Uruguay under Juan Idiarte Borda: An American Diplomat’s Observations
ESPITE ITS HAPHAZARD METHOD of selecting diplomats during much of the nineteenth century, the United States sometimes enjoyed the services of surprisingly competent amateurs, brought into the Foreign Service from a great variety of backgrounds. A good example was Granville Stuart, whom Grover M. Cleveland appointed minister to Uruguay and Paraguay during his second administration. Stuart was a Montana Democrat, a former California gold miner in the 1850s and at various times merchant, rancher, dispenser of vigilante justice, and politician from 1857 to the date of his appointment.' He had few ostensible qualifications and little experience fitting him for such an assignment; yet he served creditably and perhaps more successfully than many professional diplomats with benefit of more sophisticated training. His appointment resulted from patronage pressure exerted by a Montana silver Democrat, banker, and former territorial governor, Samuel T. Hauser. Stuart and Hauser had been friends and business associates since the 1860s when these two men, of Virginia and Kentucky birth respectively, had spent the Civil War years in Montana mining camps. In 1894 Stuart was sixty years old and deep in debt as a consequence of unfortunate mining and cattle dealings; he had a young wife to support and also had financial obligations to children from an earlier marriage to a Snake Indian woman. Bad luck had followed him for nearly twenty years, and in 1893 he sought a federal appointment as surveyor general for Montana. If that failed he wanted a diplomatic appointment to Bolivia or Ecuador where he hoped to find mining opportunities that would