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for the benefit of favored interests,” and civil service reform, and denounced the “packing of the Supreme Court to relieve rich corporations,” and the attempt to cure the Kuklux disorders, irreligion, or intemperance “by means of unconstitutional laws.”
This movement for a national convention received some directions from Washington.
Schurz was occupying his seat as Senator at the time, and he held intimate relations with Charles Sumner, whose quarrel with President Grant was a matter of national interest.
The unfriendliness of the Massachusetts Senator and the President, beginning, perhaps, when Sumner was obliged, on constitutional grounds, to oppose the confirmation of A. T. Stewart, Grant's first nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, grew into charges and counter-charges of great bitterness while the Santo Domingo treaty was under discussion, and the President gave Sumner the chief credit for the defeat of that measure.
Motley's recall from England was the President's first act of retaliation.
In the following December the President proposed the annexation of Santo Domingo in the same way that Texas had been annexed as a State, and Sumner again led the opposition, selecting words that were especially irritating to
New York, D. Appleton and Company, March 1903.
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