AN AMERICAN CITIZEN SACRIFICED TO HELP THE TREATY.
This drama of a usurper sustained by foreign power is illustrated by an episode, where the liberty of an American citizen was sacrificed to the consummation of the plot. It appears that Davis Hatch, of Norwalk, Connecticut, intimately known to one of the Senators of that State [Mr. Ferry] and respected by the other [Mr. Buckingham], lived in Dominica, engaged in business there, while Cabral was the legitimate President. During this time he wrote letters to a New York paper, in which he exposed the character of the conspirator Baez, then an exile. When the latter succeeded by violence in overthrowing the regular Government, one of his first acts was to arrest Mr. Hatch, on the ground that he had coöperated with Cabral. How utterly groundless was this charge appears by a letter to Baez from his own brother, governor of the province where the former resided,[32] and also by the testimony of Mr. Somers Smith, our Commercial Agent in San Domingo, who spoke and acted as became a representative of our country.[33] Read the correspondence and testimony candidly, and you will confess that the whole charge was trumped up to serve the purpose of the usurper.
Sparing all details of trial and pardon, where everything testifies against Baez, I come to the single decisive point, on which there can be no question, that, even after his formal pardon, Mr. Hatch was detained in prison by the authority of the usurper, at the special instance of Cazneau and with the connivance of Babcock, in order to prevent his influence against the treaty of annexion. The evidence is explicit and unanswerable. Gautier, the Minister of Baez, who had signed the treaty, in an official note to our representative, Mr. Raymond H. Perry, dated at San Domingo, February 19, 1870, and communicated to the State Department, says: “I desire that you will be good enough to assure his Excellency, the Secretary of State in Washington, that the prolonged sojourn of Mr. Hatch here has been only to prevent his hostile action in New York.”[34] Nor is this all. Under the same date, Cazneau had the equal hardihood to write to Babcock, then at Washington, a similar version of the conspiracy, where, after denunciation of Perry as “embarrassing affairs here,” in San Domingo, by his persistency in urging the release of Mr. Hatch, he relates, that, on occasion of a recent peremptory demand of this sort in his presence, Baez replied, that Hatch “would certainly make use of his liberty to join the enemies of annexation,” and “that a few weeks’ restraint would not be so inconvenient to him as his slanderous statements might become to the success of General Grant’s policy in the Antilles,”—and he adds, that he himself, in response to the simultaneous charge of “opposing the liberation of an innocent man,” declared, that, in his opinion, “President Baez had the right, and ought, to do everything in his power to serve and protect negotiations in which our President was so deeply interested.”[35] All this is clear, plain, and documentary. Nor is there any drawback or deduction on account of the character of Mr. Hatch, who, according to the best testimony, is an excellent citizen, enjoying the good-will and esteem of his neighbors at home, being respected there “as much as Governor Buckingham is in Norwich,”[36]—and we all know that no higher standard can be reached.
In other days it was said that the best government is where an injury to a single citizen is resented as an injury to the whole State. Here was an American citizen, declared by our representative to be “an innocent man,” and already pardoned for the crimes falsely alleged against him, incarcerated, or, according to the polite term of the Minister of Baez, compelled to a “prolonged sojourn,” in order to assure the consummation of the plot for the acceptance of the treaty, or, in the words of Cazneau, “to serve and protect negotiations in which our President [Grant] was so deeply interested.” The cry, “I am an American citizen,” was nothing to Baez, nothing to Cazneau, nothing to Babcock. The young missionary heard the cry and answered not. Annexion was in peril. Annexion could not stand the testimony of Mr. Hatch, who would write in New York papers. Therefore was he doomed to a prison. Here again I forbear details, though at each point they testify. And yet the Great Republic, instead of spurning at once the heartless usurper who trampled on the liberty of an American citizen, and spurning the ill-omened treaty which required this sacrifice, continued to lend its strong arm in the maintenance of the trampler, while with unexampled assiduity it pressed the treaty upon a reluctant Senate.