Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  The truth is that Stanton’s approval of Lincoln and of the Lincoln reconstruction plan was unconditional, and he had nothing to do with Chase’s sly maneuverings. Yet his personal relations with the ambitious Treasury head continued to be close, for soon after Lincoln announced his plan for the South, Stanton asked Chase to stand as godfather at the baptism of his baby daughter, Bessie.

  Nevertheless, Stanton wholeheartedly supported Lincoln’s reconstruction program, for in December 1863 and throughout 1864, it fit the Army’s needs. The day after Christmas, Lincoln and Stanton visited the prison camp at Point Lookout, Virginia, where the amnesty proclamation had already enticed a sizable portion of the captured rebels into signifying their desire to become “galvanized Yankees.” Stanton thereafter ordered cavalry units and Union spies to spread copies of the proclamation throughout the South, greatly adding to the effectiveness of the Union’s propaganda. Combined with increasing Northern victories, the Lincoln reconstruction and pardon plan proved a powerful solvent of the Southern will to fight. Despite organized and unofficial Confederate attempts to combat it, it helped bring on the ultimate collapse of the rebellion. Stanton’s acuity in recognizing the potency of the Lincoln plan as a war weapon must be given its due credit.11

  Working through the War Department, Lincoln tried out his reconstruction plan in four of the states now partially controlled by Union armies—Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia. In the first three, Unionist constitutions were soon created and ratified by the required 10 per cent of oath-swearing voters. Then state officials from governors on down were installed under the protection of army bayonets, and these states sent representatives to Congress. In Virginia a Unionist minority under Francis H. Pierpont, which had set up a rump government at Alexandria, had previously won Lincoln’s recognition as the rightful government of the state.

  But in no case did Congress, dominated by the radicals, consent to seat the delegates elected by these states. To be sure, the new state governments rested on the shaky bases of Union Army support and the conversions of former rebels, whose sincerity in swearing oaths of future loyalty the radicals professed to doubt; and as will be seen, Lincoln himself came to distrust the regeneration of the residents in these “loyal” areas of the South.

  Congress in July 1864 created a more drastic reconstruction measure as a product of radical pressure. Known as the Wade-Davis bill, it contradicted Lincoln’s plan in every particular; asserted Congress’s right to control the reconstruction process; and declared that reconstruction must wait until rebel resistance ceased, that the majority, not merely 10 per cent, of the voters in a Southern state must swear to an “ironclad test oath” of past as well as future loyalty, that ex-Confederates must be excluded from suffrage and officeholding unless Congress rather than the President pardoned them, and that slavery, along with the rebel war debt, was dead. The Wade-Davis plan obviously looked to substituting Negro voters for almost all Southern whites, for few whites could honestly claim the kind of unalloyed past Unionism that the test oath required.

  Lincoln was hurt and angry at this open challenge by men who were leaders of his own party, especially as it was made in an election year. He killed the Procrustean Wade-Davis bill with a pocket veto, explaining to the country that its enactment would have snuffed out the free state governments already established in the South. But he admitted that he was not inflexibly committed to his own plan of reconstruction. If Southerners wanted to come back into the Union under the Wade-Davis terms, Lincoln would enforce its stipulations. Enraged by Lincoln’s action, the sponsors of the bill drew up a manifesto excoriating the President.

  Though co-operating fully with Lincoln in establishing these new state governments, Stanton remained on close terms with Wade and Davis.12 The tenacious suspicion that Lincoln’s “Mars” was supporting the radicals in their war upon Lincoln seems to gain a degree of credibility from Stanton’s later testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that reconstruction was properly “subject to the controlling power of Congress.” He had never doubted that his and Lincoln’s efforts to create loyal state governments in the South were legal and necessary, he said, but added: “I supposed then and still suppose, that the final validity of such organizations, would rest with the law-making power of the Government.”

