Such is a summary of the San Domingo business in its characteristic
features. But here are transgressions in every form,--open violation of
the Constitution in more than one essential requirement; open violation
of International Law in more than one of its most beautiful principles;
flagrant insult to the Black Republic, with menace of war; complicity
with the wrongful imprisonment of an American citizen; lawless
assumption of territorial sovereignty in a foreign jurisdiction;
employment of the national navy to sustain a usurper,--being all acts
of substance, maintained by an agent calling himself “Aide-de-Camp to
Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States,” and stipulating
that his chief should play the lobbyist to help the contrivance
through Congress, then urged by private appeals to Senators, and
the influence of the appointing power tyrannically employed by the
Presidential lobbyist, and finally urged anew in an Annual Message,
where undisguised insult to the Senate vies with absurdity in declaring
prospective profits and with geographical ignorance. Such, in brief,
is this multiform disobedience, where every particular is of such
aggravation as to merit the most solemn judgment. Why the grand inquest
of the nation, which brought Andrew Johnson to the bar of the Senate,
should have slept on this conglomerate misdemeanor, every part of
which was offensive beyond any technical offence charged against his
predecessor, while it had a background of nepotism, gift-taking with
official compensation, and various Presidential pretensions beyond all
precedent,--all this will be one of the riddles of American history,
to be explained only by the extent to which the One-Man Power had
succeeded in subjugating the Government.