The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

gave him when I first came here as all the scandal would have been avoided and he would have got great credit for reforming the service.” Fred Seward’s successor was John Hay, a man who would one day write a memorable chapter in American diplomacy, but who would prove no friend to Mosby. The official attitude toward Mosby remained unchanged. He continued to be treated as a crack- pot, and to be harassed in subtle ways, such as by denial of funds for chair or boat hire, or by ignoring his requests for furlough. Petitions for money to purchase law books fell upon deaf ears, despite similar allowances made to his predecessor. Mosby wrote to Garfield that Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, in a move smacking of petty revenge, even removed one of Mosby’s sisters from a Civil Service position. Garfield assured the Virginian that despite what he had been hearing, President Hayes found no fault with Mosby’s conduct. Newspapers all over the country, smelling the blood of a second Seward in the offing, were, in fact, stirring in his behalf. Note was taken of a reported disagreement between Hayes and Secretary of State William M. Evarts over how George Seward’s inevitable resignation should be handled. Evarts allegedly wanted to hold Seward’s resignation until his impeachment should again become imminent, while Hayes wanted to install a new man in Peking at once. “Mr. Evarts,” commented the Wash- ington Post in March 1880, “... seems infatuated with the idea of being the special defender ... of all the legally unconvicted violators of law that dis- grace his department, especially those bearing the name of Seward.” In the event, the president had his way, and it was shortly announced that George F. Seward, after many years of meritorious service, etc., etc., had resigned his post in Peking. Mosby again set his sights on the Bangkok consulate, where, in the words of a U.S. Navy ship captain quoted in a dis- patch fromMosby to John Hay, things were going on “that would disgrace a Modoc Indian.” Mosby was by now being depicted as a man who outreformed the reformers. “Col. Mosby,” remarked the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1880, “seems just now to be a particu- larly sharp thorn in the side of our mild and virtuous ‘Civil Service reform’ administration. ... [He] seems to be one of those restless, inquisitive spirits who feel that they have a mis- sion to look into things, and get at their true inwardness. Instead of being content to draw his pay, take things easily, and shut his eyes and ears, …he keeps a bright lookout, and is always wanting to understand the working of the machinery.” By the spring of 1880, Bailey and Sickels had resigned. President Hayes had, as Mosby told Garfield in May, “at last swept the China coast.” A crop of respectable men now took up sta- tion in the East. “The president’s new appointments in China,” Mosby wrote to Garfield in October, “are all first- rate men.” His immediate objectives accom- plished, Mosby began to press President-elect Garfield for more widespread reform. “The State Department needs overhauling and renovating,” he wrote to Garfield in November. “It above all needs an able law officer — some of its decisions on law questions would ‘make the angels weep.’” He hoped to resign shortly, he added, and enlisted the president- elect’s aid in regaining a “foothold at the bar.” In particular, he wrote to Garfield, “I shall ask you to give me the position of assistant attorney- general for which many friends urged my appointment.” Irony and Fulfillment The following summer (1881), Mosby’s long-term hopes were dashed by an assassin’s bullet in Washington. After Garfield’s death, he stayed on in the Orient, immersing himself over the next four years in the boiling issues of Chinese immigration to America and the opium trade. He sallied forth from time to time on other Far East issues that he felt merited attention, from the perceived arrogance of Spanish authorities at Manila to per- ceived weaknesses in the distribution of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific. He pushed for an increased American involvement in China, arguing (not unlike George Seward before him) for a ground-floor American role in Chinese railroad-building and other internal projects. In late 1881, Ulysses S. Grant appears to have prodded President Chester A. Arthur to name Mosby consul general at Shanghai. But Mosby, according to papers in the National Archives, got wind of the plan and balked, replying through a stateside spokesman that he would prefer something at home, or a first- class post in Europe. In 1884, he received what he considered an even greater honor: the powerful Chinese viceroy Li Hung-chang offered him command of an army in the field. But 64 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 [He] seems to be one of those restless, inquisitive spirits who feel that they have a mission to look into things, and get at their true inwardness. — San Francisco Chronicle , April 1880