On this tour with Andrew Johnson, Grant was confirming Cadwallader’s judgment that he “could not drink moderately.” The reporter, now chief of the New York Herald’s Washington bureau, foresaw trouble when he spotted a table of refreshments furnished by the Cleveland reception committee.
Grant could not resist the waiters who passed through his car urging passengers to eat and drink. Very soon, Cadwallader and John Rawlins had to lead Grant to the baggage car and cajole him into sleeping on a pile of rubbish and empty sacks. They took turns standing guard to keep witnesses away until the train reached Cleveland.
There, Gideon Welles’s son, Edgar, helped carry Grant and his drinking companion, the nation’s surgeon general, to a chartered boat that ferried them to Detroit. Grant waited there for the tour, but in St. Louis he left Johnson’s entourage for good.
• • •
Along the route, reporters had been studying Secretary Seward for any signs of disapproval of the president’s speeches, but he sat through them all, chewing on a cigar and applauding on cue. To some degree, Seward owed his impassive expression to Lewis Powell’s bowie knife, which had severed the nerves on one side of his face.
Although there was no evidence of a split, Seward’s influence on Johnson had become limited. He had agreed with the president that the Fourteenth Amendment exceeded Congress’s authority but recommended Johnson’s support since it was bound to pass. Johnson disregarded his advice. When Seward fulfilled the obligation of his office by forwarding the amendment to the states for ratification, Johnson had seemed annoyed with him.
At the same time, with the enthusiastic urging of Thurlow Weed, Seward had endorsed Johnson’s idea for the new Union Party, a fusion of Democrats and conservative Republicans. But when a Philadelphia convention was scheduled, Seward became wary and chose to spend the week at home.
Seward’s distancing of himself did not mean he would join Johnson’s attorney general, postmaster general, and secretary of the interior in resigning. Instead, he soon found a dramatic occasion for reaffirming his loyalty.
On the train back to Washington, Seward was struck down by cholera. Seward’s daughter Fanny, twenty-one and herself suffering from tuberculosis, became convinced that her father was near death once again and traveled to Harrisburg to be at his side.
But when Johnson also arrived at his bedside, Seward roused himself to assure the president that “if my life is spared,” Johnson would continue to have his support.
Once back in Washington, Seward recovered just as his daughter died. Losing Fanny, he said, he felt “a sorrow that only God himself can heal.”
• • •
Thaddeus Stevens, also ailing, made only two campaign speeches. But addressing a crowd in Bedford, Pennsylvania, on September 4, 1866, Stevens outdid Andrew Johnson in passion and plain speaking. Gone was the wary politician concerned with white and black men being seen arm in arm.
Stevens predicted for voters what they would be hearing “ten thousand times” from his opponents: “ ‘The Radicals would thrust the Negro into your parlors, your bedrooms, and the bosoms of your wives and daughters. They would even make your reluctant daughters marry black men.’ And then they will send up the grand chorus from every foul throat, ‘nigger,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘nigger!’ ‘Down with the nigger party, we’re for the white man’s party.’
“These unanswerable arguments will ring in every low bar room, and be printed in every blackguard sheet throughout the land whose fundamental maxim is ‘all men are created equal. . . .’
“A deep seated prejudice against races has disfigured the human mind for ages,” Stevens concluded. And so the doctrine of Negro rights “may be unpopular with besotted ignorance. But popular or unpopular, I shall stand by it until I am relieved of the unprofitable labors of earth.”
• • •
For the nation’s voters, the election of 1866 had become a choice between the president’s plan for reorganizing the South and the congressional plan, and they decisively rejected Johnson’s approach. Republicans picked up 37 House seats to boost their total to 173. Northern Democrats lost 9 votes, giving them 47 seats and ending Johnson’s hope for a national realignment.
The Democrats’ votes came from the border states of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. Tennessee had been the only one of the Confederate states allowed to vote.
