glaciers, icebergs, white bears, and walruses" was the height of folly. The land was dubbed "Seward's ice box." But if these critics could have foreseen that by the close of the century Alaska would have yielded in fish, furs, and gold nearly $150,000,000 of wealth, and that the revenue tax on her sealskins alone would have brought the government a sum ($7,597,351) considerably larger than the purchase price, while her timber resources remained virtually untouched, they would have called the land Seward's treasure box.

From the frozen north Seward turned to the tropics. Six months after the purchase of Alaska a treaty was concluded at Copenhagen, ceding the Danish islands of St. Thomas and St. John to the United States for $7,500,000. The ink was hardly dry on the treaty when a devastating earthquake and hurricane reduced the value of the islands to zero in the eyes of the American public. Not a single member of the Senate committee favored the treaty, and it was not reported to the Senate for action until the spring of 1870, when it was rejected.1 Seward wanted to annex Hawaii and Santo Domingo, but he got no encouragement for these schemes.

Grant took up the Santo Domingo project, however, and clung to it with the tenacity which Jefferson had shown in regard to West Florida, and Polk in regard to California. He sent his private secretary, Orville E. Babcock, to Santo Domingo in the summer of 1869 with secret instructions; and when Babcock returned with a treaty of annexation, Grant first acquainted the Secretary of State with the matter by the casual introduction of the treaty into a cabinet meeting. The members of the cabinet received the communication with "frigid silence," while the President "colored and smoked hard at his cigar." Secretary Fish tendered his resignation, but Grant persuaded him to remain in office. A new treaty of annexation, duly negotiated by our agent in Santo Domingo, was submitted to the Senate, where it was rejected, on June 30, 1870, by a vote of 28 to 28. Grant

1 On the occasion of our entrance into the World War in April, 1917, when we had vital interests to protect in the Panama Canal Zone and the Caribbean area, we purchased these islands of Denmark for $25,000,000,

still persisted. He secured the appointment of a commission to visit the island and report on the desirability of annexation. Senator Wade of Ohio, President Andrew D. White of Cornell, and Samuel G. Howe made the visit and presented a favorable report. But the President, at last persuaded of the hopelessness of the Senate's ratification, let the matter drop. The net result of his dogged pertinacity had been a bitter quarrel with Sumner, who was deposed from the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, the removal of John L. Motley from his post as minister to England, and the dismissal of AttorneyGeneral Hoar from the cabinet (see above, p. 41).

Taking advantage of the preoccupation of the United States with the Civil War, the French Emperor Napoleon III had set the Austrian Archduke Maximilian upon an imperial throne in Mexico in 1864, supporting him with some thirty thousand French troops.1 This action was doubly offensive to the United States, because it violated the Monroe Doctrine by subverting the republican form of government in Mexico, against the will of a vast majority of the Mexican people, and because Maximilian gave aid and comfort to the Confederacy by allowing ammunition and supplies to reach Texas across the Rio Grande and by receiving Confederate leaders at his "court" with honors and emoluments. Both Lincoln and Grant looked on the behavior of the French government as an act of war against the United States. During the visits of the President to Grant's headquarters at City Point, Virginia, in the winter of 1864-1865, the two men frequently discussed the plans for driving the French army out of Mexico at the close of the war. When that auspicious moment came, Grant stationed General Sheridan on the Mexican border with fifty-two thousand men, and made plans for General Schofield to lead a voluntary force of Americans to coöperate with the guerrilla troops of the dispossessed Mexican president, Benito Juarez. But Seward, firm in the belief that Napoleon would yield to diplomatic pressure, sent Schofield to Paris instead of to Mexico

1 For Napoleon's intervention in Mexico, see Muzzey's "The United States of America," Vol. I, pp. 619-620.

and, between September, 1865, and March, 1866, dispatched a series of notes to our minister in France, John Bigelow, which grew more and more insistent until they ended in an ultimatum.1

Napoleon had already grown thoroughly sick of his Mexican enterprise. It had cost France hundreds of millions of francs and provoked the bitter attacks of the Republicans in the French Chamber. Moreover, Prussia, having seized the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in the Danish war (1864), was preparing to grapple with Austria for the leadership of the German states. Realizing the menace to France of Bismarck's program, Napoleon abandoned Maximilian as readily as he had taken him up; and in spite of his lavish promises to the newly crowned 'emperor" of military support for five years, he ordered General Bazaine to send home the French troops in three detachments (October, 1866; March, 1867; October, 1867). Maximilian's beautiful consort, Carlotta, crossed the Atlantic to plead her husband's cause with Napoleon, with her brother Leopold II of Belgium, and with the Pope-all in vain. She lost both her entreaties and her reason. Prussia's decisive victory over Austria in the battle of Königgrätz (July 3, 1866) only hastened the recall of the French troops. The last regiments left Mexico before the middle of March, 1867. Maximilian might have gone back with them to his palace on the Adriatic. An Austrian frigate waited for him in the harbor of Vera Cruz. But with a quixotic fidelity he refused to "abandon" his Mexican subjects. He was captured at Querétaro by Juarez's soldiers, and in spite of the efforts of the government of the United States and of several European courts to secure his pardon and deportation, he was court-martialed and shot (June 19, 1867).

