Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Stanton saw to it that, as much as possible, generals were in command who would go along with Lincoln’s policy once it was announced. This in part underlay his attacks on McClellan and other high officers, and explains the surprise move in mid-December, when Lincoln relieved Butler of command at New Orleans, putting Banks in his place. Butler had brought order to the city, but his highhanded methods nevertheless permitted corruption and had made him a controversial figure. Arriving in Washington, Butler proceeded to the White House. Lincoln received him cordially, but when Butler inquired why he had been recalled, the President referred him to Stanton. The Secretary was as close-mouthed as the President. Butler left his office bitterly aware of the swarm of rumors concerning the reasons for his dismissal. It seems most likely that he did not appear to Lincoln or to Stanton the proper man to administer the new policy with respect to Negroes.

  Although the holiday season in Washington was saddened by Burnside’s defeat, government officers opened their homes in traditional fashion on New Year’s Day. Noah Brooks, a newspaper correspondent on close terms with Lincoln, wrote that at Stanton’s “there was much elegance and profuseness of hospitality,” and his “face wore no sign of the worry that must have distressed him on that anxious, unfestive day.” Emancipation and Negro enlistments were sweet words to Stanton.

  Lincoln issued the proclamation, freeing all slaves in areas still in rebellion, and announcing that “such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison and defend forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.” Butler, tarrying in Washington, let it be known that he concurred heartily in Lincoln’s policy, and Sumner, learning this, imparted some information to him. “Mr. Stanton assured me last evening,” said Sumner, “that had he known your real position with regard to the proclamation he would have cut off his right hand before he would have allowed anybody to take your place; that his fixed purpose was that on the 1st of January a general should be in command at New Orleans to whom the proclamation would be a living letter, and that, in this respect, it was natural, after the recent elections in Pennsylvania and New York, that he should look to a Republican rather than to an old Democrat.”

  After talking to Stanton, Sumner had gone on to see the President, who assured him that he hoped very soon to return Butler to New Orleans, thereby indicating that he and Stanton were in agreement on this matter. Soon afterward, Lincoln called Butler to the White House and proposed that he return to Louisiana and raise a Negro army there. But Butler did not wish to serve as a mere recruiting agent; he wanted to be restored to his old command.

  Telling Stanton that he would like to send Butler back to New Orleans, if it could be managed without offending Banks, Lincoln remembered that Banks had wanted to lead an expedition into Texas. This would leave the way clear for Butler to take over again in New Orleans. Stanton went so far as to draw up orders effecting both of these objects. But Seward, because of the opposition of foreign governments to the general, objected so strenuously to Butler’s reappointment that they were never issued.6

  Meanwhile, fearfully shaken by the disaster at Fredericksburg, Burnside saw no way to redress it except by attacking again. But he had utterly lost the confidence of the men serving under him, and the discipline, morale, and efficiency of his army had completely broken down. Hooker talked loudly of Burnside’s incompetence and of the administration’s imbecility. He declared that the country needed a dictator. In view of the demoralization of the army, Lincoln told Burnside not to order a general advance without first letting him know.

  Burnside came to the White House on New Year’s morning and offered Lincoln his resignation. He told Halleck and Stanton in Lincoln’s presence that they should resign, too, in order to restore public confidence. Lincoln calmed the excited Burnside and he returned to the army. But he insisted that the evasive Halleck either approve or veto his plan to attack again. Halleck continued to side-step until Lincoln finally wrote him: “If in such a difficulty you do not help, you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance.” The rebuke offended Halleck and he tendered his resignation. He withdrew it when the harassed Lincoln withdrew the offending letter. Stanton, keeping his mouth shut, stayed out of the imbroglio.

  With the halfhearted approval of Halleck, Burnside moved his army up the river to effect a crossing. The heavens opened, a torrential rain fell, and the army, bogging down in deep mud, finally floundered back to Falmouth.

