Governor Shannon, Stanton found out, was backing Lewis Cass, of Michigan, a conservative Democrat on most issues, as the next presidential nominee. Shannon had tried to convince Stanton to abandon his advocacy of Van Buren, and now the young politician decided to take advantage of the governor’s interest in having Ohio’s Democrats come out early for Cass. “He having undertaken my conversion to that faith,” Stanton confided to Tappan in February 1843, “I have become acquainted with some, and shall soon know all their calculations.” Boring quietly into conservative Democratic ranks from within, Stanton, who remained secretly loyal to Van Buren, learned that the Cass backers expected John Calhoun, the South Carolinian, and Van Buren to kill off each other at the Democratic National Convention, whereupon “Cass will come in sweepstakes.” Shannon’s prime object was to enlist the support of Samuel Medary, fiery editor of the Ohio Statesman, hitherto a staunch hard-money man and an ally of Tappan and Stanton. Shannon told Stanton: “Sam Medary has it in his power to make Cass President.” Stanton agreed that Medary would be vastly influential; but a “truer [Van Buren] man never breathed,” he wrote to Tappan—a description proved accurate by Medary’s continued radicalism.
Throughout 1843 Stanton sought to consolidate Van Buren’s strength in Jefferson and Carroll counties, to have Van Buren men chosen as delegates to the next Democratic state convention, and to see to it that loyal anti-bank candidates were nominated for the legislature and for Congress. “We both have enough to do,” Mathew Birchard, a Democratic leader, wrote Tappan, referring to his and Stanton’s schedules. In November, Stanton was named delegate to the Democratic state convention that was to convene soon after the new year; a month later, he arranged a testimonial supper in honor of Colonel Richard Johnson, which kept him in Columbus almost into the holiday season. Such application to party duty received recognition throughout Democratic circles in the state. Backers of a projected Western Democratic Review petitioned Tappan to “mention the subject to Mr. Stanton, and get his aid if possible, as a contributor.”14
Back in Columbus after a happy Christmas time with his family in Steubenville, Stanton plunged into the work of the state convention as a prominent Van Buren man. The radical group he worked with gained control of the appointment of all delegates, and instructed them to support Van Buren. Stanton’s able leadership was clearly recognized and was doubly applauded because the defeated faction accepted the result and another disastrous party split was avoided.
Tappan learned that Stanton had been “a tower of strength.” Another Ohio party leader, who had attended every January convention since 1828, informed Tappan that he had never witnessed such good feeling as in the one just past. One Cass man had, it was true, threatened to wreck the carefully nurtured unity in favor of Van Buren which Stanton had helped create, but “Mr. Stanton of Steubenville killed him dead on the spot!—after which he was as harmless as he had been wicked, and peace was restored.”15
Soon after the convention, David Tod, whom the Democrats had nominated for governor, publicly receded from his former hard-money position, thereby dampening the ardor of the radical Democrats. They also learned that the Ohio delegates to the forthcoming national convention were being pressured to support some candidate whose prospects of winning the election were better than Van Buren’s. Stanton suspected that this movement originated in the South. He professed to believe that if the Southern bloc succeeded in defeating Van Buren at the national convention, or if they refused to support him after he had won the nomination, the Democrats of the free states should throw their united support to Birney, the Liberty party candidate, “and cut loose forever from Southern slavery and Southern dictation.” He thought, however, that “if our friends remain firm and undaunted we are still safe. Their word should be Van Buren and no other.”
Van Buren came out publicly against the annexation of Texas on the ground that it would involve the United States in an unjust war with Mexico. The pronouncement cost him the support of warlike old Andrew Jackson. It pleased many Ohioans, however, and the Ohio delegation left for the national convention at Baltimore prepared to cast a unanimous vote for Van Buren, as Stanton had hoped they would.
