On March 3, while the President sat in his office at the Capitol signing bills, Stanton brought him a telegram from Grant. Lee had suggested to Grant that the two of them attempt to end hostilities by means of a military convention which would embrace the bases of reconstruction. Lincoln had no intention of acceding, but before he could say anything Stanton implored him to refuse the suggestion. Only the President, Stanton pleaded, should negotiate peace or initiate reconstruction; otherwise he would be “a mere figure-head.” After thinking for a moment, Lincoln, reaching for a sheet of paper, wrote: “The President directs me to say to you that he wishes you to have no conference with General Lee unless it be for the capitulation of Gen. Lee’s army, or on some minor, and purely, military matter.… [And] you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political questions. Such matters the President holds in his own hands; and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions. Meantime you are to press to the utmost, your military advantages.” Then he turned to Stanton. “Now, Stanton,” he said, “date and sign this paper and send it to Grant. We will see about this peace business.”
Grant, wondering whether this message had been intended as a rebuke, assured Stanton that he would not relax his military efforts in the slightest until victory was achieved. Nor would he embarrass the government by exceeding his authority; it was because he had no authority to negotiate with Lee that he had asked for instructions. Stanton answered: “No apprehension is felt that you will ever exceed your authority, and your object in applying for instructions was understood.”15
Taken all together, Lincoln and Stanton reposed full confidence in Grant, who “rules [military] matters when he really attempts it,” in Rutherford Hayes’s words. But the President and Secretary were determined that the civilian authority should exercise full control over political concerns, including the reconstruction question.
Stanton kept a firm grip on the Army’s administrative affairs so that Grant might be free from distractions and run the field commands. It was a new civil-military relationship which was developing between Stanton and Grant. The general was in control of basic military policy; the Secretary saw to it that he had the tools of war and virtual exemption from political interference. And Lincoln was now more free than ever before to concern himself with the reconstruction question. He left the endless administrative work of the war to his busy “Mars,” who seemed indefatigable, but who was rapidly wearing out.
The strain of seeing to it that Lincoln was kept safe on the windy, raw day on which he took the oath of office for the second time, drained Stanton further. Abundant preparations insured that “we had no disturbances, no fires, no raids or robberies,” Halleck wrote Lieber the next day. Detectives watched closely over the many hundreds of deserters from the rebel army who were in Washington, and gangs of rowdies from Northern cities were “completely overawed.”
When he and the other members of the cabinet took their places in the Senate Chamber to hear Andrew Johnson swear the oath as Vice-President, Stanton sagged with weariness. Then, to everyone’s amazement, Johnson launched into a tirade against secessionists and his personal political opponents. Welles whispered to Stanton that “Andy” must be drunk or crazy; Stanton muttered that something was surely wrong with him. “Stanton appeared to be petrified,” a journalist recorded.16 It came out later that Johnson had been ill and to brace himself for the ceremony had taken a stiff drink of whisky, which, in his weakened condition, had been too much for him. Leaving the chamber, the cabinet members took reserved seats on the platform that had been built in front of the Capitol, and listened while Lincoln, in his inaugural address, pleaded for a peace without malice and with charity for all.
To the south, Sherman moved up through South Carolina, intending to make a junction with Grant. His men, in spite of orders, burned and pillaged as they marched, avenging themselves savagely on the fractious little state that they blamed for causing the war. When they entered North Carolina the destruction stopped. By March 22, Sherman had reached Goldsboro, and Stanton, sending Meigs to make sure he was properly supplied, had him take along a florid congratulatory letter to Sherman. But Stanton’s rapidly declining health temporarily robbed him of the buoyancy which good news usually inspired.
Stanton was done in. Soon after the inauguration, Surgeon General Barnes again ordered him to bed. Journalist Reid, who had no fondness for Stanton, attributed “the paroxysms of passion (daily growing more and more frequent) which have so often disgraced the war office,” to the “lamentable results of enfeebled health.” Stanton, he wrote, “is rather to be pitied than censured for what has thus befallen him in the country’s service.”
