Part of the answer is in Johnson’s hope that the Maddox suit would hogtie Stanton and the Army. A second reason rested in the approaching congressional elections. The President, secretly burning for approval at the polls, did not want to publicize the disunity in his administration. After speaking with Stanton, Lieber advised Halleck that were Johnson “to turn out the members of the cab. who do not go with him at present, it would probably turn the elections against him—but if the elections give him anything like a foothold in Congress, Blair will be in the cabinet.”
Further, though Johnson was heartily distrustful now of Stanton, as he had every reason to be, he still perversely valued the Secretary’s judgment on administrative matters above that of any other cabinet member. And last, the President was struck by the weakness of Stanton’s most vociferous detractors, the Blair-Barlow-Bayard cabal. These men had bungled with McClellan in 1864, had proved unable to sustain conservative Democratic candidates in their states a year later, and were unbearably rapacious in pressing claims for preferment upon national authorities. To be sure, Barlow insisted to Johnson that so long as he kept Stanton, “influential men … will make this a test of their support.” But, the wily man in the White House wondered, what was this support worth?13
Soon the President was to construct a disingenuous portrait of his relations with Stanton as an excuse for not having removed him. By Johnson’s later depiction, which his supporters accepted uncritically, Stanton was a devious obstructionist, who was employing the influence of his department in order to hamstring Johnson’s policies, and required the kind of pressure which he had recently experienced from the White House before he would declare himself. Now the President presumed from Stanton’s speech that the War Secretary was with him. It was a gross error on Johnson’s part.
As for Stanton, he decided to stay on for a while in the war office, in part because he had not yet made up his mind whether the President was completely lost to reason. The shrewd journalist Cadwallader noted that since the May serenade speech nothing substantial had happened to force Stanton from the position he had outlined then. Stanton felt that Johnson might still be swayed from the course he had taken during the past year.
It was Johnson, not Stanton, who had not yet announced his position with respect to the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. Until he chose to reject it publicly there was always a chance, however remote, that he and Congress could be brought together. So Stanton, though now in virtual antagonism to the President, stayed on in the cabinet.
Remaining in the war office was also a measure of self-protection because of the Maddox suit. Linked with this was Stanton’s concern for the fate of the Army. As Secretary, he was at the epicenter of the reconstruction process. Here he could give warning of dangerous designs on Johnson’s part. With a complaisant man in the War Department, the President might appoint new officers in the Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau, take over the military telegraph monopoly Stanton enjoyed and publish or suppress the reports that came into the Department, and refuse to permit the Attorney General to defend army officers in damage suits. “The Army would be very much disgusted to have one of the Blairs in the War Department,” Halleck confided to Lieber, who replied that the rebel archives which he had collected under Stanton’s orders “will all be dilapidated—destroyed” if a Blair came in. The German-born philosopher hoped that Stanton still meant what he had said to him in February of that year: “They must muster me out.”
Only if Grant were to replace Stanton, General James H. Wilson wrote, would the Army welcome a change in the war office. But Grant, determined to remain behind the scenes as long as he could, told General Sherman that he was quietly discouraging all such talk.14
Patriotism was the compelling reason that induced Stanton to hold on. He along with many other Americans saw grave peril in the country’s situation, and Stanton now identified the national purpose with the military institution. Envisaging himself as the civilian overlord of the martial arm, and as the defender of many men who had died but whose principles endured, Stanton was in a mood of conscious self-sacrifice. Two days after his fateful speech, he admitted to a friend: “Of late, my own mind has experienced strange sensations—present things are losing their hold; and dwelling on past events, especially of the last few years, my heart yearns toward those who have been, as it were, soldiers by my side, and are gone, or are going, forward to the front as an advanced guard. They will soon meet, or have already joined, Mr. Lincoln and others of that glorious army of martyrs, many of whom we have known here on earth.”15
In early June 1866 there was still hope for those, like Stanton, who thought that Johnson would acquiesce in the proposed constitutional amendment. Stanton and Fessenden worked together on its objectionable third section, and when the document emerged from the Senate, it no longer restricted the voting privilege for tens of thousands of past rebels, but instead disqualified from holding federal or state office only the relatively few persons who, by engaging in rebellion, had violated an oath to support the Constitution, although it provided that Congress could remove even this disability by a two-thirds vote. Its leniency as a punishment for rebellion was almost unprecedented.
