Stanton
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4 Morse, The Diary of Gideon Welles (Boston, 1911), I, xxxi–xxxii (hereafter cited as Morse, Welles Diary). The 1960 edition by Howard K. Beale (henceforth cited as Beale, Welles Diary) in I, xxi–xxxiv, offers guidance in using the earlier set. The Morse version will be employed except as Beale corrects errors or adds new data.
5 Tilton, op. cit., 217; Lieber to “My Dear Sir” (probably Benson J. Lossing), Dec. 25, 1865, Lieber Papers, LC.
6 Randall, “The Civil War Restudied,” JSH, VI, 455–6; “Edwin M. Stanton: A Biographical Sketch by His Sister, Pamphila Stanton Wolcott” (hereafter cited as Wolcott MS), The Rice University, Fondren Library, used by permission of W. V. Houston.
7 Usher to Ward Lamon, Oct. 13, 1885 (including Davis’s statement), HL; William R. Thayer (ed.), Life and Letters of John Hay (Boston and New York, 1908), II, 33 (cited henceforth as Hay, Life and Letters).
ABBREVIATIONS
AGO Adjutant General’s Office
AHA American Historical Association
AHR American Historical Review
ALA Abraham Lincoln Association
ALQ Abraham Lincoln Quarterly
AM Atlantic Monthly
ANJ Army and Navy Journal
BPL Boston Public Library
BU Brown University Library
CalHS California Historical Society
CFL Calais Free Library
CG Commanding General
CHS Chicago Historical Society
CM Century Magazine
ColHS Columbia Historical Society (Washington, D.C.)
CU Columbia University Library (Special Collections)
CWH Civil War History
DU Duke University Library
GI Gilcrease Institute
HL Huntington Library
HML Hayes Memorial Library
HQA Headquarters of the Army
HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania
HU Harvard University Library
(Houghton Library unless otherwise specified)
IGO Inspector General’s Office
IndHS Indiana Historical Society
ISHL Illinois State Historical Library
ISHS Illinois State Historical Society
IU Indiana University Library
JMSI Journal of the Military Service Institute
JSH Journal of Southern History
LC Library of Congress (Manuscripts Division)
LMU Lincoln Memorial University Library
LNLF Lincoln National Life Foundation
MA Military Affairs
MAH Magazine of American History
MdHS Maryland Historical Society
MH Magazine of History
MHM Michigan Historical Magazine
MHS Massachusetts Historical Society
MHSM Military Historical Society of Massachusetts
MoHR Missouri Historical Review
MoHS Missouri Historical Society
MVHR Mississippi Valley Historical Review
NA National Archives
NAR North American Review
NCHR North Carolina Historical Review
NEQ New England Quarterly
NHB Negro History Bulletin
NHSP Naval Historical Society Publications
NYHS New-York Historical Society
NYPL New York Public Library
OAHS Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society
OHS Ohio Historical Society
OSAHQ Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
PHR Pacific Historical Review
PU Princeton University Library
QMG Quartermaster General
RG Record Group (in National Archives)
SAQ South Atlantic Quarterly
Sec. War Secretary of War
SHA Southern Historical Association
TQHGM Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine
UCB University of California, Berkeley (Bancroft Library)
UCLA University of California, Los Angeles
(Special Collections Library)
UR University of Rochester Library
USE University of Southern California Library
UW University of Washington Library
VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
VSL Virginia State Library
WD War Department
WLCL William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan
WPHS Western Pennsylvania Historical Society
WSHS Wisconsin State Historical Society
YU Yale University
CHAPTER I
A FAIR PROSPECT
CHRISTMASES during Edwin Stanton’s childhood were highlighted by visits from relatives from all over Ohio. When the onset of dusk ended the day’s play, the tired children gathered with the adults by the warm hearth in the front parlor. His father would read from the Bible. Then, with little difficulty, an aunt or uncle could be cajoled into reminiscing about how the family came to Ohio.
