FISH, Hamilton. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States.

...Transmitted to Congress with the Annual Message of the President, December 4, 1871, Preceded by a Synoptical List of Papers and Followed by an Alphabetical Index of Persons and Subjects.

Washington: Government Printing Office, 1871.

4to., full red morocco stamped in gilt; six spine compartments; gilt edges.

First edition. Presentation binding, gilt-lettered: “Ulysses S. Grant,” on the front cover. 

Prints Grant’s July 4, 1871, Proclamation and December 4, 1871, annual message to Congress.

Hamilton Fish (1808-1893), the most distinguished and effective of Grant’s ministers, was not the president’s first choice for the senior Cabinet post. Originally a Whig, Fish served in the House of Representatives briefly in the 1840s before winning the governorship of New York. In 1850 he was elected to the Senate and voted with anti-slavery colleagues William Seward and Charles Sumner. During the war he served on the Union Defense Committee, and helped negotiate prisoner exchanges with the Confederacy.

Fish had a rare (for Washington) combination of talent, energy, discretion and loyalty. He disapproved of Grant’s plans for annexing the Dominican Republic, but ably fought on behalf of the policy against the spite-filled opposition of his former colleague from Massachusetts, and indeed Fish’s loyalty to Grant cost him Sumner’s friendship. Fish supervised the thorny problem of the Alabama claims with great skill, and easily met Grant’s instructions to resolve the dispute by the 1876 election. Fish mixed strength with diplomatic tact when he threatened war with Spain in 1873 over American support for Cuban revolutionaries. This was, in fact, another episode over which Grant and Fish disagreed: the president wanted to grant belligerent status to the revolutionaries while Fish wanted to maintain neutrality. But when the Spanish government executed fifty-three people, many of them Americans, caught trying to smuggle guns and supplies to the rebels, Fish issued an ultimatum. The Spanish agreed to negotiate a settlement to the crisis and war was averted. American-Spanish relations improved notably when Fish and Grant named Caleb Cushing as U.S. ambassador to Madrid.

Grant and Fish, in spite of the differences in their backgrounds, developed a close friendship. They had their strained moments, especially over Grant’s loyalty to corrupt cronies such as Orville Babcock and William Belknap. Fish found it increasingly necessary to be a stern voice of conscience in the face of the president’s willful blindness during the second term, and he urged his chief—with mixed success—to separate himself from his wayward subordinates.