The belief was amply warranted and Johnson suffered a thundering defeat. The Republicans won better than a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. And Republican and radical were now virtually synonymous. The overwhelming defeat suffered by the administration was in a sense an endorsement of Stanton, and in a moment of triumph it was not his nature to be humble. Long since out of harmony with the administration’s program, he now became disdainful of it as a political force.
1 Morse, Welles Diary, II, 528–31, 533–5, 538–41, 554–5; Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year (New York, 1930), 105.
2 AGO, General Orders, 1866 (Washington, 1867), No. 44; Jonathan Worth to Johnson, July 30, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 317, RG 107, NA.
3 July 5, 1866, Moore notebook, Johnson Papers, LC; Sickles to Grant, March 7, 1866, and Grant to Stanton, with endorsements, July 21, 1866, HQA, Box 97, RG 108, NA; Sickles to Stanton, July 21, 1866, Stanton MSS; Sheridan to Grant, May 4, 1866, Sheridan Papers, LC; New York World, July 11, 1866.
4 To Doolittle, Stanton MSS; Speed, Speed, 93–5. Alexander W. Randall succeeded Dennison; Henry Stanbery became Attorney General; and Browning replaced Harlan.
5 On Maddox, Cushing Papers, Ac. 5221, LC; Smithson v. Stanton, No. 2724, RG 21, NA; Stanton to Brady, March 23, 1867, Stanton MSS.
6 Morton to Stanton, Dec. 31, 1866, Stanton MSS; Pope to Grant, July 24, 1867, in Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 327, RG 107, NA; Tilton, op. cit., 215.
7 Morse, Welles Diary, II, 523, 573–4; Blair, Jr., to Sr., Aug. 7, 1866, Box XXVI, Blair-Lee Papers, PU; Barlow to W. D. Shipman, Aug. 22; to James Hughes, Nov. 8, 1865, Letterbook XI, 278–80, 1013–15, Barlow Papers, HL.
8 “Notes of Colonel W. G. Moore, Private Secretary to President Johnson, 1866–1868,” AHR, XIX, 102; The New Orleans Riot, House Exec. Doc. 68, 39th Cong., 2d sess., 4–5 (hereafter cited as New Orleans Riot).
9 Stanton to T. D. Eliot, Jan. 30, 1867, Stanton MSS, and testimony on May 18, 1867, in Impeachment Report, 398. See also New Orleans Riot, 6–7, 13, 22–3, 36–43, 273–5; Morse, Welles Diary, II, 596–70; Pierce, Sumner, IV, 298.
10 Stanton to Jonathan Worth, Aug. 7, 1866, Johnson Papers, LC; Morse, Welles Diary, 580–1, 583; Holt to Stanton, Nov. 16, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 318, RG 107; Grant to Sheridan, Aug. 3, CG Letterbook C, p. 153, RG 21; Sheridan to Grant, Oct. 6, 1866, HQA, Box 98, RG 108, NA.
11 Foster to Grant, Sept. 18, and Grant to Foster, Oct. 17, 1866, HQA, Letters Sent, Box 98; Grant to Stanton, Nov. 22, 1866, CG Letters Sent, 1866–8, RG 108, NA; Hesseltine, Grant, 77; Grant to Sheridan in Badeau, Grant, 51; Sheridan to Grant, Oct. 6, and Holt to Sheridan, Sept.?, 1866, Sheridan Papers, LC.
12 Sept. 1866 folder, containing marginal comments on a copy of the Atlantic Monthly, Hitchcock Papers, LC; petition to Johnson, Sept. 18, 1866, Johnson Papers, LC; Stanton to Speed, Aug. 14, 1866, Stanton MSS; Cole to wife, ca. Sept. 6, 1866, Cole Papers, UCLA.
13 To Ashley, in Flower, Stanton, 310–14; to Ellen, Oct. 3, 1866, owned by Edward S. Corwin.
14 To Johnson, Nov. 9, 1866, Sec. War Correspondence File, Box 323, RG 107, NA; F. Blair, Jr., to M. Blair, Dec. 21, 1866, Box XXVI, Blair-Lee Papers, PU.
