Grant

by Ron Chernow

  The first sign of trouble on Capitol Hill came when Sumner procrastinated in considering the treaty. He contended that a large majority of his committee already opposed Dominican annexation and he ranted at the autocratic President Báez: “I know his history intimately. He is a usurper, whose hands have been red with innocent blood.”14 If the treaty wasn’t approved by March 29, it would expire, and on March 14 a worried Grant requested prompt action from Sumner. The next day, the Foreign Relations Committee handed him a severe blow when it voted down the Dominican treaty by a 5 to 2 margin. As the matter shifted to the full Senate, Grant doggedly took charge of the lobbying campaign. Two days later, he marched up to the Capitol—“somewhat in the style of Oliver Cromwell,” the New York World archly noted—and summoned fifteen senators who might sympathize with the treaty.15 Such presidential leadership was highly unusual at the time, leading to accusations of executive interference with the legislative branch, and Sumner grunted that his visit was “as unconstitutional in character as that warlike intervention on the island.”16

  Grant had given Báez his personal pledge that he would apply his influence to carry the treaty. With military thoroughness, he drew up a list of senators opposed to or undecided about the treaty, inviting them to the White House. His lobbying skills weren’t finely honed and his laconic personality was poorly suited to such moral suasion. Senator Carl Schurz, a new member of the Foreign Relations Committee, described Grant’s gauche effort to win him over: “At first the President listened to me with evident interest, looking at me as if the objections to the treaty which I expressed were quite new to him, and made an impression on his mind. But after a while I noticed that his eyes wandered about the room, and I became doubtful whether he listened to me at all.”17

  Grant’s soldierly instincts made him persevere in a lost cause instead of trimming his losses. In politics a fight-to-the-finish mentality could be unsound strategy. Grant was trapped in a controversy whose dynamics he didn’t understand, and all his frustrations as a novice president crystallized around this one issue. So fierce was his commitment to the flawed treaty that the British ambassador thought it “strange that he should be so tenacious with regard to its acceptance.”18 Instead of opposing the treaty openly, Sumner deftly moved to strangle it through dilatory tactics. He wanted his vanity stroked, but Grant, pure in his sense of rectitude, refused to appease him with patronage or cool him off with an appointment for Ashley.

  On March 24, when the Senate began secret deliberations on the treaty, Sumner let loose a four-hour tirade against it. Senate opposition to annexation blended idealism with the basest form of racism. When Carl Schurz rose to eviscerate the treaty, he presented a demeaning view of Dominicans as lazy, shiftless tropical people, a theme picked up by General Joseph R. Hawley of the Hartford Courant, who complained to Sumner: “We don’t want any of those islands just yet, with their mongrel cutthroat races and foreign language and religion.”19 To annex Caribbean territory beyond the continental United States was hard for many Americans to countenance, and opponents exploited the xenophobic reaction. Before the debate ended, John Logan denounced the Dominicans as a “naked and half-savage people.”20 Opponents also lambasted the fraudulent plebiscite and venal agents promoting the scheme.

  By May 14, Hamilton Fish had extracted from Dominican representatives an extension of the treaty’s expiration date. Grant received timely warnings of the rocky road ahead. In early April, Senator Lot Morrill of Maine had advised Hamilton Fish “that the President should not press the treaty—says it has no ‘earnest’ friends in the Senate—that the weight of Argument & fact is against it.”21 Although Fish passed along this advice, Grant had personalized the issue and would not budge. By mid-May, as the treaty floundered in the Senate, Fish suggested amendments to make it more palatable by presenting statehood as only one possibility. An alternative would be something like commonwealth status, a protectorate enjoying a looser affiliation with the United States than a state. Although Grant toyed briefly with this idea, his pride was wounded and his dander up and he doubled down on his bet.

  On May 31, the frustrated president sent a message to the Senate asking to extend the time for its consideration. His support for annexation now flew into the realm of fantasy. On the one hand, he admitted the Dominican republic was a weak nation, with fewer than 120,000 inhabitants; on the other, he prophesied that it was “capable of supporting a population of 10,000,000 of people in luxury.” Even though he had never visited the place, Grant advertised it as paradise on earth: “It possesses the richest soil, best and most capacious harbors, most salubrious climate and the greatest abundance of [most valuable] products of the forest, mine and soil, of any of the [West India] islands.”22 The free labor market in Santo Domingo, he claimed, would sound the death knell for slavery in Puerto Rico and Cuba as escaped bondmen sought sanctuary there.

