So thorough was Sheridan’s devastation of the Valley that starvation threatened the people, and he asked permission to issue rations to them. Stanton approved the proposal but only on an emergency basis. Loyal persons should be sent North, where they could earn a livelihood, he said, and the disloyal made to go South and “feed upon the enemy.” While the men of Virginia were serving in the rebel ranks or as bushwhackers, he saw no reason for the federal government to support their wives and children. The tough policy toward the enemy that Stanton had advocated since his entry into the war office was now being applied with full force.6
In the West, though Sherman had captured Atlanta, he had failed to destroy the Confederate army, now commanded by John B. Hood. An energetic, sometimes reckless fighter, Hood seized the initiative, sending his bold cavalry chieftains, Forrest and Wheeler, to harass Sherman’s supply lines. To try to run down Hood would be useless, and Sherman, having no desire to remain on the defensive, proposed to send Thomas to Nashville with enough troops to defend Tennessee, and then, severing his communications and living off the country, march the rest of his army through Georgia to the seacoast, where a Union fleet could meet him and where he could establish a base. To walk a well-appointed army through the heart of the Confederacy would demonstrate the power of Union arms, he said, and the swath of destruction he proposed to leave in his wake would bring home to the Southern people the awfulness of war.
At first blush Sherman’s daring proposal did not appeal to Grant. Hood, his army unimpaired, might be too much for Thomas. Or suppose he should follow Sherman? Could an army the size of Sherman’s maintain itself in hostile country with an enemy nipping at its flanks and rear? Grant communicated his doubts to Lincoln and on October 12 learned from Stanton that though the civilian authorities were hopeful of seeing Sherman’s plan put into effect, the decision was Grant’s.
Meanwhile, however, Grant had become convinced that Sherman’s plan was sound. Once again the Washington authorities deferred to his judgment. Within three weeks Northern newspapers were headlining Sherman’s proposed movement. Stanton in hot anger dashed off a wire to Grant. Sherman’s officers should keep their mouths shut, and Sherman himself was careless in giving out information. “Matters not spoken of aloud in the Department are bruited by officers coming from Sherman’s army in every Western printing office and street.” Grant proposed to ferret out the loose-mouthed culprits and consign them to the Dry Tortugas.
On November 16, Sherman’s army of 65,000, mostly troops from the Midwest, wheeled out of Atlanta on the long march to the sea. Smoke clouds billowed behind them; everything of military value in the city was being sent up in flames. Hood did not follow Sherman, but chose to double back on Thomas. Schofield checked him in a bloody fight at Franklin and then dropped back to join Thomas. Hood took a position on the high ground south of Nashville.
Knowing that Thomas had superiority of numbers, Grant, Stanton, and Lincoln all expected him to strike. But he was a methodical general, who wanted to achieve a knockout when he swung. His cavalry was not yet ready, and Thomas wanted his horsemen in prime condition to harass a routed enemy. When he still failed to attack, Stanton telegraphed Grant: “The President feels solicitous about the disposition of General Thomas to lay in fortifications for an indefinite period.… This looks like the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country.” Stanton told Grant to authorize Thomas to seize all the horses he needed, and to urge him to get on with the work; else: “If he waits … Gabriel will be blowing his last horn.”7
Grant ordered Thomas to attack at once. When he still held back, Grant advised Lincoln to replace him. Though Lincoln and Stanton both had confidence in Thomas despite his seeming lack of aggressiveness, they had Halleck inform Grant that if he wished to remove Thomas, no one in the government would oppose his decision, but he would have to issue the order himself. Grant sent an order of removal to the War Department with instructions to forward it to Thomas, who meanwhile reported that a sleet storm in the Nashville area had halted all operations. Grant consented to withhold his order, but again becoming impatient, decided to go to Nashville and effect the change in command. Lincoln and Stanton tried to dissuade him, but found him immovable. Before he could leave, however, a telegram from Thomas announced that he had won a smashing victory at Nashville.
The message reached the War Department at 11 p.m. on December 15. Eckert took it off the wire, ran downstairs, leaped into an ambulance, dashed to Stanton’s house, and pounded on the door. The Secretary stuck his head out of a second-story window. Eckert shouted the news. “Hurrah!” cried Stanton, and Eckert could hear Ellen and the Stanton children also shouting “Hurrah!”