The children wanted especially to hear about grandmother Abigail Macy Stanton. She had been a tiny woman, but a strong-willed one. Once, after falling from a horse and breaking her arm, she had walked alone through miles of hilly woods in order not to miss Quaker meeting. Grandfather Benjamin Stanton had been a massive, powerful man, as stubborn as his wife. During the American Revolution he was Quaker enough to stay out of the Army, but as a fervent rebel, he fitted out privateers. Along with the varied business interests near Beaufort, North Carolina, which his father had bequeathed to him, had come numerous Negro slaves. Benjamin refused to set them free, though Abigail and other Friends preached at him for years to do so. He did, however, free them in his will. But by 1799, the year of his death, North Carolina law forbade manumission.
Abigail set forth with her children and “the poor black people” for land where no slavery existed. By schooner, oxcart, raft, and foot, this courageous woman led her charges across the mountains to Jefferson County, Ohio, where in 1800 she purchased a 480-acre tract one mile west of Mount Pleasant.1
Of such stock was David Stanton, Edwin’s father, one of the four sons of Benjamin and Abigail. When he was twenty-four years old, David married Lucy Norman, “a plump, substantial, vivacious” young woman of Culpeper County, Virginia. Her father was a wealthy miller and planter, much given to lawsuits against his neighbors. Lucy’s disposition was as unbending as her father’s. She left home at sixteen because he had taken a third wife, of whom she disapproved, and went to live with her godfather, David McMasters, a Methodist preacher, and his wife. With them, Lucy moved to Mount Pleasant, and here she met David Stanton.
Silhouettes of Edwin Stanton’s parents, Lucy and David Stanton, probably made on their honeymoon in 1814. (illustrations credit 1.1)
They married on February 25, 1814, and the Reverend McMasters performed the ceremony. A son was born to them in Steubenville on December 19 that year; they christened him Edwin McMasters Stanton.2
David Stanton began medical studies when Edwin was five months old. Because of the novelty and scarcity of medical books, almost all doctors studied with a qualified physician and submitted to an examination by a board of local officials when they felt ready. On May 9, 1818, David was found “duly qualified to practice Physic and Surgery.” He soon became known as a benevolent, devoted, and industrious physician. David also had his share of the headlong streak that marked the Stantons. Expelled from Quaker meeting because of differences of opinion concerning Biblical interpretation, he joined his wife in the Methodist Church, only to defy its opposition to antislavery agitation.3
Edwin’s parents contributed small amounts of money to aid Benjamin Lundy, whose abolitionist newspaper was printed in Steubenville. Edwin later remembered the antislavery discussions which his father and Lundy enjoyed, and that the doctor once sought to “make it a matter of conscience not to use an article of medicine that may be the product of slavery.”
Concerns for social problems did not, however, dampen the conge
niality of the Stanton home. There was never much money, for a village doctor’s fees were small and payment in produce rather than cash was the rule. There was, on the other hand, no want.4 An atmosphere of happiness and service pervaded Edwin’s childhood, and as the family increased—another son, Darwin, and daughters Oella and Pamphila followed Edwin—the oldest child lived happily in the warm security it afforded him. Edwin quickly sensed the respect in which his father, a skilled physician by the standards of that day, was held by the community. Dr. Stanton assembled a “cabinet of curiosities” that impressed his neighbors, and Pamphila always remembered the pretty sight of Edwin and Darwin stalking snakes, frogs, and insects in order to add them to their father’s collection.
Darwin had his father’s blue-gray eyes, fair complexion, light-brown hair, and elastic step. Edwin, with his dark skin, brown eyes, and erect carriage, resembled the mother, though Pamphila thought that he had a “more self-assertive nose.” All the Stanton children participated in the devout religious life that parental piety enforced. Methodist ministers and elders crowded their home when quarterly meetings were held in Steubenville, and notwithstanding Dr. Stanton’s separation from the Quaker faith, many Friends visited him socially and as patients.