  The extra Senate time spent on the treaty in June hardly added to its luster. Early in the month, Fish privately transmitted to Grant allegations from Major Raymond Perry, who spied double-dealing in Babcock’s promotion of Dominican annexation. Perry dubbed Babcock a “damned rascal” who had connived with Joseph Fabens and William Cazneau and stood to profit royally if the treaty went through.23 Grant served warning upon Babcock “that if anything dishonorable or dishonest was proved” against him, “he should answer it with his Commission.”24 Despite repeated warnings, Grant never overcame a blind spot toward Babcock, missing a shady side to his character. Babcock’s papers confirm that he was hip-deep in machinations with Fabens as they conspired to send money and arms to President Báez.25

  In June, a further blot stained the treaty when Senator Orris Ferry of Connecticut condemned the treatment of Davis Hatch, a Connecticut businessman residing in Santo Domingo who had been imprisoned by President Báez. Hatch had protested to Washington that Báez was a scoundrel. A trial in Santo Domingo City ended in a death sentence for Hatch, commuted to banishment by Báez. Despite this verdict, he suffered in jail for six months. When Babcock visited the island, he did nothing to spring Hatch from jail, apparently fearing that when released, he might poison American public opinion against Báez. When Senator Ferry leveled charges against Babcock, Charles Sumner roared that the general should have his name “struck from the army, and struck from the roll of honorable men.”26 Sumner began telling fellow senators that when Grant had stopped by his house in early January, he had been under the influence of alcohol—of which there was no evidence.

  The Hatch fiasco prompted a Senate investigation. The majority report cleared Babcock, but a minority report said he had turned a blind eye to Hatch’s mistreatment. Under intense questioning by Carl Schurz, it emerged that both Babcock and Grant’s old pal Rufus Ingalls had received land on Samaná Bay that would appreciate prodigiously if the treaty passed. The whole enterprise had ensnared its supporters in the machinations of an island permeated with corruption. By now in a surly, defensive mood, Grant did nothing to discipline Babcock, but cast him as the innocent victim of a witch hunt. “I never saw father so grimly angry,” son Jesse later commented.27

  In frustration, Grant lashed out at cabinet members for failing to sustain him on the treaty. On June 13, when Fish saw him on unrelated business, Grant went on a rampage against his supposedly disloyal cabinet. Fish replied that only the treasury secretary opposed the treaty, but Grant was adamant that “the Secretary of the Interior is opposed to it; the Attorney-General says nothing in its favor, but sneers at it; and the Secretary of the Treasury does not open his mouth.”28 Never before had Grant demanded unswerving loyalty in the White House. And just as he spied a host of hidden enemies in his midst, he failed to see the one truly betraying him. As Fish wrote in his diary, Grant referred “warmly and affectionately to Babcock, whose innocence of the charges against him he firmly believes.”29

  When Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes visited the White House on the sweltering evening of June 27, the two men sat o
ut on the south portico with its fine view of an unfinished Washington Monument. Grant brooded at what he perceived as the rank injustice of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Hayes recorded Grant’s reflections: “Sumner as chairman, a man of very little practical sense, puffed-up, and unsound. Carl Schurz, an infidel and atheist; had been a rebel in his own country—as much a rebel against his government as Jeff Davis.” What riled Grant most deeply were the savage attacks on Babcock, and “he felt ‘much embittered’ against Sumner” for his unjust remarks about him. He gave Babcock a “fine character,” complaining that he was given no opportunity to defend himself against Sumner.30 Having felt unfairly accused before the war, when he was hounded from the army, Grant instinctively sided with the victims of character assassination, even when that sympathy was sorely misplaced.

