There was much need of such statement. Mr. Charles Sumner, the eminent senator from Massachusetts, had completely broken with the President on this and other questions; had attacked the policy of the administration violently; had hinted at the supremacy of unworthy motives; and had imputed rascality to men with whom the President had close relations. He appeared, also, as he claimed, in the interest of the republic of Haiti, which regarded with disfavor any acquisition by the United States of territory on the island of which that quasi-republic formed a part; and all his rhetoric and oratory were brought to bear against the President's ideas. I had long been an admirer of Mr. Sumner, with the feeling which a young man would naturally cherish toward an older man of such high character who had given him early recognition; and I now approached him with especial gratitude and respect. But I soon saw that his view of the President was prejudiced, and his estimate of himself abnormal. Though a senator of such high standing and so long in public affairs, he took himself almost too seriously; and there had come a break between him, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, and President Grant's Secretary of State, Mr. Fish, who had proved himself, as State senator, as Governor of New York, as United States senator, and now as Secretary of State, a man of the highest character and capacity.
The friends of the administration claimed that it had become impossible for it to have any relations with Senator Sumner; that he delayed, and indeed suppressed, treaties of the greatest importance; that his egotism had become so colossal that he practically assumed to himself the entire conduct of foreign affairs; and the whole matter reached a climax when, in a large social gathering, Mr.
Fish meeting Senator Sumner and extending his hand to him, the latter deliberately rejected the courtesy and coldly turned away.
Greatly admiring all these men, and deeply regretting their divisions, which seemed sure to prove most injurious to the Republican party and to the country, I wrote to Mr. Gerrit Smith, urging him to come at once to Washington and, as the lifelong friend of Senator Sumner and the devoted supporter of General Grant, to use his great powers in bringing them together. He came and did his best;but a few days afterward he said to me: ``It is impossible;it is a breach which can never be healed.''
Mr. Sumner's speeches I had always greatly admired, and his plea for international peace, delivered before Iwas fairly out of my boyhood, had made a deep impression upon me. Still greater was the effect of his speeches against the extension of slavery. It is true that these speeches had little direct influence upon the Senate; but they certainly had an immense effect upon the country, and this effect was increased by the assault upon him by Preston Brooks of South Carolina, which nearly cost him his life, and from which he suffered physically as long as he lived. His influence was exercised not only in the Senate, but in his own house. In his library he discussed, in a very interesting way, the main questions of the time; and at his dinner-table one met interesting men from all parts of the world. At one of his dinners I had an opportunity to observe one of the difficulties from which our country suffers most--namely, that easy-going facility in slander which is certain to be developed in the absence of any effective legal responsibility for one's utterances. At the time referred to there was present an Englishman eminent in parliamentary and business circles. I sat next him, and near us sat a gentleman who had held a subordinate position in the United States navy, but who was out of employment, and apparently for some reason which made him sore. On being asked by the Englishman why the famous American Collins Line of transatlantic steamers had not succeeded, this American burst into a tirade, declaring that it was all due to the fact that the Collins company had been obliged to waste its entire capital in bribing members of Congress to obtain subsidies; that it had sunk all its funds in doing this, and so had become bankrupt. This I could not bear, and indignantly interposed, stating the simple facts--namely, that the ships of the company were built in the most expensive manner, without any sufficient data as to their chances of success; that the competition of the Cunard company had been destructive to them; that, to cap the climax, two out of their fleet of five had been, at an early period in the history of the company, lost at sea; and Iexpressed my complete disbelief in any cause of failure like that which had been named. As a matter of fact, the Collins company, in their pride at the beauty of their first ship, had sent it up the Potomac to Washington and given a collation upon it to members of Congress; but beyond this there was not the slightest evidence of anything of the sort which the slanderer of his country had brought forward.
As regards the Santo Domingo question, I must confess that Mr. Sumner's speeches did not give me much light;they seemed to me simply academic orations tinged by anger.
Far different was it with the speeches made on the same side by Senator Carl Schurz. In them was a restrained strength of argument and a philosophic dealing with the question which appealed both to reason and to patriotism.
His argument as to the danger of extending the domain of American institutions and the privileges of American citizenship over regions like the West Indies carried great weight with me; it was the calm, thoughtful utterance of a man accustomed to look at large public questions in the light of human history, and, while reasoning upon them philosophically and eloquently, to observe strict rules of logic.
