is an officer of the State Department it would make it all right.”48 Cabinet members sat there in thunderstruck silence. “But Mr. President,” Cox inquired, “has it been settled, then, that we want to annex San Domingo?” Cox said that Grant blushed, “smoked hard at his cigar,” and finally ended a painful pause by changing the subject. Henceforth, Grant took diplomatic matters into his own hands. He instructed Fish to draw up two treaties: one for annexation, another for taking over Samaná Bay. Fish had a racial aversion to absorbing the Dominican Republic and was, at best, a lukewarm supporter who humored Grant to gain a freer hand on other matters. By December, Grant had in hand the two treaties negotiated by Babcock.
The president didn’t anticipate what a hard sell Santo Domingo annexation would be, involving a tropical, Spanish-speaking, Roman Catholic nation inhabited by dark-skinned people. He committed fatal errors by pursuing this momentous policy in a closed-door, top-down style that made sense in wartime, but not in politics. He didn’t prepare the American electorate or mobilize public opinion or rally voters to his side. Grant hadn’t yet learned the art of appealing to the public over the heads of Washington legislators, presenting himself as steward of a broader public interest. The absence of a systematic marshaling of public opinion hurt Grant in jousting with senators who had to approve the treaty, especially Charles Sumner, august chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Fearing that Haitian independence would be compromised by Dominican annexation next door, he emphatically opposed U.S. expansion there. Sumner’s pronouncements were decrees that other political figures defied at their peril. Headstrong and imperious, he resented any treaty hatched without his personal blessing, and Grant would experience the full force of his towering fury before the Santo Domingo imbroglio was finally laid to rest.
Cuba was the other locus of controversy in the Caribbean. As with American attitudes toward Santo Domingo, it was sometimes hard to differentiate between humanitarian concerns and imperialist swagger. Right before Grant became president, Cuban insurgents launched a campaign to oust their Spanish colonial overlords, provoking brutal reprisals. In Grant’s cabinet, a stentorian voice for aiding the rebels and recognizing their provisional government was the emaciated John Rawlins. As always, he approached the issue with evangelical conviction, arguing for the expulsion of all European authority from the Western Hemisphere. As Grant’s right-hand man, he commanded special respect in the cabinet and remained as outspoken as during the war. Although severely depleted by the tuberculosis that had harried him for years, Rawlins rallied during his first months as war secretary, perhaps stimulated by his new powers, and promoted his ideas in his usual animated style.
Never one to traffic in halfway measures, Rawlins wanted to champion Cuban rebels as the first step in a policy that foresaw annexation of the island. The prospect of war with Spain didn’t seem to frighten him. Before the Civil War, the impetus for Cuban annexation had come from the South, which saw a new outpost for slavery. After the war, many northerners, including prominent blacks, favored ending Spanish domination of Cuba to rid the island of slavery, casting Cuban rebels in a heroic light. Believing the rebels would prevail, Grant leaned toward Rawlins’s views and considered recognizing the insurgents as a belligerent power. They had to contend, however, with the ever-cautious Fish, who thought it foolhardy to risk war with Spain right after the Civil War. With the United States preparing for major negotiations with Great Britain on wartime claims, Fish was in no mood to engage in side battles in the Caribbean. Having already given anemic support to G
rant’s Santo Domingo venture, he chose to go no further in the region. He was disturbed that filibustering expeditions against Cuba set sail from American ports with Union and Confederate veterans signed up by the Cuban revolutionary junta in New York.
However much he was exasperated by John Rawlins, who kept poaching on his territory, Fish recognized that the ailing war secretary was a good-hearted soul, motivated by pure feelings. “He is a generous, high-spirited, and right-minded (impulsive) man,” Fish wrote, “instinctively right in the direction of his impulses, even if occasionally extravagant.”49 At the same time, Fish realized that Rawlins’s bombastic rhetoric and impetuous nature could lead to reckless moves in the Caribbean that undermined his own work at State.
