Welles sized up Stanton as a man who loved the exercise of power. Granting that he was vigilant, devoted, and a dynamo for work, Welles thought he lacked moral courage and self-reliance under stress. “He took pleasure in being ungracious and rough towards those who were under his control,” Welles wrote, “and when he thought his bearish manner would terrify or humiliate those who were subject to him. To his superiors or those who were his equals in position he was complacent, sometimes obsequious.” Welles believed, too, that Stanton toadied to the Committee on the Conduct of the War so that it would cover up the War Department’s shortcomings.
The President, who found himself in the middle of all this scuffling, and who never really tried to run his cabinet in a single harness, revealed his attitude toward the vigorous new Secretary to Congressman Dawes. Lincoln agreed that Stanton was making a grand beginning, although he had been warned that he might “run away with the whole concern.” Stanton reminded him, said Lincoln, of an old Methodist preacher who performed so energetically in the pulpit that some of his parishioners wanted to put bricks in his pockets to hold him down. “We may be obliged to serve Stanton the same way,” Lincoln observed, “but I guess we’ll just let him jump a while first.”
For Lincoln was observing Stanton’s work closely and was pleased with what he saw. The President, heartsick over the failures that had attended the Union cause thus far, and weary of the ineptitude and incapacity of many of those who served him, saw in Stanton the man he needed. Almost immediately a deep intimacy began to grow up between these two disparate personalities. Lincoln never referred to the abuse he had suffered at Stanton’s hands in earlier years, or to the epithets Stanton had used against him more recently. Stanton had found a man to follow. As Chase foresaw, Stanton “would be master of his Department, and yield to no one save the President.”9
Stanton had immediately set himself to cleaning out the rats’ nests in the dilapidated brick building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street which had housed the War Department for more than forty years. It was literally falling apart, and was poorly illuminated and badly ventilated. He secured a special appropriation to double the existing two-story height; this expansion, and the destruction of long-useless partitions and corridors on the lower levels, far more than doubled the office and filing spaces available. This, in turn, let Stanton bring to the growing building scores of Department workers who for years had been housed in rooms scattered across the capital.
Far more vital were the problems involved in bringing the personnel, equipment, and procedures of the Department into line with vastly enlarged requirements of clothing, food, weapons, and innumerable items of equipment for an army that now numbered more than a half million men. Stanton’s task would be to augment, reform, and systematize, to maintain unrelenting pressure on half a hundred different civilian and military officials, and to deal with the manifold political and economic intricacies that faced him daily.
He was able to build on what Cameron had begun. But the greater effort had to be his. The War Department was still seriously undermanned for such an all-out effort and burdened with old functionaries and obsolete procedures. Unopened mail accumulated on tables and desk tops. Letters were sent to the wrong persons. Some duties needlessly overlapped, while others remained unassigned. Officers seeking promotions, soldiers wanting leave, civilians on every imaginable sort of business, thronged the rooms and hallways. Noise, confusion, and lack of system made the place deserve its popular name—“the lunatic asylum.”
Stanton quickly secured Lincoln’s permission to reform the creaking bureau structure of the Department and persuaded Congress to authorize the appointment of two more assistant secretaries, forty-nine clerks, four messengers, and two laborers, and the further addition of ten noncommissioned officers to the Adjutant General’s staff. New jobs brought a rush of eager applicants, most of whom were dismayed when Stanton gave preference to soldiers unfit for field service because of wounds or minor physical defects.
He appointed his trusted friend Peter Watson to one of the new assistant secretary posts; he had promised to take on this responsibility before Stanton had been willing to join Lincoln’s cabinet, and Stanton now insisted that he redeem this pledge. Short, stout, with red hair and beard, a man of business acumen whose driving energy matched that of Stanton, Watson, like Stanton, sacrificed an income amounting to many times his government salary in accepting the post. The country’s leading patent attorney, Watson had an expert knowledge of mechanical principles and devices. Stanton allowed him practically unlimited discretion with respect to ordnance, and entrusted him with confidential assignments such as organizing and supervising a secret police force called the “National Detectives,” headed by Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, and with giving to selected newspapermen the information that the Department wanted to have printed.10
For his other new assistant secretary, Stanton chose John Tucker, a Pennsylvanian who had helped Cameron organize rail and water transportation in the East. As the holdover assistant secretary, Thomas A. Scott, formerly vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was, like Tucker, from the Keystone State, the appointment brought outcries from New York’s political spoilsmen, who claimed that Tucker had profited personally from questionable contracts during Cameron’s tenure of office. Stanton vouched for his honesty and the Senate confirmed him. As personal clerk, Stanton chose Albert E. H. Johnson, who had performed confidential service for him in the Reaper case.
Stanton’s professional experiences had made him aware of the importance of railroads and the telegraph as instruments of war. He prepared a bill authorizing the President to assume control of them, although he believed that Lincoln, as commander in chief, had the constitutional power to seize these utilities in any case. The measure lagged in the Senate, and Stanton wrote urgently to Wade: “Please communicate confidentially with the loyal and honest members of both houses and have action—immediate action.” Most Northern railroads, as events proved, would render satisfactory service under private management, and in their case the full powers granted to the government by the act Wade pushed through Congress would be invoked only in rare instances.
