The Man Who Saved the Union (70 page)

Consequently when an agent from Dominican president
Buenaventura Báez arrived in Washington with hopes of restarting the annexation process, Grant allowed him an interview. Báez’s man said that the Dominicans sought attachment to the United States as eagerly as ever. He expounded on the handsome resources of the country and the noble character of the people. “
He stated further,” Grant recalled, “that being weak in numbers and poor in purse, they were not capable of developing their great resources; that the people had no incentive to industry on account of lack of protection for their accumulations; and that if not accepted by the United States—with institutions which they loved above those of any other nation—they would be compelled to seek protection elsewhere.” Grant listened but gave no response, either positive or negative.

Yet he considered the matter carefully and determined to discover
more. In July 1869 he appointed a special representative to Santo Domingo. “
Great and good friend,” Grant wrote Báez: “Deeming it desirable to satisfy my curiosity in respect to your interesting country by obtaining information through a source upon which I rely, I have for this purpose appointed Brevet Brigadier General
Orville Babcock.” Grant explained that Babcock had served on his staff during the Civil War, had become one of his White House secretaries and was a man both presidents could trust. “I have entire confidence in his integrity and intelligence.”

Grant later asserted that he intended Babcock to be an impartial observer. “
He visited San Domingo not to secure or hasten
annexation but, unprejudiced and unbiased, to learn all the facts about the government, the people, and the resources of that republic. He went certainly as well prepared to make an unfavorable report as a favorable one, if the facts warranted it.” Grant probably wasn’t telling the full story here, for Babcock had scarcely arrived in Santo Domingo when he became a vigorous advocate of annexation. And he didn’t confine himself to reporting but negotiated a treaty of annexation—something no secretary would have done without at least tacit encouragement from the president.

Babcock’s treaty caught the rest of the administration off guard. “
What do you think!” an astonished Hamilton Fish said to Jacob Cox, the interior secretary. “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 that island!” Fish and Cox assumed that Grant would disavow Babcock’s patent overstepping. “We agreed that the proper course was to treat Babcock’s action as null, and to insist upon burying the whole in oblivion as a state secret—this being the only way, apparently, to save him from the grave consequences of a usurpation of power,” Cox recalled.

To their amazement just the opposite occurred at the next meeting of the cabinet. Babcock was there, obviously at Grant’s request. “It had been the President’s habit to call upon the members of the cabinet to bring forward the business contained in their portfolios, beginning with the secretary of state,” Cox remembered. He, Fish and the other secretaries, to whom Fish had likewise spoken, expected that Fish would be recognized and would proceed to demolish Babcock’s pretensions to diplomatic legitimacy. “On this occasion, however, General Grant departed from his uniform custom, and took the initiative,” Cox said. “ ‘Babcock has returned, as you see,’ said he, ‘and has brought a treaty of annexation.
I suppose it is not formal, as he 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.’ ” Cox remembered the reaction around the table: “This took everybody so completely by surprise that they seemed dumbfounded. After an awkward interval, as nobody else broke the silence, I said, ‘But Mr. President, has it been settled, then, that we
want
to annex San Domingo?’ ”

Now it was Grant’s turn to appear nonplussed. “The direct question evidently embarrassed General Grant,” Cox remembered. “He colored, and smoked hard at his cigar. He glanced at Mr. Fish on his right, but the face of the secretary was impassive and his eyes were fixed on the portfolio before him. He turned to Mr.
Boutwell on his left, but no response met him there. As the silence became painful, the president called for another item of business, and left the question unanswered.”

T
he embarrassment provoked a minor crisis in the administration. Hamilton Fish declared that he couldn’t continue as secretary of state if the president was going to jump the chain of diplomatic command. He offered his resignation.

Grant refused to accept it. He told Fish he wouldn’t go around him again. He said he needed the secretary’s guidance and support. He insisted that Fish at least delay his resignation to give the matter further thought. Fish agreed, hoping Grant would reconsider the Santo Domingo scheme.