Despite sympathy for the Cuban rebels, Grant tread a fine line between neutrality and intervention. He was outraged in June when Spanish authorities executed two Americans in eastern Cuba, inflaming American public opinion. Still, Grant acted swiftly to end anti-Cuban raids originating on American soil, and, prodded by Fish, threatened to use military force to halt them. Grant was always willing to listen to contrary opinions. A year later, profoundly grateful to Fish, he thanked him for his restraint on Cuban intervention, saying, “You led me against my judgment at the time . . . and I now see how right it was—and I desire most sincerely to thank you.”50 It was owing to Fish’s professionalism that Grant refrained from recognizing Cuban belligerency, which might have resulted in war with Spain.
In late August 1869, when Spain perpetrated fresh atrocities in Cuba, the American press seethed with denunciations. In the New York Sun, Charles Dana declared that America was now duty-bound “to interfere in Cuba” and terminate the heinous bloodshed wrought by Spain.51 Internecine battles over Cuba in Grant’s cabinet came to a head on August 31, when Rawlins and Fish arrived for a showdown. Rawlins appeared with a deathly pallor, his eyes starting in their deep-set sockets. After visiting his pregnant wife in Connecticut, he had suffered a hemorrhage en route to Washington, then another after he arrived. Cabinet members were stunned by his cadaverous visage. Seated next to Grant, looking ravaged, he mustered enough energy for one final diatribe on behalf of Cuban insurgents. More overwrought than usual, he turned to Grant and asked forgiveness for his sustained outburst. “I have been your adjutant,” he apologized, “and I think you will excuse me for being earnest.” “Certainly,” Grant said tenderly, “and you are still my adjutant.”52
While the discussion percolated at a low boil, Grant scribbled on a sheet of paper, setting down conditions under which the United States could mediate peace between Spain and Cuba and buy Cuba in the process. As at Appomattox, Grant drafted a letter-perfect document in an attempt to bring a complex situation, fraught with danger, to a peaceful termination. When finished, he shoved the paper across the table to Fish, saying, “There is my decision.”53 The peace process would start with an immediate armistice, Cuba would compensate Spain for public property, and Spaniards on the liberated island would be free to remain or leave. Once slavery was abolished, the United States would purchase Cuba. When these terms leaked to the press in Madrid, the Spanish public reacted with explosive outrage, appalled at having to bicker with the United States over Cuba. The ferocious reaction snuffed out any hopes of a negotiated end to the conflict.
In his year-end speech in December 1869, Grant reviewed the star-crossed Cuban initiative, explaining that he had not recognized the insurgents as a belligerent power because they lacked ports, courts, or a permanent seat of government. He lamented that Spain had spurned his deal and stressed that he wasn’t swapping American for European colonialism, invoking self-determination as his guiding principle: “These [Caribbean] dependencies are no longer regarded as subject to transfer from one European power to another. When the present relation of Colonies ceases they are to become independent powers, exercising the right of choice, and of self-control in the determination of their future condition.”54
John Rawlins put on a brave front as he struggled with his terrible cough and alarming medical troubles. “My health is much improved this summer,” he told a friend on August 19, whistling in the dark, “though for two weeks past I have been a little under the weather.”55 He had already soldiered on far longer than friends had thought possible. In making his militant case for Cuba, Rawlins believed “he had over-exerted himself . . . for from that excitement his disease redoubled its violence, and his frame, already exhausted, was too weak to resist,” wrote Ely Parker.56 Rawlins remained the earnest figure he had always been, motivated by deep patriotism and personal fidelity to Grant, but the strain now proved overwhelming. Right after the Cuban cabinet debate, his health collapsed altogether and death seemed imminent. “Poor Rawlins at this moment is very ill,” wrote Fish. “I fear that his disease (consumption) has the entire mastery of him, and that he has not long to labor.”57 Unable to visit the War Department, he had aides transfer urgent papers to his residence. As he lay dying, a flock of generals—Ely Parker, William T. Sherman, Oliver O. Howard, and Montgomery Meigs, among them—stood vigil by his bedside, visibly distraught. “If the love of my friends could do it,” Rawlins remarked sadly, “I would soon be a healthy man.”58