But Stanton kept the powers the law conferred on Lincoln—which the President delegated to him—as a club to push reluctant railroad managers into obedience. He, McClellan, and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who put his genius for organization fully at Stanton’s disposal, met with a group of railroad operators at Willard’s Hotel late in February, to achieve a rate formula that would prevent gouging overcharges against the government. Stanton ordered the roads to standardize track gauges, freight-car utilization procedures, and signaling systems. He told them that the government’s needs must have priority over their private interests but that he “infinitely preferred” having the railroad companies regulate themselves to exercising himself the despotic powers Congress had granted. The officials took the hint.11
The telegraph was a different matter. Constant rather than intermittent control of the telegraph system was essential to military secrecy, and Stanton would keep close watch over it. He appointed Edward S. Sanford, president of the American Telegraph Company, to be military supervisor of telegrams, and clamped on a rigid censorship. Newspapermen had to work through Watson, who could screen out undesirable journalists. Any reporter soliciting information from anyone else in the Department was to be dealt with as a spy.
His order occasioned some disagreement, but support and commendation were far more common. For example, John Murray Forbes, a Massachusetts entrepreneur, wrote William Cullen Bryant that “the telegraph is a mighty engine of war,” vital to direct battles and to co-ordinate transportation of goods and men. “Stanton’s move to control it,” Forbes insisted, “seems to me one of the best things he has done.”12
News continued to seep out, however, and Stanton ordered Watson to investigate. Though unable to locate the leak, Watson reported that Captain Thomas T. Eckert, telegraphic super
visor of the Army of the Potomac at McClellan’s headquarters, where the central telegraph office was located, was often absent from duty and was withholding information from the Secretary of War. Stanton made out an order for Eckert’s dismissal and told Sanford to see that it was carried out, but grudgingly consented to let the young supervisor tell his side of the story. Eckert came to Stanton’s office and stood before his desk for several minutes before Stanton deigned to look up. Then, in a loud voice, Stanton accused Eckert of neglecting his duties and divulging news. Pointing to a large pile of telegrams, all in Eckert’s handwriting, he demanded to know why they had not been delivered to him at the time they were received.
Eckert explained that an order of Cameron’s, which had never been revoked, required that all telegrams be sent to the commanding general and no one else. Stanton grunted and asked why Eckert was so often absent from his office. There must be some mistake, Eckert replied; for three months he had scarcely taken off his clothes except to change his linen, and spent night after night at the office. He tendered his resignation.
An arm fell on Eckert’s shoulder. The President had silently entered the room. “Mr. Secretary, I think you must be mistaken about this young man neglecting his duties,” Lincoln said, “for I have been a daily caller at General McClellan’s headquarters for the last three or four months, and I have always found Eckert at his post. I have been there often before breakfast, and in the evening as well, and frequently late at night, and several times before daylight to get the latest news from the army. Eckert was always there, and I never observed any reporters or outsiders in the office.”
Soon afterward Stanton moved the telegraph office from McClellan’s headquarters to the War Department, in what had been the library, next to his own office, with an adjoining door for the cipher operators. Eckert, detached from McClellan’s staff and promoted to major, was given full charge of it. The change enabled Stanton to exercise closer control of army communications and news releases.
To co-ordinate the War Department and the armies in the field, Stanton set apart two rooms in the Department building as headquarters for the commanding general. But McClellan was piqued at the removal of the telegraph office and later asserted that Stanton was plotting to be commanding general as well as Secretary. He preferred to operate from Army of the Potomac headquarters in a fine residence on Jackson Square, away from Stanton’s oversight, and seldom even entered the rooms that Stanton had provided for him.13
Seeking closer control of purchases, Stanton revoked all authorizations to buy supplies abroad if similar articles of domestic manufacture could be obtained. This order, though reflecting Stanton’s constant fear that the government might go bankrupt, may have been instigated by Chase. In any event, Chase was consulted about it, for the war was already costing more than a million dollars a day, and with specie draining off to Europe, the price of gold on the New York market had jumped alarmingly. Seward protested that the order would “complicate the foreign situation”—England still smarted over the Trent affair, and Louis Napoleon was waiting only for some pretext to recognize the Confederacy. “It will have to be issued,” Stanton replied to Seward’s protests, “for very soon there will be no situation to complicate.”
Stanton required all firms and persons claiming to have contracts with the War Department to have them immediately validated and put in legal form on pain of cancellation. Despairing of the adequacy and trustworthiness of existing Department procedures and personnel, Stanton appointed a special investigating commission, headed by Holt and Robert Dale Owen, to audit and adjust all contracts, orders, and claims in the files of the Department relating to arms, ammunition, and ordnance. Other commissions were dispatched to various field depots to report on unsettled claims. Stanton ordered a large quantity of defective arms and clothing returned to the contractors without payment and threatened criminal action against a number of offenders.
