Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  This became strikingly evident on February 15. The Senate had asked Johnson to report on all instances of failure to enforce the Civil Rights Act. Stanton submitted a memorandum assembled by Grant and 0. 0. Howard, which listed hundreds of acts of violence on Negroes and soldiers. According to Welles and Browning, this was an “omnium-gatherum” of rumors. Over the opposition of almost everyone in the cabinet, Stanton insisted that Johnson add this report to his communication to the Senate. Looking earnestly at Welles, Stanton said that “he was as desirous to act in unison with the President as any one, no matter who; that this information seemed to him proper, and so … it seemed to General Grant, who sent it to him; but if others wished to suppress it they could make the attempt, but there was little doubt that members of Congress had seen this—likely had copies.”

  The report was finally given to the Attorney General for “investigation.” Hardly able to contain themselves, Welles and Browning met the next day and decided that Stanton’s “treachery” was so great and patent that Johnson must know their opinion of it. Polonius-like, Welles hurried through a heavy rain to the White House.

  Johnson listened and seemed to agree with everything Welles said. Then the President made the incredible assertion that all that kept him from immediately calling Grant to the White House to learn how far the general was involved, was the fact that it was raining!

  This starkly revealing episode illuminates more concerning the mood of the President and of his cabinet supporters than it does Stanton’s alleged duplicity. Regardless of whether or not he was in sympathy with the administration’s goals and practices, it was incumbent upon Stanton to reply fully and candidly to the Senate’s request for information, for his was the department which enforced the Civil Rights Act. Undoubtedly, Stanton’s report would embarrass Johnson. But Stanton had long since let the President know that White House policies were embarrassing the Army and the laws.

  Welles and Browning, seeing only more proof of collusion, ridiculed the report on sight as untrustworthy, though it bore Grant’s and Howard’s names, and to cast aside so lightly the integrity of both officers was not merely ridiculous but stupid. The truth seems to be that Johnson and his advisers were by now in a mood to ignore disagreeable facts. They found it more pleasant to dream up a fiction of a conspiracy and to believe it themselves.

  Stanton’s distress over his divided position was becoming increasingly apparent. He tried to prove to Johnson that he was not set against him. In mid-February, Stanton saw to it that an account of his ideas reached the Washington Chronicle. The report stressed his alarm over the movement toward impeachment, which he likened to “revolution and anarchy.” Congress and the President were wrecking the nation, and he called a plague upon both: “I aided to place two millions of men in the field to put down the rebellion; three hundred thousand have bitten the dust and an equal number are crippled throughout the land, and yet with all this tremendous effort and corresponding sacrifice, the country, in my judgment, is shadowed with the gloom of a darker hour than was incident to any crisis of the war.”

  This is authentic Stantonian prose. Whoever gave the text to the Chronicle either copied it verbatim during the interview or, what is more probable, received it directly from Stanton. There is no reason to doubt the reporter’s concluding sentence: “The Secretary seemed completely unmanned as he uttered the last remark, and abruptly turned from his visitor to conceal his emotions.”18

  During the following week, Congress hammered out its reconstruction bill, the legislators consulting Grant at every step. The bill prescribed the reinstitution of martial rule in the South under the command of five generals, who were to be named by the President. Loyal men only, black and white, were to begin anew the state-building process, and though the bill did not obliterate the Johnson state governments, it presumed that they would wither away, and they did. Under army protection, the electorate was to create new state constitutions and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. When delegates-elect to Congress received admission, the process was completed.

  There is no evidence that Stanton had any hand in evolving this measure beyond helping to block more radical proposals. He was to support it openly in cabinet deliberations and advise against a presidential veto. Yet Welles and the Blairs, somehow, were convinced that Stanton was “deep in the radical intrigues.” They thought that he dominated Seward and that together the two Secretaries managed to “confuse and bewilder” the President. In the Blairs’ view, Johnson should not only veto the bill but if it passed over his protest he should forbear from executing it. Stanton and Seward, they grumbled, were swinging Johnson away from the line of pure opposition that they would have hewed.

  To be sure, Seward was advising Johnson to go more slowly than he had been. Seward respected the fact that Stanton voiced sentiments that were widespread in the North and had powerful friends. Like Stanton, he was fearful that the impeachment inquiry, added to other strains, could wreck the government, and that presidential defiance of the reconstruction bill might make impeachment certain. But Seward was not a tool of Stanton’s. And Stanton was an ally, not a lackey, of the radical Republicans.

