Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Already, however, the enlistment of Negroes had proved to be a boon to the Union cause, and Lincoln advised Stanton that he wished to accelerate the program along the shores of the Mississippi. Abetting Lincoln’s program, Stanton urged Congress to remove the wage and bounty discrimination against colored troops, but not until the end of the war did it do so.13

  Stanton hoped to have 100,000 Negro troops organized by mid-summer 1863, and he confided to Chandler that Lincoln was offering every support. The prospect of drawing on the black strength of the South as a sustenance for the North delighted the President, who believed with Stanton that the Confederacy, already employing all its white men in uniform and in war work, must go down to defeat.

  Lincoln and Stanton, both Midwesterners, had long recognized the military, economic, and political significance of clearing the Mississippi River to its mouth. Stanton had urged Halleck and Butler to seize Vicksburg, a natural citadel high on the river bluff and now strongly fortified by the Confederates, when its capture might have been relatively easy; but neither general felt able to spare troops for that purpose, and the project was shelved by the pressure of events elsewhere. And so both Lincoln and Stanton were in a mood to listen when, back in October 1862, General John A. McClernand came to Washington with a proposal to complete the opening of the river.

  A fellow townsman of Lincoln’s, McClernand had served as a congressman for several years before the war. His influence among Illinois Democrats was very great. Accepting a brigadier general’s commission at the outbreak of hostilities, he did a fine job counteracting proslavery and secessionist influence in southern Illinois. But his record as a field commander had not been brilliant, and he had shown a tendency to resent superior authority and to seek the limelight.

  McClernand’s success in recruiting troops made his proposal to enlist men in the Midwest for an expedition against Vicksburg seem plausible. He caught Stanton in one of his sour moods against West Pointers. Stanton said he hoped McClernand could show them what a nonprofessional soldier could do.

  Halleck, suspicious of all amateur generals, was skeptical of McClernand’s capabilities, and though unwilling to oppose Lincoln and Stanton openly, he kept a checkrein on the untried officer. McClernand busied himself with raising troops; then he heard that an expedition against Vicksburg was already under way. He wired Stanton asking whether he had been superseded. Stanton reassured him, though in somewhat ambiguous language. The Vicksburg operation came within Grant’s department, he said, and McClernand would command one of the three corps making up Grant’s army. Halleck informed Grant that Lincoln wished McClernand to command the attack on Vicksburg under Grant’s direction. The whole business was loosely handled. McClernand assumed he was to have an independent command. Grant thought him one of his subordinates.

  Postmaster General Blair, in cabinet meeting, alluded to McClernand’s having been crowded aside, and of a “combination” to deprive him of command. Lincoln started from his chair and denied that any such maneuver could succeed. Stanton reassured the President. Everything was in order; he and Halleck had arranged matters.

  But when McClernand reached Grant’s army late in December 1862, his suspicions seemed confirmed. Sherman was in command of the troops McClernand had forwarded and was already on his way to Vicksburg by water. McClernand, hastening to join Sherman, wrote a scathing letter to Lincoln which blamed Halleck for contempt of superior authority in depriving him of his command.

  Lincoln pleaded with McClernand not to involve him in another “family controversy”; Stanton wrote somewhat evasively that McClernand must know his own and Lincoln’s sincere desire “to oblige you in every particular consistent with the general interest of the service.” While this pot simmered, Sherman and Grant’s winter-long efforts against Vicksburg resulted in a dismal failure.14

  Stanton had been keeping close watch on Grant ever since Fort Donelson fell, and was warmed at the thought of this officer’s habit of hitting hard at the enemy. But disturbing reports of tippling on Grant’s part kept trickling into Washington. Worse, it was said that many of his officers discouraged runaway Negroes from coming into the Union lines and mistreated those who came. This was contrary to the wishes of the government, wrote Halleck, at Stanton’s urging, and Grant must put an end to it. “The character of the war has very much changed within the past year,” explained Halleck, writing with an unmistakable Stantonian flourish. “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves.”

  Grant replied that he and his officers knew their duty as soldiers. Even those who were unsympathetic toward Negro enlistments would conform to the new policy in good faith, and he himself would carry out “any policy ordered … to the best of my ability.” It was the sort of declaration Stanton liked to hear from a general. Grant rose even higher in his estimation when he learned that the western commander had instructed his officers to aid not only in recruiting colored troops but also “in removing prejudice against them.”

