Lesson for President Obama: Get solid commitments from Congress.

The evening after New Year’s Day, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant wrapped himself in his winter cloak, strode out of the White House, and walked across Lafayette Square, alone, to call on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner had first come to Congress in 1851; now, 19 years later, he was not only one of the most powerful, most influential men in the Senate, but he was revered among Abolitionists and African American freedmen as a living martyr.

In 1856, during a heated debate in the Senate on the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act, Sumner was attacked by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Using his cane, Brooks beat Sumner over the head until he fell bleeding and unconscious to the floor. Sumner’s injuries were so severe it took three years for him to recover.

On the evening of January 2, President Grant was willing to do what no American president had ever done — to go in person, unannounced and unescorted, to make a personal appeal to a senator for his support. Sumner was at home, dining with two newspapermen. The sudden, unexpected arrival of the president surprised the senator and his guests, but Sumner recovered his poise, asked Grant to join them at the table, and offered him a glass of sherry. Grant took the seat, but declined the wine. Then he explained the purpose for his call. He wanted the treaty for the annexation of Santo Domingo to pass; as chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner’s support for the treaty was essential. Sumner replied, “I expect, Mr. President, to support the measures of your administration.”

Grant was content. He wished the gentlemen a good evening and walked back across Lafayette Square, believing that he had received Sumner’s assurance that he would back the Santo Domingo treaty.

According to the terms of the proposed treaty, the United States would annex (“purchase” might be a more accurate word) the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo for $1.5 million, plus an honorarium of $100,00 paid directly to the president of Santo Domingo, Buenaventura Baez, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the annexation. Grant’s motive was controversial: after five years of vigilante violence in the old Confederacy, in which African Americans were the frequent target of such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, the president had come to the conclusion that white Southerners would never live peacefully beside their former black slaves. The prudent solution, it seemed to Grant, was to relocate the more than four million recently freed African Americans outside the continental United States where they would be safe and free to prosper. Grant truly meant well, but today it is impossible to read of a president planning to relocate millions of African Americans and not cringe.

It must have been disheartening for the freedmen that President Grant’s solution to the killings and other outrages they suffered at the hands of the Klan was not an all-out effort to enforce the law, but rather a scheme to encourage the victims to leave the country — as though the upheaval in he former Confederacy was all their fault, or nothing could be done about it. The debate over the annexation of Santo Domingo brought out a rash of nasty, hareful, elitist rhetoric, even from reformers in the North who had once sympathized with the plight of the slaves. It marked the beginning of the end of the egalitarian ideal of Reconstruction.

When the Santo Domingo treaty was presented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Sumner did not obstruct it but let it come to the Senate for debate. And there he buried it. Standing before his fellow senators, Sumner claimed that by acquiring Santo Domingo the United States would saddle itself with a nation where political upheavals were almost a daily occurrence; he characterized Santo Domingo’s President Baez as “a political jackal,” and as for President Grant, Sumner damned him for bullying an impoverished, militarily weak nation into handing over its independence to the United States, for attempting to graft an “imperial system” onto the American form of government. Then, working himself into one of those oratorically florid moments for which he was famous, Sumner charged that if America annexed Santo Domingo it would be the first step in “a dance of blood.” (Whatever that meant).

In June 1870 the Senate voted on the Santo Domingo treaty. Deadlocked at 28-28, the treaty failed to win the two-thirds required for approval. Senator Sumner had won.

Grant felt betrayed, but Sumner always claimed that his reply the night the president called upon him had been non-committal. It could be read that way, but from President Grant’s perspective, the senator from Massachusetts had sandbagged him.

The scheme to ship the former slaves to Santo Domingo was in essence a public statement by the president of the United States that blacks and whites could not live peaceably in the same communities, that the acts of violence committed by the Klan and other vigilante groups like them were regrettable but understandable, and that he, Ulysses S. Grant, would not defend the rights of black Americans nor ensure that they enjoyed the full protection of the law.

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Thomas Craughwell is the author of, with M. William Phelps, Failures of the Presidents: from the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq.