Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Trumbull evidently intended it as a conciliatory measure, in line with some of the President’s statements in his December message to Congress. But on March 24 Johnson informed the cabinet that he intended to veto it, and he wanted each member to express his opinion before he did so.

  Stanton, exhibiting an intimate familiarity with the proposal, explained that he disliked some of the enforcement features of Trumbull’s bill that were modeled on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but that under existing circumstances Johnson should approve it. His reasoning, and his evident liaison with the Trumbull wing of the party’s moderate leaders in Congress, carried no weight. Johnson had set himself unalterably against the bill, and the bid for compromise which it signified. It granted the black race safeguards beyond anything ever enjoyed by the white race, he complained in his veto message, and in encroaching on powers rightfully belonging to the states, it was a step toward unwarranted centralization of governmental authority. And again the President objected to the passage of a law affecting all the states while Congress denied representation to eleven of them.

  Within two weeks both the Senate and the House had passed the bill over Johnson’s veto, the first time in the nation’s history that such action had been taken on a major measure, though the Republican leaders had to resort to desperate expedients to push the repassage through. It seemed that the party breach had now become irreparable, as Johnson would yield nothing, for the sake of harmony, to moderate Republican sentiment, though the rich prize of the support of the middle-roaders was well within his reach.

  Discerning, troubled Northerners, such as the diarist Strong, veered away from Johnson. “I fear that these vetoes shew Johnson’s sympathies and prejudices to be wrong and dangerous,” Strong wrote. “I am losing my faith in him.” This was coming about through no logical process, the diarist confessed, but through an instinctive distrust of a man in whom so many copperhead and erstwhile rebel newspapers showed such unbounded faith. Strong thought the Republicans were fully justified in insisting upon the establishment of certain safeguards before restoring home rule and full recognition to the South. He shuddered when people asked him: “Would you make the South another Poland?” But he answered inwardly: “By all means, if it be expedient.” The same sort of thoughts and misgivings must have passed through Stanton’s mind.

  Welles was ready to believe that Stanton had been guilty of lining up votes to undo Johnson’s veto, and Johnson heard from other sources that Harlan and Speed as well as Stanton were disloyal to him.14 A clamor for the War Secretary’s removal that had been intermittent since the preceding December grew louder. But leading Republicans, though puzzled as to why Stanton remained silent on the political issues of the moment, pressured him to retain his office. His friend Pierrepont, still nominally a Democrat, received the first definite word that the War Secretary would stay on, and signaled the information to the public at a dinner speech in New York City that was later directed to the President’s attention in the newspapers.

  Stanton was pleased at this evidence of bipartisan support, but he did not think it impossible that the President would ask him to resign, although he wrote to Ellen in March that the newspaper rumors that described a change in the war office “were no doubt got up for speculating purposes.” He hoped that “[General] Sherman will be my successor and this I would prefer to any arrangement likely to be made.”

  Stanton was not acting the politician. He was Secretary of War, and he placed this responsibility ahead of party purposes. Sherman was in accord with the President’s reconstruction proposals, and Stanton knew that the general still hated him because of the unhappy events of the year past. Yet Stanton wanted him as his successor rather than any of the partisan candidates who so coveted the post, because he thought that Sherman would know how to run the Army and how to shield it.15

  In his mediating position in the cabinet, Stanton had not gone any further than to criticize certain proposed actions of the President and in each instance he had finally acquiesced in them. Nor had he ever opposed Johnson’s policies publicly. The President’s suspicions that Stanton was divulging administration secrets to high-ranking Republicans were based only on the fact that the War Secretary stood high in their favor.

  Stanton ranked high in the estimation of most persons. In an administration which was rapidly losing the support of the Republican-Union party, he was so much a symbol of the solidity which the public thought had existed under Lincoln that Johnson hesitated to break with him. Stanton was also, Johnson realized, the best administrator among the cabinet officers.

