From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (43 page)

Seward's reach exceeded the nation's grasp, or at least the vision of his contemporaries. Some of his schemes fell victim to events abroad or forces of nature. The Colombian Senate refused to ratify the canal treaty; a revolution in Santo Domingo doomed the Samana Bay deal. A hurricane that devastated the Danish West Indies and the opposition of General Grant helped thwart acquisition of those islands. Some of his projects died from lack of interest or support. Most ran afoul of the tempestuous politics of the time. While Seward was busily trying to expand the nation's horizons, Johnson was paralyzed by the conflict within his own party that led to his impeachment. A hostile Senate tabled a treaty for reciprocity with Hawaii and scuttled other Seward projects. "How sadly domestic disturbances of ours demoralize the national ambition," the secretary lamented in October 1868.
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Seward's tangible accomplishments were limited but significant. The navy took Midway Island in the Pacific in 1867 under an 1850s "Guano Law" that permitted acquisition of uninhabited Pacific islands. Strategists were disappointed when it proved unsuitable for a deepwater port. Only many years later would its strategic importance be realized as an airstrip.

Far more important was the windfall purchase of Alaska in the same year. Seward had long viewed this Russian possession as a potentially vital way station toward domination of the East Asian trade. Devastating Confederate attacks on Union shipping in the Aleutian Islands in 1865 had reinforced his certainty of its strategic significance in the north Pacific. Alaska was also seen as a way to pressure Canada to join the United States. For Russia, in the meantime, this vast frozen territory had become a financial and strategic liability. Some Russians feared with good reason that an expansive United States would simply take Alaska and reasoned that they had best get something while they could. The Russian-American Company's hold was weakening. Letting go was made easier since Russia was gaining new, more defensible, territory in Central and East Asia. Some Russians also believed that the sale of Alaska would be a
good way to solidify friendship with the United States, a proper ending for a period of good relations.
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Scorned by many at the time, the purchase became Seward's greatest triumph. Eager for something to offset the administration's domestic failures, he jumped at the chance to purchase Alaska. The price of $7.2 million was $2 million more than he wanted to pay and $2 million more than the Russians originally sought, but the secretary was in a hurry to consummate the deal; he and Russian minister Eduard Stoeckl worked until 4:00
A.M
. to draw up a treaty. Critics dismissed Alaska as a "sucked orange," "Seward's folly," or Johnson's "polar bear garden." Editor Horace Greeley called it "Walrussia." Foes of the purchase accused Johnson and Seward of trying to deflect attention from failures at home. Seward lobbied furiously and effectively, however, emphasizing the land's commercial and strategic potential and the importance of obliging good friends like the Russians. Congress was in full revolt against Johnson by this time, and the House of Representatives out of pique threatened not to appropriate funds. While complaining about the "wholly exceptional" difficulties of conducting diplomacy in the American democratic system, Stoeckl, who stood to profit handsomely from the deal, bribed key congressmen. At the time of its purchase, the main product of "Seward's icebox" was indeed ice, sold in large quantities to the bustling communities along the West Coast. More quickly than anyone might have imagined, the secretary's vision was vindicated, his prize acquisition, like California earlier, bringing the added bonus of gold.
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Like Seward, Grant's secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, was a New Yorker. In contrast to his flamboyant predecessor, the wealthy and socially prominent Fish was dignified and stodgy. Where Seward had coveted his cabinet post as a stepping-stone to the presidency, Fish dismissed it as one "for which I have little taste and less fitness." Taste and fitness notwithstanding, he ranks among the nation's better secretaries of state, in large part because of his settlement of the
Alabama
claims dispute with Britain. Unimaginative and somewhat rigid in his thinking, he was a person of good judgment and distinguished himself in an administration not noted for the integrity or accomplishments of its top officials. He served longer than any other individual who held the post in the nineteenth century.

