Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Stanton would have preferred simpler living. His major contribution to their ornate home was a set of high bookcases which he had ordered built in 1864, in preparation for retirement from the war office. He designed these cabinets to come apart with the removal of a few pins, thus providing ease of transport. They now sheltered more than 2,500 volumes; lawbooks in the main, but supplemented since 1862 with works on military strategy and the laws of war. In the secluded study where these texts offered him some isolation from the grinding pressures that awaited him each day, Stanton sought brief comfort.

  But Ellen drew him forth to dinners, theatricals, card parties, and dances, and once to a White House reception for “General” and Mrs. Tom Thumb. His heart was never in it. One night at the home of Attorney General Bates he remembered some unfinished matter, rose abruptly from his seat, and said to Ellen: “Come … let’s go home.” Fellow guests thought that his behavior was more that of a rural boor than an eminent statesman.

  It was Ellen, however, who finally reduced their social standing. Her personality created enmities. Hay thought her a pretty woman, “white and cold as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her,” and a visiting Iowa lady wrote that “she is very handsome, but much complaint is made of her freezing manner and repellent address.”

  Most persons assumed that Ellen’s unpleasantness was due to Stanton’s tyranny over her. The fact was, however, that she was not well. Stanton was worried that she might succumb to consumption. Since the birth of their last child, Bessie, in 1863, Ellen’s thinning hair embarrassed her. Her temper grew waspish and uncertain, and by early 1865 she had cut their entertaining to a minimum and taken to collecting autographs.

  Their troublesome wives were another bond between Lincoln and Stanton. Like the President with his Mary, Stanton remained deeply in love with Ellen. When she and the children were away he was intensely aware of her absence. “All is silent and lonely,” he wrote her on one such occasion, “but there is consolation in knowing that you and the children are free from the oppressive heat and discomfort in Washington.”10

  For Stanton, his patriotism and his feeling for Lincoln made all the sacrifices worth while, and sustained him as he bore the burden of his position. He was happy in the prospect of final victory. Busy as always with the multitude of demanding matters that came to his attention each day, Stanton felt that all the dangers to the nation’s survival, and to Lincoln’s personal safety, were ending.

  Ever since his young manhood Stanton had had a morbid fear of death in any form. All during the war, he had been conscious of the possibility of assassination, and had received several threats that attempts would be made against his person. But his greater fear now was that die-hard Confederates or their Northern sympathizers might seek to avenge Southern defeats or halt ratification and execution of the Thirteenth Amendment by an attack on Lincoln.

  The President long before had determined that “he would not be dying all the while,” as he had remarked to Senator Cornelius Cole, of California, when Early’s raid posed an assassination possibility. He shrugged off Stanton’s pleas that he take care of himself, and only grudgingly accepted the cavalry escorts and sentries which Stanton assigned for his protection.

  Shortly before the second inauguration day, word reached Stanton of a plot to kidnap Lincoln. The tip, one of many of that kind which Stanton received, came indirectly from a War Department clerk, Louis J. Weichmann, who lived at a boardinghouse kept by Mrs. Mary A. Surratt on H Street. Weichmann told Captain D. H. L. Gleason of furtive conversations he had overheard at the Surratt place. Gleason hurried to Stanton’s office, for although he felt that the Secretary “was no favorite with the soldiers, who considered him overbearing and cold-blooded,” he also knew “that all felt that he was a man of judgment as well as iron will … who could be depended on in a pinch.”

  Gleason found Stanton “rather explosive in his language, a trifle imperious, and overbearing in his temper, and not a lovable man to meet socially.” But this was no social call. After hearing Gleason, Stanton increased the guards protecting Lincoln, over the President’s protests. With the war coming to a victorious end, there was no reason to do more.

  Precautions for Lincoln’s safety had been taken early in the war, when mounted guards were posted at the carriage entrances of the White House and sentries at the foot gates. Lincoln protested that the presence of armed guards smacked too much of imperialism, and the arrangement had been discontinued. Later, however, against Lincoln’s wishes, Stanton had detailed a cavalry detachment to accompany him on his trips between the White House and the Soldiers’ Home and on his rides around Washington. An infantry company encamped on the grounds of the Executive Mansion guarded the building. A special officer of the Metropolitan Police Force was to accompany Lincoln when he attended the theater.

