Stanton
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And Stanton’s behavior was proving the assertion correct. Always before, death close at hand had unsettled him close to the point of imbalance. Now he seemed calm, grim, decisive, in complete outward control of himself, and intensely curious about the man who was taking the oath as the new President.
Johnson was relatively unknown. Not for weeks to come was Stanton or most others to know much about him as a person or about his opinions on public matters. Even as he raised his hand to swear the oath, some Washingtonians speculated on how Stanton and Johnson would get along. One government official, George W. Payne, mused that “it remains to be seen whether Andrew the 2d will be Commander in Chief or a Subordinate. Time proves all things. Nous Verrons.” Stanton, like America, had to wait and see.
Johnson, now President, asked the cabinet to meet briefly with him at noon. He remarked that the country was in the grip of fear and panic. Stanton was later to be blamed for contributing to this unease. But much occurred for which he was not responsible. For example, one of the men who carried Lincoln’s wounded body from Ford’s Theater was Captain E. E. Bedee, of the 12th New Hampshire Volunteers. He gave Stanton some papers that had dropped from the President’s pocket. Hay, not knowing this, concluded that Bedee had stolen them, and got General Hardie to arrest Bedee, under Stanton’s name. Bedee spent five miserable days in a military prison, fuming at Stanton, who was completely ignorant of the whole affair. When the Secretary learned of Bedee’s plight he released him immediately and ordered Hardie to make a public statement exonerating the captain. But it was Stanton who received the blame.18
Stanton, meanwhile, temporarily abandoning his plans to retire from his office, was indeed in virtual control of the government. He had charge of the Army, Johnson was barely sworn in and vastly unsure of himself, and Congress was not in session. With a civil war not yet fully won and with the excitement of assassination momentarily justifying almost any action he might want to take, Edwin M. Stanton could do much as he liked. In mid-April 1865, the American experiment in democracy, the American tradition of civilian control over the military institutions, was again on the brink of extinction.
1 Hay to Stanton, July 26, 1865, Stanton MSS; Barnett to Barlow, Nov. 30, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL; W. H. Robinson to Seward, June 13, 1864, Seward Papers, UR; Chipman in Supreme Court, Eulogies, 47–9. See also Gamaliel Bradford, Union Portraits (Boston, 1914), 165–96.
2 Oct. 23, 1862, Coggeshall ms diary, owned by the estate of Foreman M. Lebold; New York World, Aug. 8, 1863.
3 Stanton to Ellen, Aug. 25, 1863, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton; Allen C. Clark, “Abraham Lincoln in the National Capital,” ColHS Records, XXVII, 36–7.
4 On children, see letter of Mrs. Wylie to Craig Wylie, April 11, 1937, owned by Craig Wylie; Bates, op. cit., 397–8, on the game; Utica (N.Y.) Morning Herald, May 17, 1886, on the horse; and on the peacock incident, the ms recollection by Lewis Hutchison Stanton, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton.
5 Typescript, “1861–5,” Dawes Papers, LC; Feb. 28, 1867, Bigelow ms diary, NYPL; A. E. H. Johnson in Washington Star, Nov. 23, 1895, and in New York Evening Post, July 13, 1891; Bates, op. cit., 129–30, 621; Grant, Memoirs, II, 380–1, and quoted in John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (New York, 1879), II, 354, 358–9 (cited henceforth as Young, Around the World); Smith, Garfield, I, 240; Meigs to his brother, ca. 1888, owned by Edward S. Corwin; Current, op. cit., 162.
6 Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, V, 146–7; Lincoln, Works, VII, 530; VIII, 17; Lincoln to Stanton, July 12, 1862, Lincoln Papers, NYPL; memo, July 14, 1864, W. H. Smith Papers, OHS; Fry in New York Tribune, June 28, 1885.
7 Piatt to Rosecrans, Feb. 25, 1865, UCLA; Lincoln, Works, VII, 255–7; Eugena Jones Hunt, “My Personal Recollections of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln,” ALQ, III, 250–1.
8 Lamon, Recollections, 234; on Robert Lincoln, ms recollection of Lewis Hutchison Stanton, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton; D. R. Barbee, “President Lincoln and Dr. Gurley,” ALQ, V, 11–12; Chittenden, Personal Reminiscences, 1840–1890 (New York, 1893), 246–9; T. J. Barnett to Barlow, Oct. 27, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL.