  Burnside came again to the White House and demanded that Lincoln either allow him to clean house by discharging Hooker and other complaining and intriguing officers or accept his resignation. On the morning of January 25, Lincoln called Halleck and Stanton to his office and told them he had decided to relieve Burnside and put Hooker in command. Both Halleck and Stanton would have preferred to transfer Rosecrans to the Army of the Potomac, but Lincoln did not ask for their opinion. He chose Hooker because that general had a reputation as a fighter and stood higher in popular esteem at that moment than any other eastern general. But in giving Hooker the assignment, Lincoln informed him frankly that he was “not quite satisfied” with him because of his loose talk about a dictatorship and his disloyalty to Burnside. A clerk in the War Department asserted that when Hooker was given command of the Army of the Potomac, Stanton’s first impulse was to resign, but his sense of duty kept him at his post.7 Perhaps Lincoln insisted that he stay, for at this time Stanton was deeply involved with his chief in a political plan of immense importance.

  Although the presidential election of 1864 was still a long way off, the Democratic bosses were already grooming McClellan, now in retirement, for that party’s nomination. The catastrophic fall election of 1862 and the effects of the Fredericksburg defeat had almost convinced Lincoln that the Republicans were destined to lose control of the government, and the worried President hoped that if the Democrats did come to power, they would do so under leadership that would continue the war for the Union. He therefore took immediate steps, with Stanton’s help, to dull the McClellan boom.

  Lincoln broached a proposition to Thurlow Weed that Democratic Governor Seymour, of New York, be his successor in the presidential office. Weed’s account of this incident has been discredited as a phantom of an old man’s mind. But soon after, Stanton’s friend Edwards Pierrepont offered Seymour the “entire force and zeal and vast energy of the War Department” to help secure him the Democracy’s nod as its next presidential candidate. With Stanton’s backing, Seymour would be sure to win, Pierrepont asserted, and then the Democratic party would unite the North as never before and in harmony with Republicans quickly bring the war to a successful conclusion.

  Taken by itself, this letter would stamp Stanton with perfidy toward Lincoln in its promise to Seymour of War Department support. But in connection with Weed’s assertion that Lincoln was in favor of Seymour as the Democratic leader most likely to continue the war, it indicates that the President and his “Mars” were working hand in glove.8 Seymour soon began to exhibit such strong states’ rights convictions, however, that Lincoln changed his mind about him. And, like most Republican leaders, Lincoln proved to be unwilling to lose power by default.

  To stem the Democratic resurgence following upon Fredericksburg, Republican congressmen began what amounted to a campaign of extermination against Democratic generals. Stanton prompted and joined in on this politicians’ vendetta. His co-operation with the legislators is explicable only when Lincoln’s Negro enlistment policy is kept in mind. He was pleased when the powerful Committee on the Conduct of the War renewed an investigation of the Army of the Potomac and put McClellan, nervous and resentful, on the griddle. Stanton secretly provided information from Department files so that Republican senators could launch a new smear campaign against West Point graduates. After Stanton relieved General Franklin of his command in the Army of the Potomac and sent him to the western frontier, it was widely rumored that other
“McClellanite” officers were destined for similar treatment.

  Goaded by the charges made in Congress against them, both McDowell and Buell asked Stanton for a court of inquiry. Stanton disliked McDowell intensely, but he granted the general’s request and the court exonerated him. Yet Stanton never again employed him in the field.

  In addition to disliking Buell, Stanton suspected him of conspiring to discredit Rosecrans in order to regain command, and he knew that Buell was opposed to the administration’s emancipation policy. Not wishing to afford Buell the opportunity to put his case before the country, Stanton refused his request for an open court of inquiry, allowing him only a secret hearing before a military commission. It was a court-martial under another name. Though Piatt, whom Stanton chose to represent the government, lodged no charges against Buell, he unfairly impugned both his ability and his loyalty.

