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Appendix II: a senator's fidelity vindicated.1
The defeated attempt to annex
San Domingo to the
United States, the recall of
Mr. Motley from the mission to
England, the removal of
Mr. Sumner from the head of the committee on foreign relations, on which he had long served, the rupture of friendly intercourse subsisting between him and
Mr. Fish, are likely, both in their public and personal aspects, to prove matters of permanent interest.
While many contributions have been made to the discussion, the more elaborate are the letter of
Mr. Fish, Oct. 29, 1877, printed in the Boston Evening Transcript, the reply of one of
Mr. Sumner's literary executors through the same journal, November 28, and a paper by
Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, in support of
Mr. Fish, dated Jan. 3, 1878, and appearing in the New York Herald.
Various persons have at times had relations to the controversy, but lately it has been treated as one which chiefly concerned
Mr. Fish and
Mr. Sumner.
Their respective claims, however, to the public esteem are not the pending question.
Mr. Sumner, in 1870, resisted in the Senate with all his power the annexation of
San Domingo as fraught with evil to the colored race, and as promoted by measures which violated international law, while
Mr. Fish strenuously supported it in the
Cabinet.
Whether, in this or other measures on which they may have differed or agreed, one or the other is entitled to the higher rank as a statesman, is not now in dispute.
The issue is a narrower one, involving chiefly the validity of the reasons alleged at different times for
Mr. Sumner's removal, which the public has quite generally attributed largely to the intervention of the
President, and of his
Secretary of State Mr. Fish.
The discussion sweeps a wider field, but it begins and ends at this point of contention.
In an interview with a reporter at
Boston, Oct. 19, 1877,
Mr. Fish stated that ‘with regard to the alleged negligence of
Mr. Sumner while chairman of the committee on foreign relations, it was a fact, susceptible of proof from the Senate records, that drafts of treaties [meaning treaties], from eight to eleven in number, remained in the hands of the committee for several months, some of them, as near as
Mr. Fish could remember, for more than two years.’
In reply to a written request for a list of the treaties referred to, he answered by letter, October 29, printed in the Boston Transcript, enumerating nine, —one each with
Mexico,
Colombia,
Guatemala,
Nicaragua,
Austria,
Salvador, and
Great Britain, and two with
Peru,—as ‘transmitted to the Senate for its action, and referred by that body to the committee on foreign relations, while
Mr. Sumner was its chairman, and which remained unacted upon at the time when he ceased to be such chairman;’ and later in the same letter he referred to the nine treaties as having ‘failed to receive
the consideration of ’