  But the President disliked these arrangements too, and sometimes evaded the guards. Stanton cautioned him to beware. When Lincoln ignored the warning and continued to walk alone from the White House to the War Department in the dead of night, as he had done since the beginning of the war, the Secretary gave orders that he must never be allowed to return alone. A sergeant recalled that one dismal, rainy night Lincoln, emerging from the side door of the War Department, remarked to his escort: “Don’t come out in this storm with me, boys. I have an umbrella, and can get home safely without you.”

  “But, Mr. President,” a soldier objected, “we have positive orders from Mr. Stanton not to allow you to return alone. You know we dare not disobey his orders.”

  “No, I suppose not,” agreed Lincoln. “If Stanton should learn that you had let me return alone, he would have you court-martialed and shot inside of twenty-four hours.”

  Ward Lamon was another who pressed Lincoln to take better care of himself. He later told Stanton that Lincoln “thought me insane upon the subject of his safety.” In December 1864, Lamon threatened to resign his position as Marshal of the District of Columbia when Lincoln, as he had done on several previous occasions, dismissed his escort and went unattended to the theater. Lamon wrote Lincoln that “you know or ought to know that your life is sought after and will be taken, unless you and your friends are cautious.”

  Lincoln’s theatergoing had become more rather than less frequent during the latter days of the war. Worn by his labors, he welcomed escape from reality. And he thought it important, as he told Cole, “that the people know I come among them without fear.”11

  At the close of the excited, joyous meeting with Grant and Stanton on April 13, Lincoln invited them and their wives to accompany him and Mrs. Lincoln to Ford’s Theater the following night to witness a play. Grant accepted, but his wife later told Mrs. McCulloch that she had said to him: “You know that Mrs. Lincoln was not very agreeable at City Point; she was very much excited because the wife of one of the Generals rode on horseback by her husband’s side, while she was escorted in a carriage with us.” In reply, Grant said they need not go to the theater; “we will go visit our children … and this will be a good excuse.” At the reception the Stantons gave for the Grants that night, Ellen and Mrs. Grant decided that neither would go unless the other did.

  Midway through the next afternoon Ellen went to the War Department to consult her husband about the invitation. He told her to decline if she wished; he had frequently rejected similar invitations from Lincoln in order to discourage his theatergoing. That afternoon the Grants went off to visit their son in New Jersey. Shortly before Stanton left the Department for the day, Lincoln came in and asked Stanton whether Eckert, whom Lincoln liked, could accompany him to Ford’s that night. Again wishing to discountenance the President’s going at all, Stanton asserted that Eckert had work to do. Lincoln said he would ask the colonel himself, but Eckert supported Stanton, and Lincoln decided to ask Major Henry R. Rathbone and his fiancée to join him. The President left, and shortly afterward Stanton went home to a late dinner.12

  After the meal, Stanton called on bedridden Secretary Seward,
who lived near by on another side of Franklin Square. The air had turned cold and raw; fog blurred the gas lamps along the street. Stanton found that Seward had guests, and chatted with them until he heard music and remembered that War Department clerks were to serenade him that night. Hurrying home, he met a group of army officers and invited them to join him. He then made a short speech to the serenaders; a little after nine o’clock the torchlit crowd moved off to quench their thirst at the Falstaff House and to await Lincoln’s exit from Ford’s Theater in order to cheer him.

  As the celebrants disappeared, Stanton invited the officers to join him in the house. The servants had gone out, and the officers soon left.

  About ten o’clock he locked up the house and went upstairs with Ellen. She entered the nursery to look after the children and he went into the bedroom.