  On February 22, Johnson asked his cabinet for their opinions on the congressional reconstruction plan. Only Stanton advised him to approve it. His stand was perfectly consistent with his words and deeds since Johnson had taken office. Stanton had openly insisted that martial law was necessary in the South even if it meant defiance of the Supreme Court. Now Congress was ready to impose military primacy after the executive had removed it and the judiciary had condemned it, and he was for it. A presidential veto of this bill might provoke impeachment, and he had already made public his fears concerning the possible effects on the nation of such an unprecedented attack on the presidency.

  Stanton saw nothing in the congressional reconstruction bill for Johnson to veto. Granting that some Republicans were more conscious of material and party gains in all this than they were motivated by sincere concern for the welfare of the Negro, their plans for the South were far from ferocious. There were to be no executions of rebel leaders, and even Jefferson Davis was soon to be released from military custody to await a civil trial for treason which never came off. Congress envisaged no mass exiles or property confiscations, no imprisonments of high rebel officials, not even an attempt to establish by the law perpetual national supervision over Southern affairs or permanent Republican supremacy in politics. Reconstruction was still to be a moderate process, considering the alternatives Congress had.

  But the President ignored Stanton’s admonitions, and set Stanbery and Black to work preparing a veto message. Stanton was not surprised at this, but he was alarmed when some of the cabinet members suggested that if Congress impeached Johnson, he ought not to submit to such a “revolutionary” proceeding.19

  The cabinet also had before it on February 22 a bill regulating the tenure of civil offices. This measure, a retaliation against Johnson’s purges of officeholders, provided that persons holding appointments from the President and Senate should continue in their posts until the Senate sanctioned their removal by the President, but that when the Senate was not in session the President might temporarily suspend an officer, reporting the reasons for doing so to the Senate within twenty days after its convening. It also provided that cabinet officers “shall hold their offices … during the term of the President by whom they may have been appointed, and for one month thereafter, subject to removal by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

  Frank Blair, Jr., proposed that Johnson circumvent the intent of the tenure-of-office bill by making “a clean sweep” of all the cabinet incumbents while there was still time. Johnson, as usual, seemed to agree, but he did nothing.

  When the cabinet met on Monday, February 25, Johnson took Welles aside and, referring to Stanton’s support of the reconstruction bill, “alluded to the … pitiful exhibition which Stanton made of himself, and wondered if he (S.) supposed he was not understood. The spar
kle of the President’s eyes and his whole manner betokened intense though suppressed feeling.” Most of the cabinet concocted fanciful schemes by which Johnson could resist impeachment by force, while the tenure question slid by. Meeting on Tuesday, the entire cabinet, with Stanton the most vociferous, and seeming “glad to be in accord with his colleagues,” as Browning recorded it, advised Johnson to veto the tenure bill.

  Johnson jumped at another chance to embarrass Stanton. He asked the War Secretary to prepare the veto. Stanton demurred, pleading lack of time and rheumatism. Seward accepted the task on condition that Stanton assisted him, and the Secretary of State contributed the lion’s share of the resulting veto message. Stanton, as Johnson later told the Senate, referred to constitutional precedents, congressional debates, and judicial decisions which supported the veto position. “To all these,” Johnson stated, “he added the weight of his own deliberate judgment and advised me that it was my duty to defend the power of the President from usurpation.” The President had no doubts in February 1867 that his Secretary of War was sincerely opposed to the tenure-of-office bill. Six months later, Stanton invoked the protection of the measure, which had by that time become law over the President’s veto.

  Stanton was equally sincere and consistent when he counseled Johnson to approve the reconstruction bill and when he advised him to veto the tenure measure. Apart from his views on the constitutionality of the tenure proposal, Stanton had suffered too often from being unable to discharge officers whom he thought were inept or untrustworthy to support a legislative restriction not only on the President’s power but on his own. For the common assumption then, shared by Johnson, Welles, and such observers as J. A. Trowbridge, was that the tenure bill protected all appointed and commissioned officials, including army officers and Freedmen’s Bureau personnel, who would enforce the reconstruction measures then being created. Stanton did not want to hogtie the Secretary of War, whether himself or a successor, in the event that he wished to remove any officer who proved inadequate.

