With a similar adolescent bravado, he went on to tell of attending a Fourth of July celebration where “every man, woman and child were drunk as a fidler’s [sic] bitch.” He added further: “Our Faculty, through fear of cholera, have prohibited bathing, and almost everything else but studying—would to God they would prohibit that shortly.”
Stanton’s romantic impulses got him into more trouble when he and S. A. Bronson, a sophomore who later became professor of theology and president of Kenyon, borrowed Bishop Chase’s prize horse one night and rode tandem into the country to call on two young ladies. They returned quite late and hurriedly. The next morning the bishop became irate at finding his horse in a lather. Knowing that Chase would stop at nothing to ferret out the culprits, Heman Dyer, a theological student who was also principal of the college grammar school, advised Stanton to confess. Stanton went to see the bishop. An emotional display took place, with Stanton and the dignified churchman in tears, until the youth’s pleas for forgiveness succeeded in weakening the bishop’s resolve to expel him. The incident was passed over.
One escapade, however, went beyond the bounds of adolescent adventure. Stanton and other students believed that a certain young tutor had betrayed their confidences, and one day at mealtime, at a signal, they rose and pelted the poor man with edibles and crockery. Someone snuffed the lights, and amid a riot of jeers, hoots, and cackles, the victim was cuffed to the door, and he never returned to Kenyon. It was Dyer’s overly lenient judgment that Stanton “was determined that the offender should be punished, law or no law, and was willing to suffer the consequences.” There were, apparently, no consequences for Stanton or the other student conspirators to suffer.
Though Stanton was at first outwardly indifferent to the religious life of Kenyon and did perhaps more than his share of carousing, he was also an avid student and a voracious reader. His sister recalled that he had written in the first books he owned: “I am going to read these books through,” and love of books remained part of his life at college and later. He was frequently sick and rarely could sleep through a night because of his asthmatic affliction, but he did not spare himself.13
Part of the life at Kenyon which Stanton found most congenial and constructive was his participation in the activities of the Philomathesian, a literary society. He was active on its committees, took part in several debates, in one of which he derided professional soldiers, was finally elected secretary, and won the society’s vellum diploma for commendable service, which he prized enough to hang in his law offices in later years. Markedly more aware of current events than many of his fellow students, Stanton joined enthusiastically in a Philomathesian debate in 1832 on the burning issues of nullification and slavery. The exchange became so heated that eleven students from Southern states withdrew from the Philomathesian and formed a new society.
Stanton’s sympathies were clear. He avidly read all the numbers that he could obtain of the new abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, printed in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison, years later writing to the crusader that “from earliest youth [you] have been an object of my respect and admiration.” Stanton recalled with a fellow student: “We fought the South together at Kenyon, and whipped.”14
Then, in the beginning of his sophomore year, just as he was immersing himself fully in the serious intellectual and religious life of the college, he had to leave. Reports from home had warned him that the family’s financial situation was worsening, but he had not realized the full seriousness of the problem until he returned to Steubenville for the 1832 summer recess. While he was home the family’s legal adviser convinced Mrs. Stanton that Edwin must forgo the luxury of further college education in order to return to gainful employment. Turnbull was willing to renew with improved terms the suspended apprenticeship agreement. “I abandoned all hopes,” Stanton confessed to a Kenyon classmate, A. J. McClintock, “renewed my engagement, and shall set out next Monday for Columbus,” where he would work in another bookstore owned by Turnbull and managed by the merchant’s brother.
