Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  A new America was being forged by men of these characteristics even before the cannon crashed at Fort Sumter. By 1865, entrepreneurs of Stanton’s drive and inventiveness were reaping fortunes through their vast midwifery of industrial production and communications. The wonder is that he should have chosen to serve the Union instead of garnering the share of this outpouring wealth that his abilities would certainly have earned him.

  Stanton’s idealistic streak had brought him to the bypass of selfless government service. His talents, combined with a puritanical standard of official and personal honesty, were precisely what were required when he took over the war office, and George Templeton Strong, a man of insight, though a critic of the Secretary rightly placed him in a “reputation of honor as Lincoln’s right-hand man.” From his often unpleasant experiences at the war office, Strong concluded that Stanton combined good and evil in his character. “He was honest, patriotic, able, indefatigable, warm-hearted, unselfish, incorruptible,” Strong judged, as well as “arbitrary, capricious, tyrannical, vindictive, hateful, and cruel.”2

  Taken together, these characteristics, when joined with the personal loyalty he offered to Lincoln, enabled Stanton, the second-rate man, to serve greatly. He was the man for those extraordinary times, and he did a titanic job in the face of immense difficulties.

  Never, except for temporary shortages which no wartime government has ever learned how to prevent, had the far-flung Union armies lacked the essentials of war after he took office. During 1861, his predecessor, Cameron, had spent approximately $40,500,000 for supplies, and a great deal of this was misspent. In Stanton’s first year as Secretary, army expenditures for matériel tripled; a year later they more than doubled again. When Lee surrendered, Union supply depots held enough matériel to support another three years of war at the heavy current rate of consumption. Whole fleets of ships, railroad cars, and wagons, vast droves of cattle and horses, moved about constantly to keep the augmenting armies supplied. Quartermaster General Meigs rightly asserted that nothing like it had ever been done before. “You may well be proud of this record,” Stanton’s friend Pierrepont wrote to him, “as the country will be of a Secretary who made such a report possible.”3

  If supplies were plentiful, the quality of the soldiers’ food left a great deal to be desired, despite the exorbitant prices the government was forced to pay for it. But notwithstanding the complaints about “salt horse,” no army up to that day had eaten so well as the Union’s forces after Stanton took over. Shoes, uniforms, and the many miscellaneous articles of equipment improved measurably in quality as well as in quantity under his vigilant eye. The word “shoddy,” a common epithet of 1861, had largely dropped from soldiers’ letters by 1865, and there was no “carnival of fraud” in the purchase and distribution of supplies.

  Stanton appointed special commissioners to oversee the standards of manufacturers of military supplies, and these vigilant men did effective work. To oversee the commissioners, as well as to supervise army morals, Stanton resuscitated an almost defunct army bureau, the Inspector General’s Office, and making it responsible only to himself, used it as a watchdog. But this unit lacked prestige and influence. Its personnel hesitated to submit reports adverse to comrades. Stanton therefore, in order to get inquiries into accusations of fraud, turned repeatedly to special investigating commissions, usually staffed by a general and a civilian, with the backing of Stanton’s authority to compel testimony.

  More than this he could not do. The best men of the North were attracted to business, the Army, and elective politics; there were few like Stanton who would submerge their talent, energy, and honesty in the profitless blind alley of appointive office. Once a friend urged him to dismiss a War Department civilian official of high rank, who had accepted bribes. Stanton bitterly replied: “I know all you say is true—He is a d—d scoundrel—But who will do the daily work that he has charge of, who is an honest man? Will you?”

  Because the answer was almost always negative, Stanton plugged ahead with the best human material he could find, and burned himself out seeking to oversee the work of many subordinates whom he mistrusted but for whom no better replacements were available. Similarly, if Congress’s ambiguous laws on captured cotton and trading permits opened the way to defalcations, embezzlement, and trickery in the Treasury Department, he was powerless to intervene. Except to fuss and threaten, there was nothing he could do.

