Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Then there was the question of the Army’s role in the South. Here the military were expected to retain powers and functions undreamed of in prewar America. In assuming the responsibility for occupying the South, Stanton and the Army faced their knottiest postwar problem. The Army’s problems in the South were not only different from those confronting it in the North and the West; they were unique in the American experience. Now American soldiers would regulate the lives of millions of other Americans. Only the lessons learned since 1861 were at hand to guide Stanton and Grant in administering the occupation, and these might not be relevant in peacetime.

  In reality, Stanton was now the head of a peacetime military establishment consisting of two armies, each with its own purposes. The pacification of the West and the occupation of the South were their primary separate missions, and prescribed different organizations for each. This duality, though obscured by political crosscurrents, was to be recognized in Congress’s reconstruction statutes two years hence, when the southern army commands were placed under legislative control, and the President was permitted to retain command only of the northern and western sections. But in the first months of Johnson’s presidency, what political future impended for the Army or for the nation was unknown.

  No matter what policies the President and Congress had in mind for the South, Stanton had to bring stability to the war-torn area quickly. The South was a vacuum, bare of legitimate authorities, verging in some sections on anarchy. The Army moved in because no one else could do the job.

  In the provost marshal units developed during the war years by every army field command except Sherman’s, the Army had ready to hand an apparatus capable of taking on the complex occupation tasks. But the provosts of each military level—army, corps, division, regiment, and in some instances down to the company—were responsible only to their immediate superior officer, were independent of one another, and were capable only in theory of executing a general policy.

  Stanton, knowing this, had included in his first reconstruction proposal to Lincoln the suggestion that there be established a centralized provost organization. Although this section was tabled, at Welles’s suggestion, as a threat to democracy, events were to prove that centralization in reconstruction was needed for uniformity and consistency in policies, regardless of whether President or Congress set the goals. But even in their unreformed administrative arrangement, the provosts offered the best tool the Army had for immediate use in the South.

  In the first weeks of peace, Union provosts disarmed Confederate veterans, restricted travel, enforced liquor prohibition decrees, put Negroes to work on roads and bridges, set up provost courts to try ordinary criminal cases, applied loyalty tests, established priorities in food distribution, supervised the repair of municipal sewage facilities, and drew up maximum-price schedules for scarce commodities. Because of their wartime experience, the provosts were able to take on these multitudinous tasks in addition to traditional military police functions, and this ability made it possible for them to bring about a swift transition from shooting war to nominal peace. In most cases in the South, provosts became the locus of both military and civilian authority. “I would rather act as Provost Marshal myself,” wrote General H. M. Judah, commanding in Georgia in midsummer 1865, “than make a mistake in the appointment.”

  Stanton kept the Army engaged in this kind of essential housekeeping and out of politics as much as possible. When Provost Marshal Patrick presumed to reinstate civilian municipal government in Richmond, the Secretary blistered him. Such matters, he insisted to Patrick, were outside the business of the Army.2

  The South was in the soldiers’ hands. Neither the President nor Congress had thus far set a line of policy for the Army to follow in the defeated rebel states. Any reconstruction plan, however, needed the Army to see to its execution. The Army’s central role was not, as historian William A. Dunning later described it, the “mere accidental feature of the general issue … throwing over the situation a sort of martial glamour.” Nor was the military’s importance due to the mere fact that Stanton was War Secretary and Grant the ranking general. They, and the Army as an institution, had to become entangled in events because they came to differ with the new President on what the war had meant and on what the peace should bring.3

  For the first few eventful weeks after Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson had remained a shadowy figure to Stanton, but now the War Secretary was able to take time to evaluate the Tennessean whom tragedy had catapulted into the White House. He saw a man of vigorous physique and tremendous moral courage who, stubbornly struggling to rise above a mudsill origin, had dared to defy the secessionists of his state and speak out boldly for the Union.

  Orphaned at the age of four, Johnson had been bound out as an apprentice to a tailor, and yet had become a man of comfortable means. His flair for oratory, coupled with conscientious study of politics and government, had enabled him to become the spokesman of the artisans, mountaineers, and small farmers of his eastern Tennessee neighborhood. Elected first to the state legislature, he had gone on to Congress, become governor of Tennessee, and then a United States senator.

  At Lincoln’s urging he had risked political suicide and even death itself to serve as Military Governor of Tennessee; then, a delegate to the Union National Convention of 1864 as a war Democrat, he had become the party’s choice for Vice-President because as a loyal Southerner he could lend balance to the ticket. Throughout his political life he had been faithful to the principles of the Democracy.4

  Johnson’s allegiance to Jacksonian principles and his own stern struggle to rise in life had instilled in him a hatred of monopoly and privilege. He shared Stanton’s biting scorn for the planter aristocrats and came to the presidency breathing threats of fire and slaughter against them for bringing on the war. But no one knew that Johnson had never fully overcome the “poor white’s” feeling of inferiority, and he was soon to succumb to the flattery of his erstwhile social superiors. Although he opposed slavery, he hated abolitionists. His private secretary, Colonel William G. Moore, judged that Johnson sometimes “exhibited a morbid distress and feeling against the negroes,” and was quite willing to remand them to the custody of their former masters with only such protection as the Thirteenth Amendment afforded.