  Grant’s laborious efforts to enact the treaty came to naught. On June 30, the Senate split evenly on a 28 to 28 vote—a far cry from the two-thirds necessary for passage. Nineteen Republicans and nine Democrats teamed up to kill the measure in a resounding setback for Grant. Having been a successful general made it hard for him to reconcile himself to such crushing defeats. When his son Jesse asked why Santo Domingo was so important, an injured Grant replied: “Because it should belong to us. There is not one sound argument against annexation, and one day we shall need it badly.”31 He had expended too much of his political capital on the battle and badly miscalculated the strength of hostile forces arrayed against him.

  In impotent rage, Grant turned against the man he had appointed at Sumner’s behest: John Lothrop Motley in London. For some time, Grant and Fish had been displeased with Motley, who had espoused Sumner’s hard line against England in the Alabama claims rather than their own more conciliatory posture. In fall 1869, Adam Badeau had resigned his post as secretary in London and returned to White House duties. To replace him, Grant planned to send Nicholas Fish, the secretary’s son, but Motley fiercely resisted the appointment. As Badeau recalled, Grant “was extremely angry; he looked upon the refusal as another piece of insubordination, a proof that Motley was determined to do as he pleased, and not as the President desired.”32 Once again a president accustomed to the automatic obedience of huge armies had to brook the vagaries of petty politics and wayward personalities.

  With ambitious plans in the works for settling the Alabama claims, Grant needed a cooperative representative in London. He aimed at nothing less than annexing Canada, a much less risible prospect than taking over Santo Domingo. Clearly the expansion-minded Grant envisioned some glorious addition to the country on the scale of the Louisiana Purchase. Standing in the way was Motley and his truculent language with the British. Exceeding his instructions from Grant and Fish, Motley told Lord Clarendon that Britain’s neutrality proclamation early in the Civil War had been “the fountainhead of the disasters which had been caused to the American people . . . by the hands of Englishmen.”33

  In mid-May 1870, Grant sent Badeau back to London for another tour of duty, this time as consul general. As Grant saw him off at the White House door, the talk turned to Motley. “He was persuaded that the Minister was un-American in spirit,” recalled Badeau, “and not a fitting representative of democracy.”34 Grant believed he had gotten precious little thanks from Sumner for appointing his protégé. On the eve of the Senate vote on Santo Domingo, Grant told Fish that Motley “represented Mr. Sumner more than he did the Administration, & spoke with much warmth of feeling, about Sumner.”35 Fearing repercussions from Sumner, Fish urged Grant not to fire Motley summarily. By the next day, Sumner had gotten wind of Grant’s intention to cashier Motley and was incensed.

  On July 1, the day after his Santo Domingo treaty went down to humiliating defeat, Grant acted on his vengeful feelings and fired Motley. The move had been contemplated by Grant for a while, but the timing made him look extremely vindictive. Fish was afraid the public would attribute the move to pure spite, but Grant didn’t seemed fazed. When Fish pleaded with him to retain Motley for a spell, Grant replied vehemently, “That, I will not do—I will not allow Mr. Sumner to ride over me.” When Fish pointed out that Grant was lashing out at Motley, not Sumner, Grant brusquely retorted, “It is the same thing.”36 In general, Grant wasn’t one given to grudges and festering wounds, but Sumner had pushed him into a dark frame of mind, and he still had the thin skin of a novice president. He also considered Motley a faithless, rogue diplomat.

  When Fish informed Motley of his dismissal, he offered him “the opportunity of resigning, in case you feel inclined to do so.”37 In reply, Motley obstinately declined to resign. He pointed out that he had been unanimously approved by the Senate and had faithfully served the president for fifteen months. “I fail to perceive why I should offer my resignation.”38 On July 15, Grant sent to the Senate the name of former senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey to replace Motley and he was confirmed. Motley first learned of this from the London newspapers and was shocked. He admitted he had erred in departing from administration instructions, “but he held that his offense had been condoned,” Badeau wrote. “But Grant did not often condone. The crisis finally came.”39 Frelinghuysen rejected the appointment, as did several other people, and in the end Grant turned to General Robert C. Schenck, a former Ohio congressman and minister to Brazil, who accepted the post and put Grant out of his misery. All the while, Motley refused to quit his station, becoming a pariah in London, a minister without portfolio, banished from polite society. In December, bowing to the inevitable, he finally stepped down.

