Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Now, after a year of secret skirmishing on the issue, Grant seemed ready to surrender the Army to the President. On October 17, he replied to Foster that General Orders No. 3 and 44 were clearly superseded by the President’s proclamation. But that same day Grant informed Sheridan that those orders were not actually “revoked” anywhere, but were left to each commander to employ or not as he deemed best, and that Sheridan should adopt the position that he had never “officially received” the President’s peace proclamation.

  Grant was straddling. Five days before his contradictory communications of October 17, he had written confidentially to Sheridan: “I regret to say that since the unfortunate differences between the President & Congress the former becomes more violent with the opposition he meets until now but few people who were loyal to the Government during the Rebellion seem to have any influence with him … unless they join in a crusade against Congress & declare their … acts illegal & indeed I much fear that we are fast approaching the point where he will want to declare the body itself unconstitutional & revolutionary.” Grant warned Sheridan that “commanders in Southern States will have to take good care to see, if a crisis does come, that no armed headway can be made against the Union.” He advised Sheridan to prevent the civil authorities of Texas from calling out the state militia on any excuse, and Holt seconded a decision that the peace announcement did not cancel court-martial sentences imposed since its issuance, as some troubled officers feared.

  Only in late November, after the congressional election results were in, would Grant formally inform Stanton that, as commanding general, he had finally interpreted the President’s proclamation to mean that General Orders No. 3 and 44 were still in effect in order that the Army might employ martial law and so execute the will of Congress. “It is evident to my mind,” he then wrote to Stanton, “that the provisions of the Civil Rights Bill cannot be properly enforced without General Order No. 44 or a similar one.”11

  So far as the public was concerned, the wildly popular Grant was above parties and politics. Stanton, however, knew that Grant as well as the majority of the Army’s senior officers sympathized as he did with the Republicans’ goals for the South. But the Secretary also knew of Grant’s conflicting instructions to Foster and Sheridan. He could not be sure that Grant was trustworthy or firm.

  Stanton was not privy to the secret sentiments that Grant had expressed to Sheridan. The Secretary had been franker with Grant regarding his views than the commanding general had been with him. But even if Stanton had been aware of the communication to Sheridan, there would have been little reason for Stanton to expect that Grant would be willing to live up to them in the open.

  After almost five years in the war office, Stanton needed no reminder that whichever end of Pennsylvania Avenue won the political fight over reconstruction, the Army would translate policies into action. How the soldiers would use their weight in the dispute between President and Congress depended largely on Grant.

  Knowing that the Army went with Grant, and not with him, Stanton had to suppress as best he could his uncertainty concerning Grant’s reliability. Grant, nursing his ambitions for office yet maintaining the appearance of aloofness from the political cauldron, if called to account could always claim to have been misled by Stanton. The fact was that he was directing the War Secretary, who could do nothing with the Army without the general’s assent.

  Stanton, trapped in his office by the intensity of his convictions, did not realize that he had become the prisoner of the institution he was determined to protect. The champion of civilian control over the military, Stanton was developing into a front man for Grant. All that Stanton knew was that he was in an exposed and frustrating position. He blamed the President and the Democrats for bringing him to it, and for exposing the nation to perils as great as those of 1860. After talking with Stanton, aging General Hitchcock wondered: “Have we run our race as a Republic? I hope not—but fear it.”

  Expressing unqualified optimism, Johnson’s supporters assembled in mid-August at Philadelphia in a convention dominated by Democrats. Every one of the states was represented. The convention endorsed Johnson’s policies and called for the election of a Congress pledged to support him. With the recriminations over the New Orleans tragedy at their height, the convention and subsequent pro-Johnson assemblages expressed the wishes of administration supporters and editors all over the country that Stanton be dismissed. But even with this kind of support, Johnson refrained from ousting Stanton. Senator Cole judged that the perplexed President “fears the effects of removals upon pending elections and is in doubt about what Congress intends to do in his case. Some of the Cabinet have shut down a little.”12

  Stanton’s “shutdown” was due to his worry that Grant and Johnson were about to “suck at the same quill.” He wrote to Congressman Ashley, of Ohio, that Grant was never a steady weight and his frequent visits to the White House were enough to cause concern. But Stanton hid his doubts and expressed his faith that “the head of the armies cannot ultimately be corrupted.” Meanwhile he would keep a weather eye on Grant.

  The President was also maintaining a sharp lookout over the general. Johnson and his supporters saw the importance of the Army as clearly as Stanton did, though they chose to hamstring the soldiers. Not knowing Grant’s secret views regarding the South, and patronizingly contemptuous of the seemingly simple general, the President still hoped to enlist Grant on his side, and, as the general would bring the Army with him, to leave Stanton and the Republicans adrift and rudderless. To this end, Johnson during 1866 had taken to dealing directly with Grant, bypassing Stanton in army appointments, promotions, and contracts. It seemed to Stanton by the autumn of the year that the President was very close to success. Discouraged, Stanton was ready to quit.

  He was again unwell, and his suppers ran to mush and milk. Strain and overwork had taken their toll. And Ellen, too, was ill; a persistent cough so weakened her that Stanton feared tuberculosis and sent her to visit her family in Pittsburgh, thus sparing her the turbulence of Washington at election time.