  In this view Stanton was not, however, as Welles and more recent commentators mistakenly assumed, at odds with Lincoln. The President also recognized that the two houses of Congress had the autonomous power to pass on the admission of their own members, and thus could determine the final step in reconstruction.13

  Chase’s self-appointed campaign manager, Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, of Kansas, arranged for the public distribution late in February 1864 of a “strictly private” circular lauding the Ohioan’s qualifications for the presidency and sharply criticizing Lincoln. Chase, embarrassed at the revelation of what appeared to be double-dealing on his part, hastened to disclaim all prior knowledge of the circular and submitted his resignation to Lincoln. The President chose to welcome his profession of ignorance and refused to accept the resignation. But the incident alerted Lincoln’s partisans and moved them to counteraction.

  Various Republican state conventions warmly endorsed Lincoln. And when a legislative caucus at Columbus announced that the Republicans in Ohio intended to support the President, Chase was left in the position of a candidate unable to obtain the backing of his own state. When news of this action in Ohio reached Washington, Welles overheard Seward and Stanton chuckling over Chase’s misfortune. The next day Chase announced his withdrawal from the race.

  With Chase ostensibly out of contention, some radical Republicans tried to engineer Butler as a replacement for Lincoln, but the scheme failed to catch fire. A splinter group brought their discontent into the open by nominating Frémont. But the more astute radical leaders hesitated to oppose the President openly and preferred to play for time, trying unsuccessfully to postpone the Republican, or, as it was finally named, the National Union Convention.14

  On June 7, the Republican convention met in Baltimore and Lincoln won in a walk. The politicians who would gladly have thrown him over had sensed that the people were solidly behind him, and masking their mortification, they bowed to the inevitable. Stanton was happy with the result, but he was displeased that Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, had been nominated Vice-President. Distrusting all Southerners and by now most Democrats as well, Stanton would have preferred to see Hannibal Hamlin on the ticket again. The cabal against Lincoln had made Stanton very angry and he took special pleasure in Lincoln’s success at the convention.15

  Though the radicals had been able to offer little formal opposition to Lincoln’s renomination, the harmony that impressed many persons was wholly on the surface. Scarcely had some of the delegates returned to their homes when they began scheming to sidetrack Lincoln before election time, if they could find a candidate more to their liking. Lincoln was about to perform some sidetracking of his own, for soon after the nominating convention he reached the end of the road with Chase.

  The crisis came about over the job of Assistant U. S. Treasurer in New York City when Chase chose to ignore the wishes of both New York senators and attempted to give the post to one of his henchmen. Balked by Lincoln, he tendered his resignation, a move he had previously found effective in causing Lincoln to back down. But this time the President resolved to call Chase’s bluff.

  Chase submitted his resignation on June 29, and that night Governor Brough, of Ohio, who had just arrived in Washington, encountered Lincoln, who, after cautioning him to “remember that it is not public until tomorrow,” proceeded to tell him of his intention to accept Chase’s resignation. Brough suggested that if Lincoln would delay action until morning and give him time to “get the Ohio men together,” he might be able to straighten the matter out.

  “But this is the third time he has thrown this resignation at me,” Lincoln said, “and I do not think I am called on to continue to beg him to take it
back, especially when the country would not go to destruction in consequence.”

  “This is not simply a personal matter,” Brough responded. “The people will not understand it. They will insist that there is no longer any harmony in the councils of the nation and that the retiring of the Sec’y of the Treasury is a sure indication that the bottom is about to fall out. Therefore to save the country from this backset, if you will give me time, I think Ohio can close the breach and the world be none the wiser.”

  Lincoln answered: “I know you doctored the matter up once, but on the whole, Brough, I reckon you had better let it alone this time.”

  “Then I have but one more question to ask,” said Brough. “Have you settled who is to be the successor, or is the matter open to advisement?”

  Lincoln said somewhat hesitantly that he had someone in mind but would keep that to himself for the present. Brough said he intended to call on Stanton, and Lincoln admonished him: “Remember, Brough, not a word of this to any one.”