15 Communications urging Stanton to stay in office, Sept.-Dec. 1866, in Stanton MSS; Stanton to Ellen, Oct. 2, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton; and Oct. 6, 7, 11, 13, owned by Edward S. Corwin; Stanton to Seward, Oct. 17, 1866, Seward Papers, UR.
16 Stanton to Fessenden, Oct. 25, 1866, HL; Browning, Diary, II, 103–4; W. T. Sherman to T. Ewing, Sr., Jan. 25, 1867, Ewing Papers, LC; Thorndike, Sherman Letters, 381; Ammen, The Old Navy and the New (Philadelphia, 1891), 533–4; Hesseltine, Grant, 77–9. On Baltimore, F. Blair, Sr., to E. B. Lee, Nov. 3, 1866, Box 8, Blair-Lee Papers, PU; Grant to Johnson, Oct. 24, 1866, CG Letterbook, RG 108, NA.
17 Fessenden to Stanton, Oct. 20, Ticknor and Fields to same, Sept. 9, and H. Wilson to same, Sept. 15, 17, 1866, Stanton MSS; Stanton to Henry Wilson, Sept. 20, 1866, owned by Ralph G. Newman; Flower, Stanton, 309.
18 To Sickles, in Gorham, Stanton, II, 339; Flower, Stanton, 312–14, to Ashley and Watson.
19 Morse, Welles Diary, II, 587; Flower, Stanton, 310–14; Browning, Diary, II, 115; Cadwallader, ms, “My Four Years with Grant,” 795–801, ISHL.
20 To Ellen, Oct. 6, 1866, copy owned by Edward S. Corwin; Beale, op. cit., 317, has the Philadelphia Universe complaint.
CHAPTER XXV
THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS
HIS OWN poor health and his concern for Ellen’s temporarily more serious condition competed with politics for a share in Stanton’s thoughts during October and November. He still feared that she was succumbing to “rapid consumption,” and on the advice of Surgeon General Barnes she remained in Pittsburgh, leaving the children in Washington. As always, he was lonely without her, especially now that the older children were occupied with parties and the theater. He wrote Ellen of how little Bessie, their youngest and favorite, was “standing by his side having finished her breakfast and says tell Mama ‘good morning’ and tell her to come home. She is obstinately bent on writing … and jumps up and down impatiently waiting for me to ‘git out [of] there.’ ” For himself, he was as busy at his work as ever. To comfort Ellen and perhaps to reassure himself, he asserted that political developments held no immediate threat to him.
So long as Ellen remained unwell he hid his worries behind pleasant domestic details. “I am in the Library,” he wrote, “Lewis stretched out on the sofa reading—Ellie prying around among the books, Bessie leaning over the table saying ‘tell Mama I want her to come home after breakfast’ and singing ‘red, white & blue,’ her face as bright as the morning sun beam—here she stops my writing to give me a kiss.” Stanton made it appear that his chief concern of the moment was the choice of costumes for a masquerade ball which the Grants were giving for the children of Washington’s official elite.
By late November, Ellen’s condition greatly improved, and he wrote her that his hour for resigning must still be delayed. She undertook to visit his mother and sister at Gambier, even though she and they disliked each other, in order to relieve her husband’s mind concerning their ability to get along on the diminishing amounts he was able to send them. Since he had taken on the war office in 1862, he had contributed 10 per cent—$800—of his annual income to their support. But in 1866 the exceptional costs of Ellen’s illnesses and the effects of inflation forced him to reduce his offering to $300, which sufficed only to pay the rent on his mother’s home. Even this was more than he could safely afford and he was immensely relieved at Ellen’s report that his mother and sister could get along, though barely, on less. Stanton budgeted all he thought he could spare for 1867—$80—as his contribution to them, a measure of his conviction that he must stay in his office regardless of the sacrifices this entailed.
Despite his considerate protection of Ellen from political concerns, Stanton knew that a storm was gathering. He felt with most moderate men that the President should have learned the lesson of the November elections, and should encourage the Southern states to ratify the amendment. From Washington, Grant penned a note to Sheridan to warn him that “things have changed here somewhat since the last election,” but he could not predict the nature of the change and he was afraid to commit to paper all he knew.1 Until Johnson spoke up, no one could do more than guess at the effects of the elections on his thinking.