  The Johnson administration still had three years to run. Neither man wished to precipitate a rupture that must involve their personal futures, the fate of what they still thought of as their common Union party, and the destiny of the Southern region and of the nation. Stanton still desired to serve as an adjustor between the President and Congress. He would not destroy what might be the last bridge to accommodation by resigning from the cabinet. And though he was reasonably sure that Grant felt as he did about events, Stanton was not positive. Until he knew that the Army’s interests were safe, he could not abandon the war office; he was afraid that his successor might be someone who would overawe the seemingly simple, malleable commanding general.

  1 Freidel, “Francis Lieber, Charles Sumner, and Slavery,” JSH, IX, 75–93; Pierce, Sumner, IV, 258; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 394; Sumner, Complete Works (Boston, 1900), IX, 437–89.

  2 Stanton to Gen. E. D. Townsend, and to Mrs. I. Bell, Sept. 17, 1865, Stanton MSS; Garrison, op. cit., IV, 152; Times, Sept. 23, 1865; R. M. Blatchford to Seward, Sept. 23, 1865, Seward Papers, UR.

  3 Stanton to Seward, Oct. 14, 1865, Seward Papers, UR; Washington National Republican, Oct. 23, 1865, for Seward’s speech; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 383–4; poems owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton; ANJ (Dec. 23, 1865), 277.

  4 Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers (New York, 1913), I, 264–7, 271–4; Stanton to Colfax, Oct. 16, 1865, IndHS; Sumner to Stanton, Nov. 5, 1865, Stanton MSS; Stanton to Sumner, Nov. 6, 1865, Sumner Papers, HU.

  5 Perry to Johnson, Aug. 20, 1865, Johnson Papers, LC; O. O. Howard, op. cit., II, 225–8, 258, 390; Final Report, Provost Marshal, Jan. 13, 1866, Army Commands, Georgia, IX, 78, RG 98, NA; Harrisonburg (Va.) Register and Advertiser, Feb. 2,1866.

  6 Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (New York, 1884), 472. In May 1866, Congress asked for the Smith-Brady report. Stanton refused to turn it over, and, remarkably, the congressmen acquiesced in this decision; see Investigations at New Orleans, House Exec. Doc. 96, 39th Cong., 1st sess.; Smith-Brady Commission Testimony and Report, ms, RG 94, NA.

  7 Freidel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal (Baton Rouge, 1948), 369–75; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 337–9, 362–3; Pierce, Sumner, IV, 253; O.R., ser. 2, VIII, 847–67, 890–2, 931–45; Frank, “The Conspiracy to Implicate the Confederate Leaders in Lincoln’s Assassination,” loc. cit., 641–4.

  8 Badeau, Grant, 139; Wolcott MS, 205–7; Stanton to Eckert, Dec. 16, 1865, Stanton MSS; to Mrs. Lewis Hutchison, Dec. 25, 1865, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton. McKitrick, op. cit., 3–250, best surveys the political scene and events of late 1865.

  9 Ms memoir by A. S. Chambers, NYHS; ms memo, Jan. 2, 1866, Chase Papers, LC; and see Richardson, Messages and Papers, VI, 353–71; Ralph Korngold, Thaddeus Stevens (New York, 1955), 282–31.

  10 See Grant’s reports on the South, Jan. 11–20, and G. W. Childs to Johnson, Jan. 11, 1866, Johnson Papers, LC; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 413; E. M. Pease to Stanton, Jan. 12, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 318, RG 107, NA, on the payments, and Stanton to J. R. Hawley, May 10, 1866, Hawley Papers, LC, on the cadets.

  11 Binney to Stevens, Jan. 5, 1866, Stevens Papers, LC; Washburn to Seward, Jan. 13, 1866, Seward Papers, UR; Dawes, “Recollections of Stanton under Johnson,” loc. cit., 499; Ray to Trumbull, Feb. 7, 1866, Trumbull Papers, LC.

  12 Fessenden, op. cit., II, 34–5; Morse, Welles
Diary, II; 434–5; Benjamin B. Kendrick (ed.), The Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction (New York, 1914), 230–1.

  13 Stanton to Bancroft, Jan. 9, 24, 1866, Bancroft Papers, MHS; and Bancroft to Stanton, Feb. 7, 1866, Stanton MSS; Meigs to father, Feb. 23, 1866, Meigs Letter-books, LC.

