To facilitate his labors Stanton drew up two bills and sent them to Black for submission to Congress. One provided for the compulsory return to the archives of Mexican official papers, wherever they might be found, and the other prescribed severe penalties for making false claim to land or removing records from the archives. Both bills were immediately passed, and Stanton put emissaries on the trail of vanished records. Documents were turned up from Sacramento to San Diego.9
Coming upon the famous “Jemino Index,” Stanton had a key to the location of all land titles in the official records up to 1844, and a second index was discovered for the remaining years of Mexican rule. For three months he examined and sorted records with the aid of clerks and translators. The most important documents were translated and printed. Others were photographed for presentation in court or for Black’s files in Washington, to be used for comparison with those discovered in the archives. Finally Stanton obtained the names of all witnesses who had testified in support of suspicious claims and had them investigated. “The archives thus collected,” declared Black, “furnish irresistible proof that there had been an organized system of fabricating land titles carried on for a long time by Mexican officials.” He was sure that in Stanton he had chosen the right man for this imposing task.10
Stanton’s staff sustained Black’s opinion. “Mr. Stanton has had the stables of Augeas to clean,” Lieutenant Harrison wrote to Black after working with Stanton for about two weeks, “but he brought to the task the powers of a Hercules. I have never seen a man of such untiring industry, indomitable perseverance and well directed energy, and if he does not thro’ Monsieur [Limantour] so high in the air, that he will be forced to commit his claim to the gods of the winds, then I am no prophet, and you shall be my Judge. You have selected the man, and I only wish my ability was equal to my zeal that I might give him more effectual aid, for I am very much attached to him. ‘Behold a man indeed in whom is no guile,’ can truly be said of him, and I thank you that such a man is my friend.”
As Stanton got his task in hand he began to take trips around the bay and to visit nearby mines and other points of interest. Men loosed from family influences still made up the bulk of the population. For more moderate souls, two gentlemen’s clubs provided cheer for homesick men of means, and Stanton found club life pleasant. Several theaters stayed open seven days a week. “Occasionally a fancy danseuse makes her appearance,” Stanton wrote Ellen. The churches were thronged every Sunday, and a revival meeting drew large crowds; markets displayed an abundance of delicious fresh fruits and vegetables, the meat and fish were excellent, and Stanton ate frogs for the first time.
Excitement swept the city whenever a steamer approached. Storekeepers locked their doors, lawyers closed their offices, and everyone rushed for the dock. Men cheered when the heavy mail sacks thudded on the wharf, and that night a long line would form at the post office and move slowly past the windows hour after hour.11
“This is a wonderful climate,” Stanton wrote to Black; “… Eddie is sprouting like Jack the Giant Killer’s bean—I can work from fourteen to eighteen hours a day the month round without flagging.” Back home, however, Ellen became lonely and anxious, and chided her husband for neglecting her and their small daughter to further his ambition. In reply, Stanton insisted that his family and its welfare always came first, and that “like other mortals I may yield to the necessities of life, must bear its burthens … and perform its duties, but for all this the love of my wife and child will be the only and sweetest reward.”
Ellen’s criticisms came at a bad time for Stanton. From the moment he arrived in California he had been the target of local hostility inspired by parties whose holdings would be endangered by the successful completion of his mission. Now he was stalked by political hatchet men; the struggle between Buchanan and Douglas for control of the Democratic party in California resulted in a smear campaign against Stanton, who seemed to represent the administration. Douglas men spread rumors that Stanton, who before undertaking the California mission had been counsel for a company which held dubi ous title to lands he was now examining, had profited from this connection. Actually, Stanton had severed this affiliation before leaving the East. But he now grew discouraged, and only Black’s entreaties kept him on the job.
