Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  By report, many provosts were anti-Negro in comparison with Freedmen’s Bureau personnel. Yet everything indicates that Stanton opposed the provost units primarily to achieve a desirable administrative reform. Stability in the South was no longer a daily gamble. Substitution of a relatively centralized agency like the Freedmen’s Bureau for the unsystematic provosts was a necessary improvement, quite apart from the political significance of the move.

  In the last weeks of 1865, after consultations with Grant, Stanton ordered the Bureau to assume the provosts’ functions. Bureau officers, deriving their authority from Congress rather than from the now uncertain President, would supervise the military courts in the South which had taken jurisdiction away from the state courts in cases involving Negroes. In effect, the Bureau’s agents, as one unhappy Virginia editor noted, “are to be invested with the duties of Provost Marshals.”5

  A second factor, of more importance than the need for a mere administrative reform, convinced Stanton that the provost system was inadequate in the South. For he had come to the conclusion that the entire reconstruction process begun by Lincoln and continued under Johnson was a tragic farce, thwarting the purposes of the Presidents and involving the Army in disgraceful corruption.

  In December 1864, Lincoln, becoming uneasy over the manner in which reconstruction was working out in practice, had ordered an investigation of the civil-military administration of the Mississippi River region. As finally arranged, a special committee composed of General William F. Smith and James Brady, Stanton’s colleague at the Sickles trial, headed the investigating group. They concentrated their work in Louisiana, the most highly developed product of the wartime executive reconstruction policy. Their final report, given to Stanton when he returned from his 1865 vacation trip, was a scathing indictment of the army provost marshal and provost court systems there and of the civil administrations built on the foundations of Lincoln’s 1863 amnesty proclamation.

  According to the Smith-Brady report, the entire civil government in Louisiana was “a vast scheme of fraud enforced by military rule, by means of which, a few political tricksters have taken the reins of government into their own hands.” Provost marshals, in collusion with the “popularly-elected” civilian officials, had made a racket out of trade and travel permits. Treasury agents, in on the graft, slithered through loopholes in army and Treasury regulations to pad their own pockets. The supposedly loyal white population was unregenerate despite their oaths of allegiance, and the few white Unionists, along with the thoroughly loyal but mute Negroes, groaned under harsh exactions. Elections under this travesty of a representative system were attended with fraud, terrorism, and corruption. Though the Lincoln reconstruction plan had effectively weakened the will of Southerners to continue fighting a war, it was by no means equally effective as a blueprint for postwar reconstruction.

  Stanton had brought this report to the new President, and he and Johnson, along with Grant, had studied it carefully. They realized that it was laden with political dynamite. Its publication must inevitably condemn by inference Lincoln’s whole Southern policy and affect the morale of the Army, for the report blistered almost every officer connected with the western command since 1862. It also brought the value of Johnson’s state governments in the South into the most serious question. Johnson, Stanton, and Grant agreed to suppress the report. But Stanton could not suppress his certainty that the continuation of reconstruction in its present course, in which the Army had to sustain men against whom it had fought and who involved it in sordid corruption, was against the interests of the soldiers and of the nation.

  Therefore, he curtailed the provosts as a move toward closing the channels of graft and improving the existing reconstruction process. Stanton still hoped to convince the President of the need to alter the route that reconstruction was taking so that it would include Negro voters and thus could rest on a wider, firmer base. What he knew of the President encouraged the Secretary in his conceit that Johnson might swing his way. “Johnson was at that time hanging in the wind,” a visitor at the White House, J. C. Derby, recalled, and Stanton and his friends were trying “to bring him right.”6

  Stanton also tried to bring the President and the cabinet “right” on the problem of what to do with the still imprisoned Jefferson Davis. Hoping to find evidence that would implicate Davis in Lincoln’s assassination, Stanton had employed as archivist his old wartime counselor, Lieber. Although Lieber found much useful material in the captured Confederate official papers, he failed to unearth evidence connecting Davis with the murder.