Rumors of the ruckus within the administration intensified the doubts in Congress about Santo Domingo. Annexation had gained few friends since being rebuffed under Johnson, and the Babcock demarche added an appearance of shady dealing. Critics alleged that payments to the
Dominican government that the treaty specified as exchange for annexation would simply line the pockets of Báez and his friends. Báez had agreed to hold a referendum on annexation, but questions abounded regarding its fairness.
Raymond Perry, the consular agent, wrote Fish that the referendum was rigged. “
A list was opened in the police headquarters for citizens to register their names,” Perry said. “Báez and Delmonte”—a Báez crony—“have told me several times that any man who opposed annexation, they would either shoot him or send him his passport.” Ironically, Perry contended, a fair election would produce the result Báez
wanted. “I am positive that a majority of San Domingo are in favor of annexation, and strongly in favor of it.” Perry blamed Báez for lack of courage and said the turbulent state of Dominican politics—Báez’s rivals had raised an insurgency against the government—had frightened him. “Báez seemed very timid and anxious, and often remarked that if the United States did not ratify the treaty, he and all his friends would lose their lives for taking the step he had for annexation.”

T
he resistance to annexation puzzled
Grant, who remembered how eagerly Americans had embraced the doctrine of
Manifest Destiny at the time of the war with Mexico. And it made him consider carefully what annexation could mean to the United States. Grant sometimes wrote memos to himself as a way of organizing his thoughts, and he wrote one now on Santo Domingo. “
It is an island of unequaled fertility,” he said. The highlands were suited to coffee, the lowlands to sugar. “With the acquisition of San Domingo, the two great necessities in every family, sugar and coffee, would be cheapened by nearly one half.” The country was important strategically. “San Domingo is the gate to the Caribbean Sea, and in the line of transit to the Isthmus of Darien”—
Panama—“destined at no distant day to be the line of transit of half the commerce of the world.” Britain’s possessions in the Caribbean threatened to block American access from the
Atlantic to Central America and even the Gulf of Mexico. “In case of war between England and the United States, New York and New Orleans would be as much severed as would be New York and Calais.” For America to concede British predominance in the Caribbean would be imprudent and ignominious; conversely, acquiring Santo Domingo would neutralize Britain’s advantage and put the world on notice of American power. “It would give us a foothold in the West Indies of inestimable value. Its acquisition is carrying out Manifest Destiny. It is a step toward clearing all European flags from this continent.”

It was a step, as well, toward clearing slavery from the Americas. Cuba and
Brazil were the remaining large American slaveholding countries, and the evil institution there was indirectly bankrolled by consumers in the United States. “More than 70 percent of the exports of Cuba and a large percentage of the exports of Brazil are to the United States,” Grant observed. “Upon every pound”—of sugar and coffee—“we receive from them an export duty is charged to support slavery.… Get San Domingo and this will all be changed.”

Annexation would also ease the race problem in America. “The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the prejudice to color,” Grant asserted. “The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists. The colored man cannot be spared until his place is supplied, but with a refuge like San Domingo his worth here would soon be discovered, and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay; or if Providence designed that the two races should not live together, he would find a home in the Antilles.”

61

G
RANT AND
C
HARLES
S
UMNER WERE FATED TO CLASH
. “
W
HEN WE
consider the natures and the training of the two men, it is not easy to imagine agreeable cooperation in public affairs by Mr. Sumner and General Grant,”
George Boutwell observed. “Mr. Sumner never believed in General Grant’s fitness for the office of President, and General Grant did not recognize in Mr. Sumner a wise and safe leader in the business of government.” Sumner would soon expound at length on Grant’s incompetence; Grant was pithier. Asked if he had ever heard Sumner converse, Grant responded, “No, but I have heard him lecture.” Informed that Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible, Grant said, “I suppose not. He didn’t write it.”

