the new domestic problems which they involved
all tended to divert public thought from the old political issues
arising out of the war. Foreign relations, too, began to take on a new
interest. The Alabama claims controversy with England continued to hold
the public attention until finally settled by the Geneva Arbitration
in 1872. President Grant, as much of an expansionist as Seward, for two
years (1869-71) tried to secure Santo Domingo or a part of it for an
American naval base in the West Indies. But the United States had
race problems enough already and the Senate, led by Sumner, refused to
sanction the acquisition. Relations with Spain were frequently
strained on account of American filibustering expeditions to aid Cuban
insurgents. Spain repeatedly charged the United States with laxness
toward such violations of international law; and President Grant, seeing
no other way out, recommended in 1869 and again in 1870 that the Cuban
insurgents be recognized as belligerents, but still the Senate held
back. The climax came in 1873, when the Spanish authorities in Cuba
captured on the high seas the Virginius* with a filibustering expedition
on board and executed fifty-three of the crew and passengers, among them
eight Americans. For a time war seemed imminent, but Spain acted quickly
and effected a peaceable settlement.

* See "The Path of Empire", by Carl Russell Fish (in "The
Chronicles of America"), p. 119.

It became evident soon after 1867 that the issues involved in
reconstruction were not in themselves sufficient to hold the North
solidly Republican. Toward Negro suffrage, for example, Northern public
opinion was on the whole unfriendly. In 1867, the Negro was permitted to
vote only in New York and in New England, except in Connecticut. Before
1869, Negro suffrage was rejected in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Kansas,
Ohio, Maryland, Missouri, Michigan, and Minnesota. The Republicans in
their national platform of 1868 went only so far as to say that, while
Negro suffrage was to be forced upon the South, it must remain a local
question in the North. The Border States rapidly lined up with the white
South on matters of race, church, and politics.

It was not until 1874, however, that the changing opinion was made
generally effective in the elections. The skillfully managed radical
organization held large majorities in every Congress from the
Thirty-ninth to the Forty-third, and the electoral votes in 1868 and