He soon became a familiar figure. “It was here in his early prime that I, as a telegraph messenger boy, had the pleasure of seeing him frequently,” recalled Andrew Carnegie, who rememberd Stanton as a “vigorous, energetic, and concentrated man, always intent upon the subject in hand … ever deeply serious.” Stanton’s self-description bears out Carnegie’s impression. “The practice of law here and in Ohio furnishes employment for all my time and facilities,” he later wrote Chase; “… my habits are gradually conforming to the daily round of mere business and like a stage horse I am growing accustomed to the crib & the stall of a tavern.”17
This peripatetic life was of his own choosing. Determined to raise his professional reputation and income as quickly as possible, Stanton was unable to sit back and wait for a rich practice to develop in Pittsburgh. Instead he busied himself with maintaining his Ohio clientele and with extending his connections to Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and Washington. Although he particularly welcomed corporate business and became skilled in mercantile affairs, he took clients as they came. Whether the case at hand was large or small, he was always out to win. In the higher courts, as in the lower ones, he relied chiefly on hard work. Stanton seemed to sense what correct legal behavior was. He spoke vehemently when arguing before a jury in a lower court, and was headstrong and impetuous in his manner. But he became calm, deliberate, and dignified before a higher court, where reason rather than emotion would be likely to govern the decision. In important cases he composed his arguments in advance, then committed them to memory, so that his audiences were impressed by the vigor of a seemingly extempore production which was as complete as a written speech.
Stanton’s cold, clear logic more than compensated for his lack of oratorical graces. Though he often spoke too rapidly for pleasant listening, his deep voice gave an impression of strength, and he sometimes achieved striking effects in his choice of words.18
His words could also sting. Earnest and combative, he hung on tenaciously, browbeating and ridiculing witnesses and often antagonizing spectators. Emulating his superiors in their status-conscious snobbery, Stanton practiced a haughty rudeness to those he considered to be inferiors in his profession. His cousin, young William Stanton, observed him arguing an important case in the United States Court at Pittsburgh. “The lawyers opposing him were country lawyers—from Kittatinny, Pa.—It was hard to tell which were the most ‘haughty, severe, domineering, and rude’ in his treatment of those lawyers, Stanton, or the Judge of the Court, Grier. I thought if anybody should treat me so I would want very much to shoot him—and both Judge Grier and [Edwin] Stanton deserved it.”19
Sometimes his victims did threaten him with physical violence in retaliation. Once he had the sheriff of Cadiz escort him to his office from the courthouse, less from cowardice, his colleagues believed, than from a wish to avoid fruitless controversy. On another occasion he was so rude to a witness in a Steubenville case that Roderick S. Moody, the opposition attorney, protested. Stanton lost patience. “Moody,” he snapped, “you always whine when I question your witnesses.” Moody, a capable lawyer four years Stanton’s junior, retorted: “I don’t know that a whine is worse than a bark.” Stanton had the last word, saying out of the corner of his mouth: “Puppies whine.”