  Now Stanton became desperate to know the truth concerning affairs at Grant’s headquarters, and he did not trust Thomas’s reports. Only a person of absolute discretion could serve his needs. Watson’s health had completely broken down from overwork, and though Stanton convinced him not to resign, his assistant suffered from continuing illnesses. Then Wolcott died in January 1863 from sheer exhaustion, and Stanton was now bereft of a friend and his only complete confidant.

  Early in March, Charles A. Dana agreed to serve as an assistant secretary, and Stanton soon learned that he was an able, conscientious administrator, who filled in the void left by Wolcott’s death and Watson’s feebleness. Confident that departmental affairs were in good order, Stanton took a short vacation in order to prevent a complete physical collapse. In mid-April he traveled to Gambier, where he relaxed in his sister’s home; then he went to Steubenville and sat again on his favorite rocky perch overlooking the river. Although he tried to shut out the war, keeping his presence as secret as possible, the telegraph linked him to Washington, and from his old friends in Ohio he learned of their disturbance at the slowness and cost of the campaigns and the rumors of Grant’s return to alcoholism.

  Back in Washington by the last week of April, Stanton again fell ill. He had sent Dana to Grant’s headquarters, ostensibly as a special commissioner to investigate the payroll service, but actually to check on Grant, with instructions to report daily by secret cipher but never to presume to interfere with military policy. Dana remained in the West until July, and his reports were increasingly favorable to Grant.15

  Grant and his staff had made Dana welcome after their initial suspicion of him as Stanton’s man lessened. Dana came to serve both Stanton and Grant as a liaison each could trust. When his relations with McClernand worsened, Grant was able to gain Stanton’s sympathies through Dana.

  Unable to take Vicksburg from the north, but determined not to admit defeat by turning back, Grant marched his army down the west bank of the Mississippi to a point well below the city. Admiral Porter ran his flotilla past the city’s blazing defenses and ferried Grant’s troops to the east bank of the Mississippi. Then Grant cut loose from the river, his only supply line, and living off the country, speedily interposed his army between the two Confederate forces that opposed him, one commanded by Johnston and the other by John Pemberton.

  Dana, on April 25, reported that all the Union commanders except McClernand had performed brilliantly. That general had failed to execute orders, could not control even his own headquarters, and in defiance of Grant’s policy of mobility, encumbered his actions by having his bride along with him. By early May, Dana was advising McClernand’s removal, Stanton replying that it was up to Grant, in whom he and Lincoln had full confidence and to whom they would extend all support, and both Dana and Stanton agreed that Grant should see their exchange of letters and telegrams.16

  Grant drove Johnston out of the town of Jackson and forced Pemberton to withdraw behind the Vicksburg redoubts. McClernand was
slow getting into action and performed poorly. When Grant assailed the Vicksburg fortifications, McClernand deranged his tactics by prematurely and falsely claiming to have captured two of the enemy’s positions. Dana reported that Grant almost relieved McClernand on the spot, but having now decided to lay siege to Vicksburg, he let him retain command until the city surrendered, meanwhile watching him closely. After that, Grant hoped to induce him to take an extended leave of absence. According to Dana, McClernand should not even command a regiment—a verdict reflecting Grant’s views almost entirely, but unfair to McClernand, who seems to have performed better than these reports allow, and who had run into the rigid antipathies of the West Pointers who now dominated the western armies.

  McClernand did not last out the siege. On June 19, Grant reported to Halleck that he had relieved him for issuing a congratulatory address which publicly disparaged the achievements of all but his own troops. But it was clear that this was Grant’s excuse. McClernand’s sheer incompetency, as Grant saw it, was the reason for his removal. Grant was sorry only that he had waited so long to act; the fear that McClernand would succeed him were he disabled triggered the dismissal. Not unexpectedly, and with some truth, McClernand claimed that Grant’s jealousy lay behind his removal. Stanton refused him a court of inquiry, alleging that it was inexpedient at the moment to withdraw field officers from combat duty to serve as judges. McClernand tried to enlist Montgomery Blair in a plot to oust Stanton from the war office and restore himself to command. But Blair, through Captain Wright Rives, a mutual friend, refused the bait, and McClernand dropped from the scene. Stanton was learning that amateurs were not necessarily better than West Pointers after all.