Meanwhile other matters occupied Stanton’s attention. He had been worried that certain groups of Irish Americans, hoping to strike at Great Britain by invading Canada, might actually create a war, and he had pressed for a proclamation from the President to quell the insurgent “Fenian” organizations. But Johnson’s advisers warned him that Stanton really wanted the proclamation issued in order to turn Irish voters away from the administration.
Not only is there no proof to support this assertion; there is every indication that Stanton was merely trying to meet his responsibilities by requesting the President to act. Johnson’s delay, however, encouraged the foolhardy Fenians to essay an invasion of Canada, where militiamen speedily routed them.
Stanton was overworking himself as usual, even on relatively minor concerns. His friend Senator Henry Wilson sent him a copy of a new textbook on infantry tactics with the Senate’s permission for Stanton to buy 10,000 copies at $1.25 each for free distribution. After studying the book intensively and comparing it with others, he wrote Wilson that he would not order it, even though Grant had written the preface. “Almost every … publisher & bookseller who risks his capital on … publication hopes for a ‘sure thing’ by getting the government to purchase & give [it] away—The recommendation of General Grant & other distinguished officers will help the sale of the book to those who want it, but affords no good reason for the government to give them away.”16
It was always important to Stanton that the Army keep to a high level of fiscal morality. The War Department had received several hundred claims from Northern civilians who insisted that they had been appointed as special provost marshals during the war. Many of these claimants for compensation offered sketchy proof of service. “If a precedent is established allowing these claims,” Stanton worried, “this department will be flooded with them for the next twelve months.” Congress must set standards in these matters, and he would hold the fort of administrative responsibility until the legislators attended to this need.
Not only must Stanton protect the nation’s funds; it appeared that he must also shield the Army’s and the nation’s honor. Stanton and Grant were sickened when the showman Barnum offered the War Department $500 for the “dress” in which Jeff Davis had allegedly been captured.
But it was the South, always the South, that provided the knottiest problems and posed the gravest threats to the smooth, honest operation that Stanton sought for the administrative apparatus. A vast carnival of fraud seemed ready to erupt from Dixie, as thousands of claims poured in to the War Department from purportedly loyal owners of various kinds of property which the Army had used during the war. Stanton was convinced that many of these claimants had not been loyal. “How will the … Government be protected against the immense fraud that will be attempted & perpetrated under the he
ad of loyalty?” he asked.
He was more repelled by news in May of a race riot in Memphis. A mob of whites, aided by police and other municipal officers, most of whom were Confederate veterans pardoned by Johnson, indulged in what Grant described as “murder, arson, rape, and robbery, in which the victims were all helpless and unresisting negroes.… The only protection the sufferers had was from the military forces of the United States … which was inadequate for putting down the riot speedily.”
Even Grant, who had gained a reputation as a tender man toward the former enemy, hardened his heart. When L. McLaws, of Kentucky, appealed to him to countermand the orders of army officers there excluding McLaws from a state office because of his past service in the Confederate Army, Grant merely endorsed the petition: “Cant do anything.” He could have, but he no longer wanted to. Stanton received a trustworthy report of an incident at Knoxville. A Negro sentry halted a former rebel colonel, as his orders required. When the civilian drew a pistol, the soldier shot him in the arm. A mob then invaded the army post and hanged the sentry while the local authorities stood by in support. “God damn it,” Stanton scrawled on the report of the incident.17
Under such strains Stanton’s health again gave way. On June 6 he appeared as a witness in the House investigation of the Conkling-Fry dispute; then he collapsed. Surgeon General Barnes ordered him to bed. Disobeying his doctor, Stanton stayed on the job until Barnes two weeks later “laid an embargo” on his leaving his home. “He is much better,” the physician wrote Seward, “but ought to be kept very quiet for a day or two.”18
Quiet was a luxury which Stanton and the nation needed. A suspension of all programs and policies, leaving the situation more or less as it was until a popular decision at the polls set reconstruction goals, might after all have served the interests of all regions and races most beneficently. But neither men nor measures would hold. As Stanton recuperated in the intense summer heat, new problems impended.
