Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Railroad communications developed under his encouragement into an integral part of the Northern military machine. Only such co-ordination made possible the salvation of Rosecrans’s army at Chattanooga, in the greatest transportation feat in the history of warfare up to that time. Stanton’s director of railroads did not hesitate in 1864 to use the Secretary’s name in threatening to draft striking railroad engineers and replace them with soldiers. The strikers resumed work.11

  Stanton also understood the power of the press and tried to gain favorable treatment in newspapers. Feeling that the Associated Press, under Democratic control, was untrustworthy, he hindered its agents as much as he could. He turned to smaller, country newspapers not serviced by the A.P. wires, favored them with Department advertising and printing, and by these means helped good Republicans and Union Democrats to start newspapers. Stanton did not find it objectionable that anti-war newspapers were often lost in transit and sometimes excluded from army camps. Provost marshals created endless difficulties for Democratic journalists, and military telegraphers favored the correspondents of Republican newspapers.

  Although Stanton detested generals who divulged plans to journalists, he did not hesitate to leak stories to favored correspondents and sometimes wrote them himself. He commanded the services of such men as Horatio Woodman, Crosby Stuart Noyes, Lieber, and the representatives of the potent Loyal Publication Society. Their work was reinforced by speeches, sermons, and articles by federal place holders, army officers, and ministers. The administration received inestimable assistance through the efforts of these persons. Stanton, in recruiting and sustaining them, performed an effective public relations function for the War Department and the Union.12

  On the western waters, Stanton’s enterprise created an Army-run flotilla of river steamers, a ram fleet, and a corps of “marines” to do work which the Navy at first disdained to perform. He supported the creation of the Congressional Medal of Honor, conscription, the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau, and absentee voting for soldiers, and wrestled the moribund army bureau structure toward a staff organization. Like Lincoln, Stanton realized that war in the modern manner must be directed toward the destruction of the enemy’s total resources.

  In the field of policy, Stanton had pushed strongly for emancipation and the enlistment of colored troops, and some 180,000 were now in the Army, although few saw combat service. But the enlistment of Negroes as soldiers intensified a problem that had remained unsolved since the beginning of the war—that of exchanging prisoners.

  There were two complicating factors. First, the North refused to enter into any agreement on this subject that might be construed as a recognition of the Confederacy. Second, many captured rebels did not want to be exchanged for Northern prisoners held by the Confederacy, but preferred to stay in the North if released.

  One of Stanton’s first objectives on becoming Secretary had been to relieve the plight of Union prisoners. He ordered that their pay and allowances be continued during their captivity. But his efforts to achieve a general exchange of prisoners and to supply some of the wants of the South’s captives could not surmount the obstacles of the Confederate government’s desire for recognition and the more important goals of the Union government, to which Stanton had to give his first attention.

  Reports of horrible conditions among Union prisoners in the South brought a barrage of criticism against the Lincoln administration and demands that humanity be given priority over all other considerations. Consequently, on July 12, 1862, Stanton authorized Dix to reopen negotiations for a general exchange, “observing proper caution against any recognition of the rebel government,” and exchanges were satisfactorily effected for several months.13

  By early 1863, the Union had the majority of prisoners, thousands of whom did not wish exchange, but desired to remain in the North. Agreeing with Lincoln that it was inhumane to force these captives to return to Dixie, Stanton set a new policy for would-be defectors which blended perfectly into the President’s developing thoughts on reconstruction.

  Stanton conceived a system by which captured rebels might be screened and the most promising defeatists among them culled out to serve the Union cause as turncoats. He did not expect his program to change all captive rebels into pure Unionists. Stanton planned it, rather, to open the way to freedom for a small minority of prisoners, those who were politically significant and intelligent and whose conversions would have the effect of spurring defeatism among their neighbors when, newly sworn to Unionism, they returned to communities in the border states and in occupied Southern areas.

