AT the time of his death, Benjamin Thomas—author of “the best one-volume biography of Lincoln ever written”—was at work on a life of one of the most controversial figures in American history: Edwin McMasters Stanton, the man who marshaled the military forces of the Union in the Civil War and played a crucial role in the only presidential impeachment trial in our history. Harold Hyman, himself a prize-winning historian, undertook to carry on from the advanced point in research and writing that Thomas had reached.
The result of their collaborative efforts is a monumental work worthy to stand beside Thomas’s own Lincoln as a truly outstanding American biography. Continuously absorbing and written with clarity and grace, Stanton shows us every facet of the life of an uncommon man who stood just off center stage at the time of our nation’s greatest ordeal.
Surprisingly, though Stanton’s role in the Union’s great crisis is a matter of long record, this is the first attempt in ninety years to give an objective, full-scale portrait of this complex and enigmatic figure. Stanton could be explosive and domineering or gentle and considerate; he was at once single-minded and self-doubting. But that Stanton should be “controversial” is curious, for he served with distinction under three Presidents: as Buchanan’s Attorney General during the fateful winter of secession, then as Secretary of War under Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Lincoln offered him unquestioning trust and warm personal friendship. Seward praised him as the man who organized victory out of possible defeat. And Grant concluded that he was as much a martyr to the Union’s cause as any blue-clad soldier who fell before rebel guns.
Yet Stanton’s name is commonly associated with duplicity rather than with selfless patriotism. A whole catalogue of crimes is charged against him: that he connived in Lincoln’s murder, betrayed each of the Presidents he served, antagonized such generals as McClellan and Sherman, and thwarted opportunities for the peaceful reconciliation of North and South.
This biography puts legend and prejudice in clear perspective by going directly to documentary evidence, by probing into Stanton’s motives and methods, and by evaluating his accomplishments and failures. It is a judicious and honest portrait of a stubborn, dedicated man; but it also brings to light many important details about the times in which he lived. There are significant contributions to our knowledge of the secession crisis, the internecine battles within Lincoln’s cabinet, the reorganization of the War Department, and the struggles of strong-willed men at the beginning of the Reconstruction.
BY BENJAMIN P. THOMAS
Lincoln’s New Salem (1934, 1954)
Abraham Lincoln, A Biography (1952)
Theodore Weld, Crusader for Freedom (1950)
Portrait for Posterity, Lincoln and His Biographers (1947)
Lincoln, 1847–1853 (1936)
BY HAROLD M. HYMAN
To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (1959)
Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests during the Civil War and Reconstruction (1954)
EDWIN MCMASTERS STANTON IN 1866. (photo credit 1.1)
L. C. catalog card number: 61-17829
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK,
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1962 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages and reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, Ltd.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82890-3
v3.1
TO JAMES G. RANDALL
“the memory be green”
PREFACE
I DID NOT KNOW Benjamin P. Thomas except through his writings. When he died, he was at work on a biography of Edwin McMasters Stanton, and I undertook to complete it. I soon learned that my task was more difficult in some ways than initiating a book alone. A man who was not at hand to counsel me or to argue with was my co-author.
But co-author he has been. In the notes, outlines, and chapter drafts that he had assembled, Mr. Thomas had partially shaped elements of the story he wanted to tell. He had built from the rich resources of his prodigious research, drawing from the years of thought and study that he had devoted to the Lincoln theme, enlivening all with the warmth of his large heart and brave imagination.
To be sure, we disagreed on many matters. He had touched on themes that I decided to pass over, just as I opened up channels of inquiry that he might have ignored. As this work progressed, however, I found to my pleasure that Mr. Thomas and I had achieved a partnership, and I received an education at his gentle hands.
I am honored at this association with Ben Thomas, and I hope that he would have approved of what I have done with our Stanton. Of course I accept full responsibility for this book, but I gratefully acknowledge his contributions to its conception and completion.
