These Presidential pretensions, in all their variety, personal and military, with reckless indifference to law, naturally ripened in the contrivance, nursed in hot-house secrecy, against the peace of the island of San Domingo: I say deliberately, against the peace of that island, for under the guise of annexing a portion there was menace to the Black Republic of Hayti. This whole business, absolutely indefensible from beginning to end, being wrong at every point, is the special and most characteristic product of the Administration, into which it infused and projected itself more than into anything else. In this multiform disobedience we behold our President. Already I have referred to this contrivance as marking an epoch in Presidential pretensions. It is my duty now to show its true character as a warning against its author. A few weeks only after beginning his career as a civilian, and while occupied with military usurpations and the perquisites of office, he was tempted by overtures of Dominican plotters, headed by the usurper Baez and the speculator Cazneau: the first an adventurer, conspirator, and trickster, described by one who knows him well as “the worst man living of whom he has any personal knowledge”;[148] and the second, one of our own countrymen, long resident on the island, known as disloyal throughout the war, and entirely kindred in character to Baez. Listening to these prompters, and without one word in Congress or in the press suggesting annexion of the island or any part of it, the President began his contrivance; and here we see abuse in every form and at every step, absolutely without precedent in our history.