1 T. H. Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 302–3. Other data in March 11, 1864, Comstock ms diary, LC; Garfield to Rosecrans, Dec. 9, 1863, Rosecrans Papers, UCLA; Dana, Recollections, 157; O.R., XXIX, pt. 2, 537; XXXI, pt. 3, 349–50, 457–8; XXXII, pt. 2, 494; pt. 3, 13, 261; XXXIII, 663, 728; XLV, pt. 2, 246–7.
2 Catton, This Hallowed Ground (New York, 1956), 317–19; Johnson, “Reminiscences of Hon. Edwin M. Stanton,” loc. cit., 84; Meade, op. cit., II, 169–70, 178.
3 Grant to Lincoln, May 1, 1864, R. T. Lincoln Collection, LC; O.R., XXXII, pt. 2, 407–8; XXXIV, pt. 3, 252–3, 293–4, 329–33, 409–10, 491; Ludwell H. Johnson, Red River Campaign (Baltimore, 1958); Hay, Diaries and Letters, 176.
4 O.R., XXXVI, pt. 2, 369; pt. 3, 722; Croffut, op. cit., 462; Grant to Stanton, May 13, 1864, owned by the estate of Foreman M. Lebold; Johnson, “Reminiscences of Hon. Edwin M. Stanton,” loc. cit., 76–7, 85–6; Ida M. Tarbell, A Reporter for the Union (New York, 1927), 41; Hay, Diaries and Letters, 180.
5 Morse, Welles Diary, II, 38; Louis M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade (New York, 1954), 315–20; Dix to Stanton, May 18, 20, 1864, CHS; Lincoln, Works, VIII, 13–14; Dix to Mrs. Stanton, April 16, 1864, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen.
6 O.R., XXXVI, pt. 2, 652–3, 840–1; pt. 3, 177–8; XXXVII, pt. 1, 485; XL, pt. 2, 558–9; pt. 3, 31, 59, 69, 122–3; William D. Mallam, “The Grant-Butler Relationship,” MVHR, XLI, 260–4.
7 O.R., XXXVIII, pt. 4, 19–20, 173, 260–1, 281–2, 294; pt. 5, 73; Thomas Ewing, Sr., to Ellen Sherman, Dec. 12, 1862, Ewing Family Papers, LC.
8 O.R., XXII, pt. 2, 731–2; Lincoln to Banks, Sept. 19, Nov. 5, 1863, HL; Frank Freidel, “General Orders 100 and Military Government,” MVHR, XXXII, 549; George L. Hendricks, Union Occupation of the Southern Seaboard (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1954); Wilton P. Moore, “The Provost Marshal Goes to War,” CWH, V, 62–71; Hyman, op. cit., 166–98.
9 Stanton to Woodman, Sept. 27, 1863, Woodman Papers, MHS; on Texas, Stanley to Stanton, Jan. 10; Halleck to Rosecrans, March 20, 1863, Stanton MSS; Lincoln to Gillmore, Jan. 13, 1864, Nicolay Papers, LC.
10 William E. Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics (New York, 1933), II, 252 (hereafter cited as Smith, Blair Family); Morse, Welles Diary, II, 58; Hay, Diaries and Letters, 60–70; Bates, Diary, 310; Lincoln, Works, VII, 53–6.
11 Hyman, op. cit., 187–90; Lincoln, Works, VII, 95; Morse, Welles Diary, I, 536; Bates, Diary, 343; Stanton to Chase, Dec. 30, 1863, HSP.
12 O.R., XXVI, pt. 1, 694–5; William A. Russ, Jr., “Administrative Activities of the Union Army during and after the Civil War,” Mississippi Law Journal, XVII, 71–89; Brooks, op. cit., 156–7; Jonathan T. Dorris, Pardon and Amnesty under Lincoln and Johnson (Chapel Hill, 1953), 3–94.
13 Wade to William Stanton, Feb. 5, 1864, owned by William Stanton Picher; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 247; Stanton’s statement in George S. Boutwell, Reminiscences of Sixty Years of Public Affairs (New York, 1902), II, 90–3 (cited hereafter as Boutwell, Reminiscences).