  Another court-martial convicted Fitz-John Porter, McClellan’s closest friend, of insubordination based on charges brought by Pope after Second Bull Run. Porter was dismissed from the service. To McClellan’s supporters in the Army, as to more recent commentators, it was a rigged trial, although no evidence exists that Stanton packed these courts and Stanton’s own notes indicate that he awaited the court’s decision in the Porter case with considerable uneasiness and suspense.9

  Stanton was also closely involved in the persecution of General Charles P. Stone, who had once stood close to McClellan. Far back in 1861, a detachment of Stone’s troops had suffered a minor disaster at Ball’s Bluff. Ugly suspicions of disloyalty began to center on Stone. The general played into the hands of his traducers when he forbade fugitive slaves from seeking asylum within his lines. Criticized in Congress for his tender regard for slaveowners, Stone insinuated that his detractors, especially Senator Sumner, were cowardly slackers. That was enough for the Committee on the Conduct of the War, which soon gathered a mass of hearsay evidence suggesting that Stone was disloyal.

  Chairman Wade presented this evidence to Stanton, who had just become War Secretary. It proved to Stanton that West Pointers like Stone were too solicitous concerning slavery and far too cavalier toward their civilian overlords. Stanton directed McClellan to place Stone under arrest. McClellan suggested that Stone be given a military trial, but Stanton would only allow him to appear before the committee.

  Stone never had a chance. The committee would not reveal the charges against him or the names of his accusers. Stone’s arrogance vanished. Rearrested, he was placed in solitary confinement. Stanton sent McClellan all pleas for mitigation of Stone’s confinement or for a review of his case. But McClellan by this time was under heavy fire from the committee and deemed it inadvisable to antagonize the legislators by aiding Stone. Though no specific charges were ever made against Stone, he remained a prisoner for six months.

  It required an act of Congress to pry Stone loose. Returning to Washington, he sought vindication. Lincoln, Stanton, and other officials listened to him with apparent sympathy, each blaming Stone’s troubles on someone else. Stanton again refused Stone a court of inquiry, but he did permit him to appear before the Committee on the Conduct of the War.

  Allowed at last to meet specific accusations, Stone acquitted himself on all counts and was restored to a minor command.10 Unable to live down the accusations that had been brought against him, however, he soon resigned from the Army.

  It never occurred to Stanton that a Secretary of War owed his officers greater protection from unfair army hearings or from overzealous congressmen than he accorded to Stone or the others. To be sure, all the generals who ran afoul of him had shown too much military arrogance and Democratic partisanship to enlist Stanton’s sympathy. Still worse, in his reasoning, they formed the centers in the Army for pockets of conservative sentiment regarding slavery. By mid-1862, Stanton felt that this attitude was giving the enemy aid and comfort. Six months later, with Lincoln determined to have the Army accept Negro troops into its ranks and with the Democrats booming McClellan for President, Stanton looked on these officers as unworthy of any support. In championing McClellan they defied their commander in chief.

  What it amounts to is that the war had brought the Army into politics. Only generals who won battles, Stanton felt, had a right to express themselves on policy matters, but even they, if overruled, must obey their constitutional superiors. Officers who time and again failed to gain victories had far less justification to presume to shape policy. No officer had the right to treat the President, the Secretary, or Republican congressmen with contempt.

  Politics was a dangerous game with its own set of rules. Army officers who “indulge in the sport,” Stanton wrote in a memorandum to Lincoln, perhaps to assuage the President’s uneasiness concerning the Republican attacks on Democratic generals, “must risk being gored. They can not, having exposed themselves, claim the procedural protections and immunities of the military profession.”

  Apparently Stanton’s argument convinced Lincoln. The President made no serious effort to soften the blows which rained down from Capitol Hill and from the War Department upon the heads of McClellan’s friends in the Army.11

  Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and his consent to the arming of Negro troops wiped out all major differences of opinion on those subjects between him and Stanton. Both men now bent their efforts toward implementing the new policy. Stanton told Watson that his aim now was to “carry out the great scheme of emancipation so as to overcome the rebellion.” The use of Negroes in uniform was to be another phase of the all-out war effort.