Along with Johnson's successor, war hero General Grant, who instinctively sought to project American power abroad, Fish was a spiritual heir to Seward's expansionism.
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In Latin America, Fish and Grant sought to replace European influence with that of the United States. The secretary of state envisioned a time, as he put it, when "America shall be wholly American," when the "prominent position" of the United States on the continent would entitle it to a "leading voice" and impose on it "duties of right and of honor regarding American questions, whether these questions affected emancipated colonies, or colonies still subject to European domination."
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To expand U.S. influence, they tied to the Monroe Doctrine the no-transfer principle first enunciated by Jefferson in 1808, proclaiming unequivocally that "hereafter no territory on this continent shall be regarded as subject to transfer to a European power."
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They anticipated that the erosion of European power would lead to increased U.S. trade and political influence. They pushed ahead with plans for an isthmian canal. When Colombia blocked yet another treaty, Grant ordered surveys of alternate canal routes, producing a recommendation to build across Nicaragua that would be accepted policy until the turn of the century.

The islands of Hispaniola and Cuba had long been of special concern to Americans. Seward had cast a covetous eye on Samana Bay, a magnificent natural harbor in the Dominican Republic that could guard the eastern approaches to a canal and protect U.S. commercial and strategic interests in the Caribbean. In the Dominican Republic, as elsewhere, internal rivalries created opportunities for U.S. expansion, and the object of American desires took the initiative. With Spain gone, contending factions could no longer play the Europeans against the United States and thus could only seek from Americans the money and guns to remain in power and deter the threat of a hostile Haiti. Between 1869 and 1873, various Dominican factions developed proposals for the lease of Samana Bay, a U.S. protectorate over the Dominican Republic, and even formal annexation. A fraudulent plebiscite was conducted to demonstrate popular support for joining the United States.
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Despite support for annexation on both sides, the scheme faltered. Prodded by cronies with investments in the Dominican Republic, Grant was especially eager to oblige Dominican annexationists or at least acquire Samana Bay. He gave the issue top priority in his scandal-ridden administration. In 1869, the two countries actually agreed to a treaty incorporating the Dominican Republic as a territory. Grant lobbied vigorously for Senate approval, but he met massive and unrelenting opposition. Haiti bitterly opposed a U.S. presence next door, and its minister to the United States spent $20,000 to defeat the treaty. In the United States, expansion into the Caribbean had acquired a bad name among Republicans from Democratic exploits in the 1850s. Many Americans opposed the incorporation of territory with a large non-white population. "Beware of the tropics," warned soldier, diplomat, journalist, and Missouri senator Carl Schurz. "Do not trifle with that which may poison the future of this great nation."
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On the other hand, some idealists opposed absorbing tropical territory they claimed nature had set aside for darker-skinned people. Much of the opposition, including that from the formidable Senator Sumner, was personal and political. Undeterred by the defeat of annexation, Grant pushed for the lease of Samana Bay to private U.S. interests. He might have succeeded had not a revolution in the Dominican Republic in 1873 led to revocation of the offer.
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As always, Cuba posed especially complex challenges. The Spanish colony had been a major object of prewar expansionists, many of them seeking to protect the institution of slavery. Yet another rebellion against Spanish rule in 1868 brought it back to the forefront. Americans were deeply divided. Still infused with idealistic zeal, some Republicans urged continuation of the "noble work" of the Civil War by abolishing slavery in Cuba. African American leaders like Frederick Douglass went further, advocating aid for the Cuban rebels, the abolition of slavery in Cuba, and even its annexation. Harking back to America's traditional sense of mission, other Republicans urged extending Lincoln's "new birth of freedom" by eliminating one of the last bastions of European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. Spain's brutal treatment of the rebels gave moral urgency to the pleas of interventionists. On the other hand, conservative Republicans opposed the taking of territory inhabited by mixed races and especially worried that acquisition of tropical lands would "degrade" the American people and their institutions. Some former Whigs
insisted that the United States should continue to adhere to noninterventionism. Its ideals could best be spread by example.
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Grant and Fish approached the Cuban rebellion with great caution. Although Americans were eager to remove Spain from the Western Hemisphere, the Civil War remained fresh in their minds, and they were unwilling to risk war to abolish slavery or free Cuba. Fish refused to recognize Cuban belligerency, arguing that it could hurt their cause by expanding Spain's right of search. Premature recognition, he also perceived, would undercut the U.S. position in the ongoing dispute with Britain over the
Alabama
claims. Even when Spanish officials in 1873 seized the
Virginius,
an arms-running ship flying the American flag, and shot the captain, thirty-six of the crew, and sixteen passengers, the administration responded calmly. The ship was falsely registered in the United States and carrying arms to rebels and therefore liable to seizure.

