HAZARD, Samuel. Santo Domingo past and Present with a Glance at Hayti.

London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, & Searle, 1873.

Thick 8vo.; full brown morocco stamped in gilt; six compartments, black ruled between five raised bands on the spine; 24 engraved plates and one folding map; top edge gilt; albumen photographic image of Hazard, inserted onto the front free endpaper.

First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed “To His Excellency General U.S. Grant the President of the United States with the high regards of the Author. Paris Dec. 22  72,” on the front free endpaper, with a September 1, 1944, newspaper clipping tucked inside regarding an earthquake that erupted in Haiti, and the assistance offered by Grant’s grandson, naturalist Chapman Grant; prints Grant’s December 5, 1870, annual message to Congress on pages 469-71.

Grant’s copy, with annotations on pages viii, ix, and 190.

The annexation of the Dominican Republic—“Santo Domingo” as Grant called it—was supposed to be the crowning achievement of the administration’s foreign policy. In Grant’s mind, the island offered the best chance for resolving the problem of race relations in the United States, giving black Americans a place to live and work free from the violence and discrimination they faced on the mainland. Grant’s Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish was cool to the idea, but Acting Secretary of the Navy Porter and Admiral Daniel Ammen, both close friends of Grant, coveted Samaná Bay for a U.S. naval base. The State Department drafted a treaty calling for annexation, in which the United States would pay $1.5 million of the Dominican national debt and pledge to defend the Island against any foreign aggression while the treaty was pending. Báez’s government approved the treaty, but Charles Sumner and the U.S. Senate proved a much tougher nut to crack.

Senate hearings on the treaty proceeded sluggishly in February and March, and not until March 15 that Sumner finally declared his opposition to the Treaty, noting also that a 5 to 2 majority of his committee felt likewise. It was wrong, he argued, for the United States to become an expansionist power in the Caribbean, and it would prove too expensive as well as too dangerous for America to try to absorb alien cultures. Sumner also felt the Americanization of the Dominican Republic would threaten Haiti, a country dear to abolitionists as the first and only independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Underneath all these stated reasons was Sumner’s sheer desire to thwart Grant and show him who was the real boss of the Republican Party.

Grant fought back with his usual dogged determination. He wanted his plan or nothing, and he got nothing. The Senate vote on June 30, 1870 was 28-28, well short of the two-thirds majority needed to ratify the treaty. Even after the vote Grant fought on, asking Congress in his 1870 annual message to create a commission to investigate the situation in the Caribbean nation and report back. The Senate agreed to send a distinguished body of Americans to the island, which included Frederick Douglass. Their April 1871 report stated that the Dominican people were almost unanimously in favor of annexation and the island was rich in natural resources that would make it a productive addition to the United States. The American people, however, were cold to the idea. He sent the panels’ findings up to the Hill, but when Congress once again rejected it Grant finally gave up.