Stanton assumed a nonchalant air. “The fact is,” he wrote, “I believe in the maxim that says a short life and a merry one is the better.”15 Despite his boastful flippancy, he took from Kenyon a fair share of the history, mathematics, chemistry, geology, political economy, Latin, and Greek that he had studied, and much more than he had learned in class. The months there had inspired him to hope for a professional career, fixed his religious affiliation in the Episcopal denomination, fashioned his views on federal-state relations, and confirmed the abhorrence of “the slave power” which his parents had set in him. He kept abiding friendships with Kenyon students and faculty and an enduring love for the school, seeing to it that his son and nephews attended there and aiding Kenyon graduates as much as he could. In later years Pamphila lived in Gambier, and Stanton loved to visit her there and to wander through the lovely campus of the school.16
Late in September 1832, Stanton boarded the stagecoach for Columbus. By the terms of a new contract with Turnbull he was to receive $250 a year, and his immediate needs would be met by the $50 in cash which he had obtained as another loan from Collier. With youthful resiliency, he rebounded from the depression occasioned by his forced departure from Kenyon, in anticipation of the novelties and opportunities that Columbus promised.
Situated on low ground along the Scioto River, Columbus, now the state capital, was a rapidly growing town of almost 2,700 people when Stanton arrived there. High Street, the main thoroughfare, had broad sidewalks paved with brick, and more than seventy coaches brought passengers into the city each week. Horsemen, carriages, and wagons moved along it constantly. Two blocks of the business district had three-story brick store buildings; most of the houses were also of brick with arcades of wood in front shading the sidewalks. The state buildings had already become dilapidated, and cows grazed on the Capitol grounds.
Stanton settled quickly into his new life. “I have a great deal of time for reading,” he informed his friend McClintock, “and board in a family with which I am highly pleased.” This was the family of Dr. H. Howard, of whom Stanton wrote: “The old folks are intelligent, hospitable, kind and in short just such folks as you would like. Their daughters—they have four—though not handsome are very agreeable,” and he singled out young Ann Howard for avuncular regard.
He soon gained a wide acquaintance among Columbus’s younger set, finding the females modest, sensible, and well informed, though plain, but the young men “impudent, ignorant, self-sufficient counter jumpers.” Professing his boredom with trade, Stanton wrote that he was “becoming acquainted with the proper method of doing business, learning how to cheat and avoid being cheated, besides the various usages of the world.”17
Then, during the spring and early summer of 1833, the cholera, which had struck heavily in eastern Ohio, moved menacingly westward along the route of the National Road. The epidemic began raging in Columbus during the unusually hot summer months. On August 9, Stanton was served his midday dinner by Ann Howard, and then he returned to the bookstore. An hour later Ann collapsed. At 4 p.m. she was dead. As a precautionary measure to keep the plague from spreading, her family buried her at once. When Stanton learned of the horrible event, he experienced a morbid conviction that she had been buried alive. Persuading a young medical student and another boarder to help, he hurried to the burial ground and by lamplight exhumed and opened the casket. At the risk of contamination he made certain that the girl’s body gave no sign of life, an act which his neighbors applauded for its courage, however questionable by modern standards.
He exhibited the same bravery while the epidemic continued its grim course, and sat nightly with stricken friends at the peril of his life. Such deeds took courage of a high order, for Stanton knew enough medical lore from his father’s practice to understand the consequences of contagion. He hid his fears in the youthful guise of bravado. “My own health has been good,” he wrote to McClintock, “saving that I nearly died a week since in debau
ch.… The following night I was attacked with very alarming symptoms—of cholera; from that I also escaped, by strong and timely measures. From these circumstances, I have been induced to ‘forswear sack and live cleanly’—for the present.”18
Stanton’s debauches seem to have been more callow fiction than fact. His Columbus neighbors and friends, many of whom later became violent enemies of his politics and actions, attest only to his sobriety and application to his reading during this period. And now he had a new reason to inspire his search for success. He had fallen in love.
In Columbus he had attended the Trinity Episcopal Church, where William Preston, a Kenyon trustee, was rector. At Sunday school he met Mary A. Lamson, the rector’s sister-in-law. She was a year younger than Stanton, of average height, with a slim, attractive figure; in his words: “Her hair was soft and brown; her eyes dark; her brow and forehead beautiful. Her teeth, white and regular, were the finest I ever beheld; and … a full red lip gave to her mouth, especially when she smiled, surpassing sweetness.” Mary’s intellect and literary interests also impressed the smitten youth.