1 Young, Around the World, II, 358; Grant to Stanton, Jan. 29, 1866, Stanton MSS; Badeau, Grant, 86; Hesseltine, Grant, 66–7; Fry, The Conkling and Blaine-Fry Controversy in 1866 (New York, 1893), 17, 158–9; Stanton to House Military Affairs Committee, Feb. 19, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 317, RG 107; and same to Grant, March 15, 1866, HQA, Letters Received (WD), 77 AUS1866, Box 102, RG 108, NA; S. Hooper to H. Woodman, July 13, 1866, Woodman Papers, MHS.
2 T. Campbell to Cole, Feb. 11, 1868, UCLA; O. O. Howard, op. cit., II, 284–5.
3 Bates to G. A. Coffey, May 5, 1862, Letters Sent, RG 60; AGO files 267 and 588EB 17, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 322, RG 107, NA, deals with damage suits, Lincoln’s policy, and Stanton’s March 1865 order. On precedents and contemporary cases, see U.S., W.D., Digest of the Opinions of the Judge Advocate General (Washington, 1866), 189–90, and O.R., ser. 2, VII, 441; the Nash case is in the Cleveland Leader, Feb. 8-May 25, 1865.
4 Dana to James S. Pike, May 10, 1865, CFL; Ex parte Vallandigham, 1 Wallace 243, 244–5 (1864); and see Walker v. Crane, Federal Cases 17067 (1865).
5 Browning, Diary, II, 17–18; entries, Jan. 3, Feb. 12, 15, 1866, Owner ms diary, LC; Maddox v. Stanton, in Cushing Papers, LC; Henry Wilson to Stanton, March 2, 1866, Stanton MSS; Pierrepont to Butler, Feb. 18, 1866, Butler Papers, 2d ser., LC; ms record in HR 39A-F13.7, “Protection of Federal Officials, Including Members of the Provost Marshal General’s Office, from Local Vindictiveness,” RG 21, NA, examined by permission of Hon. Ralph Roberts, Clerk of the House of Representatives.
6 Townsend to Jeremiah S. Black, Sept. 4, 1866, HL; memo of Henry Stanbery, Feb. 22, 1867, Stanton MSS. On Northern cases, J. H. Ashton to H. H. Harrison, Letterbook E, 40C, RG 60; Policy Book, pp. 148–56, RG 110; WD, Executive Letters, LXXV, RG 107, NA. Other data in AGO, Index of General Orders, 1866 (Washington, 1867); ANJ (June 16, 1866), 687; XIV Statutes at Large 46.
7 AGO, General Orders, 1866 (Washington, 1867), No. 26; secret circular in Box 102, RG 108, NA; Sheridan-Holt exchange, April 28, 1866, Sheridan Papers, LC; S. Klaus (ed.), The Milligan Case (New York, 1929), 43–7; Flower, Stanton, 307; ANJ (Sept. 9, 1865), 40. See also Letters from Lloyd Lewis (Boston, 1950), 52; King, Davis, 251–8.
8 “Many Alabamans” to Stanton, April 21, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 315, RG 107, NA; Stanton to Johnson, March 10, 1866, Johnson Papers, LC; White to Stanton, March 15, 1866, Stanton MSS; L. Cowper to Butler and the latter’s endorsement, April 25, 1866, Butler Papers, LC.
9 Fessenden to George Harrington, May 12, 1866, HL; Joseph B. James, The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (Urbana, 1956), 67–9; McKitrick, op. cit., 326–63.
10 Morse, Welles Diary, II, 495–601; Browning, Diary, II, 74–5.
11 Browning, Diary, II, 77; Gorham, Stanton, II, 302–10.
12 To Gen. J. M. Comly, Comly Collection, IV, Item 190, OHS.
13 July 14, 1866, W. G. Moore notebook, Johnson Papers, LC; Barlow to M. Blair, July 16, 1866, Letterbook XIII, 133–6, Barlow Papers, HL; Lieber to Halleck, May 23, 1866, Lieber Papers, HL.
14 Lieber to wife, Feb. 24, to Halleck, March 20, and Halleck to Lieber, April 16, 1866, HL; Wilson to Badeau, July 18, 1866, Wilson Papers, LC; Grant to Sherman, July 21, 1866, Sherman Papers, LC; Cadwallader, ms, “My Four Years with Grant,” 796–801, ISHL.