With Stanton’s approval, and perhaps at his instigation, Congress passed laws in June and July 1862 correcting the methods of letting contracts. These laws made open and competitive bidding mandatory, forbade subletting, and stipulated that all contracts must be in writing and with loyal suppliers. Contractors were made subject to martial law and liable to court-martial if indicted for fraud. Stanton, not waiting for legislative sanction to cleanse the corrupt purchasing and inspection procedures, authorized the arrest of harness makers, food suppliers, and plumbing contractors who failed to keep their products up to the standards specified in their commitments. Later, when supplies were more plentiful, Stanton barred from all dealings with the War Department any contractor who was suspected of disloyal sentiments, and he sometimes extended this definition to embrace Democratic party affiliation.14
Among Stanton’s responsibilities, internal security became second in importance only to military matters. Lincoln had divided cabinet responsibility for the suppression of disloyalty, with most of the burden going to Secretary of State Seward out of distrust of Bates and Cameron. Seward had created a sprawling, unsystematic, undisciplined, but ubiquitous security apparatus, staffed with a congeries of federal, state, and local officials both civil and military. Many hundreds of persons were jailed on suspicion of intention to commit subversive acts, and Lincoln’s suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus made it possible to hold them indefinitely without charge.
A storm of protest had grown up in opposition to the arbitrary arrests. Democrats naturally delighted in highlighting the Lincoln administration’s harsh policy. Critics gained a substantial assist when Chief Justice Taney rebuked the President for acting unconstitutionally. The jurist, speaking for himself, not the Supreme Court, although still voicing an official judicial opinion, insisted that only Congress could suspend the writ and only in areas where the civil courts had ceased to function. Lincoln replied that the Constitution gave him the first duty to preserve the Union, and it would be gravely imperiled if the government waited until the commission of an overt act before moving against possible traitors.
He had agreed with Stanton before the new war minister took office that internal security was an inseparable part of the military responsibility, and that, as much as possible, it should be centralized in the War Department rather than placed on lower army command levels or left in irresponsible local and vigilante hands. The two men, although deeply troubled by the human suffering the arbitrary arrests imposed, were anxious that the security apparatus should prevent and punish disloyalty without further disrupting unity. They were willing to suppress civil liberties when necessary but were determined to preserve political democracy; they wanted results rather than rituals.
Neither man, therefore, suggested softening the security system, for the dangers were too immediate and real. Both wanted to reform and to expand it, to make it more reasonable, responsible, and humane, and thereby increase its utility as an adjunct of the expanding armies. Stanton took on the job of jailer knowing that it would bring him criticism even from loyal Northerners and the calumny of all others. With Lincoln’s approval, he recommended that, before the War Department assumed the task, Seward release all except the most dangerous prisoners if they would swear to refrain from giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy; this was done. Stanton then appointed another special commission—this one composed of Dix and an old friend of the law courts, New York City Democratic leader Edwards Pierrepont—to tour Northern prisons as a loyalty review board, checking on civilian prisoners of the War Department who offered to swear loyalty in order to gain release, and to lodge no suits alleging false arrest against any officials. If the government had no real evidence against the individual, Stanton’s reforms opened a way from prison for him.
To the Northern public generally, Stanton seemed like a merciful and gentle official as compared with Seward because of this policy of quickly releasing all but the most dangerous internal foes. “The favorite of the day is Mr. Stanton,” wrote English journalist William H. Russell; “he has touched the
hearts of his countrymen.… One of his boldest acts has been the liberation of the victims of the lettres de cachet of the State Department.” Grateful former prisoners and relatives and friends of released persons filled Stanton’s mail with thankful praises. One such tribute, “Called forth upon hearing the order of the Secretary of War for the release of the political prisoners,” prayed on Stanton’s behalf:
That happiness be yours that on such deeds attend
Be yours those pleasures which have no alloy
And may thy earthly cup overflow with joy
Around thy home may guardian angels play
And flowers immortal blossom on thy way …
And when life fades those spirits hovering near
May place upon thy brow the crown won here
And lead thee to the home prepared above
For those whose deeds were charity and love.
But the grim pressures of civil war soon altered the public’s picture of Stanton. In 1862 and 1863 especially, Northern prisons again filled with civilians, and although he released the majority of them after a few days or weeks at the most, Stanton lost his early reputation as a gentle reformer. He became depicted, instead, as the harsh, oppressive, vindictive taskmaster of the Union. Stanton accepted the popular verdict without attempting to defend himself. He was too busy to bother.15
Stanton realized that he knew nothing of how war was organized and there was precious little time for him to learn. But he felt that he must prepare himself. Anticipating that Lincoln would soon call on him for policy consultations and that the early impression he made would go far in determining the degree of trust the President could extend to his new Secretary of War, Stanton plunged into research on the administration of armies as he had immersed himself in the Bridge, Reaper, and California cases.
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