Grant wasn’t alone in finding Sumner difficult.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Sumner friend, admired his devotion to equal rights for African Americans but captured his single-mindedness in describing him as “
a colossus holding his burning heart in his hand, to light up the sea of life.” Longfellow added: “What confidence Sumner has in Sumner!”
James Russell Lowell agreed that Sumner was full of himself. Lowell related a typical experience: “ ‘
I advise you to listen to this,’ Sumner used to say, when he was talking about himself (as he commonly was): ‘This is history.’ ”
George Hoar, who knew Sumner from both Massachusetts and Washington, declared, “It sometimes seemed as if Sumner thought the Rebellion itself was put down by speeches in the Senate, and that the war was an unfortunate and most annoying, though trifling, disturbance, as if a fire-engine had passed by.” Abraham Lincoln recognized that Sumner was irreligious but still thought him ecclesiastical. “I have never had much to do with bishops where I live,” Lincoln told a visitor,
“but do you know,
Sumner is my idea of a bishop.” A poor woman from Massachusetts petitioned the Senate for help; a Maine senator asked why she didn’t put her request to Sumner, her own senator. “Oh, sir, I did,” she replied. “But really, sir, Mr. Sumner takes no interest in claims unless they be from black people.”

Sumner took great interest in Santo Domingo, not least on account of the black people there and in adjacent
Haiti. After Grant sent the
annexation treaty to the Senate, the president mounted a campaign on its behalf. He brought senators to the White House, where he shared his thinking on the importance of annexation. He went to the Senate to speak with members there. And he visited Charles Sumner at the senator’s Washington home. The visit went well, Grant thought, with Sumner declaring, as Grant rose to leave: “
Mr. President, I am an administration man, and whatever you do will always find in me the most careful and candid consideration.”

Grant heard these words as a pledge of support, and when careful and candid consideration caused Sumner to oppose the treaty and persuade a majority of his colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee to do likewise, the president judged that he had been double-crossed. Against the committee’s negative recommendation, Grant stepped up his efforts to see the treaty passed. “
I feel an unusual anxiety for the ratification of this treaty,” he declared in a special message to the Senate. “I believe it will redound greatly to the glory of the two countries interested, to civilization, and to the extirpation of the institution of slavery.” He denied any intent to impose American power upon the people of Santo Domingo; he claimed, indeed, that annexation was the Dominicans’ idea. “The Government of San Domingo has voluntarily sought this annexation. It is a weak power, numbering probably less than 120,000 souls.… The people of San Domingo are not capable of maintaining themselves in their present condition, and must look for outside support. They yearn for the protection of our free institutions and laws, our progress and civilization. Shall we refuse them?” If the United States did not step forward, another country would. “I have information which I believe reliable that a European power stands ready now to offer $2,000,000 for the possession of Samana Bay alone. If refused by us, with what grace can we prevent a foreign power from attempting to secure the prize?”

The senators read Grant’s message respectfully, for the most part, but the treaty nonetheless stalled. Opponents seized on alleged mistreatment by the Dominican government of an American named
Davis
Hatch, who
had traveled to Santo Domingo on behalf of an American company seeking a salt concession. He guessed wrong in the struggle for power that resulted in the ascendance of
Báez and was imprisoned.
Orville Babcock might have arranged his release, the treaty’s opponents said, but instead let him rot behind bars.

The Hatch affair put the administration on the defensive, prompting Grant to employ yet stronger measures. He threatened to withhold federal patronage from opponents of the treaty. He removed Ebenezer Hoar from the cabinet to placate senators the attorney general had crossed. He offered Charles Sumner the job of minister to Britain, to get the Foreign Relations chairman out of the country.

His efforts failed. Sumner rejected the offer and continued to denounce the treaty. When the Senate voted in June 1870, the pact mustered but 28 approving votes, far short of the 48 required for ratification.