The Secretary pulled on his clothes and hurried with Eckert to the White House. Hearing a commotion in the downstairs hallway, Lincoln tumbled out of bed and received the news in his nightshirt at the head of the stairs. His worn face gleamed with pleasure in the faint light of the candle that he held above his head.
At midnight Stanton rushed off a telegram to Thomas, tendering his thanks for a stunning setback to the Confederacy. “We will give you a hundred guns in the morning,” he told Thomas. Next morning Lincoln wrote Thomas to the thundering of the guns: “You have made a magnificent beginning; a grand consummation is within your easy reach. Do not let it slip.”
Thomas began a resolute pursuit of Hood’s retreating army, but the weather again turned bad and the streams became impassable. Then the skies cleared and Thomas proceeded to follow through. Pounding and slashing at Hood’s demoralized army, he virtually annihilated it as an effective fighting force.
Stanton, his confidence in the dogged general vindicated, suggested to Grant that Thomas deserved a major general’s commission. Grant unhurriedly assented to it. But Thomas, morbidly sensitive, had been cut to the heart on learning of the intention to remove him, although he did not blame Stanton. He considered the Secretary fair and just, and granted that the War Department had done everything he asked to assure the success of his army.8
Meanwhile Sherman had vanished somewhere east of Atlanta. For three weeks all that Washington heard about him came from Southern newspapers, which claimed that his army faced starvation and predicted it would soon surrender. Grant told Lincoln and Stanton not to worry; Sherman would reach salt water in good time. On December 13, Sherman gained the outskirts of Savannah, made contact with a Union fleet, and flashed reports to Washington. Senator John Sherman sent him a congratulatory wire, and noted that “I live next door to Stanton, and he favors me with the despatches when they come. By the way, he is your fast friend, and was when you had fewer.”
Lincoln and all the cabinet had been torn with tension and worry ever since Sherman left Atlanta. News of Sherman’s victory was a happier moment for them than the reports of Lee’s surrender four months later. “Our joy was irrepressible,” Hugh McCulloch recalled, “not only because of their [Sherman’s army’s] safety, but because it was an assurance that the days of the Confederacy were numbered. Every member of the cabinet knew, at last, that the war was won and the Union safe.”9
On Christmas night, Grant wired Stanton that Savannah had surrendered; Sherman presented the city to Lincoln as a gift. Yet, despite Stanton’s sincere appreciation of Sherman’s accomplishment, it is evident that a distrust of Sherman had been building up in his mind for some time, notwithstanding the avowal of friendship for the general that he had made. For Sherman frankly disapproved of the government’s policy toward Negroes, writing to Stanton that he opposed the enlistment of blacks. He preferred to keep the Negroes for some time to come in a subordinate position, he said, “for our prejudices, yours as well as mine, are not yet schooled for absolute equality.” If Negroes did the fighting, advised the general, they would demand a voice in governing the country. He thought it preferable to use Negroes as laborers and to dragoon into the Army white men who stayed home for “trade and gain.” “If, however, the government has determined to push the policy to the end i
t is both my duty and pleasure to assist,” he wrote.
Now word came to the War Department that Sherman had driven fugitive slaves from his camps, in one instance leaving Negro refugees to be slaughtered by Confederate cavalry. Halleck, in a friendly warning, cautioned Sherman that he was gaining the reputation of having a “criminal dislike” toward “the inevitable Sambo.” Abolitionist leaders were outraged and Lincoln was under heavy pressure to punish the offending general.
Stanton, aware of and sharing Grant’s high regard for “Tecumseh,” was more disturbed than anyone else in the administration. He asked Grant to impress upon Sherman the difficulty of securing more white replacements and the consequent advisability of organizing colored regiments. Grant replied that he had already done so, and suggested that Stanton explain to Sherman in person that the use of Negro troops for garrison duty would free white soldiers for combat.