Johnson could no longer look to the major New York newspapers for comfort. The editor of the daily with the country’s largest circulation, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, was unfettered these days by both propriety and party loyalty. The scourge of Radical Republicans, Bennett had headed a story about their recent assembly, “First Grand National Convention of Nigger Worshipers at Philadelphia.”
But after Johnson’s campaigning, Herald readers no longer were treated to that slant on the news. Bennett began to write publicly—and in a private letter to the president—that he should heal his breach with Congress and accept the Fourteenth Amendment.
Johnson preferred to believe those of his friends who dismissed Bennett as an unprincipled opportunist, a man whose endorsements always went to the strongest political party.
Harder to explain away was the disaffection of Henry Raymond at the New York Times. Since Raymond enjoyed an agreement with the Times owner that guaranteed him complete editorial freedom, he was not obliged to change course because circulation began to fall. And yet as he backed away from supporting Johnson, Raymond watched readership rise again.
Despite the unmistakable warnings from the public, the president was no more able than Charles Sumner to compromise, but it was Sumner and his allies who held the upper hand. During a campaign stopover in St. Louis, struggling through a barely coherent thicket of self-pity, Johnson had shared his presentiment of what might lie ahead:
“Yes, yes, they are ready to impeach. And if they were satisfied they had the next Congress by as decided a majority as this, upon some pretext or other they would vacate the Executive department of the United States.”
As Congress prepared to meet again in December, the question became whether Johnson would give the Radicals that pretext.
Edwin Stanton
CHAPTER 9
EDWIN STANTON (1867–1868)
WHEN EDWIN MCMASTERS STANTON FIRST met Abraham Lincoln in 1855, he had looked him over and whispered to the friend who introduced them, “Why did you bring that damned long-armed ape here?”
Ten years later, as Lincoln’s secretary of war, Stanton stood by the president’s bed when he died and pronounced his first epitaph: “Now he belongs to the ages.”
The transformation had been slow in coming. From childhood, Stanton had suffered asthma attacks severe enough to provoke seizures. He had lost his father to apoplexy at age thirteen and had worked his way through his freshman year at Kenyon College in Ohio before his mother required that he drop out and return to Steubenville to support their family. Stanton had survived the cholera epidemic of 1833, then studied law informally until he passed the Ohio bar examination at twenty, too young to practice.
Those early struggles had left Stanton immune to any glorification of Abraham Lincoln’s rise from adversity on the frontier.
• • •
As soon as he turned twenty-one in 1835, Stanton moved the twenty-three miles down the road from Steubenville to Cadiz, Ohio, where he gained a reputation for being both shrewd and passionate in the courtroom. Short and husky, with a cheerful expression behind thick eyeglasses, he courted Mary Lamson, a clergyman’s bookish daughter. With marriage, Edwin bowed to his bride’s wishes, gave up alcohol, and cut back on the number of his daily cigars.
Intrigued by politics, Stanton became a strict party man, moving up in the ranks of the state’s Jacksonian Democrats. During campaigns, he was free with insults for his opponents and derided Whig president William Henry Harrison as “an old imbecile.”
Stanton also fell into a habit of passing along to his allies whatever confidential information he
could glean from an enemy’s camp.
After four years of marriage he and Mary were grateful for the birth of a daughter, Lucy, and then heartsick when the infant died the following year. The birth of a son and namesake, Edwin Lamson Stanton, helped revive his father’s spirits, but the solace was fleeting.
In February 1844, Mary Stanton fell ill with what was described as a “bilious fever.” Despite her husband’s constant prayers, she died three weeks later. Stanton wrote to a friend that the “calamity has overwhelmed me.”
Grief, in fact, seemed to unhinge him. Nights, he would carry a lamp through the house, wailing, “Where is Mary?”
The blows had not ended. For years, he had stinted on his own expenses in order to send his brother Darwin to study medicine at Harvard University. When war with Mexico broke out in May 1846, both brothers tried to enlist. His asthma kept Edwin at home; a fever of the brain was blamed when Darwin cut his throat.