With time running out, Rawlins, thirty-eight, brooded about his young family’s future. His wife had just given birth to a stillborn baby, news carefully withheld from him. He began to dictate a will to Parker, appointing “my friend Genl Ulysses S. Grant” as guardian of his three children and his wife. It was a poignant tribute to the man who had transformed his life and by whom he had stood so ably. As he lay dying, Rawlins yearned to see Grant one more time and seemed pained by his absence. “Hasn’t the old man come yet?” he asked plaintively.59 Rawlins was so palpably upset by his absence that when he inquired, “When will he get here?” Sherman had to console him with a lie: “In about ten minutes.”60 Sherman secretly dashed off a telegram to Grant, now in Saratoga, describing Rawlins’s anxiety to see him one last time. When Grant got the telegram, the last train for the day had already left, forcing him to postpone his departure. “The most recent dispatches scarcely leave a hope that I may see [Rawlins] alive,” he told a colleague.61
Those present at Rawlins’s bedside kept promising the dying man he would see Grant one last time. Thwarted by logistical mishaps, Grant’s train didn’t arrive in Washington until 5:20 p.m. on September 6. Rawlins had expired an hour earlier, with an attendant physician intoning, “The soul of Grant’s Cabinet is gone.”62 When Grant arrived at the deathbed, he stared mournfully at his friend’s ashen face and declared he had hoped to be there earlier. The doctor mentioned that Rawlins had frequently spoken his name. Overcome with emotion, Grant could only refer to the train delays that had stalled him. His failure to be at the bedside when Rawlins died led to wounding charges of neglect. “I knew personally of [Grant’s] constant and devoted attentions to his friend,” said John Eaton, “but many people chose to believe the sensational and libellous reports.”63 Likely feeling guilty, Grant wished to maintain a vigil by the corpse during the night, but Sherman, knowing he was exhausted by the journey and shaken by the death, convinced him to go to the White House, where he wrote to Emma Rawlins of her husband’s demise: “Your beloved husband expired at twelve minutes after four o’clock this afternoon, to be mourned by a family and friends who loved him for his personal worth and services to his country, and a nation which acknowledges its debt of gratitude to him.”64
The death provoked a vast outpouring of grief, and Senator George Spencer of Alabama said, “I have never known a man more universally mourned.”65 “Poor Rawlins has gone to a happier office!” sighed Adolph Borie. “A noble fellow, truly, he was so pure zealous and earnest.”66 On the day of the funeral, the route from the War Department to the Congressional Cemetery was crowded with mourners tipping their hats or bowing in homage as the cortege rolled by. It was a remarkable tribute to a man never elected to office who had thrived in Grant’s shadow. No organization chart
could evoke the influence he had wielded as Grant’s trusted counselor. A month later, James Wilson sent an appreciation of him to Orville Babcock:
The death of Rawlins is more deeply regretted by the thinking and knowing men of the country than it otherwise would have been, on account of the fact that it had come to be recognized by them, that he was the President’s best friend & most useful counsellor when engaged in renouncing rascality, which the President’s unsuspicious nature has not dreamed of being near. You and I know how necessary, the bold, uncompromising, & honest character of our dead friend, was to our living one—and how impossible it is for any stranger to exercise as good an influence over him, as one who has known him from the time of his obscurity till the day he became the foremost man of the nation. The long and short of it is that Rawlins, was his Mentor—or if I may say it, his conscience keeper.67
After Rawlins died, Sherman served briefly as acting secretary of war, encouraging Grant to name William W. Belknap, a tall, burly Iowan with curly hair and a long, square-shaped beard and a background in law and politics, as permanent secretary. Born in Newburgh, New York, and educated at Princeton and Georgetown, Belknap had fought with distinction at Shiloh and Vicksburg and joined Sherman on the march to the sea, ending the war as a brevet major general. Sherman had bristled at how Rawlins had lodged power in the War Department, reducing his own influence as chief general. He was shocked that when he complained to Grant, the latter sided with Rawlins, and their friendship never quite recovered from the difference of opinions. Even though Sherman had recommended Belknap as war secretary, he shuddered at how Belknap also circumvented him on military matters. Grant promised to arbitrate, but never did, further deepening Sherman’s disenchantment with his old comrade.