Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  It was while Stanton was in this happy mood that a message arrived from Grant expressing the utmost confidence in Meade, and recommending that he and Sherman be made major generals in the regular army. The War Secretary, once so displeased with Meade, was now willing to accept him at Grant’s estimate.4

  Stanton could enjoy such peace of mind only briefly, for suddenly his safeguarding of home-front morale seemed undone.

  Two rabidly anti-Lincoln newspapers in New York City, the World and the Journal of Commerce, printed a bogus proclamation, which they attributed to Lincoln, stating that the Virginia campaign was a stalemated failure and that military affairs everywhere were going badly, calling for 400,000 men for the Army, and appointing a day of national fasting, humiliation, and prayer. The total effect was that the Union cause was in dire straits.

  Seward rushed to Stanton’s office. It was “steamer day,” and if other papers copied the item it would soon be all over Europe. Stanton had just that instant learned about it. He ordered Dix to close down the two papers and arrest their editors at once.

  Dix became convinced that the offending editors had been the victims of a hoax. Stanton answered sharply that Dix had been ordered only to arrest the culprits and close down their papers. Dix was one of Stanton’s closest friends. But the grim Secretary had no time now for pleasantries. Dix hastily complied with the order.

  Other New York papers, even those that detested the gullible victims, denounced Stanton for encroachment on freedom of the press. Later investigation showed that the bogus proclamation had been transmitted to Washington over the wires of the Independent Telegraph Company. When the manager of that firm refused to open his books, Stanton arrested the entire Washington staff, as well as its employees in other cities, and other journalists he suspected of complicity.

  Dix finally learned that two reprobate newsmen had been at the bottom of the deception. They had hoped to make a killing on the stock market by publishing the adverse proclamation. Dix put them both in Fort Lafayette. The telegraph company had been wholly innocent, however, and Stanton immediately released its employees, permitted its offices to be reopened, and freed the inoffensive journalists he had arrested. He would have allowed the credulous editors to cogitate on their carelessness by spending a few more weeks in jail, but Lincoln ordered their immediate release.

  Welles thought that the suppression of the offending newspapers was indefensible.5 The hypercritical Navy Secretary somehow failed to see that the effects of this proclamation, if Stanton had left it to circulate unchecked, might have threatened the North’s willingness to endure the growing casualties which Grant was reporting from Virginia.

  At a strategic road hub, Cold Harbor, Grant flung his men forward in repeated assaults and saw his columns wilt away in the worst slaughter of the war. Since the beginning of the campaign he had lost a third of his army. Reading the interminable casualty lists, the nation sickened at the sacrifice.

  Repulsed at Cold Harbor, Grant tried again to slip around Lee’s flank. But the wily Confederate, moving on interior lines, always confronted him behind breastworks and refused to be coaxed out into the open field against Grant’s superior numbers. Further frontal attacks meant a larger loss of life than Grant could now afford. So he again moved southward, across the James River, putting himself south of Richmond, and then drove west toward Petersburg, the key to Lee’s communications. Lee got reinforcements to the city’s thin defense lines just in the nick of time. Grant was once again repulsed with sickening losses, and he now saw no alternative to settling down to a siege. Long lines of parallel entrenchments curled south and east of Richmond as both armies dug in. Grant stabbed at Lee’s fortifications, always keeping the pressure on, and at the same time probed westward, feeling for the railroads that brought Lee’s supplies.

  If the other Union armies in Virginia had carried out their assignments, Lee would have been smashed or in a more desperate condition by now. But Butler, soon after commencing his move on Petersburg, was neatly sealed up in a pocket at the confluence of the Appomattox and the James; and Sigel, whose appointment had been a sop to the German voters, was defeated at New Market and obliged to retreat down the Shenandoah Valley. With Grant and Lincoln’s approval, Stanton found a less important place for Sigel at Harpers Ferry, though the choice of Hunter to succeed him was not much of an improvement. To get rid of Butler, however, was a more prickly proposition.

  When Grant established his headquarters at City Point after bringing Richmond under siege, he informed Halleck that it might become necessary to remove Butler from command for incompetency, and because Butler and General William F. Smith, whose services Grant valued, could not get along together. Later, Grant suggested to Halleck that Butler be transferred to some department where he would be less likely to do harm. Halleck answered that it had been foreseen in Washington that Grant might be obliged to relieve Butler because of his total unfitness for a field command and his quarrelsome nature, but he promised to be an embarrassment anywhere. The best solution of the problem would be to leave Butler in nominal command of the Department of the James, while seeing to it that he remained at his headquarters, and to give Smith command of the troops in the field.

  Grant acquiesced in Halleck’s suggestion. Though it was an election year and resentment on the part of Butler might cost the administration votes, Lincoln approved the order and it was issued on his authority. Meanwhile, however, Smith had put himself in bad repute by loosely voicing unflattering opinions of certain of his brother officers. Because of this, and also because Grant had come to have misgivings about the workability of a divided command, he now decided to transfer Smith elsewhere and leave Butler in command for a while longer.6

  On the same day that Grant commenced his campaign against Richmond, Sherman marched his army out of Chattanooga and directed it toward Atlanta. His route led through rugged country, where subsistence would be difficult; but his sole complaint was of a superabundance of supplies! Stanton liked this approach to war almost as much as he admired Grant’s.

