John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[398] at Washington was to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, as against the usurpation of Maximilian and his French allies. He favored their expulsion from Mexico by force if necessary, and felt confident that, as soon as they knew the purposes of the United States, they would go without waiting for an appeal to arms. He also favored the policy of holding Great Britain to a rigid accountability for the damage done to American shipping by the Confederate cruisers which had been built, fitted out, and permitted to sail from English sea-ports. On these two great questions Dana was emphatically an American. He affected no love for Great Britain, and the letters he wrote from Paris in 1848, and the editorials he afterwards published in the Tribune, show that he had less for Louis Napoleon, and no confidence whatever in the stability of his dynasty. Long before our own troubles culminated he wrote:

No one can predict when the great edifice of fraud, violence, plunder, political pretence, and incapacity which constitutes the Second Empire will come to an end. The result is certain; the time and the mode depend upon accident. But we know that Louis Napoleon has outlived his proper period, and we may at any hour be called to witness the closing catastrophe of this strange, eventful, unenviable career.

From the date of Grant's election the question uppermost in the public mind was reconstruction, “which had been needlessly procrastinated” --as declared by the Sun-“under an administration that had forfeited the confidence and respect of the country,” but which would be so completed by its successor that before the next anniversary of our independence “every star would be restored to its appropriate place upon the national ensign, and a protracted and bitter controversy would be brought to a felicitous close.”