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It was Sumner’s active opposition to Grant’s plan to purchase Santo Domingo during the first half of 1870 that sealed his downfall. It was too great a challenge to the administration’s authority to be allowed to go unpunished. Hamilton Fish’s determination to break free of Sumner’s control removed the impasse between Britain and America over the Alabama claims. The timing could not have been better: Gladstone’s foreign secretary in 1870, Lord Granville, was as anxious to find common ground with the U.S. secretary of state as Fish was with him.

The sudden political will in Britain and America to end the differences between them produced one of the most remarkable and successful international conventions of the nineteenth century. “We are taking several bites out of that big cherry,” Granville wrote triumphantly to John Bright in October 1870, “reconciliation with the States.”37 Two teams, each consisting of five commissioners, met in Washington on February 24, 1871. By all accounts, the commissioners got on remarkably well; the British were surprised to discover that their American counterparts were “a very gentlemanly good set of fellows socially” and that Hamilton Fish was “quite English in manner and appearance.”38 In only nine weeks, the two teams negotiated the Treaty of Washington, which settled most disputes, potential and historical, for the next twenty years. Fish was satisfied by the British apology over the Alabama’s escape, and in return he agreed to close any legal loopholes that would allow U.S.-made Alabamas to prey on British merchant ships in time of war. He also used Sumner’s inevitable objections to the negotiations, since America’s right to Canada was not part of the discussion, to engineer the latter’s removal as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The Treaty of Washington established two tribunals, one to arbitrate the claims of private individuals against the United States for actions committed during the Civil War, the other to rule on the Alabama claims. At the first, Mary Sophia Hill finally had her say in court. In fact, she said far too much, and her claim was dismissed for indecorous language. Undaunted, she appealed the decision: “I leave my case in your honorable hands, feeling that justice, even at this late hour, will be done me, and the insult to our flag; through me, be canceled, as England always has and always will protect the most humble of her subjects. As I said before, my health is ruined, so I do not consider the damage of two thousand pounds excessive.”39 This time, the court decided that £2,000 was excessive but otherwise found in her favor, and on January 5, 1872, awarded her $1,560 in damages.

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At long last, the Alabama claims tribunal met in Geneva in December 1871. Charles Francis Adams was called out of retirement to represent the United States on the panel of five international judges who were to decide on the case. Adams had not wanted the appointment, and when he met his fellow judges he thought his worst fears confirmed. The British representative, Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn, had so short a temper that he seemed unbalanced, while the three other judges—a Swiss, a Brazilian, and an Italian—had varying degrees of familiarity with the English language. America and Britain each sent two legal teams to argue their respective sides. The proceedings started calmly enough, until the British team discovered in early January 1872 that Sumner’s “indirect claims” for $2 billion—at 7 percent interest—had been included by the Americans for arbitration. The British demanded that the claims be excluded, and the Americans responded with equal vehemence that they stay and be decided upon by the judges. There was outrage in Britain when the news became known. Prime Minister William Gladstone declared in the House of Commons on February 7 that the government would be “insane to accede to demands which no nation with a spark of honour or spirit left could submit to