Clearly, the decision for or against compromise must come from the White House rather than from Capitol Hill. Favorable action by only three Southern states was needed to add the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. If Johnson signified his wish in the matter, Southerners would have to comply, despite the fiction of Southern state autonomy which he had created.
But stubborn, secretive, taciturn Andrew Johnson had no intention of supporting the amendment. He wasted time and thought on an absurd scheme, originating in North Carolina, of a constitutional amendment counterproposal that included a heavily qualified Negro suffrage and a ge
neral amnesty for the soldiers of the Union armies as well as for rebels; and listened to the suggestion of Jeremiah Black that Johnson again appeal to the people, as though a popular mandate had not just been expressed, on the constitutional principles which the Republicans were asserting.
Johnson’s retention of Stanton in the cabinet continued to disturb extremist Democrats. Manton Marble heard from a Washington correspondent that if the vexing War Secretary stayed on as a spy for the radicals, then conservative opposition to alterations in federal-state relations or in the status of the Negro would have been wasted. Johnson must stand firm, the journalist insisted, so that Democrats of the right could isolate the radical Republicans from all moderate support. “If the President will give us a good pretext for fighting under his banner,” the reporter urged, “we can get them mad, widen the breach by an exciting debate, and all will come out right.”2
There was not the slightest possibility of success for these curiously unreal and insensitive Democratic projects. The war had made forever impossible a return to where the nation had been when Sumter was bombarded, or even to where it had been when Lee surrendered. Johnson had lost touch with the dominant trends of the time. Republicans in Congress were not going to debate any longer the desirability of the Fourteenth Amendment or whether they or the President should lead in reconstructing the South. The elections just past had decided these questions.
Johnson still had the choice of co-operating with Congress in working out the execution of its policies, or, if he preferred, he could stand by without interfering while it proceeded without him. If he chose to block Congress, however, then the legislators would have their way. But, blinded by an inflexible constitutionalism and betrayed by his racial prejudices, Johnson mistook the threats in the situation for opportunities.
Having convinced himself that he was carrying on Lincoln’s policies in the South and practicing the same fine art of executive leadership, Johnson was now unwilling to admit that reconstruction in the South had always rested its constitutional justification on the Army’s bayonets. By the end of 1865 he had professed to the nation that the Southern states were self-sustaining civil institutions, at a time when most of the officials of those states were still on the payroll of the federal government. Realizing that the North would not countenance withdrawing the troops, he kept the Army on duty in the South, but weakened the soldiers’ effectiveness as occupation forces by limiting their power to employ martial law. Now, at the end of 1866, against the voters’ opposite verdict, he had come to the position that the Army had no proper role in the South at all, and perhaps never had had one after Appomattox, even though his own orders had sent the troops there. In Johnson’s view, the nation had plenary powers over the South, yet was faced with ineluctable states’ rights restrictions. He failed to see the contradictions in these positions. Worse, he could not believe that persons of different views could be either correct, sincere, or patriotic.
At the administrative heart of reconstruction, Stanton knew how casually Johnson cast constitutional consistencies aside whenever it suited him to do so.3 But he clung to the hope that the elections just past had educated the President.
On November 30, the President had his secretary read to the cabinet a draft of the annual message he intended to deliver to Congress five days later. It did not include approval of the Fourteenth Amendment. Stanton raised a lone voice to object to Johnson’s omission, and said he wished that the President had seen fit to support the adoption of the amendment “as the best solution of our difficulties, and [for] restoring the proper relations of the states, and the general government.”
This occasion called merely for cabinet opinion on proposed presidential policy, not for a debate. Stanton’s position was frank and open. Until Johnson delivered the message to Congress there was a chance that he might change his mind.
An uncertain and suspenseful lull gripped Washington during the first days of December. “The town is very quiet,” Stanton wrote to Ellen the night before Johnson was to deliver his annual message; “very few strangers here, and the news so dull that the letter writers will have to take another turn at the Secretary of War, and ring the changes on his resignation or removal, or starve.” Then Johnson read the message; he had not incorporated any part of Stanton’s suggestions.
