The nation boasted almost no professional military literature, and its army officers maintained no permanent, critical journal of military thought. Stanton turned to the professional soldiers, and organized the Army’s bureau chiefs into a primitive kind of general staff. Association with the career army officers on War Department duty quickly tempered his distrust of the soldier, though he continued to respect men in the ranks more than those sporting gold braid. Although Stanton became willing to proffer his personal esteem and trust to volunteer and regular officers who proved their competence, he never esteemed their profession. He saw a potential dictator in every general who vaunted his self-importance, was contemptuous of incompetent commanders who were too toplofty to learn the craft of war, and firmly believed that the civil arm must use the military and not be used by it. All these were typical attitudes of his generation and he shared them with millions of other Americans.
But to function effectively as secretary of a war, Stanton had to modify some of these preconceptions, though he never abandoned their fundamental spirit. Paradoxically, he came to love the citizens’ army and to revere the men who in its service sacrificed their lives and health. From his war council, he grew to appreciate the endless complexities involved in building a war machine. Stanton also came to sense the soldier’s conviction of mission, and he ultimately accepted the military man’s identification of the Army’s welfare with the nation’s destiny. That Lincoln also intuitively grasped this equation became the first and strongest bond between the two men.
His war board improvisation at least afforded Stanton a degree of insight into army operations that Cameron had never even sought to achieve. The board consisted of Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, whom Stanton detested on sight; Meigs, the hard-working, combative Quartermaster General; General James W. Ripley, Chief of Ordnance; General Joseph G. Totten, Chief Engineer; and Colonel Joseph P. Taylor, Commissary General—reinforced by any field officer who might be in Washington, and later by Stanton’s “military aide,” General E. R. S. Canby, a tough young combat veteran. Stanton met with the board several times each week, and the verbatim reports of its sessions give penetrating insight into his rough, effective method.
Meigs reported at one meeting that a quartermaster had asked for authority to buy artillery horses. Stanton answered: “Authorize him to buy, but tell him that … the present Secretary of War holds it as a principle of law that any Quartermaster or any agent of the government who gives more for an article than the market price, will be held liable for the difference.” An officer had complained that a Cameron appointee serving under him was unfit for the service. Stanton asked why Meigs did not authorize the man’s dismissal. “If you will take the responsibility and do your duty, I shall not haul you over the coals,” he said.
A matter touching a close friend of the President arose when it was alleged that Colonel Edward D. Baker, killed at the battle of Ball’s Bluff, had failed to account for money granted to him to raise a regiment. A Philadelphia firm had submitted a bill for $600, duly attested, which it had spent, on Baker’s authorization, for newspaper advertisements soliciting recruits. Stanton told Thomas to advise the firm to make claim against Baker’s estate. “I hear that Baker had an interest in contracts for clothing,” Stanton said, “and I would tell these parties that he had no lawful authority to bind the United States.… I would just reject the account, and send the parties to the Court of Claims.”
Stanton noticed that General “Jim” Lane, a Kansas senator, who had bivouacked a “Frontier Guard” in the East Room of the White House during the first trying days of the war, was an outstanding offender in the matter of illegally overblown staff rosters. Recently the President had offered him the command of an expedition into Arkansas. Now Lane was pirating officers from eastern commands, and Thomas did not know where he had gone.
“I would not hunt for him or his staff,” said Stanton.
“But his staff are on duty,” answered Thomas.
“I would stop their pay,” said Stanton.
“But I want to discharge them,” protested Thomas.
“Well, strike them from the rolls,” said Stanton.
“One of the persons on the staff the President does not want discharged. If I discharge one I must discharge all.”
