A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [441]
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Seward was becoming conscious of his legacy; he had served as secretary of state for almost a decade, but the past three years under Johnson had been a crushing disappointment. Seward’s political reputation had been tarnished by his ill-judged attempts to play the conciliator between Johnson and his critics. In May 1868, Johnson survived an attempt by the Senate to remove him by impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but only by one vote. “I have always felt that Providence dealt hardly with me in not letting me die with Mr. Lincoln,” Seward remarked bitterly. “My work was done, and I think I deserved some of the reward of dying there.”32 Seward was frequently accused of being drunk in public during the latter half of Johnson’s presidency: “He no longer seemed to care,” wrote Henry Adams, who visited Washington in 1868; “he asked for nothing, gave nothing, and invited no support; he talked little of himself or of others, and waited only for his discharge.”33 This was an exaggeration—Seward cared a great deal—but he had lost the facility of keeping his friends loyal and his enemies afraid. “His trouble,” sneered a critic, “is not that the party to which he once belonged is without a leader, but that he wanders about, like a ghost—a leader without a party.”34
General Grant’s election to the presidency in November 1868 opened a fresh path of negotiations for both countries; for Seward it meant that he had only four months left in office to engineer one final diplomatic triumph. But his attempt to repair Anglo-American relations ended in failure. The increasingly anti-British tone in the capital arising from the prolongation of the Alabama claims dispute required the kind of political skills that the outgoing secretary of state had long ceased to possess. The Senate rejected his proposed “Johnson-Clarendon Treaty,” which would have resolved the majority of America’s disputes with Britain, by 44 votes to 1. The triumphant architect of Seward’s humiliation in the Senate was his old rival Charles Sumner.
On April 13, 1869, Sumner gave an address to the Senate in which he laid the entire cost of the war after Gettysburg in 1863 at Britain’s feet. He estimated the financial damages caused by the Confederate commerce raiders to be $15 million, adding a further $2 billion for the indirect damages caused by Britain’s “un-neutral neutrality.” As a proportion of Britain’s GDP, the same figures today would be $155 million for the commerce raiders and $265 billion for the indirect costs.35 Sumner also demanded an unreserved admission of guilt and an apology from Britain, followed by a new treaty to arrange for the reparations. The speech rescued Sumner’s flagging political career. It was one of the only instances in his life in which he correctly judged the prevailing public opinion and successfully capitalized on it to increase his power in Washington. A few weeks later, Sumner gave another speech in which he spoke of Britain’s complete withdrawal from the Americas. Until that moment, Sumner’s influence with the new Grant administration had looked tenuous, but now he had national popularity as well as his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to reinforce his bargaining power with the president.
Sumner was aided by the fact that Grant’s attitude toward England was cool, bordering on hostile, and that both the new president and his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, were fascinated by the possibility of absorbing Canada into the United States.epl.4 But Sumner’s resurgence in Washington did not last long. He overplayed his hand as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee by making it abundantly clear