  Before she left Washington she made Stanton promise to resign. “As yet I have said nothing about leaving the Cabinet to the President,” he wrote Ellen in early October, “but am only waiting to finish some business.”13 Grant, he thought in his innocence, was the unfinished business.

  Johnson was close to the double-barreled success of achieving Grant’s co-operation and Stanton’s resignation. But the President’s supporters pushed Grant too hard and too fast. The Blair adherents in Missouri swore out writs under the Civil Rights Act to have the Army enforce that law against the state’s Republican organization. Boasting that he had “hornswoggled” Grant into serving Democratic interests, the younger Frank Blair failed to realize that the general was no one to be treated in this cavalier manner.

  Then, in the first days of October, Johnson sent Grant a request for 10,000 stands of arms for Virginia’s militia. Grant was furious. He had earlier protested that no Southern militia should form at all. Now the President intended to put the Army’s weapons into the hands of men who Grant felt were unregenerate, a move that would permit assaults much worse than any thus far experienced.

  Again, as in the matter of the Army’s orders on martial law, Grant waited until the results of the congressional elections were in. Then, answering the President properly through Stanton’s office, he advised Johnson that “I would not recommend the issue of arms for the use of the militia of any of the states lately in rebellion in advance of their full restoration and the admission of their representatives by Congress.”14

  Knowing in advance of Grant’s reaction to the request for arms for the militia, Stanton again took heart. To be sure, one victory did not win the campaign. Johnson might yet oversway Grant’s judgment, or get him out of the way on some pretext. Therefore, Stanton’s business in the cabinet remained unfinished. He would stay on as Secretary so that Grant, who he felt was a shaky but essential prop to the Republican pos
ition, might receive the backing Stanton could provide through friends in Congress, and so that he might see to it somehow that the President did not replace Grant with a more malleable commanding general.

  Meanwhile a barrage of appeals from influential Republicans, urging him to stay on as a patriotic duty, and thus feeding his need to feel himself wanted and in the right, confirmed his altered verdict to hold. News from Pittsburgh that Ellen’s health was improving made easier another decision not to resign, although his doctor warned him that he could not drive his body at this pace much longer with safety. He wrote Ellen on October 6, to still her protest over his broken promise to her, asserting that Johnson was circulating stories that he was ill in order to “deep him before the public.” The new Attorney General, Stanbery, had decided to “neither rent nor purchase [a Washington residence] at the moment, while things are so ticklish and uncertain. He firmly believes that Johnson will be impeached, and I think dreads it, as bringing on fresh troubles.” For himself, Stanton did not believe that impeachment would come out of the next session of Congress, which he predicted would go overwhelmingly to the Republican radicals.

  He wrote Ellen of how he missed her and the children, and gathered flowers to send her, “but they will be withered before they reach you.” His brief moments of free time he filled with calls on Mrs. Grant, playing whist with Seward, and taking young Fannie Seward for drives.15

  With the elections almost at hand, Johnson dared not press Stanton to leave the cabinet. He feared an explosive reaction if he obviously appeared to be reaching for control of the Army. If he removed Stanton he must have as a replacement someone who commanded the unquestionable confidence of Northern moderates and radicals and who would be acceptable to the Army as well. General Sherman was the logical choice to replace Stanton. Once this would not have displeased the Secretary, but that time had passed by. All the rumors that he had submitted his resignation “are from the old ‘mint’ & like their predecessors utterly false,” Stanton advised Fessenden. Of other insistent suggestions that he was to take a diplomatic post abroad, Stanton wrote that “no earthly power could induce me to go to Spain or any foreign country whatever. My removal from the Department will gratify no one so much as myself. But it is only the forerunner of efforts to get Grant out of the way.” Meanwhile, Grant, silent on public issues, was still permitting his devoted servant John Rawlins to depict him to the President as a thoroughgoing conservative, in full accord with Johnson in all essential matters.

  In October, with “Tecumseh” Sherman’s arrival in Washington, Johnson, preparatory to ousting Stanton, made an effort to clear Sherman’s way into the War Department by inducing Grant to put aside his uniform and accept a trumped-up mission to Mexico, and thus to remove the obstacle presented by a situation in which Sherman as War Secretary would be giving orders to Grant, his superior in army rank. But Grant backed out when he realized the real purpose of the mission. Johnson finally sent Sherman on the diplomatic errand. Sherman had refused the President’s request that he become War Secretary in Stanton’s place, while Grant persisted in his unwillingness to replace Stanton himself.

  Grant was now being mentioned for President; nor was he unresponsive to that tempting call. To immure himself in the War Department or to become too closely aligned with or against Johnson would be to dim his prospects. He wrote to Admiral Daniel Ammen early in November to cancel a vacation they had planned. “I shall not be able to leave Washington this winter,… affairs have taken such a turn as to make this course necessary. I cannot explain in a letter.”

