William Stanton, observing this “brusque and busy man,” wondered how he could keep the pace he set for himself and demanded of others. The Secretary allowed himself few regular indulgences. Three mornings a week, before going to the Department, he visited the city market, according to a practice he had begun before the war, to provide for his family table. He liked to exchange gossip and banter with the garrulous stallkeepers and in the sights and smells of a busy market to recall memories of pleasant country living. A manservant paid for his purchases—for Stanton never carried money on his person—and took the parcels home.
Like Lincoln, Stanton wore the formal frock coat and tall hat of the fashionable gentleman, but unlike the President, he was very particular about his clothes. Twice a week a soldier-clerk shaved his upper lip in his office. Sometimes when the burden of his work became unendurable, Stanton shut himself up in the office and, stretched out on the leather sofa for an hour or so, read English magazines and Dickens, being particularly fond of Littell’s Living Age and of Pickwick Papers. Apart from spending time with his family, this was his only relaxation.23
Even those who distrusted Stanton in 1862 and hated him later, had to admit that his methods, personality, and energy were what the Union needed in those dark days, and that he did not spare himself. As Stanton took hold, Dana recalled, the armies “seemed to grow,” and events quickened their pace.
Stanton’s accession to the war office accompanied changes in the rhythm and intensity of the conflict. The early fumbling of the “improvised war” was ending. He was to help to alter the nature of the conflict until Americans across the land were affected by its course.24
1 To Dana, Feb. 2, 1862, YU. On the Secretary’s office, see Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (2d ed., New York, 1887), II, 446–50 (hereafter cited as Sherman, Memoirs); Weigley, Meigs, 215–17; Louis Smith, American Democracy and Military Power (Chicago, 1951), 109; Emory Upton, The Military Policy of the United States (Washington, 1912), 74, 129, 280–1, 394; Nevins, The War for the Union: The Improvised War, 1861–1862 (New York, 1959), 164–72; T. Harry Williams, Americans at War, 47–81.
2 Wolcott MS, 179; Boston Transcript, Jan. 20, 1863.
3 Strong, Diary, III, 203; Times, April 5; Tribune, Jan. 21, 1862.
4 Malcolm Ives to James Gordon Bennett, Jan. 15, 1862, Bennett Papers, LC; Evening Press, Feb. 7, 1862; McClellan, Own Story, 155; same to Barlow, Jan. 18, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL.
5 Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Berkeley, 1959), 157–62; Flower, Stanton, 119; Maude B. Morris, “Life and Times of Pontius D. Stelle,” ColHS Records, VII, 65; Kelley, Lincoln and Stanton [Questions of the Day, No. 29] (New York, 1885), 38–9; A. E. H. Johnson in Washington Star, Nov. 11, 1895.
6 Julian, Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (Chicago, 1884), 204; Zachariah Chandler: An Outline of His Life and Public Service. By the Detroit Post and Tribune (Detroit, 1880), 219 (hereafter cited as Detroit Post, Chandler).
7 William Stanton to Edwin, Feb. 15, Edwin to William Stanton, Feb. 18, and Wade to William Stanton, March 22, 1862, owned by William Stanton Picher; Joseph Geiger to Wade, Feb. 20, 1862, Wade Papers, LC; ms diary of William T. Coggeshall, Military Secretary to Governor Dennison, Feb. 23, 1862, owned by the estate of Foreman M. Lebold (this ms is now at OHS).
8 On Seward, see correspondence owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen. Morse, Welles Diary, I, 60–1, for Chase. For Bates, Howard K. Beale (ed.), The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866 (Washington, 1933), 228 (cited henceforth as Bates, Diary); and Bates to Halleck, Jan. 31, 1862, LNLF. On the Blairs, see F. Blair, Sr., to Cameron, Jan. 30, 1863, Cameron Papers, LC; M. Blair to Andrew, Jan. 7, 1863, Andrew Papers, MHS; C. Gibson to Gov. Gamble, Jan. 6, 1863, Gamble Collection, MoHS, quotes Montgomery Blair; and Dec. 30, 1864, Patrick ms diary, LC. On social ostracism, Elizabeth Blair Lee to “Phil,” Jan. 9, 1867, Box 13, Blair-Lee Papers, PU.
9 Morse, Welles Diary, I, 60, 67–9; Beale, Welles Diary, I, xix; Chase, Diary, 64–5; B. P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1952), 295–7; William W. Pierson, Jr., “The Committee on the Conduct of the Civil War,” AHR, XXIII, 574; Dana, Lincoln and His Cabinet (Cleveland, 1896), 9–20.