  He had almost finished undressing when he heard Ellen cry from downstairs: “Mr. Seward is murdered!” “Humbug,” answered Stanton, “I left him only an hour ago.” But he pulled on his clothes, hurried downstairs, and questioned the man who had brought the message. The room filled with people, some of them saying that Lincoln, too, had been assassinated. Hearing this, Stanton, in sudden high excitement, started out the door, but a man threw his arms around him and shouted: “You mustn’t go out.… As I came up to the house I saw a man behind the tree-box, but he ran away, and I did not follow him.” Stanton refused to stay and went out into the misty night. A hack stood at the door. He leaped in and told the driver to go to Seward’s.13

  Just as Stanton drove up, he met Sergeant Koerth, who had been at Ford’s that night, and from him learned the first confused details of the attack on Lincoln. Welles arrived; Stanton ordered Koerth to find some soldiers and to set guards around the homes of all the cabinet officers and the Vice-President. The two Secretaries pushed through the crowd of people in the lower hallway of the Seward home and went up to the blood-spattered third-floor room, where a doctor was examining the stricken Secretary of State. Stanton and Welles moved into an adjoining room, where young Frederick Seward, like his father suffering from stab wounds, lay paralyzed.

  Stanton decided to go to Ford’s, and Welles agreed to accompany him. At the doorway they met Meigs, who urged them not to attempt it. Welles thought Stanton hesitated. But he stuck to his decision. They found another carriage, and with Meigs and Judge David K. Cartter, of the District Supreme Court, were under way toward the theater when Eckert rode up. He, too, tried to persuade them to stay away from the neighborhood of Ford’s Theater. Thousands of frenzied people were milling through the streets, he said. But they agreed that they must go, and Meigs shouted to some passing soldiers to accompany them.

  Tenth Street, in the vicinity of the theater, was jammed with wild-eyed people. The officials left their carriage and pushed through the crowd with difficulty. They learned that Lincoln had been carried from the theater to a house across the street. There they found him, stretched diagonally across a bed because of his great length. He was unconscious and breathing heavily. This labored respiration was the sudden, bitter, shocking proof to Stanton that death must come; his infant son had sounded that way when he died in his arms.

  While the guards outside struggled to keep back the surging crowd, the room where Lincoln lay became more and more crowded. A number of physicians were attending him, and several congressmen and other cabinet officers arrived. Overcoming his mounting grief, Stanton sent an armed guard for Vice-President Johnson, who arrived soon afterward. But when Mary Lincoln, who had been sobbing in a nearby room, asked to see her husband, Senator Sumner, knowing how she detested Johnson, suggested that he should not remain, and at Stanton’s request he left. Though Stanton disliked Mrs. Lincoln, he now treated her tenderly.14

  While Lincoln’s life ebbed away, Stanton set about avenging the deed. Moving into the parlor, he ordered Corporal James Tanner, a shorthand clerk in the Ordnance Bureau, to take testimony from witnesses of the terrible moments in Ford’s Theater. They soon identified the assassin as the actor John Wilkes Booth.

  At midnight, Stanton alerted all military forces in the Washington military district; the long roll of alarm drums snapped thousands of troops into formation; railroad passenger travel to points south was stopped, and fishing vessels on the Potomac were forbidden to touch shore south of Alexandria. Dana wired Grant to return to Washington, and to see to his safety.

  Soon after midnight, a bay horse, saddled, bridled, and sweating and quivering after a hard ride, was found standing on a byroad less than a mile from the city. A liveryman named John Fletcher identified the saddle and bridle as belonging to one George A. Atzerodt, and testified that he had rented a horse that night to a certain David E. Herold, who had ridden into Maryland preceded by another horseman.

  Fletcher may have revealed that Atzerodt had stayed at the Surratt boardinghouse. Or John Mathews, a friend of Booth’s, may have told the police that the actor often visited that place to talk with John Surratt, the landlady’s son. It is unlikely that the police knew about the boarder Weichmann, through whom the War Department had learned indirectly of the earlier plot to kidnap Lincoln. But in any event, at about 2 a.m. on the fifteenth, a police squad entered the Surratt house and searched it for Booth and John Surratt. Finding nothing suspicious and eliciting little information, they went away.15

  While all this was going on, Stanton, realizing that the nation had to know what had occurred, was dictating a description of the events of the night to Dix at New York for release to the press, which, owing to mechanical difficulties, which were of common occurrence, or to the confused rush of events, did not go out until 2:15 a.m. Stanton assembled a logical narrative of the attacks on Lincoln and Seward from the incoherent accounts he had heard. He thought both men must die from their wounds, and ended with a bitter description of Lincoln’s happiness at the last cabinet meeting: “The President was very cheerful and hopeful; spoke very kindly of General Lee and other members of the Confederacy, and the establishment of government in Virginia.” Now happiness had turned to horror, and Stanton never forgot the moment or forgave its perpetrators.