Hearing of the suicide, Stanton ran distraught into a nearby woods. Friends chased after him, afraid that he, too, would kill himself.
• • •
Stanton brought his brother’s widow and her three children into his house and promised to provide for her and raise her children with his own adored son. But even with his house filled again with life, Stanton was aware that he had changed. From the jovial man whose high spirits had drawn others to him, he had become dour and brooding.
“Events of the past summer,” Stanton began one letter, “have broken my spirits, crushed my hopes, and without energy or purpose in life, I feel indifferent to the present, careless of the future—”
For months, Stanton never willingly left his house. But to make a living meant going back to court and being immersed again in politics. When legal matters first took him to Washington, Stanton found the same gloom hanging over the capital that had descended on him. He pronounced the city boring and everyone worn out from the debates over slavery. He lamented that the Library of Congress, burned down during the War of 1812, still had not been restored forty years later.
But one observation suggested that his grief over Mary’s death might be abating. “There are not many pretty faces on the avenue to look at—handsome women are very scarce here,” Stanton complained. He added that “stupid lectures are delivered at the Smithsonian.”
Friends introduced him to Charles Sumner. Hearing Sumner speak on the Senate floor, Stanton came away impressed with his uncompromising ethics but not foreseeing their near-fatal consequences.
As Stanton’s fortunes improved, he moved to Pittsburgh. Although his mother had gone to live in Virginia, he paid workmen and a gardener to keep up her house in Steubenville should she care to return.
Stanton’s son seemed to be weathering the crises in his family, including an accident that had blinded him in one eye. Seeing father and son together, people remarked on the obvious devotion the gruff elder Stanton showed for the boy.
• • •
A dozen years had passed since his wife’s death, and Stanton had turned forty-one when he became smitten with Ellen Hutchinson. Tall, fair-skinned, and quick to laugh, Ellen defied her mother, who objected that Stanton was too old for her twenty-six-year-old daughter. They were married in June 1856 and moved to Washington.
In the capital, Stanton’s growing involvement in government lawsuits gave him the air of an assistant attorney general. But the trial that extended his reputation was a squalid tale of adultery and murder.
Stanton’s scapegrace friend, New York congressman Daniel Sickles, had shot and killed Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, author of the popular patriotic lyric. Sickles believed Philip Key had been having an affair with his young wife.
Stanton not only got Sickles acquitted, but in the process he introduced into American jurisprudence the concept of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
• • •
In 1860, President Buchanan recruited Stanton to serve as attorney general in the last days of his flailing administration. Stanton did not discourage rumors that he had stiffened Buchanan’s backbone to the point that the president finally denounced secession.
With the onset of the war, Edwin Stanton was still among the skeptics who referred to Lincoln as “the original gorilla.” But if his ridicule was unchanged, Stanton’s appreciation of Lincoln’s politics had evolved. From his position in the Buchanan cabinet, he began to feed privileged information to Henry Seward, who was representing the incoming administration until Lincoln could arrive from Illinois.
Stanton reaped no immediate reward from his indiscretion. When the new president formed his cabinet, Lincoln’s priority was resolving a touchy matter with Pennsylvania senator Simon Cameron, who believed that his help in delivering his state for Lincoln had earned him the position of secretary of the Treasury.
Thaddeus Stevens’s joke about a red-hot stove had confirmed Cameron’s dubious reputation for Lincoln. And he considered Salmon Chase, the Ohio governor who had vied with him for the Republican presidential nomination, to be far better qualified for the Treasury.
When the president at last persuaded Cameron to accept instead the post of secretary of war, Cameron found that he had inherited a department with fewer than two hundred employees and sorely ill equipped for waging war. The North lacked guns, bullets, horses, medical supplies—even uniforms and food for the volunteers who were overrunning the capital. Worst of all, much of official Washington was staffed by agents and clerks loyal to the Confederacy.