Moody was furious. While the court recessed he waited for Stanton to emerge from the office of Stanton & McCook, up Third Street. Soon Stanton appeared, carrying a stout cane, for an injured knee still pained him. He had a big bundle of papers under one arm, his spectacles were on, and he was accompanied by McCook. As the two men reached the courthouse yard Moody rushed out of the building and flung himself on Stanton. Taken by surprise, Stanton went down hard, cane, spectacles, and papers flying in all directions. McCook pulled Moody off. Stanton, groping for his cane and pushing himself up with it, rushed at Moody, crying: “Damn him! I will punish him for this!” Spectators intervened, and McCook chided Moody for attacking Stanton without warning, whereupon the irate Moody squared off against McCook, whose service in the Mexican War had enhanced his reputation for fearless physical prowess. “Damn your impudence,” cried the colonel, “would you dare fight me?” Quiet was restored at last, and court resumed; and over the years Stanton and Moody became good friends.20
Part of Stanton’s brusqueness was an act designed to ward off intimacies and to preserve himself against new personal hurts. A fellow lawyer asked him for a personal loan and was rudely repulsed. But that night the man found the needed sum in his room with a note from Stanton telling him to ask for more if and when necessary. Young William Stanton remembered how the older man was full of hospitality and help the moment the day’s work was done. Edwin Stanton’s instinct was to hide his need for friendship behind a stern mask, and to concentrate completely on the case at hand and win it. The law and the courtroom were serious matters to him, and he had no place for levity in his mind or manner. William Stanton recalled how Edwin became impatient at the humorous opening address of an opposition attorney. When the man finished, Stanton rose and said in a stern tone: “Now that this extraordinary flow of wit has ceased I will begin.” The other lawyer retorted: “Wit always ceases when you begin.” Ignoring the laughter that came from the judge and spectators, Stanton went ahead with his sober but convincing presentation, and won the case.21
Winning was what mattered to him, and he was willing to take risks in search of victory. When reprimanded by a judge for excessive behavior, and ordered to sit down, he obeyed, but he would be back on his feet immediately, and would gain his point. He established a reputation for obtaining verdicts and judgments for his clients and his business increased. Stanton’s willingness to resort to any needed technique in order to impress judges and juries made him popular in this semi-frontier region where the law was nothing sacred and where a premium was placed on success. When seeking to establish a young man’s paternity of an illegitimate baby, Stanton carried the child to the courtroom, held her on his lap during the preliminaries, and when he rose to speak, gently placed the baby in her mother’s arms and in quiet, gentle terms established the facts of parentage. Defending a prisoner on a charge of first-degree murder, he deliberately swallowed some of the poison which had allegedly killed the victim in order to prove that because it could not be retained, the liquid could not kill. Horribly sick, he vomited it up, and saved his client’s neck.22
A man accused of theft was brought to trial and the presiding judge asked him if he had an attorney to represent him. The defendant mumbled that he had not. Asked to look around the courtroom and choose as counsel anyone he saw, the man pointed to Stanton. Then the judge read the indictment and asked the defendant to plead guilty or not guilty. Instead of replying, the fellow gazed vacantly this way and that, mumbling incoherently as he did so, and then laughed aloud. Stanton arose and asserted that his client was obviously insane, moved that the court discharge the prisoner, and when the judge agreed, led the man tenderly out of the building. Weeks later it leaked out that Stanton had coached the defendant in his cell before the trial. Stanton’s fellow lawyers, the judge concerned, and many of the townspeople applauded this shrewd maneuvering.
Even in cold weather, the end of a day in court found this intense lawyer with wilted collar and clothes soaked in sweat. All of Stanton’s associates were impressed by his combativeness in pleading. “Though the heavens fell,” one recalled, “he would never let up; it was push through or die.”
He enjoyed finding loopholes in the law. For example, Lisbon, Ohio, had an ordinance setting a ten-dollar fine for wagon drivers who rutted the hilly main street by driving down its sloping length with locked brakes. An old Quaker, refusing to be bound by restrictions, added deep trenches to the street’s already lunar surface. Stanton got him off without penalty by making the point that the law prescribed punishment only for driving down the street; his client had perversely added yokes of oxen to his horse teams and strained up the grade with the brakes engaged.
Another case early in his career was o
f particular importance. It involved a client’s suit against monopolists of grain and pork distribution in Ohio. “Stanton had about staked his life on winning,” another Steubenbenville lawyer recalled. “He argued part of one day and all the next. Before noon he had torn off his cravat and opened the collar of his shirt, for he always feared apoplexy. As night drew on I thought he would drop dead. He was black in the face. In the evening the case went to the jury. Stanton left the chamber and all night he and I walked up and down in front of the courthouse, discussing the trial and waiting for the verdict. Finally, at sunrise, the jury brought in a verdict for Stanton, and his rejoicing was ten times greater than that of the client he had saved from ruin.”23
Each time he returned to Pittsburgh after a round of such cases, Stanton retired to self-imposed obscurity. An occasional cigar, light wines, and books provided companionship for him during the solitary evenings. He reread Plutarch’s life of Caesar, finding in it confirmation of his distrust of all aristocracies, enjoyed Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Madame de Staël’s Thoughts on the French Revolution, and became a devotee of Dickens. Stanton found a new interest in studying the lives of great men, and, invited out one evening, he showed off his knowledge of Napoleon.