  But Stanton himself remained untouched by financial dishonesty. The only “graft” he accepted was the professional services of an army doctor. The government gave Stanton his salary, and that was everything material he took from the war.4

  Though Stanton was ever vigilant against fraud, even here it is dangerous to generalize about him. At least one time he concealed financial wrongdoing for the sake of his party and a friend.

  In 1864, the captain of a captured Confederate blockade runner implicated Republican Senator William Sprague, Chase’s son-in-law, in a venture of running guns through the blockade into Texas, where they were exchanged for cotton. Chase, during his service as Secretary of the Treasury, had been accused of laxity and favoritism in granting permits to trade in cotton. If it had come out, just after his appointment as Chief Justice, that his son-in-law had profited from a treasonable enterprise, Chase would have faced political ruin and Lincoln and all Republicans would have suffered immeasurably from the scandal. Submerging his standards of honesty in the Union’s need for faith in the Republican leaders, Stanton hushed up the matter, and the damning evidence disappeared from the Department’s files.5

  Perfection would have been impossible to achieve in his position, and Stanton never strove for it. There were many things which he could not change or even correct very much. In his efforts to keep the armies up to the mark in manpower, Stanton found himself encumbered by the fact that at the outset of the war state authorities and the War Department had tried to encourage enlistments through the payment of bounties. By 1864, Congress had authorized bounties of $300 for each new recruit and $400 for each veteran who re-enlisted. To escape the “ignominy” of a draft, states, counties, and municipalities paid ever larger bounties to volunteers as the war wore on until this practice reached fantastic proportions.

  The extravagant system was self-defeating in a sense, for men held back from enlisting in the hope of obtaining even larger bounties by waiting, and it encouraged desertion and the vicious practice known as “bounty jumping.” Desertion became one of Stanton’s major headaches, for other factors besides the lure of bounties induced men to slink off from the armies. Stanton dealt harshly with deserters and others guilty of breaking regulations whenever he had his way, but his sternness was often tempered by Lincoln’s intervention, thereby causing Stanton to grumble that the President was imperiling discipline.

  Stanton cannot be blamed for the inadequacies of the bounty system. One phase of administration where he fell woefully short, however, was his failure to make efficient use of the regular army. The difficulty of recruiting regulars in competition with new volunteer regiments should have suggested the desirability of making every qualified private of the regulars a drill sergeant of volunteers and also of dispersing the regular officers among the many raw, new units, instead of maintaining the standing army as a separate organization.

  In July 1861, Congress authorized such use of regular army officers, but first Cameron’s ineptitude and then Stanton’s distrust of career soldiers, and political considerations of prime importance to Lincoln, kept it in abeyance. This preference for nonprofessionals drastically lowered military standards and perhaps resulted in prolonging the war unnecessarily at an enormous cost in lives and money.

  But Stanton, if admittedly deficient in this regard, compensated in part by learning quickly to hold on to able officers, whether volunteers or regulars. This was no gentleman’s war, he informed Sumner when the latter’s friend, a lieutenant, requested an extended furlough in order to practice law; he was too valuable to accommodat
e. Chase met the same answer when he interceded for a colonel who wished to resign; “I found Stanton so averse to losing good officers that I gave up the attempt,” Chase wrote.6

  There was an all too prevalent feeling at the outbreak of the war that no special training was needed to command troops. Even Lincoln in a moment of discouragement had thought of taking the field in person. The notion had its roots in the American tradition of retaining civilian control over the military, a tradition to which Stanton was so unwaveringly committed that Grant met a sharp rebuke from the Secretary when he tried to assume control of the military telegraph. This idea of civilian fitness also created confusion in the conduct of the war at the top level. Lincoln continually interfered in shaping strategy and determining troop placement until Grant became the chief field commander, and continued to offer advice afterward. Though it was a necessity forced upon him by the lethargy and inefficiency of his generals and by Halleck’s reluctance to make decisions, and though it probably averted disaster until Grant emerged, it frequently put the military and the civilian authorities at cross-purposes.