15 Stanton to M. Odell, May 25, 1866, R. B. Hayes Scrapbook, X, 65, HML; Pierce, Sumner, IV, 288.
16 Stanton to Wilson, June 13, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 317, RG 107, NA; Helen Springer, “James Speed, The Attorney-General,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly, XI, 182–3.
17 On provost marshals, file of J. G. Anderson, Box 326; on property claims, A. G. Hobson to Stanton, Oct. 19, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 316; on murder of the soldier, Box 315, all RG 107, NA; McLaws file, Box 97, RG 108, ibid.; on Memphis, Grant to Stanton, July 7, 1866, CG Letterbooks, 1866–8, RG 108, ibid.; on Barnum, undated entry, Hitchcock ms diary, GI.
18 Barnes to Seward, June 22, 1866, Seward Papers, UR; Conkling and Provost Marshal General Fry, House Report 93, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 38.
CHAPTER XXIV
FRUITS INTO ASHES
IN mid-June, Johnson began to show himself willing to break away from the Republican-Union coalition which had elected him Vice-President, and to assume the leadership of a new party, which, pledged to support his ideas on reconstruction, might handily link up with the Democrats. The President endorsed a convention to consider this maneuver, scheduled to meet in Philadelphia on August 14.
Meanwhile the Fourteenth Amendment proposal reached the form in which it stands today. Moderate Republicans were ready to accept it as a last word in the reconstruction process and to seat congressmen from the South as their states ratified it. But on June 22, Johnson publicly announced his disapproval of the amendment.
Nevertheless, it went out from Congress to the states, and Stanton, through inaction, tried to help its passage in at least one instance. Die-hard Democrats in the Tennessee legislature sought to block its ratification by boycotting the sessions to prevent the presence of a quorum. General Thomas, commanding at Nashville, asked the War Department by telegraph whether he should arrest the balky legislators and compel their attendance. For three days Stanton delayed answering Thomas’s dispatch, no doubt hoping that he would act without orders. When he did inform the President of the situation, Johnson admonished him to keep the Army out of civil affairs.
During the delay two Tennessee members were brought to the legislature by state officials and made to attend, thus securing the quorum and insuring ratification. But despite the assertions of Johnson’s supporters, it was the state authorities, inspired by “Parson” Brownlow, a bitter enemy of the President, who made the arrests. Whatever Stanton might have wanted the Army to do, his role in this incident was that of a passive, perhaps too passive, observer.1
The President’s opposition to the amendment proposal, and the power exhibited by the Republicans of Congress in pushing it forward, moved Stanton and Grant to action. They
had become convinced that the troops in the South needed a frank indication that if the soldiers set themselves against the President’s peace policy, they would be assured of support from their superiors in the Army and from Congress. The occupation forces desired protection against retaliation from the White House and from harassment in state courts. Stanton and Grant provided for these needs.
On July 6, Grant issued General Order No. 44, strengthening No. 3 of the past January and openly countering the President’s April peace proclamation. It empowered all army commanders in the South, down to the post level, to arrest civilians charged with crimes against military officers or against “inhabitants of the United States, irrespective of color, in cases where the civil authorities have failed, neglected, or are unable to arrest and bring such parties to trial.” Those arrested were to stay in military confinement “until such time as a proper judicial tribunal may be ready and willing to try them.” In substance, this order informed Johnson that the Army disagreed with his policy and that his estimate of Southern conditions was unreal and unfair to army personnel.2
Johnson thereupon let the cabinet know that he was at work on another proclamation, this time to decree not only that the rebellion was at an end but that civil authority was ascendant over the military everywhere in the country. Stanton voiced his frank opposition. He and Grant had approved the actions of Sheridan, in charge of Louisiana and Texas, and of Sickles, commanding in the Carolinas, who were holding civilians under sentences of courts-martial. Johnson knew that reports on Southern conditions from Sheridan and Sickles had sustained radical claims of the unregeneracy of Southerners. The President confided to his private secretary his opinion that Sickles was “a conceited cuckold” and ignored the general’s views.
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