Although he was still ill at the time he received this suggestion—he had had to leave his own New Year’s reception and had been in bed since—Stanton decided to go along with Grant’s idea.10 He boarded the ship Nevada on January 7, 1865, in company with Meigs and other officers. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to provide a rest for Stanton and to untangle a snarl of conflicting Treasury and War Department policies concerning captured cotton. But the Negro question was uppermost in Stanton’s mind.
On January 9 the ship reached Savannah, and although Stanton complained of internal pains which he said would impel him to resign very soon, he plunged into a ceaseless round of activity. Sherman conducted the party on a tour of the city and of the Union army camps. At Stanton’s request, which the sensitive Sherman felt to be a gratuitous insult, a meeting of twenty leading Negro churchmen was called. Stanton was interested to learn from the Negroes their goals now that they were free, their willingness to accept Union military service, and their views on whether white men would accept colored neighbors when peace came.
Then Stanton asked Sherman to leave the room, whereupon he asked the Negro leaders how their people regarded the general. He had been friendly and courteous, they said; they had complete confidence in him.
Stanton seemed impressed by the good order prevailing in Savannah and by the courtesy of the troops toward the inhabitants. On the surface, the Secretary’s visit was pleasant for everyone. He invited Sherman and his staff as well as several naval commanders to dine on the Nevada, and he saw to it that he and Sherman faced each other across the table, so that they might continue their talks. “Sherman,” navy man Dahlgren noted, “was evidently not pleased with some of the plans.”
The general was more pleased when Stanton asked him to offer suggestions for handling the Negro question. Freedmen should colonize lands abandoned by rebels on offshore islands, Sherman insisted, and, isolated from exploitative whites, bridge the gap between slavery and responsibility. Stanton was interested. He and Sherman stayed up late developing the idea, to which the Secretary contributed suggestions and corrections and which Sherman put into practice the next month.
Their apparent harmony increased when Stanton and Sherman granted an audience to some white Georgians who came to Savannah during this visit to ask how their state could be readmitted to the Union. Wishing to increase disaffection among die-hard rebels, Sherman with Stanton’s approval explained to the Georgians that under Lincoln’s amnesty proclamation a full pardon had already been offered to all but a few Confederates. Stanton might have warned the general that certain radical Republicans in Congress spurned Lincoln’s plan; in the case of Louisiana, where 20 per cent of the voters had acted in accordance with Lincoln’s invitation, the radicals led by Wade, Davis, and Sumner had refused to seat the state’s representatives because it had denied the vote to Negroes. A sharp difference in reconstruction policy was shaping up between Lincoln and Congress, but Stanton apparently did not explain the situation to Sherman, perhaps assuming (on the basis of considerable evidence) that Senator John Sherman had done so. Instead, he entreated him “as a soldier and patriot” to end the war with all possible speed because bankruptcy threatened the government.11
When Stanton boarded the ship for home after a four-day visit, Sherman’s junior officers voiced their relief. “Stanton,” one commented, “has been very bearish and boorish, as is his nature, and it will be a relief to everyone to have him out of the way.” But Sherman was pleased at what he felt were the positive results of the Secretary’s visit; the general was convinced, as he wrote to his wife, that Stanton “is cured of that Negro nonsense.”
Stanton, on his part, professed to feel easier about Sherman’s attitude toward the Negro, and so informed William Lloyd Garrison. But both men were dissembling.
On the day Stanton interviewed the Negro ministers, Sherman had written secretly to Halleck that though for the moment he seemed to be popular with Stanton, he would not deceive himself; a single misstep on the Negro question could “tumble down my fame into infamy.” He appreciated Halleck’s hint that he should act cautiously, and “will heed it as far as mere appearances go, but, not being dependent on votes, I can afford to act, as far as my influence goes, as a fly-wheel instead of a mainspring.”
And Stanton was still unsure concerning Sherman’s trustworthiness in regard to the Negro. En route home, Stanton wired Grant and asked him for a meeting “so as to communicate other matters that cannot safely be written.”12
Stanton was still seriously ill, but some news he received before leaving Savannah changed his plans concerning a fast trip home. Wilmington, on the Cape Fear River, had finally been sealed off by the capture of Fort Fisher, losing to the Confederacy its last point of contact with the outside world. A previous attempt to take the fort had resulted in a fiasco, largely through Butler’s bungling.