United States officials were also leery of the consequences of Cuban independence. They doubted Cubans' capacity for self-government and feared that chaos might engulf the island, threatening U.S. economic and strategic interests. There was little support for annexation. The staunchly conservative Fish viewed Cubans as inferior even to African Americans and unfit to be U.S. citizens. He would have preferred an autonomous Cuba under informal U.S. economic and political control. A lawyer himself and a devotee of the emerging specialty of international law, Fish followed British Liberal Party leader Gladstone in advocating multilateral solutions to world problems. To resolve an issue that caused much turmoil in Congress, he proposed in late 1875 a six-nation approach to Spain to end the fighting. The European powers were then embroiled in a crisis in the Balkans and declined the overture, but Fish's ploy was quite extraordinary in its deviation from traditional American unilateralism. After ten years of brutal fighting in which as many as a hundred thousand people were killed, the Cuban rebellion fizzled out. Moving in the direction Fish preferred, U.S. investors took advantage of bankrupt and desperate Cuban and Spanish planters to buy up their property, considerably expanding America's economic stake and preparing the way for a very different outcome in 1898.
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Grant and Fish enjoyed greater success in the Pacific. As in the Caribbean, the Civil War highlighted the value of naval bases in the Pacific.
Completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 raised hopes for vastly expanded commerce with Asia. Trans-Pacific steamship lines looked for stopping-off places en route to the Orient. Hawaii seemed an ideal midpoint and Pearl Harbor a potentially vital naval base to guard western approaches to a canal and protect the western coast of the United States. With the British and other European nations lopping off Pacific islands one by one, pressures developed for the United States to do the same.
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As in the Dominican Republic, much of the impetus for closer U.S.-Hawaiian ties came from forces outside Washington, in this case Americans with business interests and political clout in the islands.
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The Civil War also had a huge impact in Hawaii. Confederate raiders destroyed the whaling business. The Union blockade increased demands for raw sugar, encouraging enterprising Americans to expand sugar cultivation. After the war, American entrepreneurs in Hawaii sought an expanded U.S. naval presence to defend a thriving commerce and a protected U.S. market for their sugar. They insinuated themselves with the Hawaiian government to achieve their goals. At one time or another, American sugar planters served as Hawaii's foreign minister and minister to Washington. They made up the delegation that negotiated the treaty. Talk of possible annexation found little support in Washington. "The indisposition to consider important questions of the future in the Cabinet is wonderful," Fish complained. "A matter must be imminent to engage attention—indifference and reticence—alas!"
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Proposals for a naval base at Pearl Harbor also aroused opposition among native Hawaiians. Eventually, to win U.S. support for the free entry of sugar into the U.S. market, American sugar planters sent to Washington to negotiate a reciprocity treaty agreed that Hawaii would not grant such trade terms or naval bases to any other nation, thus limiting Hawaii's sovereignty in return for a secure market for their commodity. The idea, as the American who served as Hawaii's minister to the United States put it, was to "make Hawaii an American colony with the same laws and institutions as our own."
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To seal the deal, Hawaii's King Kalakaua visited the United States in 1874, the first reigning monarch to do so.

As Fish observed, the 1873 reciprocity treaty bound Hawaii to the United States with "hoops of steel." It set off a period of frantic development for Hawaii's sugar plantations, increasing the islands' dependence on U.S. capital and the U.S. market. The demand for cheap labor to work the plantations led to a huge influx of Asians. Hawaiians now controlled only 15 percent of the land and 2 percent of the capital and were relegated to a "dispossessed minority." These demographic changes in turn aroused U.S. fears of Asian control. It was only a short step to annexation.
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