At seven, Edwin attended Miss Randall’s private school. The next year he attended a seminary taught by Henry Orr, then the “Old Academy” on High Street, and last the Reverend George Buchanan’s Latin School, perhaps the first classical school in the West. William Dean Howells’s father was Edwin’s seatmate at one of these schools and shared with him the use of a United States Speller, a Western Calculator, and a Murray’s Reading Lessons. Howells remembered Edwin as a physically delicate, grave and studious youth.
Before he was ten years old, Edwin worked part time on a neighbor’s farm. But such a schedule, in addition to required household chores, proved to be more than his constitution could stand, and he returned to a more normal routine.5 Perhaps too late, for in his tenth year Edwin suffered an asthmatic seizure. This disease would continue to torment him for the remainder of his life, sometimes to the point of convulsions. Edwin found solace in religion. He organized prayer meetings for children at which he presided and led the hymns, was a member of a Bible class, and at thirteen was admitted to fellowship in the Methodist Church.
Steubenville residents remembered him as a frank and manly boy. He and Darwin liked to horrify neighbors by dropping in on them with pet snakes coiled around their necks. Having a doctor as a father provided further opportunities for deviltry. A favorite nighttime prank involved placing a lighted candle inside the skull of one of the doctor’s skeletons to frighten strollers. On one occasion, Edwin’s father left him detailed instructions for attending to patients. Edwin mischievously gave a woman with foot trouble some apple butter. She later thanked the doctor profusely, claiming it had done her corns more good than anything else she had tried.
Most of Edwin’s contemporaries regarded him as an unusually mature and self-reliant youth, and somewhat imperious in demanding his own way in boys’ games. But he was never, according to Pamphila, “combative or abusive.” Such accounts contrast with the one narrated by James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, who later claimed to have investigated Stanton thoroughly and stated “that his whole characteristics were exhibited in this, that when a youngster going to school he kissed the-of the big boys and kicked those of the little ones.”6
Edwin’s asthmatic affliction may explain some of his personality traits. He could not participate in the rougher games of boyhood. A belligerent pose may have forestalled the dread taunt of “sissy.” Like many victims of asthma, Edwin had a strong craving for affection and a constant sense of dependency, but he hid these feelings behind a brusque exterior. As he grew older he increasingly exhibited the irritability that is another common manifestation of his ailment. It may also have been part of his character, merely magnified by the asthmatic condition.7
On December 30, 1827, Stanton’s father died. The thirteen-year-old boy left school four months later to serve as apprentice to the bookseller James Turnbull. He was paid $50 for the first year, $75 for the second, and $100 for the third. Lucy Stanton needed even this meager financial aid, for the general store that she opened in April 1828 in the front room of the Stanton home on Third Street failed to provide a living for the family.
As clerk and handyman at Turnbull’s, Edwin found time to read, sometimes becoming so absorbed in a book that he neglected customers. But his employer thought well of him, allowing him time off in the evenings for his studies at the Latin School and forgiving his frequent illnesses. Edwin’s work at the bookstore increased his sense of isolation from his fellows. He could not often join them on the picnics held in the fields or deep woods, or in the raids on apple and peach orchards which contemporaries recalled. Edwin could only watch through the window of his employer’s shop when on winter days his friends built roaring bonfires in the street, yelling loudly at the explosions of the buckeye nuts they had tossed into the flames.8 Forced into solitude because of his job and his asthma, the youth spent most of what free time he had alone. He found a lofty, rocky perch on the hills overlooking the Ohio River. Here, with only the tall trees for company, he watched the busy drama always unfolding on the water four hundred feet below; later he described to A. D. Sharon how he used to daydream of one day becoming a great success.