  14 See Harper’s Weekly, X, 226; Strong, Diary, IV, 76; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 463–4, 479–80; Browning, Diary, II, 65; Fleming, op. cit., I, 197–200.

  15 Detroit Post, Chandler, 299; Pierrepont speech in New York Evening Express, Jan. 12, 1866; Stanton to Ellen, March 19, 1866, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THEY MUST MUSTER ME OUT

  AFTER Appomattox, Grant had feared that Stanton might try to dominate him in the internal affairs of the Army. For his part, Stanton was at first worried that the immensely popular Grant would bypass him in the way that prewar commanding generals had flanked former War Secretaries. By the end of 1865, however, though they had a few minor disagreements, the two men settled into a comfortable and complementary relationship. Grant made the commanding general’s office more important than the war office in army administration, as it had been in prewar days—a development which Stanton favored in the interest of peacetime efficiency.

  Stanton relied on Grant’s opinions on basic army policy and military relations with the public. They agreed fully on problems of demobilization, army reorganization, surplus property disposal, civilians’ claims against the military, and the desirability of army rather than Interior Department jurisdiction over the western Indians. Together, Stanton and Grant proposed early in 1866 that Congress establish a new permanent provost bureau in the War Department to deal with recruiting and desertion matters. But when the matter became enmeshed in a personal feud between General Fry and Congressman Conkling, and Grant shied away from a contest with the powerful legislator, Stanton followed his lead and let the matter drop. Years later, Grant remembered how “every day … we grew better and better friends.”1

  So far as politics was concerned, Grant’s position was even more ambiguous than Stanton’s, and the general carefully kept secret his vaulting ambition for high elective office. Grant could appear as a supporter of Johnson and thus appeal to Democrats and Union party conservatives. Backed up by Stanton in matters of army policy, he saw to it that the soldiers executed their duties in the South and that the influence of the Army there fell into line with the plans of the congressional Republicans of moderate and radical bent, as in the supersedure of the Army’s provost courts by the equally military Freedmen’s Bureau tribunals. No wonder that Senator Cole, of California, could agree with a description of Grant in this period that argued: “Now Grant, somehow or other, seems to have a conservative odor about him, and at the same time a slight dash of radicalism will exhibit itself, which makes him not entirely one thing or the other.”2

  Wherever Grant was in politics, he was first a soldier. And, like Stanton, he was disgusted and resentful that with the war at an end hundreds of Northern civilians were suing army officers, especially wartime provost marshals, for damages. According to the claimants, these officers had arrested innocent persons, employed perjured witnesses and agents provocateurs, and deliberately ordered needless arrests in order to extort money from their victims. The law of Congress of March 3, 1863, dealing with the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, exempted officials from suits for acts done in legitimate pursuit of their duties but was no immunity against charges of exploiting official powers for base ends or personal gain.

  Lincoln had set a policy of having the Attorney General defend the few army officers who were sued during the war by civilians. But now that department of the government was too understaffed to cope with the flood of postwar litigation, and as a result of the rash of suits, army officers generally were becoming timid in the execution of their duties.

  At the same time, however, officers were angered that plaintiffs in these suits were in many instances former slaveowners from border areas and Northerners who had been convicted of disloyalty by military courts on what seemed to soldiers to be adequate grounds. Now these untrustworthy miscreants—for this was how army personnel viewed them—were maliciously striking back at those who had justly punished treason, and were demanding the return of confiscated property as well.

  These damage suits, entered in state courts, inevitably brought about conflicts of jurisdiction when writs were issued on army personnel. To raise army morale, Stanton ordered that the Bureau of Military Justice supply free legal counsel for officers being sued by civilians if the Attorney General could not, so long as the Bureau was convinced that the charges were groundless. But he also authorized courts-martial for officers found to have been justly accused. At the same time, “to allay uneasiness and prevent litigation,” Stanton had issued an order early in March 1865 directing army personnel to heed only the actions of federal courts. This order was in accord with legal and historical precedents, and with the current view of the War Department solicitor as well as the Attorney General, but because it was Stanton who issued it—as Grant had convinced him that he must in order to sustain the sagging morale of the Army’s officers—he received the fullest share of public criticism.