14 Donnal V. Smith, Chase and Civil War Politics (Columbus, 1931), 116–54.
15 Hay, Diaries and Letters, 168. Some unreliable evidence exists to indicate that Lincoln and Stanton tried to have Butler nominated for Vice-President. Like Johnson, Butler was a war Democrat, and his submergence into politics would have relieved Stanton of the problem of removing him from a field command. Butler refused a second place on the ticket, and the move, if it was ever seriously made, came to nothing. A. E. H. Johnson’s reminiscence in New York Evening Post, July 13, 1891; Butler, Correspondence, IV, 29.
16 Brough related his experiences to William Henry Smith almost immediately after returning to Ohio; ms “Private Memoranda—War Times,” William Henry Smith Papers, OHS; and see Chase to Tod, June 20, 1863, Chase Papers, ser. 2, LC.
17 Chase, Diary, 240; Sept. 16, 1864, ms diary, Chase Papers, LC; memo, undated, J. W. Schuckers Papers, LC; Fessenden, op. cit., I, 320–1; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 62.
18 George S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles (New York, 1885), I, 390–1; Butler to G. Gooch, March 1, 1864, Butler Papers, LC.
19 Dana to James S. Pike, July 10, 1864, CFL.
CHAPTER XV
A TOWER OF STRENGTH
DANA’S PREDICTION that the only way Lee could now harass the North was by means of raiding parties was accurate. Gray raiders broke loose in the Shenandoah Valley once again in the first week of July. Bald, stooped Confederate general Jubal Early commanded the raiders, but beyond this there was little reliable information. Stanton was taking all possible emergency measures, but he desperately needed accurate intelligence.
On July 8, Hitchcock called on Halleck. He was alarmed by the danger to the capital represented by Early’s thrust, but Halleck was calm and passive. At Stanton’s behest, Halleck had warned Grant of the situation, but Grant had recommended no course of action. Thinking it unwise to leave decisions affecting the safety of Washington to Grant far down in Virginia, Hitchcock hurried to see Stanton and repeated his forebodings. The Secretary calmly told him that everything was in Grant’s hands.
Hitchcock was far from satisfied, and he decided to see Lincoln. He found him more depressed than he had ever seen him, “indeed quite paralyzed and wilted down,” but nevertheless the President repeated what Halleck and Stanton had said. Hitchcock warned that if Stonewall Jackson were alive and in command of the rebel raiders, Washington would fall within three days. There was nothing to stop him. Stanton had told Lincoln the same thing, Hitchcock later learned. But neither of them could move the President. Hitchcock concluded that Lincoln, having been criticized before for interfering in tactical movements, had resolved to keep hands off Grant, and Stanton was obeying this decision.
The rebels crossed the Potomac. Lincoln, now spending every free minute at the War Department, told Hay that with good management the Union forces could annihilate any enemy detachments that ventured north of the river. Stanton agreed, provided that General Hunter would act vigorously. But Hunter had withdrawn too far westward and might not come up in time, and Sigel, Stanton knew, was inept.
Lincoln and Stanton were determined not to withdraw men from Grant, although they hoped that he would recognize their danger and decide to send some troops to Washington. The Secretary called on Pennsylvania and New York for 100,000 militiamen each to serve for 100 days. Governor Seymour responded handsomely, but Curtin was obstreperous, as usual, insisting that he control the Pennsylvania troops but that the federal government pay and supply them. Stanton scorned the proposition; unless these men were under army control they were useless. The governor finally backed down.1
Debouching from the Valley and swinging eastward toward Washington, Early’s troops seemed to overrun western Maryland. Though Union general Lew Wallace dug in at the Monacacy River, Hunter, who might have come in on Early’s rear, seemed paralyzed. Tardily recognizing the seriousness of the threat Early posed, Grant sent Rickett’s division of the 6th Corps to support Wallace, but on July 9 the Confederates swept through this thin barrier. Washington lay before them. Grant wired Halleck that the rest of the 6th and part of the 19th Corps were hurrying to the rescue. Stanton, anxiously waiting for the reinforcements to arrive, had a new worry. He had reports that an unknown horseman was shadowing Lincoln’s carriage; the Secretary increased the cavalry escort which, at his orders, had been guarding Lincoln for a year.
Early’s marauders snipped the telegraph wires connecting Washington with the North. No trains entered or left the city. Refugees streamed in from the countryside, their household goods piled helter-skelter on any sort of conveyance they could lay their hands on. Pale soldiers from convalescent camps and ragtag District militiamen manned the capital’s forts. War Department clerks worked with loaded muskets beside their desks, expecting momentarily to be ordered to the entrenchments.