  Confederate authorities, resenting the success of Stanton’s policy, used it as an excuse to hesitate on regular exchanges of the Northern soldiers they held. Stanton was taken to task for cruelly and deliberately keeping good Yankee troopers in terrible Southern captivity. But the basic policy was part of Lincoln’s larger vision of finishing the war. Stanton carried it out better than the administrative structure of the War Department would seem to permit, in a workable and effective, if primitive, form of psychological warfare.14

  The actions of certain field officers of both armies further complicated the prisoner problem. On taking command at New Orleans, Butler had caused a citizen to be executed for tearing down a Union flag. For this and other offensive actions, President Davis declared Butler and his officers felons “deserving of capital punishment,” and announced that no more Union officers would be released on parole until Butler had been punished for his “crimes.” In retaliation, Stanton, after consulting Lincoln, ordered all exchanges of Confederate officers stopped.

  Davis had also warned that any Negroes taken in arms, together with their white officers, would be dealt with according to the states’ statutes for the suppression of slave insurrections, in effect making Union officers commanding Negroes liable to the death penalty for inciting blacks to revolt, and virtually condemning Negro troops to death or slavery. With the Confederate government bound to treat the black man as a chattel and Stanton determined to release no more Confederates until all Union soldiers were guaranteed protection under the laws of war, exchange virtually stopped.

  Then the Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest swooped down on Fort Pillow, a small Union post on the Mississippi garrisoned by Negro troops. He refused to accept the surrender of the defenders and, according to restrained, careful subsequent investigators, slew them without mercy along with their white officers.15

  Perhaps as a gesture of appeasement for Forrest’s brutal act, or more likely because the Confederacy was powerless to alleviate conditions in its prison camps, the South offered to surrender some hopelessly ill or wounded Union prisoners without an equivalent return. Stanton accepted the offer. When the prisoners were delivered, he arranged for them to be photographed and inspected by a committee of Congress. “There appears to have been a deliberate system of savage and barbarous treatment and starvation,” he said, and as a measure of retaliation, he ordered the rations of Confederate captives, hitherto the same as the Union Army ration, reduced by 20 per cent. When properly distributed the reduced ration was sufficient to maintain health. But when mismanagement or vengefulness on the part of prison keepers entered into the picture, hunger and disease ensued.16

  Though exchanges were blocked, Confederate troops in many instances continued to be paroled. The North broke out in wrathful indignation upon learning that many of these parolees, under promise not to take up arms again, had again been captured in the fighting at Chattanooga. Bitterly accusing the South of bad faith, Stanton prohibited further paroles.

  With paroles as well as exchanges halted, both sides were under the necessity of guarding and supporting an increasing host of captives. Even in the more prosperous North the compounds became filthy and overcrowded. In the South conditions became intolerable.

  Appalled by reports of mass starvation in Southern prison camps, Stanton ordered Hitchcock, now improved in health and in charge of prisoners, to put Southern captiv
es on a corresponding diet. Hitchcock protested that such action would be inhumane, and, just before asking Stanton to reconsider his decision, the general confided to a friend: “I expect to have no difficulty in turning the attention of the Secretary to a better view.”

  Stanton rescinded the order. To alleviate the condition of Union prisoners, he ordered 24,000 rations sent to Libby Prison, in Richmond. False reports that the rations had been devoured by the Confederates circulated freely in the North. Incensed at these “abusive accusations,” the South discontinued the arrangement, angering Stanton in turn. Retaliation led to counter-retaliation.17

  Through it all, Stanton endured a mounting chorus of criticism directed against him from the South and from Northerners who believed that he was the heartless ogre responsible for the sufferings in the prison camps. He took comfort from the fact that Grant sustained him in his opposition to exchanges. Grant admitted that “it is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles. Every man we hold, when released on parole or otherwise, becomes an active soldier against us at once either directly or indirectly. If we commence a system of exchange which liberates all prisoners taken, we will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated. If we hold those caught they amount to no more than dead men.”