Finding this hermitic existence too bare to endure, Stanton reached out for friendship. To Daniel Sickles, a young lawyer thrilled at associating with Stanton, already prominent in the law, the older man was a kind, amusing colleague. They walked together along the Golden Triangle while Stanton “boosted” the future of the West. Once when Sickles was Stanton’s house guest, he found that his host disapproved of his addiction to reading light novels. Before he left, Sickles deliberately put a few popular romances where Stanton could find them. Years later Stanton confessed to him that he had read and enjoyed them, and always after took pleasure in all kinds of fiction.24
But most of the people who did not know him so well found Stanton an unpleasantly intense person. Impressed by the beauty of some stories from Godey’s Lady’s Book which Pamphila sent him, Stanton learned that the author, Sarah Jane Clarke, lived near Pittsburgh, and quickly managed to meet her. “He was awfully earnest,” she recalled. “A pun nearly cost me his friendship, and it was a good pun, too.”
Stanton continued to find comfort in the Bible, and he became active in a Sunday-evening Bible class formed and directed by his Kenyon mentor, Heman Dyer. Heretofore the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul had provided his favorite passages, but now Stanton discovered, as he wrote to Chase, that he had been “overlooking the merits of the great teacher, Christ, and dwelling on those below him.”25
Business cares were a blessing to Stanton during this lonely period in his life. His office with Shaler was on Fourth Street, between Wood and Market, in the heart of the Golden Triangle. With Pittsburgh creating wealth at an astounding rate, fees began to come in so rapidly that the partners were impelled to call in Stanton’s New Lisbon associate to handle the firm’s finances.
Two cases were largely responsible for this quick rise to legal eminence. Pittsburgh’s burgeoning factories had given rise to miserable job and housing conditions. Workers, especially in the textile mills, demanded a reduction of the working day to ten hours. Their employers bitterly opposed this demand. To coerce the stubborn millworkers into submission, the owners closed the mills. Serious riots broke out. Imported scabs and strikers clashed in bitter fights, and a boycott of the struck plants cut sharply into the owners’ local market.
Stanton, representing the owners, initiated a series of damage suits against the strikers, thirteen of whom, some of them women, received jail sentences. At the same time he achieved mutual acceptance of the ten-hour day, but the workers took with it a decrease in wages. When the struck mills reopened peaceably, Stanton had a profitable addition to his firm’s clientele, and it soon brought in even richer business.26
The other case responsible for Stanton’s success in Pittsburgh involved the very destiny of the city. Downriver at Wheeling, a Virginia corporation, with the consent of the state of Ohio, was throwing the longest suspension bridge in the world across the Ohio River. By facilitating travel along the National Road, it promised to make Wheeling the gateway to the West. The bridge’s central span, though ninety feet above low-water level, did not allow sufficient clearance for the soaring smokestacks of the larger river packets. If the structure should prevent them from ascending the river beyond Wheeling, that city, as the head of navigation, would draw highway, railroad, and river traffic to it, leaving Pittsburgh sequestered.
On August 16, 1849, Stanton appeared before U. S. Supreme Court Justice R. C. Grier in the federal circuit court in Philadelphia to seek an injunction against the bridge company on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania at the instance of her attorney general. He claimed that the Ohio River was a navigable stream, free to the citizens of Pennsylvania as well as those of other states; that the bridge under construction would hinder those citizens in the use of the river and thus work irreparable injury to their trade, commerce, and business; and that the bridge would also diminish the revenues derived by the state of Pennsylvania from its system of canals and railroads to the point of rendering that system useless.