Stanton became somewhat nervous, but managed to calm some bureau officers more agitated than himself. He had his secretary take $5,000 in government bo
nds and $400 in gold belonging to Ellen, now their entire personal fortune, from a War Department safe and carry them home with him that night. The clerk hid them in his mattress.2 Toward midnight on July 10, Stanton sent for the Lincolns to come in from the Soldiers’ Home in Georgetown, where the Lincolns and the Stantons had adjoining summer residences. Lincoln was irritated and came to the White House against his will. He was angrier when he learned that a gunboat was standing by so that the President might flee from the city. Lincoln later learned that it had not been Stanton who ordered the vessel readied, but Admiral S. P. Lee, who was later rebuked by Welles for contributing to the public panic.
On July 11, troops from the Army of the Potomac reached the city in strength. Early’s men began to withdraw. Lincoln and Stanton hoped to cut them off, but they recrossed the Potomac loaded with plunder. Dana, for Stanton, wrote Grant the next day that everything had been at loose ends for want of a commander in the Washington area, and Grant should appoint one at once, because if the incompetent Hunter ever managed to get to Washington, he would be the ranking officer, “but he will not do.” It was up to Grant to act now; mere advice or suggestions were insufficient. “General Halleck will not give orders except as he receives them; the President will give none, and until you direct explicitly what is to be done,” Dana implored Grant at Stanton’s behest, “everything will go on in the deplorable and fatal way in which it has gone on in the past week.” Grant was clearly in top command.
But just as clearly, the Union chain of authority, weakened by Halleck’s maidenly behavior, needed a link below Grant capable of independent action in the area north of the Army of the Potomac. Early’s raid, to Grant, meant only that Lee was weaker by that many troops; to Lincoln and Stanton, it was a threat to the symbol of the Union.3
Montgomery Blair, furious at the burning of his home in Silver Springs by the raiders, commented openly that the army officials around Washington were incompetent poltroons, specially criticizing Halleck and Stanton. Halleck protested to Stanton that the slanderer should be ousted from the cabinet. Stanton referred the matter to Lincoln without comment; the Secretary agreed with Blair about the incompetent officers and wanted to dismiss Halleck, but Lincoln would not allow it.
Through the raid and the subsequent recriminations, Stanton kept his temper in check to a noticeable degree. He had been quiet and subdued through the whole affair, displaying little of the apprehension that he usually exhibited under stress. Stanton even claimed to William Henry Smith, an Ohio friend, a week after Early’s threat was dispelled, “that the most comfortable time in Washington since the beginning of the war, was when cut off last week from the rest of the world.” His son, who had been with his father every moment, wrote proudly to Pamphila: “You may be sure that father did his duty, humiliating as it was to witness persistent carelessness and blundering and discouraging as it was to be constantly hampered because some one’s feelings might be hurt by supersedure, or for other paltry reasons.” The War Secretary, young Edwin claimed, “was constantly vigilant,” and Lincoln would have done well to listen to him.4
Stanton’s mild behavior seems most attributable to his faith in Lincoln and Grant. He could face the world as he had never been able to do under that general’s predecessors in command. Like Stanton, Grant distrusted Hunter, who finally asked to be relieved. Grant readily consented. He had already chosen Philip Henry Sheridan to command in the Shenandoah Valley. This mite of an Irishman, short, slight, ungainly, seemed too inexperienced to Stanton, but both he and Lincoln acceded to Grant’s judgment, and Sheridan proved to be a terror in battle. Grant, like Stanton, wanted to supersede Halleck at this time, but Lincoln again vetoed the idea.5
By early August, however, Stanton was again exhibiting his well-known nervous pessimism, and this attitude is reflected in Dana’s admission “that [the] last month has very much complicated the political as well as the military situation.” Grant was stalemated near Richmond. The old evil of the Army of the Potomac—mutual recriminations among the officers—was reappearing. “At all this the country is deeply discouraged,” Dana admitted, “and the party for peace at any price very active. Still more active, if possible, is the anti-Lincoln party among the Republicans, composed of all the elements of discontent that a four year administration could produce.” The Democrats, happy at Republican discord, were, however, finding that their “candidate is missing after the most desperate search,” but Dana again prophesied that they must take on McClellan. Lincoln and Stanton saw the probable candidacy of McClellan on the Democratic ticket as a first move toward getting the Union Army to quit fighting, Dana reported, and to this end the peace faction was trying to restore the general to an active command before the election, “but I don’t think it has had any influence on the mind of the President, or that there is any likelihood of his yielding to it.”
