Hamilton Fish
by Allan Nevins
Summary
Allan Nevins built his biography of Hamilton Fish around a paradox: an administration remembered mostly for corruption produced, in its secretary of state, one of the most careful and successful diplomats America ever had. The book follows Fish from his patrician New York upbringing, connected on his mother's side to the old Dutch families of New York, through Columbia College and into a legal and political career that carried him to Congress, the lieutenant governorship, the governorship of New York at forty, and finally the United States Senate before Ulysses S. Grant asked him to run the State Department in 1869. Nevins gives real weight to how long Fish actually stayed: eight years running the State Department, longer than any other member of Grant's cabinet.
The heart of the book is the patient diplomacy that took a genuine international crisis and closed it without a war. Nevins follows Fish's negotiation of the Treaty of Washington and the Alabama Claims arbitration, which forced Britain to answer for Confederate commerce raiders built in its own shipyards and ended with an award of fifteen and a half million dollars to the United States, a settlement Fish achieved through restraint rather than saber rattling. The book gives similar attention to the Virginius affair of 1873, when Spanish authorities in Cuba executed American and British crew members of a captured gunrunning ship, and to Fish's steady refusal, against real domestic pressure, to recognize Cuban rebels as belligerents while the Alabama negotiations were still unresolved.
Nevins writes as a historian working from the State Department's own records and Fish's private papers rather than as a storyteller chasing incident, and the book asks a reader to follow the actual machinery of nineteenth century diplomacy, treaty language, arbitration procedure, cabinet argument, rather than a single dramatic arc. It suits a reader more interested in how a competent official keeps a fragile peace than in a colorful character study, and it rewards patience with a genuinely underappreciated figure Nevins clearly believes deserves better than a footnote in Grant's scandals.
Historical Context & Significance
The 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Biography went to Nevins for a book whose full title, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration, signals its real ambition, using one honest cabinet officer to explain how an administration remembered for corruption still managed real foreign policy successes. It was Nevins's second Pulitzer Prize for Biography; he had already won in 1933 for Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, a study of the same Gilded Age political world Fish's diplomacy had helped defend from inside the State Department.
American Heritage later ranked Fish among the country's top ten secretaries of state, citing the same achievements Nevins had already made the spine of this book, the Alabama Claims settlement, the Virginius affair, and the Hawaiian reciprocity treaty. Fish has never become a widely read historical figure outside specialist circles, and Nevins's biography remains the fullest treatment of a diplomat whose reputation rests almost entirely on the quiet fact that, under his watch, the United States and Britain settled a war worthy grievance at the negotiating table instead.