So, in mid-September 1833 he asked his guardian for help so that he might return to Kenyon for a year to finish his course, then to study law, and thus advance himself. Turnbull had treated him unfairly, he complained, for although Stanton had assumed the management of the Columbus store, he had been refused an increase and thus had been able to save very little money toward his education. But, mindful of his obligation to his family’s support, he was willing to manage the store for another year if Turnbull granted him the raise.
Collier consulted the bookseller, who again refused the increase. Stanton thereupon abandoned his hopes of completing college and urged his guardian to allow him to study in Columbus under the preceptorship of a practicing lawyer. His persistence impressed Collier, who secured Turnbull’s reluctant agreement to cancel the apprenticeship contract. Collier, however, correctly pointed out to Stanton that he would be much better off studying law in Steubenville at Collier’s office than in Columbus. Steubenville’s lawyers had worked out a regular system of instruction for their students, and Stanton would join five neophyte attorneys already enrolled there.
Mary Lamson helped him make the difficult decision to accept Collier’s offer and to give up hope of returning to Kenyon by promising to wait for him even though it meant an indefinite separation. In November 1833, Stanton began the unhappy journey back to Steubenville. There he found his family in pitiable straits. They had rented a small, decrepit three-room house further up Third Street from the comfortable residence in which he had spent his childhood. At first Stanton found it difficult to adjust, and wasted his days and evenings renewing acquaintanceships and putting on the airs of a sophisticate who had listened to debates at the state capital and attended college. But he soon assumed the labors of a student of law and the duties of the head of his family. During the winter his mother suffered from erysipelas and Pamphila had whooping cough. Since he wanted his other sister, Oella, to continue her studies at Beatty’s Seminary, he brought his lawbooks home and mixed elementary law with nursing the sick women.19
By the turn of the year 1834, Stanton was in a better frame of mind; his family’s health was improved and he was encouraged by his progress in his studies. He thanked God that he had failed in his earlier purpose of remaining in Columbus. “My guardian was wiser than I,” he admitted to McClintock, “so here my term of probation will be passed.” Stanton borrowed still more money from Collier and other Steubenville residents, and moved his family into a more comfortable house on High Street, near the Seminary.
Pamphila remembered these months as a happy time. Darwin was always fun-loving, and Edwin, though more serious, applauded his jests with an easy, hearty laugh. Well informed on politics, Stanton discoursed to the family on current happenings. Detesting idleness, he took advantage of every cultural advantage the town afforded. Monday evening found him at the Atheneum for debates. Examinations for all Steubenville law students took place on Tuesday and Friday nights, and on Saturday night the Lyceum provided lectures on literature, science, and history. Mary Lamson’s influence was reflected in his reawakened interest in religion, and in his confession to Pamphila of a Quakerish disgust at all military pomp. He led his family in morning and evening prayers and taught a class at the Methodist Sunday school.
What made him happiest was the high quality of the instruction he was receiving. The Steubenville bar, he claimed, was the equal of that of Columbus, and its regular curriculum for students was attracting state-wide attention. Stanton particularly welcomed the fact that the large-scale business that Steubenville’s lawyers enjoyed forced more practical work on their students than was usual. In June, Stanton wrote McClintock that he had assisted his mentor in every principal settlement in Ohio.20
A year passed by quickly for young Stanton. Then, during the spring of 1835, Ohio was thrown into turmoil as Theodore Dwight Weld and other students who had incurred disfavor at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati for antislavery agitation, carried their preachments throughout the state. They advocated racial equality, a doctrine that few persons were willing to embrace, and endeavored to organize abolition societies.