Even as an adolescent, Edwin’s vision of success was expressed in material terms. The glamorous age of the steamboats was just beginning; the arrival at Steubenville of one of these wonders, with its puffing stack and thrashing paddles, drew him from his hideaway to join his excited friends on the busy waterfront. A ceaseless panorama of river craft laden with goods and people passed by, linking the northeast and southwest of the burgeoning country. Movement, change, and growth were the postulates of the period. Edwin’s grandmother had heard wolves howl near Mount Pleasant and had worried over Indian marauders. Now Steubenville was a bustling town with neat houses of brick, wood, and stone, clustered beside the river in a natural amphitheater. Its 3,000 residents worked in foundries, boatyards, two cotton factories with a thousand spindles each, a paper mill of high quality, and small shops. Fertile land rewarded the farmer’s labor well, and the rolling hills provided fine grazing for sheep and cows.
Dr. Alexander M. Reid, a lifelong intimate of the Stanton family, remembered young Edwin’s observation to him that in order to get a share in this richness a man had to scramble. To the fatherless boy, the prizes of the struggle seemed worth the effort.9
Three years in Turnbull’s bookshop convinced Edwin that, in view of his health, the quickest way to the things he wanted was through education. He decided to attend college. Impressed with his intensity and obvious intelligence, Turnbull agreed to suspend the apprenticeship agreement, which had been renewed, and Daniel L. Collier, Mrs. Stanton’s lawyer and Edwin’s guardian, began a series of loans to him which he continued for four years, and which finally totaled almost $850. Decently clad in a new suit, sixteen-year-old Stanton left Steubenville for the first time in his life, in April 1831, bound by stagecoach for Gambier, Ohio, to attend Kenyon College.10
Kenyon was one of the four colleges which Ohio then boasted. In all, there were fewer than 600 students in the thirteen colleges west of the Alleghenies at that time. Edwin Stanton was about to enter a small and privileged group. When he first saw Kenyon, it was still a college in the wilderness. On every side the grounds descended into dense primeval woods. Deer, raccoons, squirrels, and rattlesnakes were common.
By modern standards, Kenyon required a great deal of its students. The rising bell sounded at 5 a.m. Within twenty minutes young Stanton had washed and dressed, made up his bed (students slept in three-decker, built-in bunks on loose straw mattresses), cleaned his share of the room, and built his fire in cool weather. In addition to prayers and classes, students took an occasional turn at working in the college fields and on the campus roads. Salmon P. Chase recall
ed that the founder of the college, Bishop Chase, his uncle, expected every boy to do “most of whatever a boy could do on a farm.” Annual charges were $30 for instruction, $40 for board, $4 for a room with a stove, and $6 for one heated by a fireplace. Henry Winter Davis, two classes below Stanton at Kenyon, remembered that the ground was often so muddy that it was common to see forty or fifty students strung single-file on a fence top, going to their meals.11
Kenyon was an outpost of Episcopalianism, and Stanton, along with the other students, attended morning and evening prayers on weekdays and two church services on Sunday. Spontaneous religious revivals among the students were frequent, and classes often had to be suspended. Theological students held prayer meetings in the barnlike dormitory to buoy up the faith of weaker brethren and to enlist recruits for the ministry. The first purpose of Kenyon was religion, and secular studies were an afterthought. Faculty and students fanned out from the college each Sunday to minister to congregations in isolated forest hamlets. Religious concerns so dominated college life that a Temperance Society boasted of almost 100 per cent student membership.12 Though Stanton joined this association, he held aloof when it extended its efforts against the use of tobacco. He had begun to smoke cigars, and in other ways was growing up quickly.
Three months after he came to Gambier, Stanton wrote to a Steubenville friend: “I am in chase of a petticoat, what success I may have God only knows—but if I fail, it will not be for want of exertion on my part.” He recounted how he had spent an evening with the girl so enjoyably “that I took no note of time,” and at 1 a.m. started back to the campus but lost his way in the woods. Finally, just before dawn, “cold, wet, and tired,” he crawled into his bunk. He had still to pay the price for the chill and fatigue of his adventure resulted in a fever and confinement to his bed for several days. “So much for love,” he wrote, “rather expensive, don’t you think so?”