This“ outsider-to-insider” political identity was critical to their engagement with President Grant in 1872, and again in 1879, as they viewed him in a similar manner. Like Abraham Lincoln, Grant came from the Midwest, a region as relatively distant from the political center of Washington, DC as the Chosun and Satsuma were from the imperial capital of Kyoto. And, like them, he had elevated himself to the center of national political power through modern warfare. Grant’ s journey to national political dominance mirrored their own, and they saw him as a winning general who possessed the right to rule through victory.( Grant did not hold these views of himself and upheld the primacy of republican democracy throughout his life.)
The Iwakura Embassy men understood that President Grant was executing the same form of Hamiltonian government as his predecessor, Abraham Lincoln. And just as the first US Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, had studied the great French financier Jacques Necker, the Bank of England and other European financial models, the Meiji regime members had also examined these and Hamilton’ s own words and works in founding the US Treasury, the US Mint, the customs system and other centralized public institutions. They did so because Hamilton offered a pragmatic template to secure the same goal the Japanese men shared with the founding father— the establishment of a centrally driven state with the governing, financial and industry policy institutions essential for delivering sovereignty through industrialization to an underdeveloped nation. The Meiji regime required a contemporary empirical example of Hamiltonian statecraft in action, and they found it in Grant’ s America.
Grant’ s first-term Secretary of the Treasury, George S. Boutwell, and his two-term Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, pragmatically executed Hamiltonian statecraft. Boutwell in the 1850s had turned away from Adam Smith’ s free trade ideology and embraced Hamiltonian practice as a direct result of Great Britian’ s own protectionist actions. As President Lincoln’ s Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Boutwell was at the heart of the 37th Republican Congress as they collectively enacted revolutionary governing efforts to secure Union military victory. As Treasury Secretary, he executed reforms that moved the Treasury closer to Hamilton’ s founding vision for the institution than it had been in years. In 1872, the Iwakura Embassy representatives spent several months visiting the US Treasury; the US Mint; customs houses in New York, Boston and Philadelphia; and other key federal financial institutions. There they witnessed firsthand the Grant-Boutwell institutional legacy of Hamiltonian statecraft in action.
Grant selected Fish as Secretary of State for both his unwavering loyalty to Lincoln and his expertise in 19th century international diplomatic relations. Fish obtained this experience through pre-war Congressional service and an extensive tour of Europe that included meetings with its political elites. His father, Nicholas Fish, named him“ Hamilton” to honor the memory of his dear friend— the man he had fought beside at Yorktown and the nation’ s first Treasury Secretary. Throughout his life, Hamilton Fish never wavered from the political or economic traditions that defined his name.
On July 4, 1871, the Meiji regime learned that Grant and Fish had delivered the most Hamiltonian of national goals— the securing of peace between the United States and Britain with the Treaty of Washington. The regime leadership would conclude that the treaty was an act of brilliant strategic international diplomacy on the part of two pragmatic national leaders. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Grant and Fish had come to the same conclusion as Hamilton had realized in the 1790s— that peace with Great Britain was essential to the nation’ s strategic security and national prosperity. The Meiji men and the new master of continental Europe, Otto von Bismarck, concurred with this analysis and admired the work of the two Americans.
Mead Art Museum
Left to right: Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant all inspired Japan’ s Meiji regime in their pursuit of national sovereignty and economic prosperity.
National Portrait Gallery
Grant, Boutwell and Fish all served critical roles in shaping the strategic direction of the Iwakura Embassy. The Embassy’ s primary goal when it departed from Japanese shores was a desire to execute revisions to the unequal treaties system. While Grant expressed some support for the United States to engage in unequal treaty revision, Fish disabused the Iwakura Embassy men of the idea. He held that the only means by which Japan would ever unshackle itself from the unequal treaty system was to enact Hamiltonian statecraft by mastering the 19th century Western international diplomacy system and creating a central government capable of delivering the national modernity( state, military, financial, industrial) required to counter Western encroachment. In this stance, Fish reflected his and Grant’ s shared belief that the price paid through the Civil War and the renewed strength of the nation’ s government meant the United States would no longer tolerate the interference of foreign powers in its affairs.
Iwakura and his Embassy members needed no convincing that Fish’ s analysis of their own lack of mastery of 19th century international diplomacy and of Japan’ s international status as an underdeveloped nation was correct. In the United States, they experienced the transcontinental railway( begun by Lincoln and completed by Grant), with its steel bridges spanning the mighty American rivers. They witnessed the rapidly expanding commercial and industrial cities of Boston, Philadelphia and New York. They observed Wall Street and northern industrialization, and they experienced the power of the newly transformed federal government in Washington, DC. They documented it all. Their journey left
www. MoAF. org | Fall 2026 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 35