  It must be said for Stanton that he never tried to dictate strategy except in bringing his influence to bear on Lincoln in opposition to McClellan’s Peninsular campaign. Had Stanton been allowed a free hand, he would probably have centered the control of army operations in the War Department. Greater military efficiency might have been achieved that way, but there would have been a loss in flexibility. It may have been all for the best that Lincoln maintained close watch over war operations and was in many particulars his own Secretary of War. For Lincoln plowed around obstructions, thereby avoiding abrasions, whereas it was Stanton’s habit to meet them head on. The Secretary would have shivered many a plowshare without the President’s restraining guidance.

  No doubt Stanton’s early lack of appreciation for West Point training contributed to the poor leadership that so often plagued the Union armies. But the system of allowing state governors to choose officers up through the rank of colonel, and Lincoln’s practice of granting commissions for political reasons, contributed even more to inefficiency. Stanton’s aversion to West Pointers dissipated under the acid test of war, and on the whole his judgment with respect to the choice of top commanders turned out to be good. Grant and George Thomas were his personal protégés, and Grant in turn brought forth Sherman and Sheridan. Stanton inherited Buell and McClellan, erred in recommending Pope and in seconding a vicious policy toward Southern whites living inside that general’s lines, had no voice in the selection of Burnside, disapproved of Hooker and Rosecrans, endorsed Meade, and seems to have been noncommittal in the selection of Halleck.

  No matter how much Stanton at first distrusted West Pointers, he always had to rely on their advice in matters involving the Army’s bureau administration. He was barely settling into the war office when he faced the question of reorganizing the Army Medical Bureau. Officials of the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization dedicated to healing wounded soldiers and sustaining their morale, pressured Stanton to replace old, ossified Surgeon General C. A. Finley with Dr. William Hammond and to modernize the Medical Bureau altogether. Heeding Hitchcock’s advice against stripping the Army’s bureaucratic gears through overrapid reforms, and sharing Lincoln’s disquiet at the political meddling indulged in by the Commission’s leaders, Stanton opposed the action. Congressmen favorable to the Commission thereupon forced Stanton to appoint Hammond.

  Stanton got his back up. Although he fully appreciated the humanitarian work that the organization was doing, he hated interference and became antagonistic to its leaders. Soon the heads of the Commission had linked up with the Blair family and the New York World in a resolute attack to cause Stanton’s downfall.7

  This confirmed Stanton in his dislike of pompous, bumptious Hammond, who, like most Commission officials, was a friend of McClellan. Meanwhile, Hammond initiated a whole series of constructive though expensive reforms in the Medical Bureau. Stanton curtailed these expenditures and hand-picked a committee to investigate the Bureau. The investigators turned up enough evidence to satisfy Lincoln that Hammond should be brought before a military court for trial.

  Defending Hammond, Commission leaders persuaded a number of prominent physicians, educators, literary figures, and scientists to sign a remonstrance accusing Stanton of treating the accused man unjustly. This tipped over a beehive in Congress. Most of the eminent signatories beat an undignified retreat when Stanton threatened to summon them to Washington for an investigation.8

  Neither Stanton nor Hammond would back down, and the trial began in January 1864. Hammond had two days in which to answer charges that took six months to prepare. Certain letters vital to his defense disappeared from his files. A new Judge Advocate, John A. Bingham, Stanton’s former opponent in politics in Cadiz, subjected Hammond to a “blanket tossing”; the court found the doctor guilty of improper conduct and dismissed him from the service. Lincoln refused to intervene in the case.

  With Hammond deposed, Stanton chose Acting Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes to head the Medical Bureau. Once more master in one part of his own house, Stanton now bent his efforts toward improving the Bureau’s effectiveness in line with Hammond’s earlier recommendations, granting it exclusive control of camp and general hospitals and generously rewarding members of the Medical Corps with brevets.