Cameron turned to private contractors only to watch discipline suffer and money evaporate. Within months, Congress was scrutinizing bloated wartime profits, and Northern newspapers were excoriating Cameron’s political cronies for getting rich from selling blind horses, rotting food, and carbines that jammed on the battlefield. Cameron had once seemed indifferent to slavery. Now he tried to fend off the attacks by aligning himself with the Radicals.
He decided to give weapons to those slaves who had taken refuge behind Union army lines. It would be a daring strategy, and Cameron asked Edwin Stanton for his judgment. He claimed afterward that Stanton had been enthusiastic.
But when Cameron announced his policy without clearing it with Lincoln, the president was distressed. He anticipated the anger it would arouse among his conservative supporters, and Lincoln himself was clinging to a postwar vision of sending the emancipated slaves back to a place with “a climate congenial to them.”
Cameron would have to go. Lincoln shunted him off to St. Petersburg as ambassador to Russia while Congress was preparing its report on his derelictions. To replace him, Lincoln wanted a Northern Democrat to demonstrate that the war transcended party affiliations. Whatever Edwin Stanton might be saying behind his back, Lincoln knew of his energy and his mastery of detail.
To a friend, the president said that Stanton’s great abilities had “made up my mind to sit down on all my pride” and “maybe a portion of my self-respect” and nominate him.
• • •
From retirement, James Buchanan regarded the appointment sourly. He granted to his niece that Stanton was “a perfectly honest man and in that respect differs from his immediate predecessor.” But the ex-president thought Stanton was unqualified for “the greatest and most responsible office in the world.” He did note, however, that Stanton “was always at my side and flattered me ad nauseam.”
Equally flummoxed by the president’s choice, the Radicals warned Lincoln that Stanton was gruff and undiplomatic. The president responded with the story of a Methodist clergyman he claimed to have met out West. “He gets wrought to so high a pitch of excitement in his prayers and exhortations,” Lincoln recalled, “that they are obliged to put bricks in his pockets to keep him down.
“We may be obliged to serve Stanton in the same way, but I guess we’ll let him jump a while first. Besides, bricks in his pockets would be better than bricks in his hat.”
Once confirmed in office, Secretary Stanton inaugurated an open-door policy at t
he War Department. Every Monday at 11 a.m., he stood behind a tall desk and surveyed contractors, office seekers, suspended military officers, and impractical inventors. From each, he demanded, “What brings you here?”
In a few moments, he had disposed of one petitioner and—ferocious or kindly, as the case might require—turned to the next. When Lincoln had a free hour, he walked over to the War Department and watched from the back of the room. The president called it “Going to see Old Mars quell disturbances.”
But the most daunting challenge Stanton faced could not be resolved with the snap of his fingers. General George McClellan, whose reluctance to do battle had become Lincoln’s greatest frustration, found comfort in casting Stanton as an enemy who was always plotting against him. The general’s allies in the press took up his charges, with the New York World especially harsh in pitting a meddlesome middle-aged civilian against the dashing thirty-six-year-old McClellan.
Stanton regularly complained of his anguish at being unable to get McClellan to move, and their telegrams leading up to the disastrous battles of late June 1862 revealed the general offering one excuse after another for his delay. First the timing was wrong, then his forces were inadequate to challenge Robert E. Lee and march on the Confederate capital in Richmond.
When he was forced to retreat instead, McClellan blamed Stanton and wired him angrily, “If I save this day now, I owe no thanks to you or to any other person in Washington.
“You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”
• • •
Stanton did not need to respond to the accusation. A clerk in the War Department’s telegraph office decided that those sentences bordered on treason and deleted them before he handed over the wire.
McClellan’s language had been mild, however, compared with what he was writing home to his wife: “Stanton is the most unmitigated scoundrel, the most depraved hypocrite and villain.”
It may have reassured the general to think that the secretary of war was acting alone, but when he was finally relieved of command, Lincoln himself wrote out the order.
After Lincoln Page 17