“While I administer this office, I will not sanction an abuse of that kind. Discharge them all,” rumbled Stanton. “If the President don’t like it, let him so intimate, and I will retire.”16
Stanton’s energy quickly permeated the War Department. Heads of bureaus, accustomed to the leisurely, gentlemanly procedures of earlier Secretaries, were startled to find “Report Forthwith” scrawled across papers he referred to them, in the harsh, strong script they were to come to know so well. Applicants for interviews with the Secretary, even influential senators such as Wade, were amazed to receive appointments at 9 a.m., a previously unheard-of hour. On public days, Stanton held reception hours at 10 a.m. and at 3 p.m., and while crowds waited in his anteroom he met with one person at a time, standing at a chest-high writing desk for all the world like a hectoring minister. The desk was there at the suggestion of doctors, who, concerned that Stanton took no exercise, hoped that a peripatetic office regimen might be of some benefit.
Stanton’s unresting efforts brought quick results. Joshua F. Speed, calling at the Department to obtain arms for use in Kentucky, wrote to Holt that he had “accomplished in a few days what heretofore would have taken as many weeks.… Instead of that loose shackling way of doing business in the War Office, with which I have been so disgusted & which I have had so good an opportunity of seeing—there is now—order, regularity and precision.” He expected Stanton to “infuse into the whole army an energy & activity which we have not seen heretofore.”17
But some old-timers in the Department were not so greatly impressed. K. Pritchett, a clerk, writing to let Cameron know how things were coming along without him, complained of “a general moan around the walls of the Department. It appears in truth as if daily confusion grows worse confounded.… We have orders upon orders, all seeming predicated upon the idea that every thing heretofore was disorder and fraud.” Papers were now filed “under as many heads as the curiosities at Barnum’s museum.” To find anything was like “digging out a badger with the aid of a dozen ferrets and as many terriers.” With legal-minded Assistant Secretary Watson every letter was a “Declaration,” every order an “Indictment,” Pritchett reported, and asserted that Meigs felt distressed at his inability to “penetrate the rubbish, and get at the new machinery to set his wheels a’going, which are all at a standstill for want of motion of the main shaft, the tinkering and oiling occupying all the time and nothing done.” Clerks worked until midnight, sometimes until three in the morning. “Secretary Stanton is doubtless a great man, since you have endorsed him,” conceded Pritchett; but it seemed to persons in the Department that he showed “but little sympathy and small appreciation for labors that are breaking many of us down.”
Stanton asked no more of others than he was willing to do himself. Seldom quitting the Department before ten o’clock at night, he was the first to break down, confirming the fears of his friend Barlow that he was working too hard. Less than a month after taking over, he collapsed one day in his office, suffering, Lorenzo Thomas reported, “with a rush of blood to the head.” An army ambulance took Stanton home, and Washington blossomed with rumors of a change in the cabinet. Congressman Dawes wrote: “My heart has never so failed me as when I heard it. It did seem to me as though God had turned his face away from us and we were left to utter wreck.” But Stanton was suffering merely from exhaustion; he was back at work within four days, boasting of being able to exceed his former schedule. When, later in February, a rumor spread that he was again ill, he wrote to Dana: “I was at the Department or in Cabinet from 9 a.m. until 9 at night & never enjoyed more perfect health.”
Watson, who like his superior officer kept working until he could scarcely stand, became i
ll and, as Stanton phrased it, broke down “flat.” Stanton ordered him home and instructed the sentries at the door not to admit Watson to the building until Stanton told them to.18
Stanton’s brief illness afforded the employees a chance to catch their breath. Cameron heard that General Thomas’s legs were reduced to the thickness of pipe stems from standing at Stanton’s elbow, “ready to be questioned in behalf of the service,” and Thomas and another Department officer, reminiscing over the easier days, “yesterday compared the present with the past and we sighed for a good old gentleman [Cameron] … up in Pennsylvania,” who had delightfully mingled social courtesies with the intelligent and prompt dispatch of business.