  Brough talked to Stanton for almost two hours, never divulging what he knew. The next morning he again called on Stanton, and while the two men sat talking a messenger brought each of them a note from Chase. Stanton opened his and read silently: “I felt myself bound yesterday to send my resignation to the President. I would have been gratified to be able to consult you, but I feared you might be prompted by your generous sentiments to take some step injurious to the country. Today my resignation has been accepted, and if you have not already been informed of it, it is due to you that I should give you the information as soon as received by myself.”

  Meanwhile, Brough, glancing through the note that Chase had sent him, learned that Lincoln intended to appoint former Governor Tod, of Ohio, to the Treasury post.

  Stanton finished reading, slipped Chase’s note in his pocket, and fell back in his chair with a groan. Brough rose to go, but Stanton gasped: “For God’s sake don’t leave me yet.”

  “I think,” said Brough, “you have quite as much as you can digest today.”

  “What do you refer to?” asked Stanton.

  “I mean that little paper in your pocket.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Oh, I knew of it last night.”

  “You did, d—n you, and did not tell me of it? Is that being friendly?”

  “I was under a pledge of secrecy which I could not violate.”

  “But what will we do, who can succeed him?”

  “His successor is already appointed, and his name is sent to the Senate.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Ex-Gov. Tod.”

  Stanton gasped when he heard this. “Then we are gone!”

  Tod, while serving as governor, had co-operated splendidly with the War Department. But he was known as an extreme hard-money man and could scarcely be expected to continue Chase’s policy of issuing paper money. Stanton, once a hard-money man himself, had come to accept paper money as the only means of keeping the war machine going and of avoiding the bankruptcy nightmare he had feared since Sumter. And he remembered the old Ohio campaign slogan: “Vote for Tod and the black laws.” He feared that Tod would align himself with the Blair-Welles wing in the cabinet.

  “Well, Stanton, I must go,” said Brough, “but let me give you a bit of comfort: that appointment will never be accepted.”

  “Then, remember,” said Stanton, “that I hold you personally responsible for the result.”

  Moving on, Brough drove over to see Chase and frankly expressed the opinion that Chase had been in the wrong, then returned to the White House, where Lincoln confided that the feverishly excited members of the Senate Finance Committee were unalterably opposed to Tod and wanted him to withdraw the nomination. But he did not intend to do it. Brough predicted that Tod would resolve the difficulty by refusing to accept the appointment.

  And that night, Hay brought Brough a note from Lincoln stating that Tod had declined to serve. Brough broke the news to Stanton. The Secretary exclaimed joyfully: “You may go where you please, Brough, I am going to bed to sleep. We are safe for another day.”

  Early the next morning, Lincoln advised Stanton that an Ohio man must replace Chase, and that he was considering former Governor Dennison, a stiff-necked, energetic, antislavery man, whose administration of the state’s finances at the outbreak of the war had been somewhat loose, and whose forceful war measures as governor had not been popular. Meeting Brough later, Stanton said: “You must help me defeat that, Brough, or we are lost. I would not remain Secretary of War an hour after such an appointment.”

  Brough found the President adamant on the point of giving Chase’s place to an Ohioan. Stanton had suggested during his talk with Lincoln that Brough would be far better than Dennison, but Brough immediately refused the post and said Ohio would be better satisfied to have it go to someone of national reputation in matters of finance.

  Just then a messenger entered and laid a card on Lincoln’s table. Brough saw the name of William Pitt Fessenden, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on the card, and told the President: “There is your man.”

  “He will not accept,” said Lincoln.

  “The public will compel him to,” said Brough. The President took Brough’s advice and sent Fessenden’s name to the Senate.16

  Fessenden, an advocate of drastic wartime taxes and of Chase’s financial measures, though accounted a radical, was far more moderate in his attitude toward the South than Chandler, Stevens, or Wade. Stanton regarded him as wholly satisfactory and urged him to accept the appointment. When Fessenden complained that the job would kill him, Stanton retorted: “Very well, you cannot die better than in trying to save your country.” Fessenden’s acceptance of the position pleased all factions of the party, and Welles, who, like Stanton, had feared that Chase’s departure might excite unrest, noted that “it appears to give relief rather than otherwise.”

