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By Root 192 0

of Radical Republicans—was a poor choice of enemy. It was not so much that Grant was “a vengeful hater,” true though that was, but that he remained thin-skinned, sensitive, and burdened with the inferiority complex of a boy who had been brought up by harsh and distant parents, made fun of at school, been passed over for promotion in the army, failed at every attempt to make money or improve his situation, and eventually settled into life as a clerk in his father’s store and the town drunk until the Civil War came along and saved him. He was deeply conscious of the gaps in his education and resentful of any perceived slight. A patrician New Englander, a Harvard man, wealthy, imperious and formidably well read, Sumner was just the man to make Grant conscious of his own shortcomings, and Sumner’s opposition to the Santo Domingo scheme was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back.2

Photographs of Grant in the White House are a painful contrast with those taken of him as a general—he looks puffy, peevish, unfocused; and his civilian suits, obviously meant to be the height of fashion, merely seem pretentious and ill fitting—he doesn’t look nearly as comfortable in them as he did in uniform. His hair is slicked back and his shoes look like something a farmer might wear to milk the cows, rather than those of an elegantly dressed politician. There is something about his expression that is at once furtive and depressed, like somebody who is carrying out an impostiture or has stumbled into a place where he doesn’t belong—say the drawing room of a club of which he is not a member.

The truth is that Grant looks lost, and of course in a certain sense he was. Despite the fact that the citizens of Philadelphia had given the Grants a home, as well as those of Galena, Grant was stuck in the White House, beset with problems he couldn’t solve by ordering an attack.

He had his successes, to give him his due. He resolved the complex set of problems that was endangering relationships with Great Britain, in part due to his own determination to remain calm, in part due to Hamilton Fish’s common sense, understanding of diplomacy, and ability to pacify the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, even the formidable Sumner, who, like many New Englanders, was a confirmed Anglophobe. Appeasing Great Britain was not by any means a popular move in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly in New England, where the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill had taken place less than a hundred years before and were still deeply etched in people’s memories, as if the Redcoats might reappear at any moment. The feeling was made more acute in the minds of Massachusetts politicians by the increasing presence of large numbers of Irish, whose hatred of the English was bred into their bones, as a voting block.

The issues that had arisen between the United States and the United Kingdom had escalated during the Civil War, exacerbated by the construction in English shipyards of a number of Confederate commerce raiders and blockade runners, which had inflicted major damage on American shipping. Some of these ships were not only built in the United Kingdom but partly manned by British crews. Preposterous sums were being suggested in Congress as “damages” to be paid by the British, Sumner’s being an eye-popping two billion five hundred million dollars. In addition to this there were such issues as disputed fishery rights (again significant in Sumner’s New England, but not to an Ohio/Illinois man like Grant), Confederate debts, and the growing belief among Radical Republicans that Canada should be annexed, partly to punish the United Kingdom and partly because it seemed obvious to New Englanders, as it had one hundred years earlier, that the Canadians would rather be governed from Washington than from London. However much Grant wanted to annex Santo Domingo, he was not remotely interested in annexing Canada to please Senator Sumner; he doubted that the Canadians wanted to become Americans (they had stoutly—and successfully—resisted an American