9 Leonard Grover, “Lincoln’s Interest in the Theater,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, LXXVII, 945–6; Brooks in Sacramento Union, May 27, 1863; Ellen’s copy of the poem is owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen; property list and financial details owned by Craig Wylie.
10 To Ellen, Aug. 25, 1863, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton; Oella Stanton Wright to Ellen, June 24, 1864, on health; and Stanton’s bookcases are now owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen; Hay, Diaries and Letters, 45; “An Iowa Woman in Washington, D.C., 1861–1865,” Iowa Journal of History, LII, 85–6; Jasper A. Conant, “A Visit to Washington in 1861–1862,” Metropolitan Magazine, XXXIII, 315.
11 Cole, Memoirs (New York, 1908), 214; Gleason, “Conspiracy Against Lincoln,” MH, XIII, 59–65; Lamon to Lincoln, Dec. 10, 1864, and to Stanton, April 27, 1865, Lamon Collection, HL; George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth (New York, 1940), 60–6, 68–73; Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 46; reminiscence of Louis Koerth in New York Commercial Advertiser, March 24, 1903.
12 Reminiscence of Susan Man McCulloch, owned by Hugh McCulloch; Fry, op. cit., 291; Badeau, Grant, 362; Bryan, op. cit., 160–1; Bates, op. cit., 366–8. Eisenschiml’s account, in Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 38, 61–3, and Roscoe’s, op. cit., 145–6, 189–95, passim, offer conclusions from these facts which seem unsupportable.
13 Ms diary of an anonymous War Department clerk, Lincoln Photostat Coll., LC; Browning, Diary, II, 20; Flower, Stanton, 279; M. A. De Wolfe Howe (ed.), “Dickens, Stanton, Sumner, and Storey,” AM, CXLV, 463–5, has Stanton’s account. Edwin L. Stanton thought that there never was a man outside the Stanton home; Wolcott MS, 200.
14 Koerth in New York Commercial Advertiser, March 24, 1903; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 284–7; Howe, “Dickens, Stanton, Sumner, and Storey,” loc. cit., 463–5; “Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton,” in Boston Transcript, Jan. 7, 1870.
15 O.R., XLVI, pt. 3, 756, 766; David Miller DeWitt, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Its Expiation (New York, 1909), 59–61, 270–2 (cited hereafter as DeWitt, Assassination).
16 The evidence on what Stanton said is surveyed in Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 482–5, and Bryan, op. cit., 186–90. There seems little doubt that Stanton made some such statement; this is one of the few times on record that his prose style transcended the pedestrian. Other data are in O.R., XLVI, 775, 780–1; Pitman, op. cit., 236; and see Robert T. Lincoln to Edwin L. Stanton, Dec. 24, 1869, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton, on the Secretary’s emotion and kindness to the President’s family.
17 Townsend, “The Crime of Lincoln’s Murder,” ms owned by George A. Bonaventure; Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 194; DeWitt, Assassination, 57–8; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 288–9; O.R., XLVI, pt. 3, 783–5; XLVII, pt. 3, 221.
18 Epilogue (n.p., April 15, 1865); Payne ms biographical sketches, CHS; the Bedee affair is in the James A. Hardie Papers, LC.
CHAPTER XIX
SHERMAN’S TRUCE
ALL WAS vague and uncertain,” Welles remembered of the noon cabinet meeting on Saturday, April 15. Johnson told the tired men before him that he would announce his policies in due time, but in all essentials they would be the same as Lincoln’s. He asked the cabinet members to stand by him in his difficult and responsible position, and with the others, Stanton numbly agreed. Over the weekend. Republican congressmen, drawn to the capital by news of the assassination, met with Johnson and were largely satisfied that his policies toward the South, and concerning the need for the Negro to vote there, were in substantial accord with their own.
