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By Root 187 0

Grant’s presidency), Grant was left pretty much to his own devices in a White House that was, by modern standards, chaotic and open to an endless crowd of office seekers, admirers, and total strangers. Lincoln had thrived on this kind of thing—he was, after all, a natural politician—but Grant was an army man and needed the kind of staff and efficiency that surrounded his headquarters in the field. It didn’t help that he had been nominated for the presidency unanimously, or that he had run for the presidency without making speeches or leaving his new home in Galena. He had never been called upon to define what he wanted to accomplish as president, and his fame and status as a great man and a four-star general were such that practically nobody felt entitled to question him on the matter. His silence made it appear to most people that he was deep in thought or busy formulating plans, but for the most part that was an illusion, although not a deliberate one. Grant certainly desired to produce “peace,” “prosperity,” “harmony,” and the reintegration of the South into the American body politic on terms that protected the former slaves (now called “freedmen”) without necessarily making them equal to whites, but he had no idea how to go about achieving these aims.

No less an authority than the historian Allan Nevins summed up Grant’s presidency by remarking on “his vast ignorance of civil affairs, economics and his tendency to look upon the presidency as a reward, not a responsibility,”1 and there is no denying the truth of this, but one must add to it an unfortunate tendency to pursue with the utmost tenacity ideas that had been planted in his head by others and made no sense in the first place. Grant astonished his own cabinet, his own party, and almost everybody who mattered in the U.S. Senate by a politically doomed plan to annex the island of Santo Domingo (later the Dominican Republic) to the United States (he would not be the last American president to get into trouble in the Caribbean). Santo Domingo was weak, split among rival factions, and up for grabs, and once Grant’s attention had been directed toward it, he was moved both by a mild sense of imperialism, a late-blooming case, as it were, of Manifest Destiny (although he did not propose to conquer Santo Domingo so much as to buy it), and by the belief that it might absorb perhaps as many as four million American blacks. At one stroke, he imagined, America’s position in the Caribbean would be made secure, American investment and ingenuity would turn Santo Domingo into a paying proposition, and the problem of what to do with (and about) the freed slaves in the South would be solved. There was not the slightest enthusiasm for the idea anywhere, as it turned out, except among those Dominican political figures who were eager to sell the country to the highest bidder. Radical Republican senators raised strong objections to the idea of suppressing one of the few existing black republics, American blacks showed no more enthusiasm for the idea of being transplanted to a Caribbean island than they had for being shipped en masse to Liberia—to the extent that they were consulted about it—and hardly anybody wanted to add a black American territory (or, eventually, even less desirable, a state) to the Union. Most vehemently opposed to annexation was the formidable Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose firm abolitionist beliefs went back long before the Civil War, when he had been savagely beaten with a cane at his seat in the Senate by Preston Brooks, a member of the House from South Carolina, because of his fierce opposition to slavery, and became thereafter both a martyr and a hero to the cause of black rights.

Grant fought this battle to the bitter end, and he lost it. Nor was he a good loser. As Nevins put it, Grant suffered from “his lack of magnanimity, for despite the Appomattox legend, he bore grudges and was a vengeful hater.” He became Sumner’s sworn enemy, and Sumner—being one of the most respected, even venerated,