Grant had invited the President and Secretary to visit his headquarters before the final drive began. Stanton’s illness prevented him from making the trip, but Lincoln accepted the invitation and decided to take his wife and son Tad along.
Although Ellen protested, Stanton decided to bid good-by to the Lincolns at the wharf, but their ship pulled out before he arrived. Less than an hour later a violent gale struck Washington, unroofing houses, uprooting trees, and lashing the Potomac into a fury. Stanton, concerned for the President’s safety, again left his sickbed to go to the War Department for news. Word came the next afternoon that all was well with the Lincolns. Stanton replied that Lincoln had gone to the “Sunny South” just in time; the Washington weather was cold and disagreeable following the storm. “I would be glad to receive a telegram from you dated at Richmond before you return,” the Secretary stated.17
Except for the weather, Washington was unusually peaceful. Even Lincoln’s political tormentors were quiet, and the army command seemed content at last with what the War Department was doing. Sherman came from Goldsboro to consult with Lincoln and Grant. Both generals felt confident that the Confederates were now fighting on determination alone. Grant was ready to begin his final drive as soon as Sheridan joined him from the Shenandoah Valley. His chief concern was that Lee might slip away, move southward to join Johnston, and play hare-and-hounds with the Union forces until he could again be brought to bay. Lincoln, sure that the end was near, and disturbed by Sherman’s propensity toward severity for the South, made it clear that he wanted a soft peace, one which, abjuring revenge and reprisals, would enable erstwhile enemies to live in friendship again; but he and Senator Sherman, also present, predicted how politically difficult the reconstruction issue would become.
General Sherman left to rejoin his army, and Grant, bidding farewell to the President, began probing westward toward the railroads that supplied Lee’s army and afforded a possible escape route. Grant planned to smash heavily at Lee’s overextended right flank. Lincoln wired Stanton that he felt he should return to Washington but wanted to stay on and watch Grant’s movements develop.
Stanton urged Lincoln to remain, at least for a few days. The President’s presence on the scene would spur the troops to take Richmond; “compared to that no other duty can weigh a feather.” Only petty tasks waited in the capital. Lincoln decided to stay, and sent his wife back to Washington.
Shifting his troops to the endangered right wing, Lee gave Sheridan’s horsemen a tough time at Five Forks. But the Union cavalry held, and infantry support arrived in time for Sheridan to strike back furiously. Lincoln informed Stanton that Sheridan, aided by Warren’s 5th Corps, had carried everything before him. Grant had ordered an attack along his entire line. A breakthrough somewhere was imminent.
Stanton haunted the telegraph rooms in the War Department, forgetting to go home for dinner, and on the night of April 2 not going home at all. He heard from Lincoln that night that Grant had taken 12,000 troops. “This has been a blessed day for the country,” Stanton exulted.
Early the next morning, Lincoln flashed Stanton the news that Lee had evacuated Petersburg. Grant, sure that Richmond was now undefended, was hurrying troops to cut off the retreating Confederates. Stanton sent Ellen a scrawled message: “Petersburg is evacuated and probably Richmond.
Put out your flags,” and her raising of patriotic bunting at their home set off a day of wild celebration at the capital.
Stanton feared that the President, near the battle lines, might expose himself unduly, and warned him not to risk capture by “a treacherous and dangerous enemy.” Lincoln thanked him for his caution, but said: “I have already been to Petersburg, stayed with Gen. Grant an hour and a half and returned here. It is certain now that Richmond is in our hands, and I think I will go there to-morrow.”18
A sixteen-year-old telegraph operator, W. E. Kettles, of Boston, was handling the wire when news that the Union troops had entered Richmond flashed into the War Department. The boy seized the dispatch, upsetting an inkwell in his eagerness, and ran with it to another telegrapher, who threw open the window and shouted into the street: “Richmond has surrendered!” The news spread fast, and people streaming from stores and offices speedily filled the thoroughfares. Cannons began firing, whistles tooted, horns blew, horsecars were forced to a standstill, the crowd yelled and cheered. Stanton came into the telegraph office, and picking Kettles up in his arms, lifted him to the window sill and shouted: “My friends, here is the young man who received the telegram which tells us of the fall of Richmond!”