  In the dark morning hours a War Department detective searched Booth’s trunk in his room at the National Hotel and discovered a letter addressed to the actor which indicated that the murder plot had been spawned in Richmond. By 3 a.m. Stanton had become convinced that Booth was the murderer, and word went out to arrest him. The hours passed by, full of activity on Stanton’s part, yet each one endless and nightmarish.

  At dawn a cold rain set in, drenching the waiting, unmoving crowd outside. Tanner finished transcribing his notes and went into the room where Lincoln lay. He approached the bed, and from between Halleck and Meigs he glimpsed Stanton, visibly moved, trying to keep control of himself.

  The unconscious figure breathed with shuddering gasps. At least ten doctors were attending the President now. But there was little they could do. The end was very near. At 7:22 a.m., Surgeon General Barnes folded Lincoln’s arms across his chest and looked significantly at the Reverend Phineas D. Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, which the Lincolns had attended. The minister lowered his eyes in the heavy silence, now empty of the murdered man’s heavy breathing, and uttered a short prayer. A long moment of quiet followed his “Amen.” Then Stanton, openly weeping at last, murmured that Lincoln now belonged to the ages.16

  While preparations were being made to remove the President’s body to the White House, the cabinet members, with Seward and the new Treasury Secretary, Hugh McCulloch, absent, convened in the back parlor to sign a letter prepared by Attorney General Speed informing Andrew Johnson that the duties of the presidency now devolved upon him. Speed and Welles were delegated to take the letter to Johnson. Stanton, Welles thought, showed chagrin at being passed over. It seems doubtful, however, whether any of these exhausted men were perceptive enough at this moment to measure subtle reactions with any accuracy. Stanton may merely have wanted to see how well his orders of the night befor
e, setting up a guard around Johnson and all the cabinet officers, were being carried out.

  By this time, Stanton and most of the other men in the sad room were convinced that Lincoln’s murder was the result of a vast conspiracy “planned and set on foot by rebels under pretense of avenging the rebel cause”; and this is what Stanton released to the press. Police, military detectives, and whole regiments of troops were scouring southern Maryland trying to pick up the trail of the accomplices. Stanton called in Colonel H. S. Olcott, of the Secret Service, the chief of the New York Police Department, and Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, top War Department sleuth, to aid in the search. Journalist George A. Townsend noted how Washington was “full of Detective Police” when he arrived there the next day to cover events.

  At Stanton’s order, Fry ordered all provost marshals in the North to scrutinize persons trying to leave the country for Canada or Europe. Later all this was to seem like panic on Stanton’s part. But on the grim morning that Lincoln died, no one thought that these were excessive precautions.17

  For the moment, everything that could be done was taken care of. In the bright morning hours of Saturday, April 15, the weary men who had waited for Lincoln to die went to their homes for what rest they could get. But the church bells of the capital, tolling the President’s death, prevented even an hour’s sleep. At 11 a.m., when the cabinet assembled to witness Johnson take the oath of office as President of the United States, everyone sagged with physical and mental exhaustion.

  Still, a sense of urgency pervaded them, Stanton above all, for he had the immediate responsibility for the security of the country, and the war was still not ended. As the cabinet members assembled to hear Johnson, they may have seen copies of a throwaway broadside which was widely scattered in Washington that day. Entitled Epilogue, its anonymous author, after vividly describing the wild night of the assassination, concluded that there was no need for panic. “Today Stanton’s powerful hands seize the direction and transmit it to the hands of the new President,” the writer continued; “Stanton is up to every emergency.”