They exchanged lengthy literary and philosophical observations, and Stanton delighted in her breadth of reading experience and variety of interests. He was troubled that she had no liking for poetry; “How can that be when you love Shakespeare and Milton and are so fond of music?” On a visit to Washington in 1854, he wrote her of the impressive ceremonies attending the opening of the Supreme Court session, adding: “You would laugh to see Judge Grier striding in with the tail of his gown flying in the wind.”
He told Ellen of his daily routine in Washington: breakfast at nine, work in the Supreme Court from eleven till three, and dinner at four, followed by study in the law library or infrequently by social diversions until bedtime. The Bridge case occupied his thoughts by day and Ellen by night. By the end of 1854 he had confessed his love to her; in early February 1855 he proposed marriage. She withheld a definite reply. “Allow me then after the fashion of old to offer myself as your Valentine,” he wrote two weeks later. “Be thou mine as I am thine.”1
In their growing intimacy, Stanton revealed himself to Ellen. “There is so much of the hard and repulsive in my—(I will not say nature, for that I think is soft and tender) but in the temper and habits of life generated by adverse circumstances, that great love only can bear with and overlook.” He dwelt on his first wife and their son, and described a Fourth of July outing with his mother, Eddie, and Darwin’s widow and children in a wild glen near Steubenville, where he and Eddie, sprawling on a warm, moss-covered rock, had rested, talked, and recited poetry while the others fished or strolled in the woods.
But Stanton’s courtship did not follow a smooth path. His temper, always ready to lash out, met Ellen’s stubborn resistance. When Ellen’s mother protested against her twenty-six-year-old daughter’s contemplating marriage to a man of forty-one, Stanton wisely let Ellen handle Mrs. Hutchison in her own way. She eventually consented, but insisted that they live in the Hutchison home. Stanton refused, and was ready to suggest that he and Ellen make their home in Steubenville, which would have meant abandoning the rich practice he was building from his Pittsburgh office, when Mrs. Hutchison acquiesced in a separate Stanton household.
On March 16, 1856, he placed an engagement ring on Ellen’s finger; they solemnized the event by exchanging a lawyerlike vow he had written: “To bind our hearts in a band of perpetual love, we do solemnly promise each other never to part without a kiss of love to each other—and if any difference or misunderstanding should hereafter occur between us … we will not separate without a kiss of forgiveness and reconciliation.” Called again to Washington, he wrote of his attendance at a wedding party there and described the elegance of the capital’s social leaders—carefully adding that in nobility of features, sweetness of expression, and charm of manners, she ranked higher than the flashing beauties around him.2
June 25, 1856, their wedding day, dawned clear and mild. Stanton woke and wrote to his bride: “On this morning … I salute you with assurances of deep and devoted love, that this evening will be attested by solemn vow[s] before the world and in the presence of God.… May our Heavenly Father bestow his blessing upon the union.” He had found again what he had thought lost forever with Mary’s death—love of the abiding sort—and approached his second marriage “with calm and joyful hope, disturbed by no conflicting feeling, quiet and peaceful.”
It was a small wedding, held in Ellen’s home, with forty persons present and without ushers or bridesmaids. Ellen’s dress was a white satin so heavy that her brother thought it would stand alone. George Harding, Stanton’s associate in the Reaper case, sent Ellen a beautiful cross of heavy gold set with pearls and diamonds, which she wore on a chain. Dr. Theodore Lyman, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, conducted the service, and the couple left on a honeymoon which took them to Niagara Falls, Montreal, Quebec, the White Mountains, and Nahant, Massachusetts.
Stanton had learned during their courtship that Ellen had a will of her own, but as a wife she brought cheer, social charm, and an element of common sense that had been lacking in Stanton’s life. Her steadiness counterbalanced his excitability. She became a mother to young Eddie and was welcomed into the family by Stanton’s mother and sisters, although this initial accord among the Stanton women later soured.