Weld offered a series of lectures in Steubenville. Years later, he recalled that he had been told that a young lawyer named Stanton intended to challenge his thesis at the meeting. The traditional account of this incident, by Weld, and another version, by Henry Wilson, had it that Edwin was so struck by the force of Weld’s arguments that he remained dumb, then went privately to see Weld and, confessing that “my guns are spiked,” announced his conversion to the doctrine that “all men hold their rights by the same title deed.” But Allyn E. Wolcott, for whom Stanton had secured a place as a student in Collier’s office after an introduction by their mutual friend McClintock, and who later became related to Edwin by marriage, recalled only that he and Stanton went together to hear Weld lecture at the Methodist church. “We both called on Weld the next day,” he recalled, “and had a very pleasant conversation with him. I never heard that Edwin intended answering [Weld] … or was expected to answer said lecture. If he had thought of such a thing, he certainly would have informed me of it.”21
Stanton was busy enough readying for his imminent bar examination and too ambitious to entangle himself in the pitfalls of the growing abolition controversy. In August 1835, he went to St. Clairsville for his bar examination and passed it. Still under age, he could not be licensed, though Collier thenceforth allowed him a large measure of responsibility in preparing cases for court. Soon after passing his examination, he was arguing a slander suit while Collier watched from the rear of the courtroom. One of the opposition attorneys asked the court to oust Stanton from the case for being under age and not entitled to practice. Collier rose and defended the qualifications of his student. Stanton had cheek enough to remain standing during Collier’s speech and resumed pleading the instant his guardian finished, without waiting for the judge to rule.
During the three years that Stanton spent in Collier’s office, he and Mary Lamson corresponded faithfully. While he tried to master his lawbooks, she continued her own schooling, studying French and Latin and hoping to go on into chemistry, geometry, and arithmetic. “Arithmetic I like,” she wrote to her fiancé. “As females often have the character given them, perhaps justly, of being irresolute and unsettled in purpose, mathematical studies should be considered of the highest importance to them.” Mary felt that women would never be able to exercise their rightful place in the world until they were better educated. Obliged to quit school soon after this, she asked Edwin to advise her in her reading. She had enjoyed Felicia Hemans’s romantic poems, she wrote, but she found Thomas Moore’s Journals and Letters of Lord Byron in questionable taste, since it revealed Byron’s “censurable” as well as his admirable traits.
Stanton replied that he was not fit to advise her, as his own reading had become so specialized. Her own good taste and the advice of her si
ster would set proper standards. He believed, however, that she was wasting her time with Moore. Byron’s poetry was fine but his character was abhorrent, and though knowledge was desirable, it should not be knowledge of evil. There was enough evil in life without seeking it in books. Love had changed Edwin Stanton. The free and easy moral attitude that he had at least assumed at Kenyon and during his first months in Columbus now gave place to prudery.22
“I am twenty-one, a free man, and admitted to practice law,” he exulted in December 1835. A few weeks after the turn of the year 1836 he moved to Cadiz, an Ohio village of 1,000 inhabitants, the seat of Harrison County, where Chauncey Dewey, a wealthy lawyer with an established practice, had offered him a partnership. Slow in speech and in methods, the forty-year-old Dewey disliked the rough and tumble of the courtroom. Stanton immediately took over much of the firm’s trial work with Dewey as mentor. The younger man learned much from this association, for the firm handled a large proportion of the cases in Harrison County and enjoyed an extensive practice in neighboring counties.
People in Cadiz called him “Little Stanton,” although he was five feet eight inches tall and stocky in build. Though extremely nearsighted, so that he peered intently through thick-lensed spectacles, he was an attractive youth, taken together: clean-shaven, with thick, dark, disheveled hair, and friendly and good-natured when not battling to win a case.
He brought system to Dewey’s office; papers were now in perfect order. After a full day of pleading in court, Stanton would return to the office and labor for hours more. He was known, more than once, to climb into his buggy after midnight, drive the twenty-five miles to Steubenville for a document or a book, and be back in court the next morning ready for another full day of work.23
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