  The Sanitary Commission would continue to do mighty work throughout the war, notwithstanding Stanton’s aversion to its leaders. In this the Secretary may have had more justification than has been supposed, for all accounts of his relationship with the Commission have been based upon its own records or represent the views of its leaders, who, though high-minded and well-intentioned, were also domineering and opinionated, and thus not easy to work with. After the war the official historian of the Commission easily obtained full confirmation of Stanton’s unfavorable disposition. But he added significantly: “I am still unable to place my finger upon telling facts which will prove in what special cases this animus was exerted to our manifest injury.”9

  As with the Medical Bureau, Stanton was seriously hampered by bureaucratic inertia in equipping the Army with the tools of war. Though antiquated weapons soon gave place to better and more modern arms, no one in the War Department gave much encouragement to inventors except on Lincoln’s intercession, and it took Stanton a long time to find subordinates who were open-minded and genuinely interested in weapons development.

  Hitchcock’s early advice to Stanton to avoid unsettling existing bureau procedures and supervisors wherever possible, plus the Secretary’s uncertain and unforgiving temper, may also account for his toleration of hidebound General James W. Ripley as Chief of Army Ordnance—that together with the fact that he entrusted Watson with the supervision of technical ordnance matters and that Lincoln himself kept an eye on weapons experiments. The breech-loading rifle, for example, failed to win adoption until a relatively late date. And it may be that Stanton leaned somewhat to Ripley’s point of view—that it is better to depend on old and tested weapons for which production facilities are in existence than to experiment with “newfangled” items which, even if they promise a great deal, may never get off the drawing board in time to be of use. To strike a reasonable and safe balance between the tried and the promising is the perennial problem of the armed services in wartime. Though greater boldness and initiative in the War Department would have brought an earlier increase in the Union Army’s firepower, yet, considering all the complications involved, Stanton’s officials met that problem reasonably well.

  Ripley finally proved to be such an obstructionist that he had to be removed at last. Over Stanton’s objections, Lincoln selected as his successor General Ramsay, who had disobeyed Stanton’s order to remove the weapons from the Washington arsenal at the time Pope met disaster. To his discredit, Stanton hamstrung Ramsay by appointing Captain George T. Balch, nominally as Ramsay’s assistant, but virtually as his overseer. Finally, in General Alexander B
. Dyer, a choice of Watson and Stanton, the Ordnance Bureau came under the supervision of a man well qualified for the job, and with his advent the Bureau would be more sympathetic toward the development of better instruments of war.

  Stanton’s performance in relation to the medical and ordnance organizations fails to reflect the highest credit on him. To be sure, Hitchcock and Halleck, who were sometimes hidebound in accepting changes, must share with Stanton the blame for hesitating to inject new methods and abler personnel into the two moribund bureaus. But the final responsibility remains his. Bravely inventive in most matters, he permitted the overcaution of his advisers, his own impatient temper, and the pressures of a multitude of competing demands for his attention, to get the better of his good sense.10

  In other respects Stanton clearly contributed greatly to the success of the Union effort. He organized the country’s telegraph and railroad industries into effective instruments of warfare. Frederick Seward described him as “the master spirit of the contest,” shuffling men and supplies on a vast chessboard visible only to himself. In order to insure that his control over the telegraph would be absolute, Stanton determinedly kept the Department’s telegraphers in civilian status and under his orders alone, outside the control of the Army’s Signal Corps. His monopoly of telegraphic communications often placed Stanton in a bad light. Orders went out from Washington under his name which were in fact signed by subordinates. Bureau heads could sometimes convince the overbusy Secretary that a complex policy was necessary and secure his approval for it after it was already in effect. Stanton took the blame for errors and excesses in such circumstances, and he took it without flinching.