Fish and Sumner were inseparable,
and their policy was sure to be safe enough for support. No
mosquito could be so unlucky as to be caught a second time
between a Secretary and a Senator who were both his friends.
This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he
approved; he saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and
he was delighted; but when he renewed his relations with Sumner
in the winter of 1869-70, he began slowly to grasp the idea that
Sumner had a foreign policy of his own which he proposed also to
force on the Department. This was not all. Secretary Fish seemed
to have vanished. Besides the Department of State over which he
nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on Fourteenth Street,
there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations over which
Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and,
finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War
Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a
policy of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man
ever approved. For his life, Adams could not learn where to place
himself among all these forces. Officially he would have followed
the responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the
Secretary. Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile
towards Grant, but he asserted as yet no policy of his own.
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