Uncertain at first whether to live in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, or Washington, the Stantons finally decided on Washington, in part because he had assurances stemming from his associations in the Reaper case that he would secure a substantial practice before the Supreme Court. They took rooms in the National Hotel while looking for a house, and Ellen immediately became a victim of the mystifying “National Hotel disease,” known now to have been amoebic dysentery, which prostrated many of its guests. Soon they leased a house at 365 C Street, N.W., where Stanton had his office in the basement. But he maintained his Pittsburgh association with Shaler and, waiting proof that the Washington move would be permanent, he left his law library in Shaler’s care.
For Stanton, life held new promise.3 Sustained study and hard toil had won him an ample income and high rank in his profession. The agony of a lost love had become a tender memory, and his second marriage had again brought him the affection that he craved. Engrossed in business, he no longer took any public part in politics. While he concentrated on his own career, the nation moved along a fateful path toward disruption.
When Douglas’s principle of popular sovereignty was applied in Kansas, a virtual civil war erupted there. President Pierce threw his support to the proslavery faction, which had forcibly gained control of the territorial legislature. With newspapers headlining these events, the presidential election of 1856 approached. The Democratic National Convention nominated Buchanan for President, with John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, as his running mate, and endorsed Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine “as the only sound and safe solution of the slavery issue.”
The vigorous young Republican party nominated John C. Frémont, the California “Pathfinder,” and William L. Dayton, of New Jersey. An ephemeral third party—the Americans, or “Know-Nothings”—nominated former President Millard Fillmore and took enough votes away from Frémont in crucial areas to give Buchanan and the Democrats the victory.
As a resident of the District of Columbia, Stanton could not vote. The Republican platform embodied a great many of his beliefs, but even during his brief dalliance with the Free-Soilers in 1848, he had never broken with the Democratic party. He did not do so now, and this surface loyalty brought him professional dividends.
Years earlier Stanton had struck up a friendship with Jeremiah S. Black, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and it was an intimacy that he did not fail to cultivate when Black resigned from the bench to become Buchanan’s Attorney General. Stanton wrote to Black, offering congratulations, and adding: “Mrs. Stanton also desires me to say that as Edmund Sparkler told little Dorrit you will always find ‘a knife a spoon and an apartment at your service’ in her house.”4
Tall, loose-jointed, and slouching, wearing dowdy clothes and a black wig that was often awry, Black, like Stanton, had a retentive memory, a sharp tongue, and an agile legal mind. Stanton’s senior in age by four years, Black had the mental outlook of the lawyer. Legal principles and legal remedies, rather than moral precepts or political exigencies, determined the bent of his mind. He revered the Constitution with its safeguards to property, including property in slaves. Black regarded abolitionism as a manifestation of that holy zeal which so often in history, he felt, had led men to defy the law. In Buchanan, whom Black had supported politically for the past twenty years, he was sure the nation had a President capable of ending the vexed slavery question.
Two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, to which Stanton invited his son and nephews, the Supreme Court handed down its historic decision in the case of Dred Scott, a slave who had sued for his freedom on the ground that he had been taken to and kept in territory where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise. The Court declared that a Negro was
not a citizen and could not sue in a federal court. Going further, it held that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature, created by act of Congress, could deprive citizens of their property without due process of law. Hence, the already repealed Missouri Compromise, which denied slaveowners the right to their human property in federal territory, was unconstitutional and void.
The decision gave force to the contention of Southern Democrats that Congress, far from possessing the power to exclude slavery from federal territories, had a constitutional obligation to give it positive protection there. It cut from under the Republicans their contention that Congress should prohibit slavery in the national domain. But it also cut the props from under Douglas’s concept of popular sovereignty, now that the people had no legal means of excluding slavery from a territory. Douglas did some quick mental gymnastics. Regardless of the Scott decision, the people of a territory could still exclude slavery, if they chose to, he declared, by refusing to grant it the protection of local police regulations, without which it must perish.
