AS COMMISSIONER TO SANTO DOMINGO -1871 505 



some years before, it had done so of its own free will ; and 

 that &quot;not a single Spanish vessel was then in its waters, 

 nor a single Spanish sailor upon its soil.&quot; On the other 

 hand, he insisted that the conduct of the United States had 

 been the very opposite of this; that it had brought pres 

 sure to bear upon the little island republic ; and that when 

 the decision was made in favor of our country, there were 

 American ships off the coast and American soldiers upon 

 the island. To prove this statement, he read from a speech 

 of the Spanish prime minister published in the official 

 paper of the Spanish government at Madrid. To our 

 great surprise, we found, on arriving at the island, that 

 this statement was not correct; that when the action in 

 favor of annexation to Spain took place, Spanish ships 

 were upon the coast and Spanish soldiers upon the 

 island; and that there had been far more appearance 

 of pressure at that time than afterward, when the little 

 republic sought admission to the American Union. One 

 of our first efforts, therefore, on returning, was to 

 find a copy of this official paper, for the purpose of 

 discovering how it was that the leader of the Spanish 

 ministry had uttered so grave an untruth. The Span 

 ish newspaper was missing from the library of Con 

 gress ; but at last Dr. Howe, the third commissioner, a life 

 long and deeply attached friend of Mr. Sumner, found it 

 in the library of the senator. The passage which Mr. 

 Sumner had quoted was carefully marked ; it was simply 

 to the effect that when the first proceedings looking toward 

 annexation to Spain were initiated, there were no Spanish 

 ships in those waters, nor Spanish soldiers on shore. This 

 was, however, equally true of the United States ; for when 

 proceedings were begun in Santo Domingo looking to an 

 nexation, there was not an American ship off the coast, nor 

 an American soldier on the island. 



But the painful thing in the matter was that, had Mr. 

 Sumner read the sentence immediately following that 

 which he quoted, it would have shown simply and dis 

 tinctly that his contention was unfounded ; that, at the time 