General Thomas had found himself in an unenviable position under Stanton. Suspecting him of disloyalty, the Secretary felt that Thomas was “only fit for presiding over a crypt of Egyptian mummies like himself.” Unable to pin any specific charge on Thomas, Stanton sent him off on frequent field trips and assigned his duties to able, discreet, hard-working General E. D. Townsend.19
Business in the War Department began officially at nine o’clock. As Stanton’s carriage turned off Pennsylvania Avenue around that time, the doorkeeper would stick his head inside and announce: “The Secretary.” The word spread; stragglers and loungers scurried to their desks, and the place quivered with activity. Alighting from his carriage, Stanton was usually beset by favor seekers waiting on the side-walk. He might stop for a word with an enlisted soldier or a needy-looking woman, but he would curtly tell the others to go to his reception room upstairs.
Proceeding to his private office on the second floor in a corner overlooking the White House, Stanton immediately began pulling on the tasseled cord that set a bell to jangling in the hallway and brought messengers on the run. All day that bell would jangle like a “moral tone,” as one clerk put it, “filling the ears and minds of the working staff with lessons of duty and necessity.”
Stanton considered it a duty to see as many business callers as he could, but it was impossible to give everyone a private audience, and even cabinet colleagues, senators, and representatives, sometimes finding it impossible to see him, took “potluck” with the crowd in his reception room. Colonel James A. Hardie, a handsome officer who spoke with a Scotch burr, presided in this room, ascertaining each caller’s business and dispatching it if he could, or sending in the names of those individuals whom he thought the Secretary would wish to interview personally. Naturally, those not admitted were offended, and Attorney General Bates once protested, after being stopped at Stanton’s door, that Stanton’s clerks were actually empowered to “prevent the meeting and consultation of the heads of Departments.”
The reception room was always jammed. Stanton, emerging from his office, walked across the room with a somewhat awkward gait because of his stiff knee and took his place behind the high desk. Waving back those who approached him, he would make a slow, deliberate scrutiny of the crowd, confer briefly with Hardie to learn whether any cases merited special attention, then summon someone forward. Soldiers usually got first chance, then soldiers’ wives or widows. If a soldier carried crutches or showed the marks of wounds, Stanton often left the desk and talked to him where he sat. Wounded officers were also granted solicitous attention; otherwise shoulder-straps were likely to meet a cool reception. Everyone was required to state his business quickly in the hearing of the others.
Stanton personified force and competence as he stood behind the tall desk, looking each visitor squarely, almost defiantly, in the eye, his own eyes glittering through his steel-rimmed spectacles, his broad nostrils tremulous when he became excited, his wide forehead flushed and often perspiring, his complexion dark and mottled as though from high living, his dark hair beginning to thin a bit, and his lips compressed above his immense black beard, which gave off a mixed odor of tobacco and cologne. Middle age had put a considerable amount of flesh on his short frame. His movements were deliberate, almost studied. He reminded Provost Marshal William E. Doster of a school-master who had had a poor night’s sleep.
At Stanton’s entrance a hush fell on the room. People conversed under their breath, and the clerks and orderlies moved about with soft-footed deference. “ ‘Influential’ people tried their influence only once,” Doster declared, “acquaintances at the bar tried it and were rebuffed, corrupt people found themselves suspected before they drew near. Women in tears, venerable old men, approached slowly—but withdrew quickly as if they had touched hot iron. A few got what they wanted and earned it in the getting.”
The Secretary’s brusque rudeness, Doster acutely realized, was in part natural to his character, and sometimes he assumed it as a protection against influential favor seekers, especially congressmen.20 Stanton decided to request the Senate, many of whose members were guilty of absorbing excessive amounts of War Department energy in seeking commissions and contracts for constituents, to suspend confirmation of military appointments and promotions until he could scan the list of more than 1,400 names with a view to rewarding “merit or honors in the field.” The existing system, he wrote General Don Carlos Buell, “has been against my judgment and wishes.”