In Washington, Buchanan and Black assured inquirers that the charges against Stanton were infamous and evanescent, and so it proved. The attempt of Douglas Democrats to impugn Stanton’s honesty cemented his ties with the Buchanan wing of the party. He closely observed the California state elections of 1858, in which Douglas Democrats and the Republicans both sought to wrest control of the legislature from the Buchananites in a campaign unmatched for viciousness. As soon as the result became certain, Stanton wrote exultantly to Black: “It has been a most triumphant and glorious victory.… You say to the President that his own great name achieved the triumph.… The election is but an emphatic overwhelming endorsement of the President and his administration.”12
Politics did not distract Stanton long from the land claims inquiry. Limantour was an adroit opponent. The Frenchman offered full and seemingly unimpeachable evidence and convincing witnesses in support of his claims, and the signature of Micheltorana, last but one of the Mexican governors of California, who signed Limantour’s grants, supposedly in 1843, was genuine beyond a doubt. The petitions for lands and the grants themselves had apparently been written on the specially stamped paper provided by the Mexican government, and President Arista of the Republic of Mexico had commended the claims to the favorable consideration of the U.S. land commissioners.
But Jouan’s assertions proved devastating in overthrowing Limantour. Four years after California had been ceded to the United States, Jouan avowed, Limantour had obtained eighty blank petitions and titles from Micheltorana, all of them signed, to fill in as he wished. In preparing a spurious claim for Limantour, Jouan had made an erasure which left a hole in the paper. That document, with the telltale hole and erasure, Stanton now produced in court. And Jouan also provided one of the blank titles signed by Micheltorana.
Letters found by Stanton provided clinching proof of Limantour’s fraud, for they made it clearly evident that the special stamped paper on which Limantour’s grants were written had been manufactured at a later date. Stanton found two seals in the archives of the customhouse at Monterey, one the genuine seal used by customs administrators, the other a counterfeit of which only eleven impressions could be found—all on grants to Limantour or witnesses who appeared for him. Extending his search, through agents, to the archives of Mexico City itself, Stanton was able to certify that no confirmation of the Limantour grants by the Mexican Minister of the Exterior could be found in the Mexican archives, though alleged confirmations appeared on the margin of the grants. Some of Limantour’s witnesses were caught in perjury; others were shown to have been readily available whenever testimony was needed in support of other suspicious claims.
As evidence of fraud piled up, all but one of Limantour’s lawyers withdrew from the case after having labored on it for five years. On October 16, 1858, Stanton wrote that the remaining lawyer “had fled two days before.” No rebuttal to the government’s proofs was offered. The claims were rejected by the district court on the conclusive strength of Stanton’s evidence, and Limantour, indicted for perjury, jumped his $35,000 bail and fled the country.
Stanton was now ready to leave for home, when Eddie fell ill. Then another fraud against the United States came to his attention, and Stanton again canceled his return passage, determined “to throw a brick” at the promoters of the New Almaden quicksilver mine, and to “stay to see where it hits,” as he wrote to Watson.
The original mining grant, now worth an estimated $15,000,000, had been confirmed by the land commissioners, but Stanton obtained an injunction in the federal district court against the further working of the mine until ownership could be proved. During these proceedings Stanton encountered Henry W. Halleck, a man with whom he was de
stined to come into close contact in years to come. A retired army officer, Halleck had become a leading California lawyer and worked as an engineer for the New Almaden company. He offered testimony on the company’s behalf, but the court found it unconvincing, and in some respects contradictory, and disallowed the documents he had brought forth. Stanton, seldom lenient toward an opponent in a lawsuit, unjustly suspected Halleck of perjury.13
Through his labors, Stanton’s thoughts were with Ellen. He worried over the arrangements he had made for her support during his absence, and he repeatedly requested Black and Watson to look after her needs and his private and professional affairs. To Ellen he wrote of his anticipations of home-coming, and of his longing for her and their little girl. His cares increased as young Eddie’s health failed to improve in the last months of 1858, although the plucky youngster summoned enough energy to write his infant half sister as her first birthday approached: “I am sorry that you can’t say ‘Eddie’ but will try to come home soon and teach you.”