10 Stanton to Lincoln, Jan. 24, 1862, Stanton MSS; William E. Doster, Lincoln and Episodes of the Civil War (New York, 1915), 126–7; IGO, Register of Reports, 1861–5, Feb. 5, 1865, RG 159, and statements of Stanton, Watson, and General G. D. Ramsay, Dyer Court of Inquiry, II, 399–400, 523, RG 153, NA; Meneely, op. cit., 374–5; E. D. Townsend, Anecdotes of the Civil War (New York, 1884), 77–8 (cited hereafter as Townsend, Anecdotes).
11 Stanton to William Stanton, March 4, 1862, owned by William Stanton Picher; same to Wade, Jan. 27, 1862, Stanton MSS; Meigs’s circular on rates, May 1, 1862, QMG Letterbook LX, 33–5, RG 107, NA; Samuel R. Kamm, The Civil War Career of Thomas A. Scott (Philadelphia, 1940), 83–5; news clips in A. E. H. Johnson scrapbook, owned by Mrs. Lois Reeside Sherrerd.
12 H. T. White to Stanton, May 19, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 319, RG 107, NA; O.R., ser. 3, I, 899; Sarah F. Hughes (ed.), Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes (Boston, 1899), I, 291.
13 David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office (New York, 1907), 39–40; Meneely, op. cit., 238, 251; McClellan to Grant, Dec. 26, 1866, McClellan Papers, LC; Roscoe Pound, “The Military Telegraph in the Civil War,” MHS Proceedings, LXVI, 185–203, and G. R. Thompson, “Civil War Signals,” MA, XVIII, 199.
14 Francis McGhan v. Lewis Clephane (1866), in WD, Letters Received, CLXIII, 175, RG 107, NA, describes penalties imposed on fraudulent and disloyal contractors; see also Stanton to Dana, June 6, 1862, Dana Papers, LC; to Henry S. Sanford, Jan. 29, Feb. 28, 1862, Sanford Papers, HML; U. S. Statutes-at-Large, XII, 441–2, 596; O. R., ser. 3, I, 927; Meneely, op. cit., 262–4, 372–3; Weigley, Meigs, 200–3.
15 Poem owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen; Russell in Washington Star, March 31, 1862; Hyman, op. cit., 139–97; Francis Lieber’s memo on habeas corpus suspension, HL.
16 Proceedings of the War Board, March 14, 21, 26, 1862, Stanton MSS, and with fuller copies supplied by Gideon Townsend Stanton; Stanton to John H. Clifford, May 7, 1867, NYHS. On attitude toward officers, see Doster, op. cit., 118; Theodore C. Smith (ed.), Life and Letters of James A. Garfield (New Haven, 1925), I, 238 (hereafter cited as Smith, Garfield).
17 Speed to Holt, Feb. 4, 1862, Holt Papers, LC; Colonel L. C. Duncan, “The Strange Case of Surgeon-General Hammond,” Military Surgeon, LXIV, 102–3; Watson to Wade, Feb. 11, 1862, Wade Papers, LC; New York Times, Jan. 25, 1862.
18 Pritchett to Cameron, Feb. 2, 1862, Cameron Papers, LC; Dawes to Mrs. Dawes, Feb. 11, 1862, Dawes Papers, LC; Stanton to Dana, Feb. 23, 1862, Ac. 2626, Dana Papers, LC; Wolcott MS, 180; Barlow to Stanton, Feb. 23, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL.
19 Townsend, Anecdotes, 79–80; Samuel Wilkeson to Cameron, Feb. 12, 1862, Cameron Papers, LC.
20 Doster, op. cit., 114–17; William Stanton to Mrs. 0. S. Picher, Oct. 12, 1907, owned by William Stanton Picher; Bates to Stanton, Letterbook C, 254, RG 60, NA.
21 Stanton to Dana, Feb. 1, 1862, Ac. 2626, Dana Papers, LC; to Buell, O.R., X, pt. 2, 617; Meneely, op. cit., 371–3. The incident involving Mrs. Lincoln is in Boston Daily Evening Transcript, Jan. 7, 1870, and was undoubtedly written by Stanton’s friend Horatio Woodman; see Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (Boston, 1953), 323–4; on relatives see William Stanton to Mrs. O. S. Picher, Oct. 12, 1907, owned by William Stanton Picher.
22 Wade to William Stanton, March 9, 1863, Feb. 5, 1864, owned by William Stanton Picher; on Tappan, photo of Stanton’s and Lincoln’s endorsements on the application, May 13, 23, 1862, Washington, D.C., Evening Star, Aug. 9, 1960 (document discovered by Mr. Joseph F. Thompson, Jr., and reproduced in University of Kentucky Library, Lincoln Facsimile, No. 9, Jan. 1961).