When the new President again met with his cabinet, on Sunday morning, the sixteenth, Stanton, as was his responsibility, brought forward the plan of reconstruction he had presented at the last meeting of Lincoln’s cabinet. In accordance with the dead President’s request, he had now made separate provisions for North Carolina, where a new government had
to be established, and for Virginia, where the loyal Pierpont government, though commanding the allegiance of only a fraction of the people, might become the basis of a restored commonwealth. He did not, however, have copies of the document ready; it was to be printed confidentially by trusted workers at the Treasury, and he wanted cabinet agreement on its contents before entrusting the plan to the typesetters. But the general tenor of the paper was clear to the assembled cabinet. There was little discussion; too much else remained to be done at that moment.
Welles thought that his earlier objection against the section of Stanton’s plan which had proposed setting up a centralized provost marshal organization in the Army to stablilize conditions in the South until civil government came in, had been successful, for Stanton omitted this clause from the current version of his plan. But Welles was merely betraying his ignorance of the realities of military occupation. Stanton knew that the army field commands with their existing provost units would be the immediate occupation force in the South regardless of whether his proposed new organization was approved, and in any case a new army bureau was something for Congress to deal with. No matter what proved to be the nature of the more permanent reconstruction that the President might wish to follow or that Congress would insist on, Yankee soldiers were going to run things in the South for a time.
Therefore, what was really important at the moment was less the civilians’ plans for final reconstruction than the ability of the civilian institutions to direct the Army. Stanton’s responsibility, the day after Lincoln’s death, remained what it had been before that event—to bring the war to its close and to see to it that the military machine moved in obedience to its civilian superiors.
Only from the vantage point of retrospect, when the events of later years had distorted his memory of what was truly the case in April 1865, could Welles assign to Stanton a Machiavellian role in having a “tough” reconstruction plan at hand. The document that Stanton read to the cabinet on April 16 was neither a finished blueprint for reconstruction nor an essay in the radical philosophy of Southern war guilt. It was precisely what Stanton’s responsibility required him to have ready—a sketch, an outline for immediate use, to guide the President, the cabinet, and the Army.
That evening Welles, at Stanton’s invitation, called at the War Department, and the two men chatted until Sumner, Dawes, Colfax, Gooch, and Covode, of Congress, came in. Meigs also joined the group. Stanton took from his desk the newly printed copies of the plan he had outlined that afternoon to the cabinet, and read it to the group before him. Welles later professed to be shocked to find Stanton divulging cabinet secrets to outsiders; Stanton always insisted that as this was the plan Lincoln had already approved in substance and that Johnson had promised to follow, there was nothing amiss in this procedure. He was merely emulating Lincoln’s habit of testing the reaction of congressional leaders before acting on a proposal—for their approval must ultimately be necessary, as Lincoln had acknowledged, before reconstruction could be completed.1
Therefore, Stanton had prepared an outline to guide himself at this meeting with Sumner. He knew how respectful Lincoln had been to the powerful senator’s opinions, and vividly remembered that Lincoln, only five days before, had publicly advocated Negro suffrage. No doubt Sumner would bring up the subject now.
Stanton had not finished reading his proposal when Sumner asked him what provision he had made for Negro voting. Stanton replied that he had purposely avoided raising the question for fear of causing a split in the Union-Republican party. But, Sumner insisted, freedom for the Negro would be a mockery without the right to vote. He would not support any plan of reconstruction, he declared, that failed to grant the black man his rights. Again Stanton deprecated the necessity of intruding this burning question at this moment; again Sumner insisted. Most of the others, including Welles, now left. Sumner and Colfax were then able to persuade the hesitant, exhausted War Secretary to insert a clause in his plan for North Carolina stating that all “loyal citizens” would be allowed to vote.2
Meanwhile, Lincoln’s death still dominated Stanton’s thoughts. He helped arrange the funeral details, and on April 19, during the stirring services in the Capitol Rotunda, Stanton was barely able to contain himself.
A talk with Mary Lincoln confirmed Stanton’s own resolution that nothing concerning the dead President should be exploited commercially. Stanton had instructed General Townsend, who accompanied the funeral party as his representative, to allow no photographs to be taken. In New York, however, his injunction was disregarded. The Secretary sent Townsend a stiff reprimand, and ordered the plates seized and destroyed, along with all prints that had been made, warning Townsend that he would hold him personally responsible if any more pictures were taken.3
Two days later, Stanton and Welles met by prearrangement at 6 a.m. to pay their last respects to Lincoln before his remains started on the funeral journey to Illinois. Later in the day, at a cabinet meeting, mercifully brief, everyone but Welles seemed willing to let slide for the moment the question of Stanton’s reconstruction order—all were drained emotionally by their reactions to two weeks which had seen Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s murder.