Stanton’s efforts to take army appointments out of politics brought strident complaints from the spoilsmen. “The pressure of members of Congress for clerk & army appointments [increases] notwithstanding the most stringent rules,” he complained to Dana; “and the persistent strain against all measures essential to obtain time for thought, combination, and conference is damaging in the extreme.” Stanton grew momentarily discouraged—“It often tempts me to quit the helm in despair,” he confessed—but his spirits bounced back with the need for action. He was able to arrange the Department schedule so that congressmen had Saturdays reserved for their patronage business. From Tuesday through Thursday of each week only matters directly relating to active military operations were permitted; the public could call only on Mondays, and Stanton would see no one at his home on business. Some congressmen complained, but Stanton maintained his stand, even against Mrs. Lincoln.
The day after he took office, a man Stanton recalled as “one of those indescribable half loafers, half gentlemen,” came to him with a card from the President’s wife, bearing the request that he be given a commissary’s appointment. Stanton lost his temper, tore up the card, and excitedly told the man that “the fact that you bring me such a card would prevent me giving it to you.”
The next day, “with a kind of small triumph in his eye,” the persistent job seeker returned, this time with Mrs. Lincoln’s formal request that he be placed. Stanton tore up this letter as he had the card, later that day called on Mary Lincoln, and lectured her on her duties to the nation and to her husband. She subdued her own temper, told the war minister that he had been correct, and promised never to bother him again with such requests. Stanton was proud that he almost never allowed personal relationships or official connections to swerve him from duty.21
For example, Ben Wade used the full force of his influence in an attempt to obtain a commission for William Stanton; reporting failure, Wade informed the younger man: “He placed it entirely on the ground of relationship; I argued against him and told him it was a great hardship to place you on any worse ground on that account, but could not argue him out of the absurd position he had taken.” When his nephew Benjamin Tappan, Jr., the son of Stanton’s beloved sister Oella, applied for a commission in the regular army, Stanton rejected the application, maintaining that to accept it would violate his rule against such appointments except as a reward for meritorious service. Then Lincoln interceded, writing that if Stanton “knows no objection … except that he is a relative of his, let him be appointed on my responsibility.”22
Stanton’s sternness toward favor seekers so impressed everyone that John Hay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, felt it preferable to “make a tour of a smallpox hospital” rather than to ask special favors from Stanton; businessman Forbes asked a friend for “such a letter … as will convince him
that I do not come to steal anything from ‘Uncle Sam’ ”; and Stanton’s onetime friend, political intimate, and professional associate, Barlow, learned from Governor William Sprague that “the Secretary of War will permit no interference in matters like that of which you request my influence.”
Working like a man driven, Stanton expected the same dedicated performance from his subordinates. Once the gruff Secretary surprised hard-working Colonel Ramsay, of the Washington Arsenal, with an order to go on leave: “You have a right to relaxation & I pray you take it.” But Stanton rarely felt that he had the same right himself.
Overwork did not sweeten Stanton’s temper. A word taken amiss or a gesture subject to misconstruction caused him to explode, and with a quick snap he would dash his glasses from before his eyes as though they obstructed his vision, thrusting them far back on his flushed forehead, while the muscles of his face twitched spasmodically and his voice trembled with passion. “But the storm would pass away as quickly as it came,” a clerk recalled, “and be succeeded by a calmness of demeanor almost as painful by reason of the sudden contrast.” If the victim was a subordinate, Stanton at their next meeting would put his hand on the man’s shoulder in a kindly and seemingly unconscious manner, or comment that he looked tired and must take a little rest, and perhaps invite him to share a simple luncheon. If the offended person stood high in the Department, Stanton might tell him an important piece of news in confidence. He was reluctant to apologize directly and tried to find some other means of expiation, even if it amounted to no more than a word of appreciation for a new blotter on his desk.
Writing on the back of an envelope, Lincoln approves a commission in the Army for Stanton’s nephew, Benjamin Tappan, Jr., but the Secretary of War “declines to make the appointment.” (illustrations credit 7.1)
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