Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration
by
[Dodd, Mead, $5.00]
MR. NEVINS’S latest biography, Hamilton Fish, is a monumental single volume of more than nine hundred pages and thirty-seven chapters, covering the foreign policy of the Grant administrations with more detail and completeness than any other work with which I am familiar. But it seemed neither lengthy nor tedious as I read it on the train between Boston and New York, and for sheer entertainment I preferred it to Gone with the Wind, which the gentleman across the aisle was yawningly plodding through to the last paragraph. Mr. Nevins’s narrative of real people, of parasites and plotters and a few honest men, is seldom dull, frequently brilliant, and appealing to the average reader as well as the scholar. In it fact is actually more thrilling than fiction.
Mr. Nevins has a vast amount of new material, including an unpublished diary of more than a million words and many memorandum and letter books, and an astonishing story to tell. His hero, Hamilton Fish (18081893), at the age of sixty quite unexpectedly began eight eventful years as Secretary of State, from 1869 to 1877. His career both before and after was creditable to him: he had been Congressman and Governor and United States Senator. But in the State Department he stood out as ‘the strongest figure in one of our most troubled administrations.’ Fish appears as a rugged and homely, conscientious and methodical man of principle, who, surrounded by indecisiveness, confusion, and scandal, ‘illustrated the validity of older standards of rectitude and honor.’ Again and again he kept Grant from making disastrous blunders. Repeatedly he told the President the dismal truth. Without prejudice or hate, Nevins recounts Grant’s absurd appointments to responsible positions, his susceptibility to sinister influences, the venality of his associates, anil his helplessness under the manipulations of such untrustworthy friends as Butler and Babcock, it is a sordid story, but every American should he familiar with it.
This book is well documented, discriminating, and thorough. The tale of how Charles Sumner, whom Nevins rightly calls ‘ the most intolerant man that American history has ever known,’ achieved his own ruin; the account of the farcical negotiations with Cuba and San Domingo; the dramatic episodes of the Treaty of Washington and the Geneva Arbitration, of the Virginius, the Panic of 1873, and the Whiskey Ring; the inside story of Fish’s resignation on December 5, 1871, and the storm of protest which followed; the admirable character sketches of the urbane Caleb Cushing and the incorruptible Carl Schurz, of Motley and Belknap and the preposterous Roscoe Conkling — all these are examples of the rich stuff which the volume contains. One chapter entitled ’ Potomac Backgrounds’ is in itself a masterpiece, describing a Washington of appalling contrasts, of vitality and heterogeneity, and everywhere the ‘aroma of corruption.’
In short, this is American political biography at its best. One has only to draw down from the library shelves such works as Parton’s Jackson or Lodge’s Washington, so much commended in their time, to discover how Mr. Nevins’s book shines by comparison in technique, in style, and in permanent historical value. Probably the final word has here been said on Hamilton Fish, and he will take his place among the greater American statesmen. His fame, and that of his biographer, are secure.
CLAUDE M. FUESS