  Behind Grant’s fearful reticence lay his knowledge that the President, though denying that the use of troops was legitimate in the former rebel states, had toyed with a Blair-inspired scheme to use federal soldiery to cow Baltimore’s Republicans in local elections just past, though Maryland had never seceded. The plot had not come off, but that Johnson should even consider it seriously was enough to concern the War Department. At the same time, the President was expressing a concern that armed secret organizations were ready to overturn the government in Washington. No wonder that Grant, with his ambitions for the White House, feared to leave the capital.16

  With Grant and Sherman refusing, for their different reasons, to replace him, Stanton resolved to hold the fort at least until Congress convened in December, as Fessenden and many others urged. Meanwhile he would attract as little attention to himself as possible and so perhaps hold off a decision between himself and the President. This explains why Stanton made no protest when Johnson bypassed him in trying to rig the Maryland election and when he transferred General George Thomas out of his Tennessee command. Stanton’s addiction to silence made him refuse a chance to defend the course he had chosen in the Atlantic Monthly. He answered the publishers’ offer: “In the grave and solemn condition of public affairs now existing, it is not likely that I shall seek to draw the attention of the people from what so deeply concerns themselves by any personal consideration or explanation.”

  There were other reasons also why Stanton did not wish to attract attention to himself. He was probably instrumental in organizing a Loyal Union Convention, which met at Philadelphia, on September 3, to counteract the Johnson convention, and in arranging for an anti-Johnson Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Convention at Pittsburgh in late September. But shortly before this latter convention assembled, he heard reports that the delegates planned to issue a resolution asking him to keep on at the war office. “It must be obvious to you, as it is to me,” Stanton advised Congressman J. K. Moorhead, of Pennsylvania, “that any personal allusion to me would be prejudicial to any good influence I may be able to exert.” He pleaded that the convention issue no “personal compliments … for which I have no taste.” As a result, none were forthcoming.

  Johnson’s supporters were sure that the silence on Stanton’s side represented weakness.17 Indeed, Stanton felt strong enough to remain in office, if at all, only until Congress assembled, as he advised Sickles. Congress could tie Johnson’s hands so that he and his supporters could not wreck the country or bring on another revolution, “although they have gone so far already,” Stanton gloomily wrote, “that no statutes can prevent their acts from bringing on a reign of chaos and bloodshed in the South that will horrify the civilized world.” To his friend and former colleague Watson, Stanton confessed his pessimism: “Public affairs are very gloomy; more so, and with more reason than ever before—not excepting the dark hours of 1860–1.”18 He still did not know how Grant would choose to act if matters moved to decision.

  Early in October, President Johnson had requested the members of the cabinet, Grant, Farragut, and other celebrities to accompany him on a “swing around the circle” of the major Northern cities to bolster the prospects of the congressional candidates pledged to support his policy. Stanton, though he had urged Johnson to make the trip, perhaps thinking it would enlighten him concerning the true state of Northern opinion, begged off from accompanying him on the grounds of his wife’s poor health.

  Johnson addressed large crowds, and at first, while pulling no punches against his opponents, he kept his remarks in good taste. At Cleveland, however, some severe heckling, which seems to have been prearranged, caused him to lose his temper, and he broke into a tirade against Congress. From then on his political enemies harassed him almost every time he spoke, and all too often he bandied coarse language with his hecklers. Stanton deplored the manner in which Johnson was demeaning himself and his office, and later confided to the journalist Cadwallader the partial untruth that the reports of the President’s conduct on his campaign tour were what finally decided him to oppose Johnson. Still, Stanton had resolved to stay in the cabinet until December, and so when the President returned from the tour, he was on hand along with the rest of the department heads to greet him and, according to Cadwallader, “was unusually gracious.”19

  Soon after returning to Washington, Johnson began a political purge of federal officeholders who had shown signs of hostility to him
. Stanton retaliated by depriving pro-Johnson newspapers of War Department advertising, thereby causing the editor of the Philadelphia Universe to complain to Johnson: “The War Department Quartermasters have advertisements every week; but we never hear from them.”

  Meanwhile, the political outlook became darker for Johnson. Almost all of the Republican congressional candidates took the Fourteenth Amendment as their platform; and although party extremists such as Stevens and Sumner regarded the amendment as merely a step toward “complete justice” and wanted to impose additional conditions on the South, most Republican spokesmen and a majority of the Northern people were ready to accept the amendment as a “finality.”

  Seldom have revolutionists been offered remission on more generous terms—the establishment of equal civil rights for everyone regardless of race and a guarantee that for a reasonable time the national government would continue under the control of the party that had won the war. If the seceded states had accepted this settlement, the punitive doctrines of Stevens would have found small favor in the North. But Johnson’s unflagging adherence to rigid constitutional theories and his denunciations of Congress encouraged the Southern states to resist, and in the weeks before the election some former rebel states refused to ratify the amendment. With that the tide of Northern sentiment set strongly away from Johnson and turned in the direction of the radicals, and now no one knew where it would stop. In the rank emotionalism of the times, people were even led to believe that Johnson was in league with traitors. It all worked for Republican success. A month before the election Stanton wrote to Ellen: “Both parties will be very much astonished if the elections do not go overwhelmingly for Congress. Everyone that I see expresses that belief.”20