Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Here their children took over, shouting, jostling the two tired men, and cajoling until a game was granted. One day, telegrapher Bates, bringing a message to Stanton from the War Department to the summer home, found the Secretary engaged in a spirited game of “mumble-the-peg” and was himself dragooned into it.

  Lincoln and Stanton more than liked each other’s children, and neither man could resist the blandishments of the young. A friend of Stanton’s youngest daughter remembered how she and other youngsters would loiter around the Stanton home to enjoy his gentle stories to them. Though Stanton never accepted gifts for himself, he could not remain unbending where his children were concerned. An anonymous friend sent young Lewis Stanton a white pony and a colorful Zouave uniform. Stanton ferreted out the donor’s identity, but by this time the children were in love with the pony, and the wire Stanton sent, instead of saying that he would return the beast, read: “Lou is on his back and don’t believe he will ever get off.”

  Someone had given the Stanton children a flock of peacocks. When they persisted in flying off, soldiers at the Home hit on the expedient of tying a stout cord, with a piece of wood attached, to a leg of each bird. These devices were light enough to permit the peacocks to fly into the trees to roost, but heavy enough to prevent their leaving the grounds. Lewis recalled: “One evening … just before sunset, Mr. Lincoln and my father arrived at the cottage. They at once noticed the peacocks who were roosting in a small cluster of cedar trees with the ropes and sticks caught in the many small branches and recognized the dangerous and uncomfortable position when on the morrow they would attempt to fly to earth. The two men immediately went to work, and I can see them now dressed in their long black coats and beavers solemnly going to and fro unwinding the ropes and getting them in straight lines and carefully placing the small pieces of wood where without catching they would slide off when in the morning the birds flew down.”4

  Lincoln spent more time with Stanton than with any other cabinet officer. This close association aroused the jealousy of Welles, Blair, and Chase, and perhaps this subdued but intense competition for first place in the President’s heart accounts for some of the acrimony that existed among the cabinet officers. Almost every man who served Lincoln loved him; that Stanton received the warmest response was his treasured and private reward for his efforts.

  To be sure, Lincoln’s preference for Stanton’s company may have been due in part to his desire to oversee his volcanic “Mars,” and also to the monopoly Stanton kept over the military telegraph. Lincoln was at the War Department as often as he could be, and at critical times he and Stanton rarely left the place. The President was a familiar sight to the guards Stanton kept posted around the White House—striding in his long, awkward gait to the rickety turnstile that separated the two buildings, hurrying back to a reception or dinner he had deserted in order to slip over to see Stanton and read the dispatches.

  Though the relationship between them was not as amiable as that between Lincoln and Seward, it was more intimate. Stanton and Lincoln virtually conducted the war together, whereas Seward had a free hand in managing the State Department except when a diplomatic crisis threatened. Lincoln, Seward told diplomat John Bigelow in 1867, “was the War Minister, and a very good one.”

  Lincoln was calm, unruffled, careless with secrets, forgiving, inclined to tell a joke to place matters in perspective; Stanton was seemingly merciless, secretive, implacable with error, furious at reverses. Congressman Dawes observed of them: “The one sorrowed over the calamities of war; the other sorrowed that more was not achieved by it.” Heart and head of the war, was the way telegrapher Bates thought of the two men, and he insisted that they never really were at odds. “Stanton required a man like Lincoln to manage him,” Grant said years later. Lincoln dominated Stanton by “that gentle firmness.” Sometimes too forbearing, Lincoln was frequently saved from error by Stanton’s strict sense of duty. There were times when Lincoln overrode Stanton, as in appointing officials to the War Department and officers to the Army. Other times the President found himself imposed upon. Yet the two men worked well together on the whole, and counterbalanced each other’s faults.