  One case may illustrate how Stanton stood as a buffer between the Army and indignant Northern civilians. In February 1865, the provost marshal of Cleveland, Captain F. A. Nash, was accused of taking bribes from men he had certified as unfit for military duty. A state grand jury, packed with angered patriots and jubilant copperheads, brought an indictment against Nash. Stanton’s March order transferred jurisdiction to the federal court, where the grand jury confirmed the indictment. Freed on bond, Nash faced a court-martial that Stanton had ordered personally. The local army commander arrested the editor of the Cleveland Leader for publishing details of the court-martial proceedings. Stanton ordered his immediate release. Late in May, the military court found Nash guilty and prescribed a stiff sentence. But throughout, the press of the Ohio Valley saw Stanton as the villain of the piece.3

  For years now Stanton had worried about what the civil courts would do in connection with the wartime emergency arrests and trials of civilians by the military, and the property confiscations performed by soldiers obeying his, the President’s, and Congress’s orders. In 1864, the Supreme Court had squirmed out of having to take on this hot issue, when it denied Vallandigham judicial review of the sentence a military commission had imposed on him. One of the major reasons Lincoln had appointed Chase to the Supreme Court was that, as Dana phrased it, “if any law is needed at this special juncture he will make it.”

  But Lincoln had become alarmed, early in 1865, when he learned that Chase now believed that the President, and thus Stanton and the Army, had no right to suspend civil processes, that it was a function only of Congress. “Such an opinion from the Supreme Court,” Dana wrote, “would have been a very injurious blow to Mr. Lincoln’s administration,” and Attorney General Speed, with Stanton’s support, persuaded the Court to postpone consideration of pending cases involving this issue. This arrangement had only held off the problem, but any respite was a blessing.4

  Then, just before he took his brief Gambier vacation in December 1865, Stanton learned that Joseph E. Maddox, of Baltimore, was claiming $30,000 damages from him because during the war he had been arrested on what he claimed were false charges of disloyalty.

  Soldiers had found Maddox in possession of confiscated tobacco. He asserted that Lincoln had granted him a permit to trade through the blockade but that a military commission nonetheless sent him to prison. Stanton had freed Maddox after he had been in prison for some months, but had retained the tobacco for the government.

  Maddox entered his suit against Stanton early in December in the New York City and County supreme court. Strong anti-Army sentiment had prevailed in New York City ever since the draft riots, and in 1864, in a suit against General Dix, a New York judge had declared the exemption provisions of the Habeas Cor
pus Act unconstitutional. As his counsel, Maddox employed Caleb Cushing, prominent Massachusetts Democrat, intimate of President Johnson, and an old enemy of Stanton’s. The War Secretary, realizing the difficulty of proving that the extraordinary wartime internal security actions had actually been taken under specific presidential or legislative authority, had the government hire Pierrepont, who had been counsel for Dix in the 1864 case, to defend him.

  From the first, Stanton had been apprehensive about the Maddox case; Browning noted after talking with him about it that “he was a little crusty in his manner, and, I think, suspected we wanted to make a point on him.” Stanton had Lafayette C. Baker, former head of the army secret service, go to work to learn what he could about Maddox. Meanwhile, Cushing tried to compromise the affair out of court, for he was soon convinced that Maddox had no real case. By early June, Cushing was advising his client that “only honorable suits are wise ones” and that “the continued prosecution of the Secretary has the necessary effect of embarrassing the action of the War Department.” He had learned that Marble, Black, the Blairs, and Barlow were behind Maddox as part of their drive to oust Stanton from the war office. Cushing, though unfriendly to Stanton, shied off from using the law for such blatantly partisan ends.

  Although Stanton at first could barely give credence to Baker’s reports that his political foes were willing to wreck the United States Army in order to get at him, the sleuth was soon able to bring him proof. The Secretary was outraged, albeit still terribly worried over the personal disaster that would befall him if the suit succeeded.