Next in illustration of the prevailing misrule is the San Domingo
business, with its eccentricities of wrong-doing; and this, too, is
now in issue. At the thought of this unprecedented enormity, where
wrong assumes such various forms, it is hard to be silent; but I shall
be brief. The case is clear, and stands on documents which cannot be
questioned. I keep within the line of moderate statement, when I say,
that, from the beginning of our Government, nothing in our foreign
relations has been so absolutely indefensible. It will not do to call
it simply a fault and an insolence; it was an elaborate contrivance,
conceived in lust of territory, pursued in ignorance, maintained
in open violation of the National Constitution, pushed forward in
similar violation of International Law in fundamental principles, and
crowned by intolerable indignity to the Black Republic, even to the
extent of menacing hostilities and the sinking of its ships,--all
without authority of Congress, and by Presidential prerogative alone.
In this drama the President, like a favorite actor, assumed every
part. In negotiating the treaty he was President; in declaring war
he was Congress; in sending ships and men he was Commander-in-Chief;
and then in employing private influence with Senators to promote his
scheme--according to the promise in the protocol with Baez, signed in
his name by Orville E. Babcock, entitled therein “Aide-de-Camp to his
Excellency General Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States of
America”--he was lobbyist. That such things can be done by a President
without indignant condemnation, loud and universal, shows a painful
demoralization in the country. That their author can be presented for
reëlection to the Presidency, whose powers he has thus misused, shows a
disheartening insensibility to public virtue.
Here I remark, that, so long as the President confined himself to
negotiation, he was strictly within the line of the Constitution.
Even if indiscreet in character and impolitic in object, it was not
unconstitutional. But in seizing war powers without the authority of
Congress, in upholding the usurper Baez that he might sell his country,
in menacing the Black Republic, and then in playing the lobbyist to
promote the contrivance, the President did what no other President
ever did before, and what, for the sake of Republican Institutions,
should be rebuked by the American people. It was the knowledge of these
proceedings that changed essentially my relations to the question.