23 Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary, 115; Hughes, op. cit., I, 288; Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary Stanton,” CM, XXXIII, 75–86; Johnson, �
��Reminiscences of Hon. Edwin M. Stanton,” loc. cit., 79; William Stanton to Mrs. 0. S. Picher, Oct. 12, 1907, owned by William Stanton Picher; Stanton to Ramsay, June 28, 1863, HL; Sprague to Barlow, Aug. 2, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL.
24 Dana, Lincoln and his Cabinet, 20.
CHAPTER VIII
ORGANIZING VICTORY
ON THE huge map which he ordered placed near his desk during his first day as War Secretary, Stanton could see what the Union had achieved in nine months of civil war. Considering the unready state of the nation when Sumter fell, there had been great accomplishments. Scratch forces had taken important rebel fortifications off the Carolinas. Westward, improvised armies had saved Kentucky and Missouri from secession, were enlarging a Unionist center around Wheeling, and were poised to move toward Tennessee and Arkansas.
In the East, likewise, swift and brave action had thwarted Maryland’s secessionists, and the safety of Washington was no longer a daily gamble. Since Bull Run blighted hopes of a swift victory, McClellan had wrought vast improvements in the spirit, discipline, and drill-field performance of the greatly augmented Army of the Potomac. But though the huge force McClellan commanded now maneuvered with impressive snap, it fought only a few indecisive skirmishes. Nothing he accomplished compared with the successes of Union commanders in the Mississippi Valley.
Throughout the last half of 1861, Stanton had shared in the Northern expectation that McClellan was readying a massive onslaught southward. He came to the war office convinced that the general’s immobility had been a tragic error, permitting the South to improve its defenses. During his first days in the war office, Stanton gained information that sustained him in this conviction.
Consulting the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, and examining their files, Stanton found ample evidence, partly from McClellan’s own generals, that he had merely been toying with an army which had been fully prepared to advance against the enemy for many months, and even now had no plan for throwing it into action. Nor could Stanton have failed to note during the past months that McClellan possessed many of those qualities that he found obnoxious in the professional military man—swagger, ostentation, questionable professional competence, and contempt for the civil government. Viewing the general from a new vantage point, Stanton quickly adopted the low opinion of him that the committee entertained. Committeeman Julian was delighted that Stanton “agreed with us fully in our estimate of McClellan and as to the necessity of an early forward movement.”
Stanton’s ability to master great masses of complex data with extraordinary rapidity was exhibited as never before. After four days of this education, Stanton advised Dana confidentially that McClellan “has got to fight or run away; and while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.”
Probably on the same day he wrote to Dana, January 24, Stanton talked with Lincoln. The Secretary argued that McClellan should quickly bring war to the enemy. To his pleased surprise, Stanton learned that the President had also concluded that the North must mount concerted military offensives in order to crack the Confederacy. McClellan’s inactivity had already strained Lincoln’s patience. Stanton’s estimation of Lincoln commenced an ascent that never slackened; his view of McClellan began a descent that he never found reason to alter.1
Three days after this meeting, Lincoln issued a general order, which Stanton helped to inspire, commanding all the Union armies to make a concerted advance by Washington’s Birthday. Four days later a special order from the White House enjoined the Army of the Potomac to begin an overland advance toward Richmond within the time prescribed.
It brought an immediate protest from McClellan. He wanted to leave his position in front of Washington, transport his army by water to Urbana, on the Rappahannock River, and advance on Richmond from there. Neither Lincoln nor Stanton thought well of the plan. It meant further delay, and it would leave Washington uncovered. Stanton would have rejected it out of hand, but Lincoln decided to get the opinions of McClellan’s division commanders. Seven of them voted for McClellan’s proposal unconditionally, and one more approved it provided that the Confederate batteries along the Potomac were first reduced. Four opposed McClellan’s project, but only two of these supported the more direct offensive that Lincoln and Stanton had endorsed.
“We saw ten generals afraid to fight” was Stanton’s comment. Lincoln, who two weeks earlier had felt so desperate about the immobility of the Union armies that he had thought of personally taking field command, agreed that Stanton’s analysis was probably correct, but thought it unwise for two inexperienced civilians to place their judgment above the opinions of the generals. Though Lincoln did not revoke his order for a direct attack on Richmond, he tacitly assented to the council’s verdict. On February 27, Stanton, albeit reluctantly, instructed Assistant Secretary Tucker to begin assembling transports to move the army down Chesapeake Bay.