  Sherman’s adversary, Confederate commander “Joe” Johnston, took every advantage afforded by the seamy terrain. It became a campaign of thrust and parry between two skillful swordsmen, each trying to put his opponent at a disadvantage. But Sherman kept pressing. When he notified Stanton on May 14 that he had taken Dalton, the Secretary wired his thanks and his hopes for still greater success. “Your dispatches are promptly forwarded to General Grant,” he said, “and the victorious shout of your army strengthens the hearts of the Army of the Potomac.”

  Now, with Grant in over-all command and with Sherman performing so creditably in the West, Stanton noticeably lost his earlier antipathy toward West Pointers and was warm in his praises of Sherman. An Ohioan, the brother of the influential Republican senator John Sherman, “Tecumseh” was related by marriage to the powerful Ewing family. After graduating from the Military Academy, Sherman spent thirteen years as a regular officer, with relatively little combat service even in the Mexican War. He resigned from the Army in 1853 and unsuccessfully entered the banking field, then the law, but hungering for the military life again, he took on the superintendency of a military college in Louisiana. With the secession winter, he returned North, and in May 1861, was once more in uniform.

  Trouble had dogged him, and unscrupulous journalists whom he offended spread the rumor that he was insane. No doubt Sherman was unstable, but once he joined Grant’s command he performed brilliantly as a constructive subordinate. A close relationship of mutual trust had developed between him and his commanding officer. Now Sherman, on his own, was living up to Stanton’s estimation.

  Sherman sensed a note of discouragement in the reports Stanton sent him about Grant, and he told Stanton not to lose heart: “If General Grant can sustain the confidence, the esprit, the pluck of his army, and impress the Virginians with the knowledge that the Yankees can and will fight them fair and square, he will do more good than the capture of Richmond or any stra
tegic movements, and this is what Grant is doing.” Sherman could have added that he was doing much the same good work in the West.7

  While Grant’s guns thundered at Richmond’s defenses and Sherman moved doggedly toward Atlanta, Lincoln and Stanton continued working quietly to bring the subjugated areas of the South back into the Union, and the political managers on the home front shaped their strategy for the forthcoming presidential election. Lincoln’s emancipation edict and his consent to the use of Negro troops had mollified the radicals to the extent of enabling the Republicans to present a united front in the state and congressional elections of 1863, but with the national nominating convention approaching, the party cleavages opened again. Now the troublesome issue was the terms on which the seceded states were to be allowed back into the Union.

  From the very beginning of the war, Lincoln had held to reunion as the primary goal. His quickness of action in the slaveholding border states in 1861 and 1862 had kept them in the Union. Since then portions of Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Florida had been taken by federal armies. Lincoln’s orders and congressional enactments concerning property and suffrage rights favored loyal men and imposed penalties on the disloyal in these occupied areas.

  Stanton, as head of the Army, had known the need for an over-all occupation policy long before Lincoln determined upon one. As Union forces penetrated more deeply into Dixie, Northern soldiers had come to assume the role of occupation forces. They were singularly unfitted for the task, lacking any consistent military rules, traditions, or legislative enactments for their guidance, and Stanton had asked Lieber to prepare a codification of the rules of land warfare as a basis for coordination in military occupation policies.

  Yet, even before co-ordination was possible, similar needs brought Union commanders, without concert or study, to similar actions. They had the dual duties of belligerent occupation and of the restoration of national authority; they had to govern as well as occupy. This complex task fell everywhere on officials who, Stanton learned, were becoming the work horses of the armies once the battlesmoke cleared—the provost marshals.

  Provost marshals soon transcended their traditional role as disciplinarians over troops and assumed the multifarious tasks of determining who among the Southern civilians in their control should remain free or go to jail, stay at home or face exile, get scarce food, clothes, seeds, and tools, travel on the railroads, receive mail, or practice professions and trades. Military provosts enforced Treasury, postal, and conscription laws, put confiscation policies into effect, and prosecuted before military courts those civilians who broke regulations or who were caught aiding the South or allegedly intending to do so.

  Everywhere provosts enjoyed the help of Negroes and of Southern civilians who claimed always to have detested the Confederate cause, who had assembled black lists of zealous secessionists, and now were ready to claim the fruits of their Unionist fidelity. And almost everywhere, provosts tested the allegiance of the conquered civilians in their jurisdiction by requiring them to swear to some kind of an oath of loyalty. Without a provost’s receipt for a completed loyalty oath, Southern civilians inside Union occupation zones could barely exist.