  This harmony was desperately needed if the Union’s effort was ever to achieve co-ordination. Back in the dark days of September 1862, Chase, talking to Garfield, had spread out his fore and middle fingers to form a V, of which the forefinger represented Stanton, “full of impulsive energy, strong and sincere, but impatient of delay and restraint and feeling at times completely disheartened by the complexities of his position.” The middle finger was Halleck—intelligent, “cold as a stone, cares not one penny for his work, only as a professional performance.” At the junction between the two was Lincoln, “with a great and noble heart.” Then, after heartbreaking failures and frustrations, the addition of Grant to the command structure proved adequate to bring on the defeat of the rebellion.

  Lincoln and Stanton were alike in most important respects, Meigs realized. They asked for action, progress, and achievement. Not receiving them, they were “urgent when patience failed under costly inaction.”5

  Whenever affairs came to an impasse between them, it was Lincoln’s will that controlled, and the phrase “I yield to whatever the President may think best for the service” is in one form or another widely distributed through more than three years’ accumulation of memoranda and notes between the two men. When Stanton saw a specific order in Lincoln’s handwriting, he knew that his own objections to an appointment, a contract, or a policy had been overruled, and though he fretted, he did not fail to comply with the President’s decision. Until that moment, however, he felt free to try to sway Lincoln as much as he could, and to insulate him if possible from too persuasive petitioners.

  A typical instance involved a group of captured Confederates who, prompted by a Pennsylvania recruiting agent, offered to take the oath of allegiance, enlist in the Union Army, and serve against the western Indians. Lincoln ordered that their wish be granted, that they receive the usual bounty, and that they be credited against Pennsylvania’s draft quota.

  Stanton refused to carry out the order. Provost Marshal General Fry immediately sided with Stanton, pointing out that the prisoners already belonged to the Union and to allow them bounty would be a waste of money. Pennsylvania deserved no credit for their enlistment, Fry insisted, and to permit such an error would deprive the armies of needed manpower from that state. Stanton said: “Now, Mr. President, those are the facts, and you must see that your order cannot be executed.” Lincoln, sitting on a sofa in Stanton’s office with his legs crossed, answered firmly: “Mr. Secretary, I reckon you’ll have to execute the order.” Stanton snapped: “Mr. President, I cannot do it. The order is an improper one, and I cannot execute it.” Lincoln looked Stanton straight in the eye and said with determination: “Mr. Secretary, it will have to be done.”

  “Stanton then realized,” wrote Fry, “that he was overmatched. He had made a square issue with the President and been defeated, notwithstanding the fact that he was in the right. Upon an indication from him I withdrew and did not witness his surrender. A few minutes after I reached my office I received instructions from the Secretary to carry out the President’s order.”

  In a letter to Grant, however, Lincoln admitted that Stanton had been right. “I send this as an explanation to you, and to do justice to the Secretary of War,” he wrote. “I was induced, upon pressing applications, to authorize agents … of Pennsylvania to recruit in one of the prison depots …; and the thing went so far before it came to the knowledge of the Secretary that, in my judgment, it could not be abandoned without greater evil than that which would follow its going through. I did not know, at the time, that you had protested against that class of thing being done; and I now say that while this particular job must be completed, no other of the sort will be authorized, without an understanding from you, if at all. The Secretary of War is wholly free of any part in this blunder.”6

  But it was only rare
ly that Lincoln had to say “I am the President” in order to get something done. He usually found a way toward solutions with which Stanton might disagree but against which the blunt War Secretary would not take an adamant stand. This subtle relationship between the two men deceived many persons. Insensitive, credulous Donn Piatt, for example, asserted after observing Lincoln and Stanton for three years that the President “is weak and timid and the indomitable will, intellect, and energy of Mr. Stanton controls him.”

  Stanton never controlled Lincoln, but the President’s customary method of dealing with his cantankerous War Secretary—through tact, calm but firm explanations, and frank statements of his own embarrassments in a particular situation—was rarely visible on the surface of affairs. This is well illustrated by Lincoln’s advice to Stanton concerning the complex question of captured rebel soldiers who did not wish to be exchanged.