Only heroic efforts by Medary prevented the delegation from switching to Cass, however, when it became evident that Van Buren could not be chosen under the new rule put through by the Southern delegates, which required a two-thirds vote to nominate. At last, with the convention deadlocked, the Ohioans reluctantly voted for a “dark horse,” James K. Polk, and helped to nominate him.16
Things were going well for Stanton personally. His new baby boy was thriving after a series of illnesses; finances were in such good shape that Stanton had sold the Third Street house in Steubenville for $1,200 and leased a fine, larger place on the corner of Third and Logan, which he later purchased. Shade trees, shrubs, and flowers grew abundantly in the yard. Mary, under Edwin’s guidance, had undertaken a varied reading program which filled her hours during his frequent absences. She was determined to have a hand in educating her child, and as an early feminist, she dreamed of playing a part in a future regeneration of world morality to be brought about by the education of women. She and Stanton remained warm and affectionate, full of hope for their life to come and pleasure in their past and present.
Tragedy, made more unbearable by its unexpectedness, shattered this happy relationship. Stanton was on his way to Steubenville from Columbus late in February 1844 when the frightening news came to him that Mary was desperately ill with “bilious fever.” He hurried home. For a despairing fortnight he scarcely left her bedside. His brother and his brother-in-law, both doctors, were constantly in the house. But their medications and Edwin’s prayers proved fruitless. Mary steadily weakened, and on March 13 she died.
Life grew dark for Stanton. He wrote a friend: “It has pleased God … to take from me my beloved wife, upon whom all my affections and happiness rested.… This calamity has overwhelmed me. I know not where to look or whither to turn.… We were both young and happy in each other, looking forward to a long life of joy and happiness. By incessant toil we were gathering around us all that we thought would promote our comfort and enjoyment and this spring had in our thought attained these. A few days ago I laid her in her grave, and to me they are now ashes, ashes.”
His grief verged on insanity. Stanton ordered Mary’s funeral dress altered and realtered. Moaning and weeping, he cried: “This is my bride and she shall be dressed and buried like a bride.” At night he would leave his room, tears streaming from his eyes, and taking up a lamp, search the house, crying over and over: “Where is Mary?” He stealthily brought to her grave her wedding rings, jewels, and letters.
Gradually he returned to normality. But still he spent hours reading Mary’s letters, which he later had printed in a brochure so that his son and a few close friends and relatives might remember her. “She was my guide, my counselor, and my familiar friend,” he explained in a preface addressed to the boy; “… I have tried in vain by talking of her to you in familiar scenes and by her grave, to call up some thought of her in your mind.… It is better therefore to place some memorial of your mother beyond the vicissitudes [of memory], so that when you grow older you can … have her words, her example, her prayers, to counsel and direct you.”17
For a long time the days remained bleak for Stanton. He was apathetic, barely rousing himself from his torpor to write Tappan in April of political happenings at Columbus. But his family required funds, and Stanton was back at law practice in midsummer 1844, and by August was deep in what obviously was for him the therapeutic jungle of politics.
When Polk won the Democratic nomination for President and the party platform declared for the “re-annexation of Texas,” the enthusiasm of many Ohio Democrats of antislavery leanings measurably cooled. But Stanton, notwithstanding his earlier threat to join the Liberty party if Van Buren should lose the Democratic nomination, and perhaps to exhaust himself and so escape his grief at his wife’s death, worked ha
rd for Polk. In large part due to Stanton’s efforts as chairman of the county Democratic committee, Polk carried both Steubenville and Jefferson County, though Clay carried Ohio. The Whigs gained control of the Ohio legislature and elected Mordecai Bartley governor.
With Whigs in control of the state patronage, Ohio Democrats looked to the Polk administration in Washington for jobs. It disgusted Stanton. “Every one is after some office,” he wrote Tappan in December, “and every species of truckling to what is supposed to be an important influence in the coming administration is resorted to. I never expected to see anything of the kind out of the Whig party.”
