All this will be found under two different heads, or in two different sources: first, what is furnished by the State Department, and, secondly, what is furnished by the Navy Department. These two Departments are witnesses, with their agents, confessing and acting. From the former we have confession; from the latter we have acts: confessions and acts all in harmony and supporting each other. I begin with the confession.
In the strange report of the Secretary of State, responsive to a resolution moved by me in the Senate, the dependence of Baez upon our Navy is confessed in various forms. Nobody can read this document without noting the confession, first from the reluctant Secretary, and then from his agent.
Referring to the correspondence of Raymond H. Perry, our Commercial Agent at San Domingo, who signed the treaties, the Secretary presents a summary, which, though obnoxious to just criticism, is a confession. According to him, the correspondence “tends to show that the presence of a United States man-of-war in the port was supposed to have _a peaceful influence_.”[25] The term “peaceful influence” is the pleonasm of the Secretary, confessing the maintenance of Baez in his usurpation. There is no such thing as stealing; “_convey_ the wise it call”; and so with the Secretary the maintenance of a usurper by our war-ships is only “a peaceful influence.” A discovery of the Secretary. But in the levity of his statement the Secretary forgets that a United States man-of-war has nothing to do within a foreign jurisdiction, and cannot exert influence there without unlawful intervention.
The Secretary alludes also to the probability of “another revolution,” of course against Baez, in the event of the failure of the annexion plot; and here is another confession of the dependence of the usurper upon our Navy.
But the correspondence of Mr. Perry, as communicated to the Senate, shows more plainly than the confession of the Secretary how completely the usurper was maintained in power by the strong arm of the United States.
The anxiety of the usurper was betrayed at an early day, even while vaunting the popular enthusiasm for annexion. In a dispatch dated at San Domingo, January 20, 1870, Mr. Perry thus reports:--