Across the country, busy librarians and archivists searched their collections for useful material and made it available to us. The footnotes will indicate the extent of our obligations to university and private libraries and historical societies, and agencies of the states and of the national government. They will not, however, note the many persons who spent time and energy checking leads that did not bear fruit but whose efforts were nonetheless important. To all these men and women, to the personnel of the Interlibrary Loan office at UCLA, and to the staff of the Huntington Library, who among other services made the S. L. M. Barlow Papers quickly available for use, I offer heartfelt thanks.
Stanton descendants who with openhanded generosity provided manuscripts include William Stanton Picher, Gideon Townsend Stanton, and Mrs. E. K. Van Swearingen, who added hospitality to her contributions to research. Important manuscripts were also produced by George Bonaventura, Professor Edward S. Corwin, W. V. Houston, Willard King, Mrs. K. McCook Knox, the estate of Foreman M. Lebold, Hugh McCulloch (grandson and namesake of Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury), Ralph Newman, Milton Ronsheim, Carl Sandburg, Miss Alexandra Sanford, William Selden, Mrs. Henry D. M. Sherrerd, Justin Turner, and Craig Wylie. Professor Robert V. Bruce assisted Mr. Thomas in the early stages of his research, and I benefited substantially from his efforts. My colleague Professor Brainerd Dyer added the reading of this manuscript to the heavy professional burden he bears. His criticisms and encouragement were of great value, and I am grateful for his gracious aid. As this book progressed toward its present form, Alfred A. Knopf and Henry Robbins offered firm, patient editorial guidance.
A grant from the Social Science Research Council made it possible for me to enlarge my understanding of Stanton as Secretary of War and of the politics under President Johnson that involved the war office, and UCLA provided funds and free time to assist me in this work. I know how much I owe to my wife, Ferne, and to our children, Lee, Ann, and Billy.
HAROLD M. HYMAN
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Plates
Introduction
Abbreviations
I. A Fair Prospect
II. Jacksonian Reformer
III. On the Way Up
IV. At the Heights of the Law
V. First Blow for the Union
VI. From Critic to Colleague
VII. Secretary of a War
VIII. Organizing Victory
IX. Failure and Frustration
X. Relentlessly and Without Remorse
XI. Discouraged But Not Despairing
XII. My Way Is Clear
XIII. War in Good Earnest
XIV. Trampled by the Hoof of War
XV. A Tower of
Strength
XVI. His Iron Mask Torn Off
XVII. The Misfortune of That Station
XVIII. Stanton’s Lincoln
XIX. Sherman’s Truce
XX. Justice
XXI. Discord
XXII. Decision
XXIII. They Must Muster Me Out
XXIV. Fruits into Ashes
XXV. The Root of Bitterness
XXVI. Off the Sharp Hooks of Uncertainty
XXVII. In Suspense
XXVIII. No One Will Steal It Now
XXIX. Cling to the Old “Orifice”
XXX. Campaigning for Grant
XXXI. The Obsequies Have Been Enlarged
EPILOGUE:
A Note on the History of Stanton Biographies
A Note About the Authors
PLATES
1.1 Stanton in 1866
(Courtesy Mrs. E. K. Van Swearingen)
2.1 The Stanton home in Cadiz
(Courtesy Milton Ronsheim)
2.2 Stanton’s first law office, Cadiz, Ohio
(Courtesy Dard Hunter Museum)
2.3 Stanton in 1857
6.1 Ellen Hutchison Stanton
(Courtesy Mrs. Van Swearingen)
6.2 Edwin Lamson Stanton
(The National Archives)
6.3 Stanton in 1865
(Library of Congress)
10.1 The War Department Building
(The National Archives)
10.2 “Council of War,” by John Rogers
(Courtesy New-York Historical Society)
10.3 A more common view of Lincoln and Stanton
10.4 Friends, Enemies, and Colleagues, I
(The National Archives)
SALMON P. CHASE, WILLIAM H. SEWARD, MONTGOMERY BLAIR, GIDEON WELLES
10.5 Friends, Enemies, and Colleagues, II
(The National Archives)
GENERAL HENRY W. HALLECK, GENERAL E. A. HITCHCOCK, GENERAL MONTGOMERY MEIGS, GENERAL LORENZO THOMAS
26.1 Stanton at the War Department, 1865
(The National Archives)
26.2 “A Fight for the Championship”
26.3 Stanton in 1869
(Courtesy Mrs. Van Swearingen)
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 Lucy and David Stanton
(Courtesy W. V. Houston)