Control of federal patronage in Ohio would be decisive in the internal party struggles, and Stanton’s anti-bank faction outmaneuvered the Cass clique and gained the inside track with Polk. Stanton was mentioned for a federal district attorney’s office, but he wrote to Tappan: “I am not a candidate and would not accept if appointed.” He did, however, recommend suitable “hard money men” for various federal offices and became angry because some appointments were going to those he considered undeserving.18
Immediately upon his inauguration, Polk moved to realize the annexation of Texas. And now, for the first time, Stanton was disturbed by the prospect of annexation. The Ohio Democrats had been attempting to make a show of unity in support of Polk’s policy, but Jacob Brinkerhoff, an Ohio Democratic congressman, finally broke the party traces with a speech denouncing annexation as designed for the benefit of the South, and demanding the exclusion of slavery from Texas as the price of Northern acquiescence in annexation.
Stanton sent Brinkerhoff congratulations. “There is too much inclination among northern men, to submit in silence to the insolent demands of the south,” he wrote. “… You have set a manly and noble example, in which many, besides myself, will to the uttermost sustain you.” But Stanton kept his antislavery sentiments confined to private thoughts and communications. He was a party regular.
Expansionist sentiment proved too strong to resist. In the last days of 1845, when Texas was formally admitted to the Union, Stanton’s stiff-necked Democratic loyalty wavered. Again he felt that his friend Chase might be following the wisest course in trying to keep the Liberty party dedicated to the single purpose of opposing slavery. Still, he remained within the regular Democratic ranks, so far as the world at large was concerned.19
The Whig-controlled Ohio legislature retired Tappan from the United States Senate, but before his term expired in 1845, both he and Stanton became indirectly involved in a scandal, when Caleb McNulty, who had been rewarded for his services to the Democratic party in Ohio with appointment as clerk of the House of Representatives in Washington, was charged with stealing $45,500 of House funds. The House dismissed him by unanimous vote, and in default of bail he was confined in the District of Columbia jail. McNulty, whom Stanton had once called “a glorious fellow,” had made Stanton’s brother, Darwin, his assistant, and Tappan was one of McNulty’s sureties.
Stanton wrote to Tappan: “McNulty’s blow up was not unexpected to either of us, but he has blown quicker, went higher, and is now fallen deeper than I anticipated.… Your Whig friends have been deeply sympathizing in what they fancied, or hoped was your loss. They deeply regretted that you should now, in your old age be broken up and ruined by McNulty. I advised them to spare their grief, and bottle their tears.”
McNulty’s guilt was taken for granted, and even the Democratic press demanded that he be punished and that his bondsmen make full restitution to the government in order to save the party from complete dishonor. It is a measure of Stanton’s increasing competence as a lawyer that Tappan urged him to hasten to Washington and assist in McNulty’s defense.
Stanton arrived in Washington at midnight; the case had been set for trial the next morning. Going directly to the jail, he consulted hurriedly with McNulty and then examined rules, statutes, and records until four o’clock in the morning. After two hours’ sleep he put in more time examining the law. Stanton found that McNulty’s other lawyers regarded the case as hopeless, but he persuaded them to allow him to draw up a motion to quash the indictment. The court was inclined to rule such a motion out of order at that stage of the proceedings, but Stanton bulled through all objections (“cavalierly” was Darwin’s word for it) and gained permission to argue the motion the next day. Then, seizing upon every technicality, he convinced the judge that the indictment should be quashed and the prisoner discharged.
Stanton’s performance was brilliant from a legal point of view and spectators in the crowded courtroom applauded him. Papers all over the country gave the case full coverage. When he left Washington on his thirty-first birthday, in December 1845, his name was widely known.20
More because of personal than professional reasons, he and Tappan dissolved their partnership in 1845, and Stanton formed a new association with George W. McCook, a native of Pennsylvania, now thirty-three years old, who had attended Franklin College, at Athens, Ohio, and studied law in Stanton’s office. A large man, he was a lover of the classics, a staunch Democrat, and a member of a family that would later become known as “the Fighting McCooks.” Stanton was also associated with S. G. Peppard at Cadiz, Theobald Umbstaetter and Jonathan H. Wallace at New Lisbon, and less closely with Daniel Peck at St. Clairsville, E. R. Eckley at Carrollton, and Joseph Sharon at Harrison. His relations with the Tappan family did not cease with the dissolution of his partnership with Tappan, but they became strained, for Oella’s marriage to the senator’s son, a somewhat erratic man, turned out unhappily. Oella left her husband for a time; and he seems to have held Edwin and Darwin responsible in some measure for his marital difficulties. “Since Oella returned home last fall we have lived together in harmony,” the younger Tappan wrote to his father, “and she has already much improved in housekeeping as well as in other respects. As she is really trying to improve herself, and I do not intend to have her brother or brothers about the house, I have no doubt she will manage so as to give us both satisfaction.”21
Nothing the divided Democrats could do managed to prevent the Ohio Whigs from passing a banking law which, in limiting the liability of stockholders and directors and the amount of notes a bank might issue, relaxed, without fully abandoning, the safeguards the Democrats had written into the banking code. The law caused new dissension in both parties. Some Whigs wanted to return to a system of unrestricted banking. The “hard-money” radical Democrats of Stanton’s faction accused the “softs,” some of whom had voted for the new law, of surrendering to the bankers.