  The government had scarcely announced the new policy of Negro enlistment when zealous Governor Andrew obtained Stanton’s permission to recruit a colored regiment in Massachusetts. Unable to fill up the unit there because of the dearth of resident Negroes, Andrew asked Stanton for permission to recruit them in other states. Turned down by the Secretary, Andrew side-stepped by forming a private recruiting organization whose far-flung activities moved the Washington National Intelligencer to comment that its agents “will shortly turn up in Egypt, competing with Napoleon for the next cargo of Nubians.”

  A flood of messages came from other Northern governors, objecting to Andrew’s activities and insisting that Negroes recruited in their states be credited to their own enlistment quotas. The border states were particularly averse to serving as a recruiting ground for Massachusetts, and it became evident that Negro enlistments, like the administration of the draft, must be under federal control. When Stanton’s friend in Congress, Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, proposed legislation empowering the loyal states to recruit Negroes in occupied portions of the South, Stanton, undoubtedly at Lincoln’s behest, privately and hotly argued with Wilson against the measure, for it would simply permit a Northern white to stay home for every black obtained, augmenting the Army not at all, and the Secretary warned Wilson that he would resign the day after such a bill passed. Wilson dropped the matter, though Massachusetts and a number of other Northern states continued to recruit Negroes at times in the borderland and in the occupied South, over Stanton’s, and later Grant’s, opposition.12

  With the field again clear for federal action, Stanton sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to supervise Negro recruiting, to enlist white officers who would be willing to serve in Negro regiments, and incidentally to watch Grant. Thomas reported almost immediately that he was “working like a Turk” to keep up with the influx of Negroes. Those who were unfit for military service he put to work on abandoned plantations leased by the government to loyal white men, who paid them wages, but he also organized 20,000 of them into regiments to protect these workers. The officers were drawn from Grant’s army, and Thomas reported that Grant’s men were now so favorably disposed toward the new policy that he could have obtained many more officers than he needed.

  Assured that the new program would function, Stanton threw it into high gear. Negroes rushed to the colors in such numbers that Stanton found it advisable to organize a Bure
au of Colored Troops in the War Department under the charge of Major Charles W. Foster, who at once proceeded to regularize and give central direction not only to the recruitment of Negroes but also to their training and welfare as soldiers. Owing largely to Stanton’s efforts, the Negro from this time forth became an effectual counterpoise in tipping the scales for the Union. Cognizant also of the long-range aspects of the Negro problem, Stanton appointed Robert Dale Owen, J. McKaye, and Samuel G. Howe as commissioners to study the condition of the freedmen and the treatment that should be accorded them.

  When the new bureau was established, William Whiting, solicitor of the War Department, advised Stanton that the law of July 17, 1862, provided no federal bounty for Negro enlistees and approved paying them only as laborers, not as soldiers. Under this ruling Stanton fixed their pay at ten dollars per month, three dollars of which would be paid in clothing, as compared with the thirteen dollars per month plus clothing that white soldiers received. Incensed at this discrimination, Governor Andrew made himself the champion of the Negro troops. He had an interview with Stanton, whose bearing he described as “very reprehensible,” and concluded that it would be inadvisable to press him on the matter. “He is very sore,” he wrote, “and behaves badly.” It was probably Andrew’s evasion of Stanton’s ruling against the recruitment of Negroes for Massachusetts regiments in other states that had aroused the Secretary’s ire, and Andrew knew he would soon cool down.

  The Republican radicals were still indignant at the alleged rough treatment the administration had accorded Frémont, who had been relieved from duty after Jackson’s Valley campaign, and the new policy with respect to Negroes gave Lincoln an opportunity to assuage the radical resentment by offering him a new assignment. He offered the general authorization to raise a colored force in Virginia of about 10,000 men, but Frémont declined the appointment. Nor did Stanton favor him for any larger duty, intimating to John Murray Forbes that what was needed for the Union’s forces then amassing was a commander with an “organizing mind” who was “willing to spend and be spent.”