  The general and the Secretary were in perfect agreement. Soon after Grant took over-all command, Stanton prepared a confidential memorandum for his attention, pointing to the fact that the South, its white manpower draining away, and refusing to arm its slaves, must benefit disproportionately from whatever activity an exchanged or paroled soldier engaged in once he returned from the North. Thus the war would be prolonged, with infinitely more suffering to both sides than the relatively few prisoners must endure because of the stoppage in exchanges and paroling. At the bottom of this memorandum, Stanton penned in a joyous scrawl: “The general presented the same argument to me before I could advance it to him.”18

  All this confirmed Stanton in his belief in the barbarity of Southerners, yet he would have been a man without pity to be unmoved by the plight of Northern prisoners. There was little he could do to aid them. Even after the war, however, the Democrats would continue to accuse him of heartlessness. To meet these attacks, the Secretary’s friends in Congress asked Stanton for an explanation of his course, which Stanton provided.

  He had made unceasing efforts to liberate and relieve the prisoners, he claimed, but it had been impossible to obtain an agreement for a general exchange on Southern terms. In the beginning, this would have meant a virtual recognition of the Confederacy, and later the abandonment of Negro troops and their officers to vengeful punishment. His task had been made still more difficult, Stanton explained further, by the Confederacy’s refusal to release noncombatant prisoners captured in loyal states, by its releasing from parole and restoring to military service some 40,000 rebel soldiers taken at Vicksburg and Port Hudson, and by what he believed to be a deliberate attempt to starve Union prisoners. This justification of his actions was never made public. Nor did Stanton cite Grant’s opposition to exchanges as a reason for the failure to effect a general release of Northern prisoners. He took the buffeting himself.19

  He also took a major share of the criticism that arose because of the Union’s internal security policies. Civil liberty did suffer in the North. Even Lincoln, though deeply reverential of constitutional guarantees, would not allow himself to be unduly impeded in the exercise of power by doctrinaire conceptions of civil rights. Stanton, a man of far less breadth of vision who focused on immediate objectives, frequently used the power of his office in ways ordinarily barred to American government. This came about in some degree from his relish of power, but a more compelling factor was the magnitude and imminence of the peril the nation faced. The enemy not only threatened the ramparts; he also skulked inside the gates.

  Stanton’s widespread dragnet often ensnared the innocent along with seditionists. In Stanton’s name, army officers, state militiamen, home guards, police chiefs, and vigilantes arrested persons for disloyalty. The great fault of the internal security apparatus, Provost Marshal Doster recalled, “was that it operated like a rat-trap—there was only a hole in but no hole out.” Few of the many officials empowered by Stanton to prevent disloyalty would risk discharging a prisoner until the threat was clearly past. This made it inevitable that Stanton would be blamed for every excess. Five years after Stanton died, Chase and his friend John Schuckers met a small-town Wisconsin editor, Democratic in politics, who on Stanton’s authority had been unjustly jailed for disloyalty. “His hostility was unappeasable,” Schuckers recorded. “Speaking to me of Stanton … he broke out … ‘He’s in hell, God damn him—I know that he’s in hell.’ ”

  Yet Stanton, with Lincoln, sought to restrain the exercise of despotic power when it was possible. But he could not oversee the daily security work of all the army commands. Many civilians were imprisoned on false or trivial charges. The fact remains, however, that most of the civilians who were arrested for disloyalty and tried before military commissions on that charge, were found to be guilty.

  Stanton almost invariably acted swiftly in ordering releases for the far greater number of persons whose arrest had been clearly unwarranted; nor were many whose arrest had been merely precautionary kept in prison once the need for precaution had passed. Most prisoners gained release merely by swearing allegiance and promising not to hold further communication with the Confederacy and not to sue for damages.