Grier declared that the private citizens who alleged injury must seek redress in a lower court. But the U. S. Supreme Court did have original jurisdiction insofar as Pennsylvania itself was concerned, and he gave Stanton leave to file therein for an injunction on its behalf.
Stanton was delighted. He had feared that Grier would dismiss his motion entirely, for lack of jurisdiction. Now he was worried that the company would raise the height of the bridge without further proceedings. “But this I do not desire,” he confessed to a friend. “Having my hand in I am disposed to push it to the girth.”
An accident on Pittsburgh’s icy streets resulted in a broken leg for Stanton. But he was able to travel painfully to Washington, where on February 25, 1850, he was admitted to practice in the U. S. Supreme Court and made his first argument. The Court met in a small room in the basement of the Capitol immediately below the Senate Chamber. Heavily carpeted and richly furnished, it had an atmosphere of awesome dignity. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, an acknowledged leader of the American bar, appeared for the bridge company and contended that the Court lacked jurisdiction. But the justices sustained Stanton on this all-important point, and appointed a commissioner to take testimony from the respective parties concerning whether the bridge was or was not an obstruction to navigation by steam or sail, and if so, what alterations in it would be necessary to make the river fully navigable.
To gather these facts, Stanton journeyed up and down the Ohio River obtaining data on how various smokestack heights affected vessels’ fuel consumption and efficiency of operation, and stopping off at the larger towns to amass statistics bearing on the nature, volume, and value of commerce on the river and the relative costs and advantages of railroad and water transportation. While interviewing a pilot he fell into the hold of the steamer Isaac Newton and suffered a compound fracture of the kneecap on his already injured leg. Taken to Steubenville by steamer and carried to his home on a stretcher, he was obliged to lie flat on his back for several weeks.27 For a time he feared that he would never walk again; when he did, it was with a severe limp, which improved but never entirely left him.
The Court’s commissioner fully accepted Stanton’s argument that the bridge unlawfully obstructed navigation and that it should be raised higher above the channel or removed altogether. At the next court term, in December 1851, the Court upheld these findings, whereupon the bridge company asked permission to make a draw in the bridge, instead of raising it. Stanton then argued that the size of the vessels that would be using the draw, the strong current, and the winds would make passage through such a contracted space both dangerous and impracticable. The Court agreed, but granted the bridge company permission to obtain the opinion of an independent engineer. The engineer that the company consulted also thought that a draw
in the suspension bridge would be impracticable, but said that one could be constructed in the wooden portion of the span over the western channel of the river, which flowed between Zane’s Island and the Ohio shore, though this would also involve the opening of a new channel there.
This report became the subject of another argument before the Court when Stanton filed objections to it. At last, the Court gave the defendants the option of complying with its original decree by raising the bridge, or constructing a draw in the wooden bridge and clearing the obstructions from the western channel on their own responsibility, with leave to the plaintiff to reinstitute the suit if the latter procedure did not make the river fully navigable.
It was a signal triumph for Stanton. His dramatic maneuver in 1850 of chartering the steamer Hibernia and running it full-tilt under the bridge—delightedly watching its eighty-five-foot-tall smokestacks rip away and its superstructure collapse—in order to demonstrate the inadequate height of the bridge, received wide publicity. The minute, detailed researches he had conducted into navigation and commerce made his arguments overwhelmingly impressive and increased his stature as an inventive, able attorney. Stanton’s work in the Bridge case brought him appeals from prominent persons that he take on the tutelage of their sons. It also gave him the entrance he craved into the higher levels of the law. The Erie Railroad became his client. Stanton successfully argued the right of David Levy Yulee, of Florida, to a seat in the United States Senate, asserting that each house of Congress had plenary powers to judge the qualifications of its members, independent of the executive and judicial branches of the government. He never forgot this conclusion concerning legislative autonomy.28
Stanton Page 9