  Stanton’s role in educating Lincoln in these facts of army life was a substantial one, as together the two men read over innumerable reports from provost units on Southern duty. Out of the Army’s pragmatic institutional adjustments to occupation responsibilities, Lincoln shaped one keystone of his thoughts concerning a reconstruction. He desired, the President told Banks concerning Louisiana, “a tangible nucleus” of loyal Southerners around which “the remainder of the State may rally round as fast as it can, and which I can at once recognize and sustain as the true State government.” Lincoln appointed military governors for the occupied areas—empowered by his authority and the muscle of the War Department to exercise both civil and martial powers—to work with the provosts and other officers of the federal army “in reinaugurating the National authority,” as Lincoln described the mission of Military Governor Hamilton in Texas.8

  Stanton, like Lincoln, was wholly dedicated to the defeat of the South as the war’s purpose rather than to any primary concern for the future of the emancipated Negro. “The occupation of Texas by the military forces, and its reconquest, is the end to be accomplished,” Stanton noted to Horatio Woodman, and to this end, for every rebellious state, he improvised out of what was at hand.

  The Army was at hand. But in the developing complexities of military occupation not all of its growing number of component parts could work together effectively, nor was Stanton ever able fully to control his vast creation, even with his monopoly of control over the telegraph. The new military governors, for example, got into continuous difficulties with the generals and the provost marshals of the uniformed commands. Stanton told Military Governor Stanley, of North Carolina, that his powers were limitless, that Stanley was to “be Dictator.” But Stanley and General Burnside engaged in a running duel concerning status, prestige, and power, which Burnside usually won. Similar disputes engaged the attention of Rosecrans and Military Governor Andrew Johnson in Tennessee, and Halleck’s vast learning and persuasiveness was needed to prevent serious incidents. In essence, Lincoln’s injunction to General Gillmore in Florida—“You are Master”—rather than Stanton’s to the civilian, Military Governor Stanley, held true in such arguments.9

  Lincoln left it largely up to Stanton to deal with the endless details of military occupation. He was more interested in transforming conquests into reconstructed states. The President exploited the Army’s experiences as an occupation force, which Stanton related to him, and combined the existing military realities with his hopes for a future political reunification of the Southern states to the Union.

  Restoring the South fell within his sphere of authority under his war powers, Lincoln believed, and as a supplement to his annual message to Congress in December 1863, he announced a plan he had been considering with Stanton for some time. Excluding only a few major offenders from its lenient terms, it offered a full pardon with restoration of most rights to property, except in slaves, to all persons implicated in the rebellion who would swear thereafter to uphold the Constitution, the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation, and all laws pertaining to slaves. Anxious to quell sectional hate and make reunion palatable to the South, the President announced further that when, in any state, a number of voters equal to one tenth of those who had participated in the election of 1860 had taken this oath of future allegiance, they could re-establish a state government, republican in form, and he would recognize it and grant it federal protection. Lincoln declared that any provision adopted by such a state government in relation to Negroes “which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the national Executive.”

  It amounted to a statement that Lincoln, hoping to seduce Southern whites from their support of the Confederacy, would allow them to solve the race problem, altered as a result of emancipation, in their own way, provided they were fair-minded about it and acted quickly. Lincoln did not set this December pardon proclamation as his own final policy, much less as the only one which the nation, Congress, or the political parties might consider, for he well knew that reconstruction had to be a political issue. He made it mild because he wanted it to be attractive to Southerners, and to mark a moderate path for his party to take. Almost as a necessary consequence, its terms repelled many Northerners.

  Peace Democrats in the North condemned the December 1863 pardon and reconstruction plan as excessively harsh. Republican radicals had something far more stringent in mind for the South, and the kindly, lenient Lincoln was becoming an obstacle to their plans. Other Republican senators, though less vindictive than the radicals, feared that Lincoln’s readiness to forgive and forget might very well enable an unrepentant South, in alliance
with Northern Democrats, to regain its old ascendancy in the national government, circumvent emancipation by keeping the Negro in a state of voteless peonage, and undo all the gains that were being won at such bitter cost in the war. Out of their forebodings came a desire to keep the reconstruction process under the control of Congress, a desire that tended to push conservative Republican congressmen into the radical orbit, thus enabling the extremists to determine legislative policies. Support of or opposition to the President’s reconstruction plan soon became one of the marks that identified the faction within the Republican party to which an individual adhered.

  With a presidential election coming on, radical leaders, eager to jettison Lincoln, had commenced almost a year ahead of time to consider alternatives to him. They saw in Chase a man with views close to their own, and indications of a Chase boom were evident as early as midsummer of 1863. The Treasury Secretary listened appreciatively and craftily nudged the movement along. Smugly convinced of his own rectitude and inordinately ambitious to be President, he let it be known that his talents were available for whatever role he might be called to fill.

  Rumors came to Washington that the 10,000 Treasury agents were organizing Chase clubs throughout the country. Newspapers willing to support Chase’s candidacy were favored with Treasury advertising. Chase seldom attended cabinet meetings any more, and seemed to be avoiding the President. Stanton told Dana that although Lincoln knew full well what was taking place, he made no effort to stop it.

  Postmaster General Blair, Stanton’s unrelenting enemy, declared that Stanton “would cut the President’s throat if he could,” and fancied that the patronage of the State, War, and Treasury departments was being used against the President.10 Blair’s hatred of Stanton had become so vitriolic that he would believe nothing good of him. But Bates, a man of cautious legal mind who formed his judgments carefully, also suspected Stanton of working secretly for Chase.