Seward meanwhile was cautiously feeling his way toward a

1 At the same time President Johnson sent Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio to Mexico as the accredited minister of the United States to the government of President Juarez. After a wild-goose chase of several weeks, however, Campbell, accompanied by General Sherman, failed to locate the fugitive Mexican president and returned to the United States.

settlement with Great Britain for the damages done to the commerce of the United States during the Civil War by the Alabama and other Confederate cruisers built in British shipyards. At first Earl Russell maintained the same irritable haughtiness that he had assumed when our minister at London, Charles F. Adams, had made the first protests in the summer of 1862. "Her Majesty's government," said Russell, "are the sole guardian of their own honor." They could not admit that our claims were "founded on any grounds of law or justice." They had acted strictly in accordance with the laws of the realm, and "used all means in their power to prevent the fitting out and arming of vessels in their ports to cruise against the vessels of the United States." [!]1 But with a change of ministry and with the ominous advance of Prussia's military power, the British government modified its stark non possumus. In case of a serious war into which England might be drawn it would be most annoying to have neutral maritime nations, sheltering themselves behind antiquated statutes which violated international obligations, let forth "a swarm of Alabamas" to vex her commerce. When, therefore, Lord Derby expressed his willingness to accept "a limited reference to arbitration" of our claims, Reverdy Johnson, the new minister sent by President Johnson to the court of St. James in August, 1868, found it easy to begin negotiations. In his anxiety to conciliate England, however, Johnson seemed to forget that his own country had a grievance. After a round of social festivities in England, during which he fraternized with men who had been conspicuous sympathizers with the Confederate cause and shook hands cordially with Laird, who had built the Alabama, he concluded the amazing Johnson-Clarendon convention (January 14, 1869), which contained no mention at all of the Alabama, but provided only for a general reference to arbitration of any claims that the two countries might have against each other since their last negotia

1 Many years later Lord Russell confessed that the escape of the Alabama from Liverpool was due to his own culpable indecision, which, he said, cost his country "a million a day" ("Recollections and Suggestions," pp. 235, 334).

tion in 1853. On April 13, 1869, the Johnson-Clarendon convention was rejected by the Senate by a vote of 54 to 1.1

The vote followed upon a speech of Charles Sumner, in which the "massive grievance" of the United States against Great Britain was set forth with all the Senator's customary and unsparing vigor of rhetoric. Sumner contended that without England's hasty recognition of the South as a belligerent power and her subsequent aid to the Confederate cause, "the Rebellion would have soon succumbed under the well-directed efforts of the National Government." He presented Great Britain with a staggering bill of $2,125,000,000, itemized as follows:

For direct damages, in the destruction of ships and cargoes by the Confederate cruisers $15,000,000 For indirect damages, in driving our commerce from the ocean by the terror of these cruisers $110,000,000 For indirect damages, in prolonging the war to at least double the time that it would have taken the United States to suppress rebellion, one half the cost of the war, to wit. $2,000,000,000

Sumner's speech was warmly commended by President Grant (who changed his opinion after the breach with Sumner on the Santo Domingo question, and spoke sneeringly of "the indirect damage humbug"), by the members of the cabinet and of Congress, and even by men like Welles and James Russell Lowell, whose general attitude toward the administration was tartly critical. It appealed to the people of the country as a cogent statement of our just complaint against a power which we had been long accustomed to regard as unfriendly to the United States. Of course Sumner's speech did not help the new Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, toward an amicable settlement of

1 The student will note that between the negotiation of the convention and its rejection by the Senate, Grant had succeeded Johnson in the White House. Naturally, Johnson's followers in the United States agreed with the press in England that the defeat of the convention was due to "politics." The Republicans were not willing to let Andrew Johnson have the credit of concluding the settlement with England on any terms. But this is a puny explanation for a vote of 54 to 1. Democrats and Republicans in the Senate agreed in repudiating the treaty, and the public sentiment of the country heartily indorsed the vote.