  Adverting first to the matter of Confederate prisoners of war whose homes had been brought within the Union lines and who wished to take the oath of allegiance and be discharged, he wrote that “none of them will again go to the rebellion, but the rebellion again coming to them,” some of them might rejoin it, though not enough to do much mischief, and to release them would not only assuage distress in a number of deserving cases but also “give me relief from an intolerable pressure. I shall be glad therefore to have your cheerful assent to the discharge of those whose names I may send, which I will only do with circumspection.”

  Lincoln went on to state: “In using the strong hand, as now compelled to do, the government has a difficult duty to perform.… While we must, by all available means, prevent the overthrow of the government, we should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society. These general remarks apply to several classes of cases, on each of which I wish to say a word.”

  Two surgeons had been dismissed from the service. One, needing some lumber in the performance of his duties and unable to get it in any other way, had made out a false certificate. Another surgeon had employed two of his sons as servants. Lincoln observed that dismissal was too harsh a penalty in cases involving neither incompetency, intentional wrong, nor real injury to the service, and offered the opinion: “In such cases it is both cruel and impolitic, to crush the man, and make him and his friends permanent enemies to the administration if not to the government itself.”

  Lincoln next directed Stanton’s attention to the fate of the family of a civilian who had killed a recruiting officer in Maryland; they had been driven from their home “without a shelter or crumb.” Of course, there had been no justification for killing the officer, wrote Lincoln. But this is past. What is to be done with the family? Why could they not occupy their old home, unless it was needed for the public service, and excite much less opposition to the government than the manifestation of their distress was now doing?

  Having made these objections and suggestions to Stanton, Lincoln brought up another specific case in which the two of them had sharply disagreed. A civilian government employee in charge of refugee Negroes at Cairo, Illinois, found guilty of turning over one of his charges to his loyal master in Kentucky, had been sentenced to five years at hard labor by a military court. Lincoln had drawn up a pardon for the offender on the solicitation of his neighbors, but had delayed issuing it until he could learn Stanton’s views; and Stanton had offered the opinion that Lincoln could make no greater error and do no greater injustice to the colored race, to whom he had promised protection, than by releasing the man. “His crime in my judgment is greater than that of the African Slave Trader,” protested the angry Secretary, “and his pardon will in my opinion injure the government in the eyes of all civilized nations and destroy the faith of the colored race in the government.”

  Owing to Stanton’s opposition, the pardon had been withheld, and now Lincoln, in a letter setting forth his objections to some of the Secretary’s procedures, presented his view of the case. The offender was an old man of unquestioned patriotism, he said, and though undoubtedly guilty, had fallen afoul of a new law. His action would have been “perfectly lawful only a short time before, and the change making it unlawful had not, even then been fully accepted in the public mind.” The conclusive point with Lincoln, however, was that the severe punishment of five years at hard labor in the penitentiary was not necessary to prevent the repetition of the crime by the offender or by others. “If the offense was one of frequent recurrence the case would be different,” he admitted, “but this case … is the single instance which has come to my knowledge. I think that for all public purposes, and for all proper purposes, he has suffered enough.” And in each matter Stanton came to obedience.7

  Lincoln’s sense of humor and his utter lack of toploftiness facilitated his relations with the plain-spoken Secretary. Once when Lincoln sent a petitioner to Stanton with a written order complying with his request, the man came back to report that Stanton had not only refused to execute the order but had called Lincoln a damn fool. Lincoln, in mock astonishment, asked: “Did Stanton call me a damn fool?” Being reassured on that point, the President remarked drolly: “Well, I guess I had better step over and see Stanton about this. Stanton is usually right.”