  Dana played a large part in educating him to this fact, for Stanton trusted Dana’s judgment. Stanton was impressed to hear Grant praised for possessing abilities and personal characteristics remarkably different from those of other senior officers he had encountered. Writing to a close friend, James S. Pike, about Grant’s “splendid campaign,” Dana set a theme he followed in his letters to Stanton on the general. Grant, Dana asserted, was like “Zack” Taylor; absolutely honest, doggedly determined, and direct in purpose. But he was more intelligent and better versed in military matters. As a bonus, Grant lacked political aspirations, “and I don’t believe he could be brought to have any. I never knew such transparent sincerity combined with such mental resources,” Dana wrote.

  Through Dana, Stanton learned of Grant’s orders to General McPherson concerning Vicksburg’s Negroes, who, their former masters alleged, desired to remain with their “white families” rather than strike out for themselves. Grant ordered that army officers were to inform the Negroes that they were now free. If they wished to accompany white exiles into Confederate territory, they might do so. But, Grant added, if anyone suspected that whites were coercing Negroes to accompany them, then the blacks should be turned back “except such as are voluntarily accompanying families, not more than one to a family.”17 Here, Stanton realized, was a general who could fight, think, and grow. He was someone to keep in mind.

  1 Stanton’s memo on Burnside, undated, ca. Oct., 1862, copy owned by the estate of Benjamin P. Thomas.

  2 Charles F. Benjamin, “Hooker’s Appointment and Removal,” Battles and Leaders, III, 239–43; Hooker to Stanton, Nov. 16, 19, Dec. 4, 1862, Stanton MSS; O.R., XXI, 66–7, 773–4; Walter H. Hebert, Fighting Joe Hooker (Indianapolis, 1944), 151.

  3 Morse, Welles Diary, I, 191–2; O.R., XXI, 66–7, 773–4; Strong, Diary, III, 281.

  4 Morse, Welles Diary, I, 200–4; Fessenden, op. cit., I, 248–9.

  5 David Davis to Leonard Swett, Nov. 26, 1862, ISHL, on cabinet; other data in Halleck to Gen. McPherson, Feb. 13, 1863, owned by Carl Sandburg; Rachel Sherman Thorndike (ed.), The Sherman Letters (New York, 1894), 204–5 (hereafter cited as Thorndike, Sherman Letters); Pendleton Herring, The Impact of War (New York, 1941), 151–2.

  6 Lincoln, Works, VI, 22, 73–4, 76–7, 100; Butler’s Book, 533–4, 549–51; Butler, Correspondence, II, 563–4, III, 15, 20; O.R., LIII, 546; Sumner to ?, Dec. 27, 1862, Meyers Collection, NYPL; same to J. M. Forbes, in Hughes, op. cit., I, 353; Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time, ed. Herbert Mitgang (New York, 1958), 48; Barnett to Barlow, Nov. 30, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL.

  7 Benjamin, “Hooker’s Appointment and Removal,” Battles and Leaders, III, 239–43; William Howard Mills, “From Burnside to Hooker,” MAH, XV, 50–4; Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, VIII, 206; O.R., XXI, 941–2, 945, 1007–12.

  8 Thurlow W. Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed (Boston, 1884), 428; Eisenschiml, “An Intriguing Letter,” Autograph Collector’s Journal, I, 13–14.

  9 Stanton’s notes, undated, copy owned by the estate of Benjamin P. Thomas; Eisenschiml, The Celebrated Case of Fitz John Porter (Indianapolis, 1950); Lincoln, Works, VI, 67; Jan. 30, 1862, Patrick ms diary, LC. In 1886 Porter had the decision reversed and he was reinstated; see his ms “Written History of the Fitz-John Porter Case,” Porter Papers, LC.

  10 Stone to Sumner, Dec. 23, 1861, Sumner Papers, HU; to Gen. S. Williams, Feb. 12, and J. F. Doyle to McClellan, March 7, 1862, McClellan Papers, LC; T. Harry Williams, “Investigation: 1862,” American Heritage, VI, 171–2.

  11 Stanton’s memorandum, dated Jan. 1863, was placed in his copy of Lieber’s Civil Liberty, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen. It is noteworthy that it represented to Stanton more than a mere justification for momentary partisanship. Stanton protected against Republican congressmen such generals as Meade, Grant, George Thomas, and Sherman, who met his criteria of victorious yet obedient officers. Later, Stanton slashed at Sherman for overreaching himself as a treaty maker. And when President Andrew Johnson played what Stanton felt was a wrong brand of politics with the Army, a worse offense in Stanton’s judgment than playing politics in the Army, the Secretary helped Congress to subdue the offender.