7.1 A commission for Benjamin Tappan, Jr.
(Courtesy Joseph F. Thompson, Jr.)
INTRODUCTION
“AT PRESENT,” Theodore Tilton wrote of his friend Edwin McMasters Stanton in 1870, “he is, perhaps, the least popularly understood and appreciated of any of our first-class statesmen.”1 The same is true today.
This misunderstanding and lack of appreciation do not mean that Stanton has been ignored for ninety years. No one dealing with the vital political center of the nineteenth century has failed to consider his career. As Tilton said, Stanton was of “first-class” importance. He fought on the front lines of the party battles in the age of Jackson. Secession raised Stanton’s significance to a higher level. He entered Buchanan’s cabinet and helped to inspire that President with an enhanced sense of the powers of his office and of the dignity of the nation.
Then, as War Secretary under Lincoln, Stanton worked to guide the Union’s search for the men and measures adequate to crush the rebellion. Partly due to his efforts and ideas, the North by 1865 had come to something remarkably like modern concepts of total war. In our current concern with increasing the fighting strength of the military forces while retaining civilian direction over the military establishment, there are lessons we may learn from Stanton’s successes and failures.2
Continuing in the war office under Lincoln’s successor, Stanton found that issues almost as disruptive as those that had ruptured the Union in 1860 had come to the fore. His decision to defy Andrew Johnson helped to bring on the only impeachment a President of the United States has suffered.
Considering the exacerbating nature of the controversies in which Stanton played a part, it is little wonder that disagreement should exist among those who deal with him. But the large literature on Stanton has transcended the limits of constructive disagreement. For example, Stanton’s three biographers have been his frank champions, finding few faults that marred their subject and fewer virtues to attribute to his enemies and critics. On the other side, a more numerous phalanx of Stanton’s contemporaries and subsequent commentators have condemned Stanton in terms of unqualified derogation.
There can be no question that for the general public, as well as for most scholars in the field, Stanton’s critics have won the battle. Despite the eulogistic judgments of his biographers, Stanton’s place in our history has descended ever lower. This downward drift has gone so far that he has been implicitly accused of conniving in Lincoln’s murder.3
Stanton’s supporters and detractors share responsibility for the descent of his reputation. Setting out either to praise or to pillory their subject, these authors permitted their prejudgments to determine their conclusions and exceeded the allowable limits set by the nature of the evidence at their disposal. The defenders depended on the conclusions of Stanton’s intimates and political helpmates; indeed, his first biographer, George C. Gorham, was an important Republican politician as well as a warm personal friend during the time Stanton held the war portfolio. On the other hand, such men as Gideon Welles and Jeremiah Black, who hated Stanton personally and who bitterly opposed his politics, set down their opinions on him in order to express partisan convictions.
With a surprising lack of critical caution, “revisionist” historians during the past thirty years accepted this latter body of writings as valid guidelines to the past. The “new look” that revisionists offered of the Reconstruction years resulted in a lofty rise in Andrew Johnson’s stature. As Johnson rose, Stanton fell. Despite the revisionists’ impressive contributions to our understanding of the events they described, their conclusions need to be reconsidered.