  Needless to say, Senator Sumner was apoplectic over Motley’s recall. “My allegation is that the removal of Mr. Motley was an act of sheer brutality & utterly indefensible,” he contended.40 He called Motley’s firing “the most atrocious crime in diplomatic history.”41 In September, Sumner protested to Fish that sacking the illustrious Motley was “the most grievous personal wrong ever done in the Depart. of State, & from the character of the victim not to be forgotten.”42 He professed shock that nobody in Grant’s cabinet had shown the decency to resign in protest. Even people who thought Grant was entitled to cashier Motley faulted how he had handled it. The New York Times editor John Bigelow, who believed Motley had been dealt with “very shabbily,” noted that it was customary to give “even a footman 30 days notice.”43

  When it came to his uncompromising feud with Sumner, Grant lived up to his nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Usually reticent about criticizing people, he unleashed a volley of invective against Sumner, branding him “dogmatic, opinionated, infallible in his own estimation . . . he believed his own illusion without regard to the facts. It really amounted to a mental delusion.”44 Mocking Sumner’s vanity, he said: “Mr. Sumner could never have been bribed but in one way. That would be by flattery.”45 Once asked if he had heard Sumner converse, he replied, “No, but I have heard him lecture.”46 Told that Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible, Grant retorted, “Well, he didn’t write it.”47 Although the handwriting on the wall proclaimed in glaring letters the demise of the Santo Domingo treaty, Grant refused to concede defeat and contemplated further measures to keep it alive. He still had something to prove to Sumner, to the Senate, and to himself.

  —

  ONE OF THE FIRST CASUALTIES of Grant’s colossal feud with Sumner was Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar, who had been rejected for the Supreme Court. Although the president found him smart, charming, and able, he was uncomfortably close to Sumner and withheld support on Santo Domingo. Grant remained on the warpath against disloyal cabinet members. As he told Hamilton Fish, “I have said to Senators & others that I mean to recognize my friends—& those who sustain my policy.”48 In promoting the treaty, Grant had come under intense pressure from white Republican leaders in the South whose black constituents revered Sumner and who had paid a price for defying him. In exchange, they demanded a southerner in the cabinet and touted the attorney general post as the best place to start.

  On June 15, 18
70, out of the blue, Grant scratched out a frosty note to Hoar, asking for his resignation, a letter that shook him like a thunderclap. “I sat for a while wondering what it could mean,” he wrote, “why there had been no warning, no reference to the subject.”49 He imagined someone had unjustly maligned him and was tempted to protest. Instead he sent Grant a short, diplomatic letter of resignation. That afternoon, when he saw Grant at the White House, he was mollified by his warm words and explanation for what had happened. For Hoar’s partisans, his dismissal was shocking. Secretary of the Interior Cox believed Grant decided “to sell his best friends . . . for support in the San Domingo or any other scheme in which he might set his heart.” He later questioned Grant’s “good purposes” and glimpsed “a low & unscrupulous cunning” as the “ruling motive of his public life.”50 Whatever Hoar’s injury, he departed in gentlemanly fashion, sending Grant a gracious farewell note. In private, however, he broadcast his anger and “wished the government might be destroyed.”51

  On June 16, Grant tapped Amos T. Akerman of Georgia to replace him and he was approved by the Senate a week later. Although a somewhat obscure figure on the national scene, he was a brilliant choice, the first cabinet selection from the Confederate states. Honest and incorruptible, Akerman was a tall, slim man with a balding pate, eyebrows that jutted over deep-set eyes, and a pencil-thin mustache. The penetrating intensity of his gaze led one reporter to discern a “face of learning and disposition to deep meditation.”52 A native of New Hampshire and a Dartmouth graduate, Akerman had taught at a boys’ academy in North Carolina and practiced law in antebellum Georgia before serving in the Confederate quartermaster corps. After Appomattox, he switched to the Republican Party, endorsed black voting rights, and maintained that the South should renounce slavery and its extreme interpretation of states’ rights. Solidly progressive, devoted to the rule of law, he took part in Georgia’s constitutional convention of 1867–68, which overturned the old white supremacist constitution. Horrified by white vigilantism, Akerman, as federal district attorney for Georgia, showed a zealous dedication to black rights by prosecuting violators of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, costing him the support of many white southerners.