Despite reverses and losses the South was “as defiant as at first,” Dana admitted gloomily. The Wade-Davis manifesto had virtually served notice that the Republican extremists intended to desert Lincoln in mid-campaign and find some other candidate on whom the party could unite.6
Realizing the importance of making a show of strength on behalf of Lincoln and the Republican-Union coalition, Stanton had swung into action in Kentucky, the first state to hold an election after Lincoln’s nomination. It was scheduled for August 1. Only certain county offices and an appellate-judgeship were at stake, but the Kentucky election was regarded as a bellwether for the voting of the other border states in September.
Lincoln declared martial law in Kentucky and suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The Army, under tough young General S. G. Burbridge, a native son, tightened its grip on the state. Prominent Democrats were arrested and the name of a Democratic candidate for judge was stricken from the polls on the ground that he was disloyal. But Democratic party leaders made a substitute nomination for the judgeship, and their candidates swept the state.
Although the defeat in Kentucky made Stanton pessimistic, he never permitted his discouragement to become despair, and he turned his attention to Maine, another early-voting state. Governor Samuel Cony wanted men who had enlisted for coastal defense and in the Navy credited against the state’s draft quota. If the people were denied this “pitiful favor,” he warned Stanton, “you may look for political results agreeable neither to you nor myself.” But Grant needed men. Stanton refused the governor’s plea and another for a delay in the hated draft. In spite of this, Republican candidates came through with comfortable majorities, and Cony congratulated Stanton on this gratifying result.7
The Republican victory in Maine failed to end the search by some of the party’s leaders for a better presidential candidate than Lincoln. Once started, the movement gained its greatest impetus in New York City, though it ramified elsewhere. On August 25, Republican National Chairman Henry J. Raymond and members of his committee, highly alarmed, hurried to the White House for a consultation with Lincoln. “Hell is to pay,” wrote Nicolay. “The N. Y. politicians have got a stampede on that is about to swamp everything.” Raymond thought the only way to silence Lincoln’s critics and salvage the election would be to bring about a quick peace. He suggested that Lincoln send a peace commission to Richmond.
Inwardly Lincoln felt no more confident of his re-election than did Raymond, but he presented a bold front. And Seward, Stanton, and Fessenden—“the strong half of the cabinet,” Nicolay called them—backed up his assertion that to sue for peace would be worse than losing the presidential contest, it would be to surrender it in advance, and argued that the people still had faith in Lincoln. The committee members, according to Nicolay, returned home “much encouraged and cheered up.”8
Just at this time an incident occurred, however, that put Stanton in a bad light. The Democrats, capitalizing on the nation’s war-weariness, claimed that the Lincoln administration would reject any overtures for peace; actually there was no chance of peace, except through military victory, unless it was to b
e on Confederate terms. With Lincoln adamant against negotiations unless they promised a restoration of the Union, Stanton found himself associated with a peace effort that reflected unfavorably on the administration.
The move was initiated by the erratic Horace Greeley, when he learned on dubious authority that two Confederate agents had arrived on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with credentials from Jefferson Davis to treat for a cessation of hostilities. They were Clement C. Clay, of Alabama, and Jacob Thompson, late of Buchanan’s cabinet, and their real purpose was to foment unrest in the North. But the gullible Greeley obtained Lincoln’s reluctant consent to make contact with them. His efforts resulted in failure, as Lincoln had foreseen, but Jeremiah Black, no less credulous than Greeley, believed that if he could sit down face to face with his old friend Thompson, something might be accomplished. Stopping at Stanton’s home one morning, Black told him what he had in mind. Stanton assented to his plan, not caring to counter Lincoln’s earlier consent to Greeley.
Returning from Toledo, where he had found Thompson, Black wrote to Stanton on August 24 that he had gained the impression that the Southern people ardently wished for peace and would welcome an armistice, provided their domestic affairs would remain undisturbed and they would be allowed to honor their state debts and reward their soldiers. They now assertedly resented French and British attentions, and regarded the question of slavery in the territories as unimportant, Black reported; nor did he think they would demand a fugitive slave law.9
Stanton Page 44