  Furthermore, Johnson was irrevocably committed to the doctrine of states’ rights. To him, the Constitution was still, as it had been when he first entered politics, a compact between sovereign states; the war had not changed this relationship at all. From that postulate he soon concluded that reconstruction amounted to no more than a resumption by the revolted states of their rights and duties under the Constitution, and he stressed rights more than duties.

  Lincoln had felt somewhat the same way about the status of the seceded states, but whereas Lincoln, in advancing his plan of reconstruction, had declared that he did not mean to rule out other plans and had confessed that events controlled him to a greater degree than he could control them, Johnson, after forming an opinion, proved obstinately averse to modifying it; nor would he, when unable to have his way in full, concede whatever might be necessary at the moment in order to obtain as much as he could. His strength was not pliant like Lincoln’s, and he was often blindly stubborn, mistaking rigidity for constructive consistency. Trusting and confiding completely in no one, never happy “unless he had some one to strike at or denounce,” Johnson was of “the same materials that martyrs are made of,” his friend Hugh McCulloch wrote later.

  It was not only that Johnson lacked Lincoln’s temperament and sensitive tact. He lacked his predecessor’s statesmanship and stature. Johnson never realized that Lincoln’s 1863 reconstruction and amnesty proclamation was primarily a flexible, skillful wartime weapon designed to hasten the coming of peace, but not necessarily of equal worth in prescribing the final form which that peace must assume. There is every reason to believe, as Harrison Gray Otis noted, that Lincoln would have adapted his concepts of reconstruction, of the need for th
e disfranchisement of Southern whites, and of the role of the Negro, to the changed circumstances of 1865. Johnson could not advance beyond 1863.5

  Yet to the Democratic concept of a weak national government, Johnson inconsistently added Lincoln’s theory of the strong “war powers” belonging peculiarly to the President, from which it followed that only he was constitutionally authorized to administer the reconstruction process. This elevation of the executive at the expense of the legislative branch of the government, though promoted by Lincoln during the unprecedented emergency of the war, went contrary to the long course of Anglo-American constitutional history and the habits engendered by the weak Presidents after Jackson. The congressional opposition that Lincoln had encountered even at the height of the struggle should have warned Johnson of what to expect now that hostilities had ceased. But instead of re-examining his constitutional assumptions, he was to allow them to lead him to an extreme and exposed position. And he ended up by contending that whereas the President could declare the war ended, Congress could not say it continued; that whereas the President could employ soldiers for reconstruction purposes and issue pardons wholesale, Congress could not prescribe martial law for the South or pass an act of amnesty; that whereas the President could say who could and could not vote for members of constitutional conventions in the seceded states which were to initiate the reconstruction process, Congress could not modify the list; that whereas the President could prescribe the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment as a condition for the restoration of a state to its normal position under the Constitution, Congress had no power to make the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment a similar condition. In short, Johnson came to magnify his part of the national authority as a shield to protect state autonomy. But none of this was visible in April 1865.

  Johnson, often vehement in his language, had denounced “treason” and “traitors” with such malevolence during the war that even some tough-talking radicals had thought his language unseemly. Northern Democrats of the Vallandigham and Barlow stripe looked upon him as a deserter from their party. While Johnson was serving as Military Governor of Tennessee, Stanton had frequently been drawn into controversies between him and the Union commanders over their respective spheres of authority. But these had not been serious difficulties compared with what occurred in other occupation commands, and Halleck, in April 1865, could write of Johnson: “I like him very much, and I think he will be a firm and judicious Chief Magistrate. He was the only civico-military Governor of a rebel state who gave us no trouble, and who had the good sense to act always right.” Halleck guessed that Johnson would be more severe toward rebels than Lincoln had been, “but perhaps, after all, it may be the better.”

  Stanton agreed with this estimate of the new President. Like Johnson, he had detested West Point and glorified the volunteer generals, but he had overcome this prejudice by the end of the war. Johnson had not. For his part, Johnson had once thought Stanton too lenient toward secessionists. Late in 1864, the Secretary had ruled that attorneys pleading before military commissions on behalf of imprisoned civilians in Tennessee, need not swear to the “ironclad test oath” of past loyalty, because, in many areas, there were no lawyers who could swear that oath without committing perjury. As a lawyer, Stanton felt obliged to grant accused persons the protection of proper legal procedure, and once Tennessee was safe, he had relaxed the oath requirements over Johnson’s opposition. On the whole, however, the wartime relations between the two men had been good.6

  Though he could guess no better than anyone else what course Johnson would choose to follow regarding the South, Stanton, however he mourned Lincoln, was encouraged by what he thought were the true characteristics of his successor. After talking with Stanton, Dana wrote that “the probability of any serious division in the Republican [Union] party seems to be entirely removed by the accession of President Johnson. For the present he commands the undivided support not merely of the party, but of the country in general.”