This rationalization enabled Douglas to hold the support of his Illinois constituents and to regain favor in the North. But it cost him dearly in the South. Determined to reap the full benefit of the Court’s decision, the Southern fire-eaters assailed the “Little Giant” for providing a way to circumvent it.
In Kansas, the proslavery territorial legislature called an election to choose delegates to a constitutional convention at Lecompton. Free-Soil men could have won in a fair vote, but, afraid of being defrauded, they stayed away from the polls. The proslavery party, in full control, framed a constitution that permitted votes only for the constitution with slavery or for the constitution without slavery. Either way, the right to property in slaves already in the territory would be guaranteed. Buchanan, favoring the proslavery interests but anxious to bring Kansas into the Union, slave or free, as speedily as possible in order to quell the sectional agitation, condoned this subterfuge.
Douglas, accusing the administration of bad faith, denounced Buchanan for obstructing the free operation of the popular sovereignty principle. Buchanan virtually read Douglas out of the party and swung the patronage whip on his adherents. A death struggle developed for control of the Democratic party. Black stood loyally with Buchanan, and Stanton stood with Black. “He was always sound on the Kansas question,” Black wrote in later years, “and faithful among the faithless on the Lecompton Constitution.”
This is not surprising. Stanton no longer had political ambitions, and he was moving up into the front rank of the nation’s legal lights. He had accounts throughout the Ohio Valley as far south as Louisville and along the Atlantic coastline from Boston to Charleston. His friend Black was in a position to favor him with important government business, and Stanton had no intention of losing political step with him. Inwardly, however, he abominated the Buchanan administration’s truckling to proslavery interests. Stanton had undergone no change of heart on the slavery question. But to the world at large he remained neutral regarding the extension of slavery. Stanton was effacing his real feelings in order to gain government favor. His obsequiousness would soon pay off.5
At the time California was ceded to the United States, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated that all valid Mexican land grants should be honored by the conqueror. Congress in 1851 created a board of commissioners to which all land claims were to be submitted for examination. Claims sprouted everywhere, involving titles to vast tracts of agricultural and mineral lands, extensive urban areas, strategically located islands and coastal points, and even the sites of government installations such as forts, lighthouses, customhouses, post offices, and hospitals. The fate of hundreds of millions of dollars was at stake.
Among the largest and most enterprising of the claimants was José Y. Limantour, a Frenchman, formerly a merchant at Monterey. Embraced in two of his claims that the commissioners had upheld were large portions of the city and county of San Francisco, and other valuable areas. The United States had appealed the findings of the commissioners with respect to these two claims, and the cases were pending in the district court when Black became Attorney General.
Black began receiving letters from a certain Auguste Jouan insinuating that Limantour’s claims were fraudulent, that Jouan himself, as an employee of Limantour, had altered the date of one of the grants that had been upheld by the land commissioners. Now convinced that Limantour had attempted “the most stupendous fraud ever perpetrated in the history of the world,” Black determined to oppose both claims in the courts.
More than the casual talents of run-of-the-mine government lawyers were needed for such a work as this. Besides outstanding legal ability, the task demanded a special counsel with unquestionable honesty, untiring energy, and tact combined with the initiative to act under the most general sort of instructions three thousand miles from the guidance of superior authority. Black had seen Stanton in action and knew the high standing he had gained. He was loyal to the Buchanan administration so far as actions were concerned and the President was acquainted with him personally and favorably. Black offered him the job.6
Ellen was against her husband’s taking on this task. It meant a lengthy separation. She and Edwin had been apart a great deal since their marriage, as he made the rounds of courthouses and clients in a dozen states while she remained lonely in Washington, unable to gain acceptance among the social leaders of the town. His health was not good, and Ellen, preparing for the birth of their first child, had not been as well as her worried husband wished. On May 9, 1857, she gave birth to a daughter, and they named her Eleanor Adams Stanton. But the mother suffered “a very dangerous fever following her confinement,” Stanton wrote, and not until the end of that month were his fears for her recovery somewhat lessened. He secured for her the best nursing care, which proved so annoying to Ellen that she wrote him in June, as he was again traveling, that “much to my surprise I am allowed to write you a few lines.” The couple had to discuss the projected California assignment, and Ellen told her husband: “Parting does not become easier.”