Then, about 6:30 p.m. on the twenty-first, Grant rushed into the War Department. He brusquely asked B. M. Plumb, the clerk on duty, whether Stanton was expected back that night. Barely waiting for Plumb’s reply—that he did not know—Grant hurried downstairs, where he hastily penned a note to the Secretary and sent it to his home by mounted courier.
Stanton was at dinner when the breathless messenger arrived. He opened the note and read: “Sir,—I have just received … dispatches … from General Sherman. They are of such importance that I think immediate action should be taken on them, and that it should be done by the President in council with his whole cabinet … and the meeting [should] take place tonight.”
Within thirty minutes Stanton arrived at the War Department in a state of high excitement. Seizing pen and paper, he dashed off a note, and ordered Plumb to make copies of it and to rush one to each cabinet officer by mounted messenger. The note stated that “by direction of the President” a cabinet meeting was called for eight o’clock that night. Stanton and Grant, after conferring about Sherman’s dispatches, went to Johnson’s temporary residence to tell him of the meeting. Grant remained with the President while Stanton went on to pick up Welles.
They drove back to the War Department, and Welles waited downstairs while Stanton, in his office, called telegrapher Bates in and dictated a memorandum to be read to the cabinet. The Secretary was so excited that Bates, “a rapid penman,” could not keep up with the “sentences that came tumbling from his lips in an impetuous torrent.” Rereading the document, Stanton corrected Bates’s errors and omissions in his heavy, tight scrawl, and then at a more moderate pace dictated a new copy. He confessed to Bates that indignation at General Sherman had caused him to speak so rapidly and incoherently.
The President and the cabinet assembled promptly on the hour, along with Grant and Preston King, former New York congressman, Republican political leader, and personal adviser to Johnson. At Stanton’s request, Grant proceeded to read the communications from Sherman. The first was a letter stating that Sherman had entered into an agreement with rebel general Johnston which, if approved by the President, would bring peace from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. It had already been approved by John C. Breckinridge, Secretary of War of the Confederacy, “in his capacity as major general,” Sherman explained, and it provided for the surrender of the last of the rebel forces. This much had been expected. But Sherman also promised the recognition of existing Southern state governments once their personnel swore allegiance to the Union. Where conflicting state or local governments existed, the United States Supreme Court was to decide which was legitimate. The agreement further provided for the re-establishment of federal courts in the South, for franchise and property rights for peaceful Southerners, and for a general amnesty. Sherman and Johnston pledged t
hemselves to “promptly obtain the necessary authority” from their superiors “to carry out the above programme.”
Those present listened to Grant with a sense of shock and incredulity, for when Sherman had begun negotiations with Johnston a week before, he had informed Grant and Stanton: “I will accept the same terms that Grant gave General Lee, and be careful not to complicate any points of civil policy.” But now Sherman had done precisely what he had promised not to do. The agreement, far from being a mere military convention terminating hostilities, was a virtual treaty of peace. It recognized the legality of the insurrectionary state governments, promised immunity to all persons who had taken part in the rebellion, and permitted the Confederate troops to deposit their arms in their respective state arsenals, thus providing Southern state governments with a supply of war material. It put in question the legitimacy of all Union state governments where rival state authorities existed, as in those areas of the South where Lincoln’s reconstruction policy was in operation, and the clause specifying arbitrament by the Supreme Court betrayed Sherman’s ignorance of American institutions, for the Court had no role to play in deciding such political questions. Conflicting state governments in the South would make new strife probable. It left a possibility of recognizing the rebel war debt. And it might even be construed as recognizing the right to property in slaves.
All of those present at the cabinet meeting condemned Sherman’s action; the President, Stanton, and Speed were the most emphatic, though Speed expressed friendship for Sherman, and Grant, though strongly opposed to Sherman’s course, refrained from censuring him. Everyone agreed that generals in the field had no authority to settle political questions. Stanton, Johnson decided, should immediately inform Sherman that his action was disapproved and that hostilities should be immediately resumed after giving the Confederates the forty-eight hours’ notice required to terminate the truce.4