them than they are likely to learn from him.... Grant has lost prestige enormously in the country." "He [Grant] seems to have no comprehension of the nature of political forces," writes Bigelow three weeks later. "His Cabinet are merely staff officers, selected apparently out of motives of gratitude or for pecuniary favors received from them. His relatives and old friends were among the first provided for. . . . No President before was ever got in the family way so soon after inauguration. By his secretiveness in regard to his choice of a Cabinet and by his taking men unknown to his party or to any party, he wounded the pride of Congress incurably. . . ." ... Carl Schurz tells in his "Reminiscences" an anecdote heard in the cloak-room of the Senate at this time. One of the best lawyers in the Senate heard a rumor that President Grant was about to remove a federal judge in one of the Territories, a lawyer of excellent ability and uncommon fitness for the bench. The Senator remonstrated and Grant admitted that as far as he knew there was no allegation of the unfitness of the judge; "but," he added, "the Governor of the Territory writes me that he cannot get along with that judge at all, and is very anxious to be rid of him; and I think the Governor is entitled to have control of his staff." So much for contemporary criticism! CHAPTER XXXI PERSONAL EQUATIONS "I LIKE Grant," wrote James Russell Lowell after a visit to Washington in March, 1870, "and was struck with the pathos of his face; a puzzled pathos, as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not understand the terms."1 Grant had then been President a year a year crowded with pressing problems, some of which were complicated, it is true, but all of which might almost be stated in terms of Grant himself, and Sumner, with Fish and Motley as ever-present factors. If in the early weeks of the Administration there had been at hand a disinterested friend endowed with the ability to handle men of widely differing tastes and antecedents, the personal misunderstanding between the President and the leader of the Senate might never have developed into a feud endangering the success of the Administration and embittering the lives of all concerned; for Grant and Sumner had common aspirations, although their methods of approach were so unlike. But no such friend appeared to put his finger on the point of sympathetic contact 1 Letter to Leslie Stephen, March 25, 1870. through which harmonious relations could have been maintained. It might be thought that Fish, by virtue of his place and of his earlier relations with Sumner in the Senate, could at least have been of service as a go-between; but whatever may have been his inclination, he was not the man to undertake the task. Sumner, while glad to have him as a friend, had never looked upon him as an intellectual equal, and held him somewhat lightly as a figure in affairs. While Fish, at first regarding Sumner as his mentor, came slowly to resent the other's condescensions, and true to his Dutch ancestry, once having set his mind against his old associate, aligned himself immovably with his official chief, thus helping to accentuate the feud. Besides, he early came to formulate a sane, far-seeing diplomatic programme of his own. Sumner had a low opinion of Grant's political sagacity. He never thought Grant should have been made President as a reward for military success, took no part in his nomination, and acquiesced reluctantly when he saw that it was bound to come. There was nothing strange in this. Sumner was not alone in questioning the wisdom of Grant's selection, and Grant was not the only President about whose fitness he had been in doubt. He never quite approved of Lincoln or understood him. "Mr. Lincoln was a constant puzzle to him," says Carl Schurz. "He frequently told me of profound and wise things Mr. Lincoln had said, and then again of other sayings which were unintelligible to him, and seemed to him inconsistent with a serious appreciation of the task before us. Being entirely devoid of the sense of humor himself, Mr. Sumner frequently I might almost say always failed to see the point of the quaint anecdotes or illustrations with which Mr. Lincoln was fond of elucidating his arguments, as ... with a flashlight. . . . Many a time I saw Sumner restlessly pacing up and down in his room and exclaiming with uplifted hands: 'I pray that the President may be right in delaying. But I am afraid, I am almost sure he is not. I trust his fidelity but I cannot understand him."" 1 As for Grant, he had no skill in handling men of Sumner's type, differing therein from Lincoln, who had a way of dropping in at Sumner's house to drink a cup of the inimitable tea, in brewing which the Massachusetts statesman took peculiar pride, and after sipping it like an old gossip purring the real object of his visit into Sumner's ear. Nor would Grant have done as Lincoln did after his second inauguration, when Sumner's hostility to the Louisiana policy threatened a fatal break. "Dear Mr. Sum 1 The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, vol. II, pp. 312-14. ner," Lincoln wrote, "unless you send me word to the contrary I shall this evening call with my carriage at your house to take you to the Inauguration Ball"; and at the Ball Lincoln walked in with Sumner arm in arm and kept him by his side. Sumner thought in 1864 that Lincoln should give way to a more forceful candidate, just as in 1868 he thought a recognized Republican of ripe political experience would have been better qualified than Grant to meet the problems of the time. It may be he was right. The trouble would have been to find the man. When Grant took office Sumner was the unchallenged chieftain of the Senate. He had been chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations ever since Seward entered Lincoln's Cabinet, and, as Chase had also gone, no one was left to rival him in seniority or reputation. All things conspired to give him prominence and swell his own conception of his place in national affairs. He was well born and highly educated and had been trained almost from boyhood for a political career. He had read every serious book which had been written on the science of government, knew the best writings of all times and countries, and had stored in a capacious memory a prodigious mass of information about many things, with which he tiresomely embellished his speeches in the Senate and his daily talk. He was one of the few Americans of his |