When he, his friends, and the public, all startled by this unexpected treatment, looked to find an explanation of it, one was found which seemed to many quite sufficient.  Mr. Sumner had been prominent among those who had favored his appointment.  A very serious breach had taken place between the President and Mr. Sumner on the important San Domingo question.  It was a quarrel, in short, neither more nor less, at least so far as the President was concerned.  The proposed San Domingo treaty had just been rejected by the Senate, on the thirtieth day of June, and immediately thereupon,—­the very next day,—­the letter requesting Mr. Motley’s resignation was issued by the executive.  This fact was interpreted as implying something more than a mere coincidence.  It was thought that Sumner’s friend, who had been supported by him as a candidate for high office, who shared many of his political ideas and feelings, who was his intimate associate, his fellow-townsman, his companion in scholarship and cultivation, his sympathetic co-laborer in many ways, had been accounted and dealt with as the ally of an enemy, and that the shaft which struck to the heart of the sensitive envoy had glanced from the ‘aes triplex’ of the obdurate Senator.

Mr. Motley wrote a letter to the Secretary of State immediately after his recall, in which he reviewed his relations with the government from the time of his taking office, and showed that no sufficient reason could be assigned for the treatment to which he had been subjected.  He referred finally to the public rumor which assigned the President’s hostility to his friend Sumner, growing out of the San Domingo treaty question, as the cause of his own removal, and to the coincidence between the dates of the rejection of the treaty and his dismissal, with an evident belief that these two occurrences were connected by something more than accident.

To this, a reply was received from the Secretary of State’s office, signed by Mr. Fish, but so objectionable in its tone and expressions that it has been generally doubted whether the paper could claim anything more of the secretary’s hand than his signature.  It travelled back to the old record of the conversation with Lord Clarendon, more than a year and a half before, took up the old exceptions, warmed them over into grievances, and joined with them whatever the ‘captatores verborum,’ not extinct since Daniel Webster’s time, could add to their number.  This was the letter which was rendered so peculiarly offensive by a most undignified comparison which startled every well-bred reader.  No answer was possible to such a letter, and the matter rested until the death of Mr. Motley caused it to be brought up once more for judgment.

The Honorable John Jay, in his tribute to the memory of Mr. Motley, read at a meeting of the New York Historical Society, vindicated his character against the attacks of the late executive in such a way as to leave an unfavorable impression as to the course of the government.  Objection was made on this account to placing the tribute upon the minutes of the society.  This led to a publication by Mr. Jay, entitled “Motley’s Appeal to History,” in which the propriety of the society’s action is questioned, and the wrong done to him insisted upon and further illustrated.