  At Holt’s suggestion, Stanton had also agreed to the employment of Sanford Conover as a government agent. Conover had already shown himself to be a perjurer in the trial of the Lincoln conspirators, and almost at once he came up with a number of affidavits and witnesses involving the Confederate leaders in the assassination plot. But all of them proved to be as shady as Conover himself.

  Therefore, Stanton had come to favor trying Davis for treason, for he knew that his evidence was insufficient to implicate the Confederate President in Lincoln’s murder, even though he was reluctant to admit it. He still hoped that, with a little more time, he would find something incriminating, and on his insistence the matter was allowed to hang fire. Stanton also let his own resignation hang fire, so that the search for positive evidence against Davis would continue.7

  In December, however, as the members of Congress began straggling back to Washington, Stanton’s thoughts again turned to a return to private life. He was weary and still far from well, and Ellen joined with their friend Pierrepont in urging him to resign and form a law partnership in New York City. But he was dissuaded from this course by the pleas of the men he most respected—Sumner, Grant, Lieber, Brady, and others—that he stay at his post.

  To collect his thoughts concerning his future, Stanton left on a trip to Steubenville before the congressional session started. He found the train ride invigorating in the crisp winter weather, with sparkling snow covering the mountains and everything frozen tight. As before, he kept in touch with affairs by telegraph, and Eckert, left in charge in Washington, supplied him with daily summaries of events. From Steubenville he went on to Gambier, where Pamphila was now living, to be with his mother on her birthday, and to learn whether his contributions to their support, which had diminished since 1862 as a result of his reduced income, would continue to be adequate if he remained in the war office. Grateful for the chance to relax, he enjoyed talking to members of the Kenyon faculty, and spent quiet hours reading Dickens, his long-time favorite, while taking his ease on the sofa in Pamphila’s parlor.

  Although the Gambier trip rested him physically, Stanton remained uneasy in his mind about his personal future and the drift of political affairs. His discerning sister, taking pleasure in his enjoyment of reading aloud from Little Dorrit and David Copperfield, realized that “his anxieties … exceeded all he had known before.” He warned her to burn all his future letters containing references to public matters, but he did not alarm his family by telling them that he was facing financial disaster as a result of the cumulative drain on his capital occasioned by his diminished income since 1862.

  With these burdens to trouble his thoughts, Stanton returned to Washington in time for Christmas and to observe the early weeks of the first postwar Congress. The ordinarily flinty War Secretary was always mellow on family occasions, enjoying the festive tree and the Christmas gifts with Ellen and the youngsters. “Our children are rejoicing over a Christmas tree as vigorously as if the wax-tapers and trinkets that have made it so glorious to behold, were not the same that have done duty the last three years,” he wrote to Pamphila, and pride-fully recounted how his home was crowded with well-wishers and friends of the Stanton youngsters. True, he wrote to his mother-in-law in Pittsburgh, the Washington weather was so thick, foggy, and disagreeable that “Ellen finds everything, like Mrs. Gummidge, ‘going contrairey.’ But for all that the children are happy and noisy. Ellen thanks yo
u for the portfolio, & [Eleanor] for her work box. Lewis sends his thanks to you … for the gifts he got. But Bessie caps them all for wild fun and pigeon pie.”8

  Stanton knew that this was a happy calm before the storm. Among the elected delegates to Congress now crowding the capital were members from all the late rebel states except Texas, where the President’s reconstruction program had been delayed. The Republican leadership, prepared for this moment, had arranged that the rolls of the House and Senate remain bare of the names of delegates from the South. Excluded from their seats, the Southern members would have to keep knocking on the doors of Congress until a new joint committee of fifteen, dominated by Republicans, chose to decide all matters relating to reconstruction; nor would either house admit new members until this committee had reported that the Southern states were entitled to congressional seats. In all this, the Republican leaders hoped that the President would come to see things their way.