  Dana predicted that Johnson would move cautiously on all matters, and “especially upon the all important question of the readmission into the union of the seceded revolutionary states. Upon this subject there is a very great division of opinion, and men are very zealous upon all sides of it. Mr. Johnson is, however, evidently disinclined to any precipitate action, and I judge that neither Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, nor Texas, will get back into the union until they are thoroughly regenerated.” Dana also thought that on the question of punishing rebel leaders Johnson’s vindictiveness was exaggerated.

  This was close to what Stanton, Halleck, and Grant thought were the President’s views toward the South. The promise of harmony on this essential question augured well for the continued political success of the Republican-Union coalition.

  Since 1863, Stanton had formally supported this war-born alliance of the Republicans with former Democrats who wished to exert every effort to crush the rebellion. So had Johnson. It is clear that, unlike many wartime Union Democrats who were already returning to the regular Democratic fold, Stanton considered his own divorce from the party an irrevocable one. He wanted the Republican-Union coalition to succeed, and he agreed with his friend Brady that Johnson would find a natural political home with “sensible Republicans and … War Democrats” like themselves.

  To Stanton, the Democratic organization was permanently tainted with treason. He had resented the Democrats’ wartime criticisms of the administration’s policies on internal security, conscription, emancipation, and Negro enlistment. Once a hard-money Jacksonian, Stanton had become converted to newer economic doctrines. He feared that if the Democrats succeeded in repudiating the government’s wartime monetary measures, the abyss of bankruptcy would loom frighteningly close. The Army’s occupation activities were costing almost as much as the conduct of the war itself. A drastic retrenchment in appropriations for the military, which Democrats were already demanding, would mean that there would not be enough soldiers to enforce whatever reconstruction policy was finally agreed on.

  To be sure, the Democrats, though quickly restored as a national party, lacked leadership. But the Republican coalition, with Lincoln’s moderating influence gone, was embarrassingly rich in would-be leaders, each of whom controlled powerful factions in Congress and in the Northern states. Stanton was worried that the precarious unity within the Republican organization would suffer unless President Johnson, now head of the Republican-Union alliance, could quickly gain enough prestige within the party to keep differences muted. The obvious way for Johnson to gather laurels was for reconstruction to proceed quickly and effectively in the South. Stanton was determined that the Army would aid the President in this need.

  Stanton felt that his own position, in relation to the various Republican factions, was a moderate one. He was “in betweenity,” and he told James S. Scovel, a New Jersey Republican leader, that he wanted to “unite the conflicting interests of the republican party.”7

  Therefore, Stanton was particularly alert to opportunities for advancing these goals when on May 8 his plan of reconstruction came up as the principal order of business before the cabinet. Stanton knew that Welles was in opposition to many of its features, but he expected support from Kentuckian James Speed, the Attorney General since 1864, and from Blair’s replacement as postal head, William Dennison, an old Ohio acquaintance. The new Treasury Secretary, Hugh McCulloch, of Indiana, was an unknown quantity. Fellow Hoosier John P. Usher was due to relinquish the Interior portfolio within a week; Stanton hoped that Usher’s successor, James Harlan, of Iowa, would prove to be an ally. Seward was still painfully recuperating and it was not yet known whether he would be able to resume his responsibilities at the State Department.

  Whatever the cabinet members thought, decision was up to the new President. And so Stanton reintroduced his proposal for a centralized provost marshal corps less in the hope that Johnson would approve the suggestion than from a desire to educate him and the cabinet concerning t
he nature of the Army’s problems in the South. The Secretary had also separated his proposal for Virginia from that for North Carolina. He had received word from Halleck that even the Virginia Unionists regarded the Pierpont government as a sham. Stanton proposed using it only as a medium for calling and supervising an election to choose new state officials.

  Stanton’s proposal was designed merely as an interim arrangement, to build on what the Army was already doing without a plan while waiting for higher authority to give purpose, direction, and meaning to its occupation of the South. He had no conception of his draft as a sophisticated or complete scheme, and he was committed to almost none of its provisions. It was a sketch, not a blueprint.

  Welles, ever suspicious of Stanton, saw his plan as a design for extending permanent military control over Virginia. But when he again objected to the proposed reform of the provost marshal organization, and to the abandonment of the Pierpont government, and persuaded other cabinet members to sustain these objections, Stanton, after defending the need for the provost reform, surprised him by surrendering with “alacrity and cheerfulness.” The War Secretary thereupon amended his proposal so as to commit the federal government to aid Pierpont, and the provost matter was cut from the text.

  Stanton’s plan for North Carolina again came before the cabinet the next day, and the members studied it carefully, for whatever was adopted for North Carolina would probably become a pattern for the other states. Following the plan worked out by Lincoln and put into effect in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas, Stanton proposed that the President appoint a provisional governor for North Carolina. It would be the duty of this official, acting under the protection of federal troops, to see to it that delegates were elected to a convention to draw up a new or revised state constitution providing for a republican form of government. The state could then resume its proper relationship to the Union.