With the California question uppermost in their minds, Ellen, Edwin, young Eddie, and little “Ellie” journeyed to Pittsburgh early in October to visit Ellen’s parents. There Stanton made the decision to take on the work, with Ellen agreeing to remain in Washington. Stanton notified Black that he accepted the post and would be ready to go to California as soon as he could clear up pending cases. His fee was fixed at $25,000 with liberal allowances for expenses and the employment of a staff. On February 19, 1858, Stanton reached New York, accompanied by Eddie, Lieutenant H. N. Harrison, detailed to him by the Navy, and James Buchanan, Jr., a nephew of the President, to embark on the side-wheel steamer Star of the West. Out on the Atlantic the weather became cold, rough, and disagreeable, and most of the passengers on the crowded ship fell sick. Eddie and Harrison stayed well, but Buchanan kept to his berth. Stanton too had adequate sea legs. He wrote to Ellen every day, sitting on a stool and using a makeshift desk composed of his and Eddie’s valises, and posting his accumulation of letters whenever the ship made port.7
When the ship docked at Kingston in Jamaica, one of the British possessions where Parliament had recently abolished slavery, Stanton went ashore and attended church. He was struck by the gentility of the colored members of the congregation and by the fact that whites and Negroes sat together. Stanton concluded from his observations that the economy of the island had suffered from emancipation and that some of the great estates were falling into ruin, though the condition of the blacks had improved. The tropics delighted him; hot days and “surpassingly lovely” nights succeeded each other as the ship steamed on across the Gulf of Mexico. At Aspinwall (Colon), Stanton and his party took the railroad to the Pacific side of the Isthmus. In the hot, crowded cars, white and colored travelers amazed him by their endless eating and drinking. He forgot discomfort as the tropical jungle flashed by, abounding in brilliant flowers. Arriving at Panama, Stanton felt the charm of the anc
ient Spanish town though he deplored its general dilapidation and the degradation of the people.
The party left Panama for San Francisco on the Sonora, a ship three times as large as the Star of the West. His asthma left him. The time passed pleasantly in reading, studying Spanish, completing for publication the text of his argument in the Reaper case, which had been appealed to the Supreme Court, and writing daily to Ellen. On the first Sunday out of Panama a minister held services in the ship’s saloon, and Stanton and Eddie attended. But he wrote to Ellen that “it did not suit my notion of a preacher to lay off his gown and go to drinking wine and telling stories … within ten minutes after he had done preaching.” The following Sunday, Stanton and Eddie read the morning service in their stateroom.8
Gales drove them off course as they moved up the coast; but Stanton had never felt better. Then engine trouble developed, and a fierce storm blew up. He and other passengers became badly frightened as giant seas swept the hurricane deck, knocked in ports, and poured through staterooms. But on March 19 the Sonora passed safely through the Golden Gate, and Stanton took quarters at the International Hotel.
Immediately he plunged into his task, and he soon discovered that it would involve the virtual restoration of the widely scattered archives of California for the period of Mexican rule, for only from reasonably complete records, systematically arranged, could the history of all claims be traced and their validity determined. Two weeks after his arrival he wrote Watson: “I spend about ten hours every day in examining and arranging Spanish documents, letters, records, etc., in the Archives office, and as I often have to resort to an interpreter, the work is slow.” Within a month he not only was reading Spanish easily but had covered the years 1838 to 1844, “having with my own eyes examined every book and paper in the Archives,” he informed Black. “I have six book binders at work,” he added, “two clerks & Mr. Harrison, Mr. Buchanan, Eddie & myself from eight in the morning to six in the evening.” Still he needed additional assistants to carry the work forward.
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