Each time Stanton made plans to sail for home, his son’s health worsened. His condition seemed critical for a time, but by late November he had improved to the point where he could be moved, though he was still unable to stand. Stanton prepared to start home on December 5: “Judgment has been entered in favor of the U[nited] States in all my cases,” he wrote Watson, “—and my work is done.” But Eddie was still sick at Christmas and it was early January 1859 before the Stantons boarded ship for home. “I write to tell you that we are coming, to tell Ellie we are coming, coming, coming at last!” Edwin exulted to Ellen. “My heart leaps for joy at the thought … we talk every day of you and are counting the hours.”
Stanton rendered a great service in restoring the California archives and in defeating numerous fraudulent claims. If the procedures adopted by the American Government for the validation of claims placed an unreasonable burden of proof on claimants, involved both the innocent and the guilty in expensive court actions lasting in some cases a decade or even longer, and left California land titles in a state of uncertainty for an inordinately long time, the fault was not with him. He had a job to do and he did it with his usual single-minded earnestness. Moreover, not a little of the niggling and pettishness resorted to by the government lawyers had resulted from the necessity of combating suspicious claims with legal technicalities because of lack of evidence. Now, through Stanton’s restoration of the archives, claimants as well as the government could support their cases with facts.14
To be sure, Stanton incurred resentment and suspicion from those who assisted him in California when promises of additional payment for services, which he had made to them, were not fulfilled. He filed their claims, but owing to Congress’s indifference or its preoccupation with more vital matters that soon confronted it, funds for the payment of these obligations were not appropriated, and more than a decade passed in some instances before justice was done.
The government’s inefficiency in meeting its obligations also affected Stanton’s reputation in California. Late in 1860, James F. Shunk, Black’s son-in-law, was there serving as a special federal agent. “Few people here,” he wrote Black from San Francisco, “feel kindly to Stanton.” Denying that he gave “ear to every bit of scandal that has reached me or the grumblings of every disappointed man who thinks he has not been paid enough for his work,” Shunk nevertheless described the “general feeling” that Stanton was too lavish in his promises, and had put the blame on Black. “You may depend upon it,” he wrote to Black, “that Stanton is not a perfectly fair man. Don’t start.—I have made up my mind on that point … upon sufficient evidence. He has suffered you to bear all the odium of any disagreeable things you may have done, even at his suggestion, by representing that he was not on terms of intimacy with you.… When I remember how often I have seen Mr. S[tanton] puff his cigar upon your sofa for an hour at a time without alluding to business, I am compelled to think, that this statement was rather disingenuous.” Shunk, knowing his father-in-law’s regard for Stanton, acknowledged that his accusations must seem like “flat blasphemy,” but he felt he had to report what he had learned.15
But Black’s confidence in Stanton, far from being shaken by these charges, became stronger than ever when the two men were thrown closer together by the march of events.
Arriving home in early February 1859, Stanton looked forward to a long vacation trip with his family. He first had to clear his desk of the accumulation of business matters, and this delayed their departure. Then he became involved in assisting Black in writing a series of opinions in government cases—many Washingtonians believed that Stanton was an official Assistant Attorney General—and advising President Buchanan on patronage matters, especially where California offices were concerned. “Every California crumb is closely watched and claimed by many,” he wrote to one eager aspirant for a Treasury position there.
Despite his increased professional prestige and enhanced income, Stanton was suffering from a severe letdown after his exertions on the West Coast. “Everything … is duller on this side than on the Pacific slope,” he commented.16 His lassitude vanished, however, when he was asked to take part in a sensational trial.
His friend Daniel Sickles, after a turbulent career in New York politics, had overcome the dissolute habits of his youth since his marriage and was now a congressman. But socialite Philip Barton Key, a son of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, had started a love affair with Mrs. Sickles. Sickles eventually learned of it. On the peaceful Sunday morning of February 27, 1859, he shot Key to death on a Washington street, walked to Black’s home, and surrendered himself into custody.