  Johnson, though indignant at this parliamentary maneuver, had by no means decided to pit himself against his party’s chieftains. On December 5, the President had read his annual message to Congress. Written by the historian George Bancroft, it was a dignified and forceful speech. Appealing to the North to forget the past, Johnson declared that although each house could judge the qualifications of its members, ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by any Southern state should be sufficient indication of its sincere desire for peace and union to permit its representatives to be seated. The President denied that the federal government had any right to control suffrage in the states, but the freedmen must be secure in their liberty, their property, and their right to enjoy a just return from their labor, and if they showed “patience and manly virtues,” the vote, too, might be theirs in time.

  But inaction held little appeal for the altruistic Sumner or the tough-minded Stevens, and about the time that Stanton returned from his visit to Gambier, the forthright Pennsylvanian rose in the House to take issue with the President in a bitter speech. Reiterating a program of land distribution in the South which he had worked out during the previous summer, Stevens announced his belief that the safety of the nation depended on the continuance of the Republican party in office, and this in turn, Sumner insisted, depended on giving the Southern Negro the vote.

  Stanton still displayed his capacity for friendship with men of varying opinions. He privately favored Stevens’s ideas, Stanton admitted to Chase, but he kept this as a private opinion, never seeking it as a political end, perhaps because he realized that it could not pass. Votes for the Southern Negro was as far as he would go.9

  Justice for the freedman, whether political or economic, seemed far from the desires of Southerners, according to the testimony of witnesses before the reconstruction committee. This testimony, although unreliable in part, was enough to confirm Stanton’s suspicions that the newly elected officeholders in and from the South were a prejudiced and stiff-necked lot, intent on keeping the Negro “in his place” and regaining control of the national government. When it was rumored that Johnson planned to end the military occupation of the South, the army commanders in that area complained that such action would leave white Unionists and Negroes exposed to rebel vengeance, and the House rushed through a resolution protesting against the removal of troops until Congress “shall have ascertained and declared their further presence there unnecessary.” It was said in some quarters that Stanton had prompted this resolution, which in Welles’s opinion was “purposely offensive” to the President.

  Showing his displeasure by appointing the West Point cadets-atlarge without consulting Stanton—he had sought Stanton’s advice the year before, and Lincoln had consistently done so earlier—Johnson also transferred the responsibility of paying the Southern state governors from Stanton to Seward. This was admittedly less efficient for all concerned, but Seward’s views now seemed to be much closer to those the President held.10

  Though it seemed to Welles that Stanton was clearly adrift from the President, Stanton’s real position at this stage of the developing crisis was that of a prospective compromiser. John Binney, who had spoken to Stanton in New York City, understood Stanton’s purpose when he wrote to Thad Stevens: “It is of great importance that you & the other Radical leaders should keep up communication with the President, if it is possible;—so that you may adjust your measures more harmoniously for practical cooperation. This you can manage, I should suppose, through Mr. Stanton,… who is a most faithful & true friend of the cause. I believe the President will be in favor of the measures, if they are wisely conducted, & presented in practical statesmanlike shape.” Israel Washburn, former governor of Maine, also regarded Stanton, along with Seward, as a moderating influence in the party, and advised the latter that though the President and Congress had become so antagonistic that he sometimes feared they could never work together again, yet “so long as you & Stanton remain in the Cabinet I shall have hope.”

  Other moderate Republicans also hoped for party harmony and foresaw only disaster in pushing Johnson to a showdown on the question of Negro suffrage in the South. Charles Ray, former editor of the Chicago Tribune, wrote Senator Trumbull that Johnson would capitalize on Northern race prejudice and become “cock of the walk” if Congress took an uncompromising stand on Negro suffrage. With the war emotions dying, Ray wrote, “people are more mindful of themselves than of any of the fine philanthropic schemes that look to making Sambo a voter, juror and office holder.” Ray asserted that most Northerners wanted only to protect the Negro’s civil rights and assure him a livelihood in the South.