  12 Pearson, Andrew, II, 71–3; Cornish, op. cit., 108, for Intelligencer; Brooks, op. cit., 104–5; Quarles, op. cit., 189–90; Hesseltine, War Governors, 287–90, 297–304.

  13 O.R., XVII, pt. 2, 421–4; ser. 3, III, 121, 252; Pearson, Andrew, II, 71–3, 81–5, 96–118; Lincoln, Works, VI, 242–4, 342; Hughes, op. cit., II, 69–70; Quarles, op. cit., 192–5; Townsend, Anecdotes, 76–81; Sumner to S. G. Howe, May 15, 1863, HU.

  14 Morse, Welles Diary, I, 217; Stanton to McClernand, Oct. 29, 1862, McClernand Papers, ISHL; McClernand to Lincoln, Jan. 7, 1863, R. T. Lincoln Papers, LC; O.R., XVII, pt. 2, 302, 332, 420, 579; Smith, Garfield, I, 238.

  15 Watson to Stanton, June 7; Stanton to Dana, March 11, 1863, Stanton MSS; O.R., XXIV, pt. 1, 31; pt. 3, 156–7; Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New York, 1902), 20–1 (hereafter cited as Dana, Recollections); Benjamin P. Thomas (ed.), Three Years with Grant (New York, 1955), 60–2; Wolcott MS, 90–1.

  16 Gen. James H. Wilson to Adam Badeau, May 6, 1863, Wilson Papers, LC; Stanton-Dana exchange, April 25-May 6, 1863, Stanton MSS; Dana, Recollections, 33; O.R., XXIV, pt. 1, 84; Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960), 407–13.

  17 To McPherson, July 7, 1863, DeCoppett Collection, PU; Dana to Pike, July 29, 1863, Pike Papers, CFL; on Blair, see Rives to McClernand, July 16, 1863, owned by the estate of Benjamin P. Thomas; O.R., XXIV, pt. 1, 43, 169; Dana’s dispatches to Stanton, April 25-June 19, 1863, Stanton MSS.

  CHAPTER XIII

  WAR IN GOOD EARNEST

  BOASTING LOUDLY of what he would do when the spring rains ended and the roads dried out, Hooker prepared for his promised assault. Then, in the first week of May, he had made his first large-scale contact with Lee, and seemed to be seized with indecision. Although outnumbered two to one, Lee resorted to daring strategy, sending “Stonewall” Jackson on a wide flanking movement to the left that would bring him in on Hooker’s rear. Perfectly executed, the maneuver caught Hooker by surprise and crushed the Union right. The two main armies came to grips near the hamlet of Chancellorsville. Hooker imposed a strict censorship. For three days the War Department learned virtually nothing excep
t that Hooker had been wounded and that his army was in a desperate plight. Then it became clear that Hooker’s defeat was complete. Stanton’s fears that he was only a mediocre commander, incapable of directing large numbers of men in battle, were proved distressingly correct.

  On May 6 word came that Hooker, his wound not serious, had withdrawn across the river. But the Union losses would amount to 17,000 men. Lincoln paced his office, groaning: “My God, what will the country say?” And Stanton, as he checked the endless casualty lists, seemed crushed, admitting to a White House secretary that “this is the darkest day of the war.” The Army of the Potomac, which he had so painstakingly supplied, which he felt was his own creation and had become his very idol, had failed again. Now military defeat, cabinet intrigues, and home-front disaffection kept Stanton “in a condition of a candle burning at both ends,” a clerk recalled. But there was work to do.1

  Stanton tried to lift Northern morale and to deflect criticism from himself and from the Department by letting it out to the press that Hooker had suffered a mere reverse. He attempted to encourage Hooker, informing him that the public confidence in him was unshaken, and used the same line with Republican congressmen and other friends of the general, promising that Hooker should lack for nothing he could give him.

  But Stanton, straight-laced as ever, was disturbed by reports that discipline in the Army of the Potomac had broken down and that the general’s headquarters resembled a “combination of barroom and brothel.” Stanton warned Hooker to ban liquor and women from his camps.