The prominence of the principals, the very thought of the illicit affair and the murder taking place within sight of the White House, put the nation in a flutter. Sordid gossip went the rounds, even to the point of insinuations that Mrs. Sickles had granted her favors to many men in addition to Key, and that her husband had risen in President Buchanan’s esteem as she had been pleasant to “Old Buck.”
One of the country’s most celebrated criminal lawyers, James T. Brady, and his partner, John Graham, hastened down from New York City to conduct Sickles’s defense, and immediately enlisted Stanton, as well as other Washington attorneys, as associate counsel. Humorless, thickset Robert Ould and wiry, fidgety J. M. Carlisle were attorneys for the people. The trial commenced on April 4 in the insufferably overheated Washington criminal courtroom.
Brady and Stanton complemented each other in courtroom tactics. The former was noticeably proper to the prosecuting attorneys, judge, jury, and witnesses; Stanton, however, hit at everyone with a sledgehammer earnestness which stood out in contrast to his colleague’s extreme politeness. Stanton’s vigor excited general comment, and his obvious affection for the defendant added a sense of personal involvement to his conduct of the case.
The defense tried to prove that an adulterer may be slain with impunity by the injured husband, and that Sickles was so disturbed in mind at the time of the homicide as to be unaccountable for his acts. It was the first time in American jurisprudence that a plea of temporary insanity had been advanced in a murder trial. The prosecution was prepared to combat the plea by contending that Sickles cared nothing for his wife’s affections, for he, too, had been living in adultery; but this line of testimony was excluded by the judge.17 Whereupon the prosecution shifted its strategy to stress the deliberate, cold-blooded nature of the attack, and to pay as little heed as possible to Sickles’s provocation.
A great deal of melodrama animated the proceedings. Stanton once called for a recess so that Sickles could regain his composure after the testimony of a friendly witness reduced him to tears, and counsel sometimes wept from the pathos of the case. Summing up for the defense, Stanton held forth on the sanctity of the marriage vows and a husband’s right and duty to keep his home inviolate against seducers. The jurors sat spellbound. Cheers broke from the spectators, drowning out t
he judge’s repeated warnings. A modern student of trial procedure describes Stanton’s performance as “a typical piece of Victorian rhetoric, an ingenious thesaurus of aphorisms on the sanctity of the family.” But its effect on the jury was profound, and an onlooker, Mrs. Olive Cole, recalled a decade later that “Brady did not half the service for Sickles that Stanton did.”
From the first, however, there had been little doubt that Sickles would be acquitted. But there could always be a slip, and the defense also relied heavily on the plea of temporary insanity. Wild cheers rocked the courtroom when the jury, after deliberating only seventy minutes, brought in a verdict of “not guilty.” The crowd, waving hats and handkerchiefs, made a rush for Sickles in the dock. Stanton’s voice boomed out above the uproar: “I move that Mr. Sickles be discharged from custody.” The judge so ordered, and as Sickles pushed his way out of the dock, Stanton murmured in his ear: “Now go it!” An eyewitness reported that “Mr. Stanton, unable to repress the emotions of his big heart,… almost rivaled David when he danced before the ark of the Tabernacle.” Brady, Stanton, and Graham were serenaded that night, and Stanton’s name was now known far beyond the professional circles of the law.18
As the trial approached its close, Stanton’s boredom had returned. “Everthing is in a dead calm,” he wrote a California friend, and announced his plans to begin his long-deferred vacation. Early in May 1859, he, Ellen, Eddie, and little Eleanor set off for Akron to visit Pamphila, and his mother and Oella met them there. It was the first time that the entire family had been together in ten years. Only Pamphila’s husband, Wolcott, was missing. As attorney general of Ohio, and an ardent Republican, he was defending a number of citizens who were facing federal prosecution, under the 1850 fugitive slave law, for aiding a slave to escape. Stanton and Chase helped Wolcott with his argument, and according to Pamphila, Stanton felt that their combined product was “the best on that side of the question he had ever seen.”
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