  But Stanton did insist on the most severe penalties for those against whom the evidence of disloyalty was strong. Similarly, any captive who, freed after swearing loyalty to the Union, violated the pledge and again fell into Stanton’s hands, could expect the fullest penalties in his power to apply. And Stanton could not abide a suspect who lied to him. A Confederate spy captured by Stanton’s agents once offered him erroneous information, later boasting to Barlow: “Stanton was humbugged; he believed my statements & acted on them.” But Stanton unearthed the deception and saw to it that the trickster remained in a military jail even after the war ended. To Stanton, the internal security problem was deadly serious and intensely personal.20

  On the whole, control of the press was singularly lax. Only news sent by telegraph came under direct government scrutiny; letters circulated freely without examination; couriers were normally allowed to come and go at will; and papers not only printed detailed information on military plans and troop movements but criticized the government freely, in numerous instances carrying their opposition to the point of disloyalty. The problem of maintaining secrecy in the face of so much journalistic freedom plagued the Union Army throughout the war.

  War correspondents with the troops did come under military jurisdiction, however, and the 57th Article of War gave Stanton a weapon against journalistic irresponsibility by making anyone holding correspondence with or giving intelligence to the enemy liable to death or such other punishment as a court-martial might prescribe. Though Stanton was often careless of the First Amendment, and subjective and arbitrary regarding excessively frank scribes, offenders rarely suffered punishment. Now and then a general excluded a correspondent from his lines and in a few cases the War Department denied passes to culpable journalists. But the brash and ingenious newsmen were not easily muzzled, and throughout the war the Confederates could obtain copious information merely by scanning the Northern papers. Stanton’s action against the New York World and the Journal of Commerce for printing the bogus Lincoln dispatch is a rare instance of the suppression of newspapers. There were numerous other episodes in which the military arm moved against offenders, but such shutdowns were always temporary.

  The mistaken zeal of subordinates often outran the intentions of the War Department and the President, and when Burnside suppressed the Chicago Times for criticizing his arrest of the quasi traitor Vallandigham, Stanton revoked the order at Lincoln’s behest, adding: “The irritation prod
uced by such acts is … likely to do more harm than the publication would.” Had the impetuous Stanton been allowed to have his way, the policy might have been tougher. But press control was a matter over which Lincoln exercised close personal supervision. The result was that with few exceptions the policy of the government was tolerant rather than oppressive, and it often endured torrents of abuse in the press without attempting retaliation.

  Most of the newsmen’s shafts were directed at Stanton. They hated him “as they do Original Sin,” wrote Noah Brooks, Lincoln’s journalist friend, “for he is as inexorable as death, and as reticent as the grave. He is very arbitrary, and shuts and no man openeth, or opens and no man shutteth.” Only Louis Koerth, a convalescent combat veteran who was serving as Stanton’s clerk-bodyguard, knew how deeply hurt the Secretary was when he overheard newsmen muttering: “There goes old bulldog.” Information on Stanton as press censor derives largely from the accounts of these journalists. It is little wonder that he appears in the worst possible light.21

  Careless of his own popularity, seldom afraid to say no, working like one of his lowliest troopers, Stanton plunged ahead, implacably intent and not easily turned aside from his purpose. With all his blind spots, he administered his office with commendable efficiency. Method, system, and irresistible driving energy characterized his performance. Impulse, prejudice, and reluctance to admit error marred it.

  He seemed to invite enmity by his sheer impatience. Laboring like a giant in a position in which he had to make enemies, any man would have become irritable. Stanton tended in that direction because of his asthmatic malady, which worsened until twice in 1864 he was overcome by fits of strangulation, and a liver ailment also grew more severe. He watched the fate of Union armies like a mother who has entrusted her sons to strangers, and his wrath at incapacity, at error, or at what he thought were more sinister reasons for reverses, was always unrestrained. Obliged to contend with incompetent generals, wolfish contractors, and arrant and furtive traitors; working his brother-in-law to death and himself close to it; and feeling the loss of thousands of men in battle who he felt were better than those who came to him for favors, Stanton became an impatient man, prone to quick, often unjust suspicions.