Stanton’s private reaction to Johnson’s message was bitter and unrestrained. On the day after the President apprised Congress of his position, the Secretary answered a petition he had received from Greeley asking that he pardon a Southerner convicted by a military commission. Stanton asked Greeley “how to secure a reciprocal benefit to those in the South who are exposed to persecution in rebel communities. Reports from military commanders press this necessity as urgent and represent that no spirit of forbearance and forgiveness exists and that loyal persons for loyal acts during the war, are pursued with relentless hate.” He opposed pardons for individuals and a general amnesty, therefore, “because of this want of reciprocity in forgiveness. How can it be secured?”4 To thousands of Northerners, this was the heart of the matter.
Ellen now took on her first political assignment since she had sought the office of Chief Justice for her husband two years earlier. Going to New York, she met with their friend Pierrepont, who had tried to moderate the differences between the factions of the Union party and had worked for Johnson during the 1866 campaign. Pierrepont was now ready to abandon the President and the renascent Democrats in favor of the Republican-led Congress, and wanted Stanton to come to New York to talk over the matter and to meet important persons who were still uncommitted on political issues. Ellen insisted that he come. She wanted him to enjoy a change and she looked forward to socializing in the metropolis. Stanton procrastinated. He turned aside her impatient letters with sweet words and with descriptions of their adored Bessie, who was “as lively as a cricket.” He could not leave Washington at this critical juncture, for a new, exposed flank had developed in the Army’s lines.5
During 1866 the President had leaned increasingly toward the position that the Army had to stop employing martial law within the “reconstructed” states. Grant and Stanton had insisted that the Army must retain this power. Their reports concluded that the Army had aided the state authorities, not hindered them; nevertheless, state officials and Southern civilians were persecuting the nation’s soldiers, not the other way around. Soldiers must be able to protect themselves if civil institutions unrecognized by Congress, and staffed by pardoned recent rebels, chose not to keep order. Martial law was the only way.6
Stanton had little hope that the President would extend the application of martial law, even in the peculiarly anarchic case of Texas. Part of the pleasure Stanton took in the results of the November 1866 elections derived from his certainty that the augmented Republican phalanx in Congress, faced with executive inaction, would now supply authority for the Army to employ martial law in the South when necessary.
The Secretary was terribly concerned when he learned in early December that Johnson had acquired a potentially powerful ally. For the Supreme Court of the United States was readying its final pronouncement on the Milligan case, involving the question of martial law, which presumably would give added strength to the White House. If the Court decided that Milligan’s contentions were correct, that the Army had never properly employed martial law even in the wartime North, then the Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau by implication were rendered powerless in the postwar South. Congress’s Civil Rights Act would become unenforceable, not only by reason of Johnson’s policies but also because of the added weight of an adverse judicial decree. During 1866 Congress had overcome presidential vetoes and the Army had bypassed Johnson’s peace policies. The Milligan case posed the question whether President and Court together might be too powerful for the legislators and the soldiers, and might thus overturn the verdict of the 1866 elections.
If Johnson had been willing to advocate support of the Fourteenth Amendment in his annual message, and thus permit
disfranchisement at least of the leading rebels while providing for Negro suffrage, Stanton and most moderate Republicans would gladly have left the Milligan matter alone. Stanton was at this time considering the case of a Confederate provost marshal, G. E. Pickett, who after the war had ended was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by a United States Army court for hanging Union prisoners in his charge. Pickett appealed to the “reconstructed” state courts, which ordered the Army to transfer him to civil jurisdiction. Stanton refused to obey this order; at the same time he held off executing Pickett, over the objections of Holt, who wanted to send Pickett to the gallows without delay. On December 10, Stanton advised Johnson that because of rumors of the Court’s decision in the Milligan case, he was delaying action in all similar matters. “The magnitude of the offences alleged against Pickett,” Stanton wrote, “is such that there should be no room to contest the jurisdiction of the tribunal to whom the trial may be committed.”7
The possibilities inherent in the Milligan case made Grant more than ever the vital center of the situation. Johnson, of course, would happily abide by a Supreme Court decision which nullified the Army’s power. Would Grant obey the President’s probably ensuing orders taking away from soldiers in the South the last hope for protection? What would happen if Johnson, encouraged by a Court decision in favor of Milligan, decided to replace Grant, and the commanding general refused to give up his office to a successor who would cooperate with the White House and end martial law in the South? The least dreadful result would be the splitting of the Army into two opposing factions. It required no seer to envisage the possible result of this move—another civil war and the permanent collapse of the republic.
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