  Trumbull had recently drawn up two bills designed to accomplish that very object, and Ray believed that the Republican party should stand on that program and let Negro suffrage come with the march of time. If the President would support Trumbull’s bills, compromise was more than possible, and there would be no necessity for a rift with him. Stanton could bring his own views into perfect accord with these.11

  One of the bills that Trumbull was sponsoring provided for the continuation and extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, thus providing military protection for Negroes under legislative authority but with executive enforcement. The other proposal was designed so that national civil rights laws would more permanently safeguard the Negro’s civil rights against state action. Trumbull was an upright, scholarly man whose opinions were far more moderate than those of Stevens and Sumner, and the Bureau expansion bill, the first of the two to be passed by Congress, was described by Senator Fessenden as a product of the best thought of an extremely able committee.

  At Johnson’s request Fessenden spent a morning discussing the bill with him, and he came away convinced that the President would agree to it and that it would be the means of bringing him and Congress together. The next day, when Fessenden told Stanton about this interview, the Secretary expressed great relief. He had feared that Johnson would veto the bill and felt pleased at the prospect of harmony.

  Surprisingly, however, Johnson did not discuss the measure with the cabinet until, on February 19, he read the members a veto message that he proposed to send to Congress the next day. None of them dissented, as the President had already made up his mind; but Welles correctly concluded that Stanton was unhappy about what appeared to be a change of heart on Johnson’s part.

  It would not have been conceding much to Congress if Johnson had signed the Bureau bill. His refusal to do so tended to drive the moderate Republican sponsors and supporters of the measure toward the camp of the extremists, though for the moment enough Republicans chose to stick with Johnson, still the titular head of their party, to defeat an attempt to override his veto.

  Johnson in his veto message not only disapproved of the Bureau bill but questioned Congress’s right to legislate on matters vital to the Southern states while they remained unrepresented; he thus denied the entire moderate Republican position. It seemed now even more vital to many incensed Republicans that the freedmen be protected by the national government, and Stevens pushed t
hrough a resolution which stated that only Congress could declare a state entitled to representation. Thus, as a result of the President’s intransigence, Republican party strategy which had excluded the Southern delegates the preceding December now became the announced policy of both houses of Congress. The legislators had declared that Johnson had made executive leadership in reconstruction unacceptable. It was a high price to pay for the veto.12

  Stanton so far had kept quiet about his own feelings. He deliberately avoided making public speeches; at his request Bancroft substituted for him in offering a eulogy on Lincoln and an oration for Washington’s birthday. On the latter occasion, a group composed mostly of Democrats applauded Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill and then moved on to the White House to salute him. Stirred by the crowd’s enthusiasm and flushed with what he held to be a triumph, the President came out on a portico and gave vent to some impassioned oratory, calling the Joint Committee on Reconstruction “an irresponsible central directory,” denouncing Stevens and Sumner as traitors to the fundamental principles of government, and even accusing his political enemies of plotting his assassination. His outburst could not encourage those who still hoped for party harmony. “Whether the difference [between Johnson and Congress] is radical or only in degree,” Meigs wrote the next day, “I don’t feel competent to judge yet. But I deplore the breach which puts our President in an attitude … with all the copperheads and rebels and all the weak-kneed on his side.” Here, Stanton’s opinion is clearly reflected.13

  There was still a hope of reconciliation if Johnson would approve the civil rights bill, the second measure that Trumbull had introduced. Friends of this measure expected Johnson to approve it. Designed to emasculate the “Black Codes,” it classified the Negro as a citizen, gave him the right to acquire and hold property, make contracts, go and come at pleasure, teach, preach, and testify in court, and brought these privileges under the protection of the national government. It decreed equal status in law for blacks and whites and made anyone who deprived any citizen of equal rights in law subject to punishment under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal courts.