Lincoln’s curious military orders, and his contradictory willingness to defer to McClellan, reflect the indefiniteness of power relationships and allocations of functions at this time. As the war progressed, things changed, so that Lincoln’s intercessions in military strategy became fewer. But the President, as he learned how to steer the ship of state, kept firm control of the policy wheel. A succession of generals and civil officials learned to their sorrow of his determination to be master in his White House. Stanton sensed this sooner than most, and bent his own impetuous will to the decisions of his superior.2
However, Lincoln was never fully able to co-ordinate the efforts of his cabinet officers; indeed, he never realized the need to do so. Since November 1861, the Navy Department had been preparing to attack New Orleans, and Welles had ordered that all news of the plan be withheld from the War Department for fear that details would leak to the enemy. He had, however, taken McClellan into the secret because troops would be needed to occupy the city once the Navy had won it.
But paunchy, prying General Benjamin F. Butler, Massachusetts Democratic politician turned soldier, was able somehow to sniff out Welles’s plan, and he told Stanton of it. Stanton, as Welles recalled, “seized hold of the information [on the New Orleans expedition] with avidity and gave hearty support to the movement.” As Stanton had learned of the secret, Welles did not rebuff him, perhaps because McClellan had been indifferent toward the project and had shilly-shallied about appointing anyone to command the troops. But soon after Stanton entered the war office, McClellan gave Butler the command.3
Now it was obvious to Stanton that McClellan’s voice was to dominate strategy in the East; the New Orleans campaign was primarily a navy show. The vital midwestern region, controlling the complex of the Ohio and northern Mississippi rivers and the immensely important tier of slaveholding border states, clamored for the attention of the officials in Washington. Stanton was still distrustful of the bureau heads in the War Department, and sent Assistant Secretary Scott on a tour of the Midwest.
Lincoln had been disappointed in Buell, commanding the Army of the Ohio, because of his failure to move into eastern Tennessee, where Unionists were being harassed by the Confederates. But Scott reported that Buell had been immobilized by bad weather and poor roads; moreover, Buell had a better plan. With forty or fifty thousand troops from the inactive Army of the Potomac, Buell would break the Confederate defense line along the railroad from Bowling Green to Columbus, occupy both Nashville and Memphis, and then have a permanent base for future operations in the heart of the enemy’s country.
Buell also pointed out to Scott the necessity of achieving better coordination between the Union armies in the West. General Ulysses S. Grant, one of Halleck’s commanders, was operating within the area of Buell’s command at that moment, but Halleck had made no effort to put him in rapport with Buell. Grant, in conjunction with a fleet of gunboats under Commodore Andrew H. Foote, had just captured Fort Henry, eighty miles up the Tennessee River from the Union base at Paducah; but Buell warned that at Fort Donelson, on th
e Cumberland, the Confederates were building up a strong force. Grant would be obliged to retire and might even be cut off unless quickly reinforced, and Buell could send him little help because of the miry roads.
This advice from the scene of action impressed the civilians in Washington. Stanton wired Buell on February 9 that Lincoln wanted the western commanders to co-operate, and “says that your two heads together will succeed.” But co-operation was not won so easily as this. Grant moved to invest Fort Donelson. Word came to the War Department that Foote’s gunboats had taken a severe battering and been obliged to draw off. Grant was in a predicament. It began to appear that Buell had been right.
Stanton fretted and worried. “We have had a disaster, I think, at Fort Donaldson [sic],” he wrote Chase, “and I apprehend still worse results, unless movements are forced from the Potomac.”
Then, on February 17, news came that after a bloody fight in bitter weather, Grant, assisted by General C. F. Smith, had won Donelson and had taken more than 14,000 prisoners. It was Monday, and Stanton’s reception room was jammed when he read Grant’s “unconditional surrender” dispatch to the crowd. Jumping with excitement, Stanton proposed three cheers in Grant’s honor; the shouts, a clerk wrote Cameron, “shook the old walls, broke all the spiders’ webs, and set the rats scampering.”
Meanwhile, Scott had moved on to appraise the situation at St. Louis. Halleck, in command there, agreed with Buell that fifty thousand troops from the Army of the Potomac should be sent West. But he thought that he, not Buell, should have them. Halleck also suggested that Buell, Grant, and Pope be made major generals, “and give me command in the West. I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.”
Lincoln and Stanton were a jump ahead of the immodest Halleck so far as Grant was concerned, for that night Stanton brought the President a nomination promoting him. The Secretary was exuberant, complaining only that John B. Floyd, his former colleague in Buchanan’s cabinet and now a Confederate general, had escaped from Donelson.4
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