The authors in both camps could have benefited from a statement by John T. Morse, Jr., who helped to prepare the invaluable, partisan “diary” of Gideon Welles for publication. Morse, bemoaning the fact that Stanton had not kept an equivalent record, warned that Welles’s account of events “is too much like sitting at the prize-ring and seeing only one pugilist.”4
It is in part Stanton’s own fault that his critics have hit with more effect than his champions. He refused to become a contender on his own behalf. Stanton told Tilton that he despised the “common arts” by which men keep their names “green and fragrant before the people,” and he ignored the suggestions that came to him from John W. Draper, Francis Lieber, George Bancroft, and John C. Ropes that he keep a diary and arrange his personal papers in an attitude of polemical defense. In addition, Stanton’s biographers, however anxious to extol their subject, failed in their task of re-creating a personality. In their lives of Stanton they failed to build a live Stanton. Yet one of Stanton’s friends, the scholar Lieber, thought of him as a man so warm and complex that a Plutarch would have delighted in the task of describing him.5
A better balance has recently been emerging in our approach to the Lincoln-Johnson years. Stanton—like Welles, Chase, and Seward among his cabinet colleagues and Grant, Sherman, and Halleck of the army galaxy—is beginning to stand forth out of the shadow cast by Lincoln’s overtowering figure. There is increasing recognition of the complex nature of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Historians are accepting the need for fresh approaches to the era’s problems and personalities. As the inadequacies of oversimple theses on the period become apparent, and new bodies of evidence come to light, the awareness of the need for re-evaluation has grown markedly.
The opportunities for a fairer evaluation of Stanton’s life are greater today than ever before. A century of scholarship is at hand to be exploited, and revealing manuscript sources are available for use as never before. As an example, a sharp beam of light is cast on Stanton in an unpublished sketch prepared by his sister, which contains many letters he
wrote to her and to others. In addition, a substantial body of letters brought forth by Stanton descendants, collectors, and archivists offers new insight. Perhaps we are ready for the “realistic” study of Stanton that Professor James G. Randall called for two decades ago.6
In 1885, John P. Usher, who worked alongside Stanton in the cabinet, bemoaned the fact that contemporary writing on Lincoln was “the d—dest trash and fiction … lies respecting things possible and impossible.” To this, Judge David Davis replied: “Yes, but what is the use of correcting it.”
There is always a use in correcting it. But correctives should follow an injunction that Hay set down seventy-five years ago when he and Nicolay were preparing their great history of Lincoln: “We must not write a stump speech.… We will not fall in with the present tone of blubbering sentiment, of course. But we ought to write the history of those times like two everlasting angels who know everything, judge everything, and don’t care a twang of the harps about one side or the other … [L]et us look upon men as insects and not blame the black beetle because he is not a grasshopper.” Then Hay reminded Nicolay that there was one exception to his admirable injunction to objectivity: “We are Lincoln men through and through.”
We are not “Stanton men through and through.” But we agree with another admonition of Hay’s, in which he warned Nicolay that Stanton “is going to be a nut to crack.”7
It has defied cracking for ninety years, but the kernel is worth another effort.
1 Sanctum Sanctorum (New York, 1870), 217.
2 T. Harry Williams, Americans at War: The Development of the American Military-System (Baton Rouge, 1960), 47–81; General Sir Frederick B. Maurice, Governments and War: A Study of the Conduct of War (London, 1926), 118–23.
3 George C. Gorham, Life and Public Services of Edwin M. Stanton (Boston, 1899); Frank A. Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln’s Great War Secretary (New York, 1905); Fletcher Pratt, Stanton: Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York, 1953). Hereafter these will be cited as Gorham, Stanton; Flower, Stanton; and Pratt, Stanton. The accusations involving Stanton in Lincoln’s murder are in Otto Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (Boston, 1937); and Theodore Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy (Englewood Cliffs, 1959), which are unsound in method and untrustworthy in conclusions, as is Milton Lomask, Andrew Johnson: President on Trial (New York, 1960), concerning Stanton’s role in the impeachment crisis.
Stanton Page 1