  In fact, Chase discovered that he had few real friends. On the day his retirement was announced, only Stanton and Fessenden of the cabinet called at his home. He found Stanton always warm and cordial. “No other Head of Dep’t has called on me since my resignation,” he later admitted to his diary, and on another occasion noted that he had “called on Mrs. Stanton. Nice children. Took tea with the family & spent evening.”17

  It took courage on Stanton’s part to maintain public association with the discredited Chase, for their continued friendship inspired rumors that he too was on the way out. But Lincoln appreciated Stanton’s worth. In addition, the President knew that Ohioans regarded Stanton as their man and would have deplored his exit from the cabinet so soon on Chase’s heels. Yet Stanton’s intimacy with Chase, Wade, Davis, and other radicals does not mean that he was faithless to Lincoln. He seemed, rather, to be trying to bring them and the President somewhere closer to a middle position on reconstruction. Under either Lincoln’s or the congressional reconstruction plan, the Army must play a primary role. Stanton had to know what was going on, and he was, as always, willing to dissimulate in order to stay on the inside track.

  It is clear, however, that his own feelings at this time were far closer to Lincoln’s than to the radical extremists’. Shrewd Samuel Bowles considered Stanton to be in “the extreme right of the Republican party” along with Lincoln, Chase, and Andrew, rather than of “the Wendell Phillips school.” Furthermore, Butler, now a thoroughgoing radical, complained that Chase’s departure from the cabinet had left that faction without representation among the President’s official advisers.18

  And so the sultry political vapors from the steam box that is Washington in summer, blew hot across the country, veiling the true feelings of the sphinxlike figure in the War Department toward the President and toward Chase, his friend of long standing. The rivalry that had long marked the relations between Lincoln and Chase might yet determine the next occupant of the White House, the outcome of the war, and the destiny of the nation; the Republican party, dedicated to repairing the shattered Union, seemed on
the way to its own rupture. But the politicians were more strained than the political organizations.

  For the first time in the war, the military and political situations were actually well under control. Writing to a friend abroad from Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Dana commented on Chase’s retirement and on Lincoln’s renomination, and mirrored Stanton’s feelings on events. The radicals were “desperately opposed to Mr. Lincoln,” Dana asserted, “not only on account of his slowness in going ahead upon questions of principle, but especially on account of his persistent attachment to the Blairs, who are upon the whole, the most unpopular men in the whole country.” But with the nomination once made, most men accepted Lincoln as the best choice.

  The Democratic party, Dana continued, “seems to be hopelessly split” between the peace and war factions, and thus their convention was being delayed until August in hope of reconciling the two. McClellan would probably be the opposition candidate, he guessed, although the Unionist branch “is looking to Grant.” He would not run, Dana was sure, and so Lincoln’s triumph was certain.

  Sherman was now “far forward into the centre of Georgia,” closing in on Atlanta, destroying Jefferson Davis’s last major rail links between the southeast and the Mississippi Valley. Grant has “a secure base, with short lines of communication” on the James, threatening Richmond and the eastern terminus of the Southern railroad system, such as it was. “It is a mere question of time and patience, though you need not be surprised at more brilliant and effective movements,” Dana advised. Lee was no longer a threat except for nuisance raids and there would be no more full-scale invasions of the North. “All of his railroads have been broken up, all of northwest Virginia is destitute, deprived not only of supplies but of laborers, so that the harvests which have been put into the ground … cannot be harvested.… Indeed it would be difficult to form an idea of a territory more trampled and blasted by the hoof of war, than the greater part of Virginia. I have now been over the most of it, and it is a scene of desolation which beggars fancy, and it is becoming more gloomy from day to day.”19 The gloomier Virginia appeared to Dana, the happier Stanton became. This was the way to wage war.