A roar from the crowd answered Stanton. The Secretary was beside himself with joy. Work in the War Department was abandoned for the day, the first time such a thing had happened since Stanton took charge. He strolled about the building in an exuberant mood. But there was a hint of disappointment in the message he penned to his wife: “Lee and the remnants of his army escaped during the night. It is not known where Jeff Davis is gone, but Grant is pursuing Lee.”
The night that Richmond fell, Stanton ordered two candles placed in every window of the many buildings now occupied by the War Department, with a man standing by to light each pair when a band crashed into the first notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Flags decorated the façade of the main War Department building. THE UNION IT MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED appeared in jets of flame, and beneath this motto an American eagle grasped in its talons a scroll labeled “Richmond.” Flags, flowers, evergreens, and lanterns ornamented Stanton’s residence.
Surging crowds accompanied by discordant brass bands passed from one house to another, demanding speeches from anyone of importance. Many persons who habitually avoided public speeches spoke that night, and Stanton’s unplanned address, according to newsman Brooks, was the best of these “offhand” offerings, and was reminiscent of the President’s talk at Gettysburg. Stanton, tears in his eyes, stopping several times overcome by emotion, asked the cheering crowd to thank God, to ask His blessings for Lincoln and the men in uniform who had brought them to this joyous day. “Henceforth our commiseration and our aid should be given to the wounded, the maimed, and the suffering,” he said, his powerful voice clearly penetrating the din. He hoped for divine guidance so that the victorious nation could “be just in the hour of victory, and to help us to secure the foundations of this republic, soaked as they are in blood, so that it shall live for ever and ever.” Cheers interrupted every line, and reached a new volume after Stanton read Grant’s dispatch announcing the fall of Richmond. He introduced telegrapher Kettles to the crowd; the boy had dined with the Stantons that night and now, flushed with joy and embarrassment, could find no words.
Seward had been another dinner guest. He left it to the crowd “to judge what I ought to think of such a Secretary of War as this,” and the response made the verdict clear. It was Stanton’s night and he was happy.19
While Grant pushed rapidly westward in an effort to head off Lee, Lincoln remained in Richmond, where he consulted with Judge Campbell, Confederate Assistant Secretary of War, about the restoration of the Union. Fearful that the guileless Lincoln might surrender the fruits of victory, Stanton summoned his watchdog, Dana, and hurried him off to Richmond. Before Dana reached there, Stanton wired Lincoln that Seward had been thrown from his carriage and had suffered serious injuries. Lincoln started at once for Washington. But Dana learned that the President had authorized General Godfrey Weitzel, the Union commander in Richmond, to inform Campbell that he would permit the rebel legislature of Virginia to assemble for the purpose of withdrawing the state’s troops from the Confederate armies and stopping resistance to the federal government. A committee of legislators had already met, reported Dana, to act on Lincoln’s proposal.
Good news continued to pour in. “Sheridan defeated Lee yesterday,” Stanton notified Ellen on April 7; “captured many generals and many thousand prisoners.” The next day, he received Grant’s wire predicting Lee’s imminent surrender, and on the ninth, he hurried to the White House with the long-awaited news—Lee had capitulated.
Grant’s terms had been generous, and had been restricted to military concerns. Reading Grant’s telegram, the President and Stanton threw their arms around each other. One onlooker, Dr. Reid, of Steubenville, an old friend of the Secretary, recalled that Stanton, “his iron mask torn off, was trotting about in exhilarated joy.”