  He and Stanton each realized that what one said of the other would be rapidly circulated. The President knew that Stanton was “terribly in earnest,” and Stanton knew that until Lincoln decided on a matter, he could protest as outspokenly as he wished. Lincoln was willing to circumvent the stubborn Stanton in matters which he felt were important enough, knowing that the War Secretary would finally accept the decision. Robert Lincoln and Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s old friend, remembered the unwritten understanding between the two men—each could veto the other’s acts, but Lincoln was to rule when he felt it necessary. Important and importunate demands that Lincoln could not refuse, he turned over to Stanton, who accepted the onus of saying no.

  On the other hand, when Stanton received meritorious requests that he ached to grant, but feared that an unbearable precedent might thus be set, he referred them to the White House. A Baltimore delegation asked him for the release of a clergyman imprisoned for disloyalty, on the grounds that the man’s pregnant wife would die unless her husband was released. Stanton sent the Marylanders to see Lincoln, knowing that the President would be touched, as he had been, and order the release. In such instances Stanton deliberately kept his harsh reputation, but pointed the way to mercy.

  Informed Washingtonians knew how to bypass Stanton. When Savannah was taken and starvation faced the inhabitants, New Yorkers assembled relief supplies and Treasury officer Chittenden approached Stanton for a pass to forward the materials to Georgia. No, the Secretary replied; the war was not yet won: “To exhaust the supplies of the enemy is one of the objects we are trying to accomplish; it is one of the most effectual means of making war.… Why do you ask me to do what you would not do yourself in my place? I will not do it. If the people of New York want to feed anybody, let them send their gifts to the starving prisoners from the Andersonville stockade.”

  Chittenden “could not answer the Secretary,” but previous encounters had taught him what to do. He went to Lincoln.

  “Stanton is right,” the President decided, “but the Georgians must not be left to starve, if some of them do starve our prisoners.” And so the supplies went off; although, in order not to “offend Stanton unless I can make something by the transaction,” Lincoln had Chittenden accompany them to report on the attitudes of the newly conquered Southerners toward the victorious North.

  The President’s sensitivity to subtle stimuli that the War Department ignored seemed to drive Stanton to distraction. Lincoln’s propensity to delay important decisions as long as possible rubbed harshly against Stanton’s taut impatience. Lincoln often clothed in seeming ambivalence his hopes that grave public matters might, by the passage of time, resolve themselves without official interference. He “talks as many ways as he has fears, impulses, & fancies,” newsman Barnett reported. These habits
of the President sent Stanton into pungent rages. But the important element for their relationship, and for the nation, was that Stanton cooled as quickly as he had ignited. Lincoln had his way, and Stanton adapted his own desires to the wishes of the great man he served.8

  Now Stanton felt his task was largely done. But still he could not relax. Perhaps he had forgotten how. Unlike Lincoln, he could never immerse himself in outside affairs and so briefly forget official matters. Stanton pursued Lincoln to the theater to “buttonhole” him on pressing business. Even at his home, Stanton could rarely find peace.

  During the early years of the war, Ellen had pretensions to social leadership. The Stantons lived in splendid style, and under her urging, entertained frequently and lavishly. She impressed visitors, and Lincoln came to like her. Ellen is one of three persons who are known to have received a copy in his hand of William Knox’s “Mortality,” the favorite poem of the President. Noah Brooks remarked that Stanton “has a little, aristocratic wife, lives in handsome style, consuming much of his large fortune, probably, in his ample and somewhat gorgeous way of living.”

  Brooks was right. The fortune that Stanton’s law practice had brought him by 1862 was gone by 1865 and he was perilously close to personal bankruptcy. But always feeling that the war could not last for any great length of time, and anticipating the rich private practice he would resume with enhanced reputation as soon as he could leave the government’s service, Stanton had denied nothing to his beloved Ellen, though he worried over the unceasing outflow of their capital, which she replaced with impressive furnishings, delicate linens, and spectacular table services. The costs of the older children’s education mounted, and, as always, he saw to the support of his mother and Pamphila and helped more than a dozen nieces and nephews. Ellen never begrudged them these contributions, though she preferred that her in laws live at some distance.9