This banking law became the overriding issue in the state campaign of 1845, and the people sustained the Whigs. Undaunted, the “hard-money” Democratic faction planned to try to gain control of the party’s next state convention at Columbus, in January 1846, and to renew the fight against the “money aristocrats.” To lead them in this struggle, a strong candidate for governor was needed. A number of Democratic county organizations again endorsed David Tod for governor. But Ohioans who were worried that Tod might prove unreliable on the bank issue wanted Stanton in his place.22
By this time Stanton had completed his work as reporter for the Ohio Supreme Court, but he rebuffed all suggestions that he stand for elective office and made no effort to promote himself as a candidate for governor. He did, however, take a prominent part in the 1846 state convention, where Tod managed to satisfy Stanton and most of the other radical Democrats that he was sound on the money question. Stanton, thereupon, worked hard to secure the nomination for Tod, and when it was achieved he looked on it as a “triumph of principal [sic],” though he doubted that Tod could win the election. Later Stanton became joyous as Tod’s prospects improved. But shortly before the election he was shocked when Democratic newspapers came out with a new watchword: “Vote for Tod and the Black Laws.”
The Black Laws, which had been in force for many years, discriminated against the Negroes living in Ohio by denying them the right to testify against a white person in court, depriving the
m of a share of the school funds, and requiring them to furnish bond against becoming public charges, though the last provision had never been enforced. But as abolitionist agitation began to disturb the public conscience, a movement for the repeal of these unjust laws made headway throughout the state. The Liberty party came out strongly for repeal; Democrats and Whigs avoided the problem at first, but the new issue soon became crucial and threatened to split both major parties.
Tod said nothing until the Whigs discovered that as a candidate for the state senate in 1838 he had favored Negro participation in common school funds. Armed with this information, the Whigs branded Tod a “nigger lover.” Queried on his position, he answered that he opposed repeal of the Black Laws. His reply was widely printed, especially in southern Ohio; and as more and more Democratic newspapers stirred up race prejudice, Stanton felt sick at heart.
He confided to Chase his deep discouragement and his doubts that “just and true principles” could prevail unless they were pushed ahead by men of single-minded views who would eschew compromises. “Who would have thought,” he asked, “that the battle between the Hards and Softs, in this State, would end, before the election, in a common shout for ‘Tod and the Black Laws!’ ”23
Meanwhile, questions arising out of the annexation of Texas and Polk’s efforts to acquire Upper California and other territory from Mexico had brought relations with that country to the verge of war. A border skirmish in disputed territory induced Polk to declare that Mexico had “shed American blood upon the American soil.” On May 12, 1846, Congress resolved that a state of war existed. Excitement swept the country as men rushed to enlist.
The Whigs opposed the war from the beginning and accused Polk of taking wrongful measures against a feeble neighbor. The Democrats closed ranks to defend Polk. Stanton’s skepticism about the annexation of Texas and his fears concerning Southern dominance in national affairs were submerged by the wave of patriotism that swept across the country. At a mass meeting in Steubenville he presented resolutions endorsing the administration’s policies, declaring that the war was “necessary and just,” and appealing for recruits.
Stanton Page 6