Stanton that night wired joyfully to Grant of his gratitude to God and his thanks to the general and his men. Immediately after, he sent an order to every army command across the nation for a salute of 200 guns to be fired the next day, and characteristically, the text of the order ended: “Report on the reception and execution of this order is to be made to the Adjutant-General at Washington.” That night the windows of the War Department again blazed with light; high up on the front in letters of fire appeared the word “Grant.” Rejoicing to the thunder of the saluting guns the next day, the nation seemed in a delirium.20
Stanton gave Lincoln his letter of resignation the next day, as he had earlier told Chase he would do as soon as Richmond fell and Lee surrendered. Lincoln looked down on Stanton from his towering height, placed a hand on each of the Secretary’s shoulders, and said: “Stanton, you have been a good friend and a faithful public officer and it is not for you to say when you will be no longer needed here.” Stanton reluctantly agreed to stay on for a brief while longer.
Perhaps this decision was made easier for him, or made to seem necessary, by news that Dana sent from Richmond on the afternoon of April 10. General Weitzel had allowed the churches there to reopen but had backed down from his original stipulation that as part of the Episcopal ritual the ministers of that denomination must offer a prayer for the President of the United States—during the war they had included the President of the Confederacy in their prayers. As a result of Weitzel’s leniency, not a single minister had asked God’s blessing on the President, though they had prayed for “those in authority,” a phrase Stanton suspected was meant to apply to rebel officials more than to the Union government. Stanton, determined that former rebels must respect federal authority, sent Weitzel a blistering reprimand, but Lincoln intervened on behalf of the general. It was another indication that the softhearted Lincoln needed watching. And Stanton was furious that the President’s charity toward defeated rebels should be returned with contempt. “He expected,” Stanton’s secretary recorded, “that they would at least be equal to the President in … Christian qualities.… To him such an insult to his chief was indefensible.”
Now worried, Stanton wished that Lincoln had not talked to Campbell in Richmond. The Secretary feared what the Virginia rebel legislators might do if the Union commander in Richmond permitted them to meet. He repeated several times to Lincoln that it had been a mistake to recognize them in the slightest manner, and urged over and over again that Lincoln revoke his instructions to Weitzel.
Confirmation of Stanton’s forebodings arrived in a telegram from Dana. The committee organized by Campbell to call the Virginia legislature into session was going far beyond Lincoln’s authorization to withdraw the Virginia troops from the Confederate armies. Assuming to act as a rightful governing body, these recent rebels were undertaking to treat for terms of peace, shocking even Campbell by their temerity. Encountering Stanton soon after he received this information, Sumner fou
nd him gravely concerned, and fearful that the Union was losing the fruits of its victories.21
Stanton was somewhat comforted that night, April 11, when Lincoln, speaking to a huge crowd on the White House lawn, defended the restoration policy he had followed in Louisiana and pleaded for the speedy acceptance of the Southern states into the Union, though repeating that he was not committed to any single plan of reconstruction. Directing his remarks to the advocates of Negro suffrage, Lincoln indicated that he had been moving forward on this question; he expressed his wish that the “reconstructed” state government in Louisiana enfranchise colored Union Army veterans and “the very intelligent” Negroes.
Encouraged by the tenor of this speech to believe that Lincoln was very close to his own position on the Virginia situation, Stanton the next morning, reinforced by the views of the new Attorney General, James Speed, continued his argument with the President. It carried over after lunch and late into the afternoon. To place such powers in the rebel Virginia legislature, Stanton insisted, “would be giving away the scepter of the conqueror.” Lincoln’s Virginia policy would bring trouble between the President and Congress. Reconstruction must encompass a new concept of suffrage in the South now that “the blacks were free,” Stanton argued. Could Lincoln, in justice, leave the Negroes to the mercies of their former masters, or forget the human and material sacrifices which he and Stanton had demanded of the North?
He spoke as earnestly and persuasively as he knew how, and Lincoln listened attentively, then forbade the meeting of the Virginia legislature. Stanton always took great credit on himself for winning this concession from the President. But it seems doubtful whether Lincoln was influenced overmuch by his arguments. For Lincoln had slowly been coming to agree with Stanton on the question of the need for Negro suffrage; in Richmond he had been extremely careful not to recognize the Virginia legislature as a lawful governmental body. Now that Campbell’s committee had gone far beyond what he had intended, he was ready enough to call off the whole thing, especially as Lee’s surrender had since accomplished what he had had in view—the demobilization of the Virginia troops.22
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