When Stanton learned in Savannah that Lincoln at Grant’s urging had at last removed the maladroit Butler, and that Fort Fisher had surrendered, he decided to stop there on his way home, despite his painful illness. In the name of the President, Stanton thanked Admiral David D. Porter and the army commander, General Terry, for their victory, for the Confederate flag that had flown over the fort, and for ridding the administration of Butler. Going ashore, he watched working parties burying the dead and putting the wounded on shipboard. Still fatigued, Stanton dined with General Saxton and his wife. He grew animated as he saw the books in the confiscated house the officer was using. “Ah, here are old friends,” he said of Macaulay’s poems. Saxton read aloud “Horatius at the Bridge,” and Stanton responded with “The Battle of Ivry.” That night and the next day, Stanton was “in his most genial mood,” quoting poetry, telling amusing anecdotes, sparking the conversation. “The Titan Secretary of War was replaced by the genial companion,” Mrs. Saxton recalled.13 With victory at hand, Stanton was at last relaxing.
He was in this happy frame of mind when he arrived in Washington, although his health was still troublesome. Stanton crossed departmental lines to compliment Mrs. Porter on her husband’s “brilliant success.” And he amused Lincoln by telling how a Union sentry challenged his party one day while they were on a river-borne survey of the Fort Fisher area. Informed that the Secretary of War and a major general were on board, the sentry responded: “We’ve got major generals enough up here—why don’t you bring us up some hard-tack?”
Then the geniality vanished. Stanton had been under a fierce congressional attack during his absence, ostensibly for his arbitrary arrests, and this time the onslaught came from the radical Republicans, who were disgruntled at Stanton’s enforcement of the President’s reconstruction plan and feared that Stanton was now under Lincoln and Sherman’s moderate influence concerning the Negro and reconstruction.
Stanton was faithfully executing Lincoln’s policy on both subjects. But knowing more than any other man in the country how the President’s plan for the South was working out, Stanton was becoming increasingly convinced that Lincoln’s mild terms of December 1863 required rethinking. Dana wrote of the deficiencies of the “newly-tinkered
states” of the occupied South, and regarding Kentucky, that the state “is one great Golgotha filled with the bones of Union men whom the President has pardoned.”
Except to Lincoln, Stanton kept silent concerning his inner doubts; they agreed to launch a full investigation of the way in which presidential reconstruction was actually working out in the Mississippi Valley, both to forestall a congressional inquiry and because Lincoln was beginning to doubt whether his was the best way toward reconstruction in practice. The war was still to be won, and even if Lincoln now chose to stick to the terms he had offered in 1863, there remained whatever time Stanton stayed on in his second administration in which he could try to persuade the President to a sterner course.
Stanton also realized that some congressmen who were criticizing him now were angrier over his rejection of their patronage requests, or over the ouster of Butler, than they were over nuances of reconstruction policy. Congress was feeling its oats now that the war was nearing its end. The first target for its attention was the Army, which must administer any reconstruction program.14
But more immediate events claimed Stanton’s attention. On January 31, Grant wired that three Confederate commissioners were at his headquarters with instructions from Jefferson Davis to treat for peace, and wished to confer with Lincoln. Stanton felt that a satisfactory peace could come only with the destruction of Lee’s army, and he feared that the kindhearted President might yield too much if he sat down with the commissioners. On his suggestion, Eckert went off to Grant’s headquarters to learn what terms they proposed.
Finding that their instructions contemplated a recognition of Confederate independence, Eckert broke off negotiations at once. But Grant, convinced from private conversations with the emissaries that peace with union was attainable, urged Lincoln to confer with them. Lincoln answered that he and Seward would meet them at Hampton Roads. The conference came to nothing, as Stanton had anticipated, and Lincoln returned to Washington. But Stanton was surprised when the President proposed two days later in a cabinet meeting to recommend to Congress the remuneration of dispossessed slaveowners provided the Confederates would lay down their arms by April 1. With victory definitely in sight, with the Thirteenth Amendment on its way toward ratification, Stanton and the other cabinet members saw no need for such magnanimity, and Lincoln reluctantly abandoned the idea.
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