Force and fraud played a large part in the restoration of white control, but it could not have been effective without some connivance from the North. Before 1872 the keenness of Northern radicalism was blunted. Thoughtful Republicans began to examine their work and criticize it. "We can never reconstruct the South," wrote Lowell, "except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so." A social order which needed the constant support of troops lost the confidence of political independents. These, as the presidential campaign of 1872 drew near, openly expressed their hostility to reconstruction as carried out by Grant, and threatened to prevent his reelection. The first term of Grant ended unsatisfactorily. His appointments to office were marked by favoritism and incapacity. He appointed the only really inferior man who has ever represented the United States in London,--one who thought it not incompatible with his high office to publish a treatise on draw-poker, and to appear as bellwether in a mining prospectus. Grant's personal intimates included shifty financiers. Corruption and misgovernment at the South were held against him, though Congress was properly to blame for them. Only in his stand for honest finance, his effort to improve the Indian service, and his conclusion of the disputes with Great Britain, could his supporters take great pride. The settlement with England was his greatest achievement. Since the summer of 1862, when the Alabama had evaded the British officials and had gone to sea, the American Minister in London had continued to press for damages. The Alabama claims were based on the assertion that the law of neutrals required Great Britain to prevent any hostile vessel from starting, in her waters, upon a cruise against the United States. In the face of official rebuff and popular sneers Charles Francis Adams formulated the claims. His successor, Reverdy Johnson, reached a sort of settlement which the Senate declined to ratify, and which Sumner denounced. It was Sumner's contention that the Civil War was prolonged by British aid and that a demand for national damages (perhaps $2,000,000,000, or Canada, by way of substitute) ought to be advanced. So tense did the international situation become in 1869 and 1870 that friends of peace were frightened. Boundaries, fisheries, and general claims aggravated the situation, which was given into the hands of a Joint High Commission, hastily summoned to meet in Washington in 1870. The resulting Treaty of Washington, and the successful arbitrations which followed it, eliminated Sumner's extreme contention but vindicated the main American claims and founded Anglo-American relations on a more secure basis than they had ever known. It was Grant's great triumph, but it was a political danger as well, for the negotiator in charge, Charles