  To be sure, Republican legislators intended that the tenure bill cover Stanton. But this was their purpose, not his. Earlier, Senator Howe, of Wisconsin, arguing that a cabinet belonged not to an incumbent President, but to the people, and that disagreement on vital issues might be the very reason why a cabinet minister should stay in office, told the Senate that Stanton knew nothing of this effort in his behalf. Then, while the tenure bill was pending in the House, Stanton instructed his friend Bingham that he did not desire the protection which the measure seemed designed to extend to him. Considering Stanton’s intention to resign at the earliest possible moment, his statement has the ring of truth.

  After all, it was far from sure that the tenure bill covered holdovers from Lincoln’s cabinet. During a Senate debate on the measure, John Sherman had specifically stated that it did not. Stanton thought the tenure proposal was undesirable as well as illegal. He neither believed that its provisions covered him in his office nor expected to remain as Secretary long enough to need this or any other protection. No one in February 1867 could anticipate that the events of the succeeding six months could alter the situation so greatly that everyone’s estimations would go awry.20

  In view of these facts, it appears most improbable that Stanton, by advocating that the President veto the tenure law, while knowing that Congress would override the veto, was playing a Machiavellian role designed to lull Johnson into a false sense of security or to provide a means for later impeaching the President. Of course, it is possible that Stanton was concealing his hope that the bill covered him. Perhaps, on the other hand, Johnson was hiding a fear that this was true. Logic balks, if this is the case, at Johnson’s retention of Stanton in his cabinet until the tenure bill became law. But the President made no move at all to rid himself of Stanton before it was too late.

  Whatever the real, hidden, undiscoverable thoughts of the participants in these events concerning the coverage of the tenure-of-office law (Congress on March 2 overrode the vetoes on it and on the reconstruction bill), the belief that it covered Johnson’s cabinet members grew increasingly widespread. Stanton came to see the law as a vote of confidence from Congress, carrying an injunction to hold on to his office and to harmonize its administration with the legislature’s decrees. When he later claimed the protection of the law he had once declared to be unconstitutional, he was back in the position of a lawyer and he merely selected from an opposite body of evidence on the question in order to protect the interests of a new client, Congress.

  On the other hand, the President later claimed to believe that he could test the legitimacy of the tenure law by refusing to execute it or by violating its provisions. Yet Johnson faithfully executed other reconstruction acts in which he professed to have as little faith and which he had also vetoed, and which Congress enacted into laws over his condemnations. No President up to the time of Johnson’s decision to violate the tenure law ever suggested a view of presidential power giving the executive a right to enforce only the laws he approved and to ignore or to violate others. War needs justified Lincoln in many extreme acts, but Johnson’s was the most insistent voice heard after 1865 that the war was finished.

  Knowing that the reconstruction law would be only as strong as the willingness of the executive arm to enforce it, Stanton’s decision to keep his office was now based on his fear that Johnson would fail to fulfill the intention of Congress as expressed in its reconstruction bill regarding the South. In February 1867 the tenure-of-office proposal in Stanton’s thinking was irrelevant, and its meaning very uncertain.21

  The veto of the reconstruction bill penned by bitter Jeremiah Black boded ill for future stability, and the subsequent need for three more reconstruction acts, each designed to push the President and Southern whites to obedient action, indicates that Stanton’s fears were founded on substantial reasons. Stanton did not trust Andrew Johnson unless he or Grant was on the scene.

  On March 1, Seward gave Johnson the veto message he and Stanton had prepared on the tenure bill. The Secretary of State told John Bigelow that the South would be readmitted within a year and that the 1868 elections would kill “the root of bitterness upon which everybody nowadays seems to be chewing.” Johnson sent the veto, along with the one on the reconstruction bill, to Congress.

  Grant, now in close agreement with Stanton on essential matters, rejoiced next day at the overriding of the veto on the reconstruction act. Writing confidentially to his friend and backer Elihu Washburne, Grant condemned “the most ridiculous veto message that ever issued from any President … It is a fitting end to all controversy (I believe this last [reconstruction] measure is to be a solution unless the President proves to be an obstruction).” Like Stanton, Grant did not trust Johnson to execute the law, and he shared the War Secretary’s derisive view of Johnson’s theory of presidential strength and practice of executive weakness. Stanton would have been vastly relieved to know that Grant and he were in basic agreement.

  Johnson had removed more patronage appointments in the War Department from Stanton’s control and tried to steer army printing and advertising contracts toward newspapers and publishers who sustained the administration. Congress countered on March 2 by requiring that the Government Printing Office do all departmental work. If it could not, the Clerk of the House, faithful radical Edward McPherson, was to farm out contracts. Avoiding another veto, Congress by joint resolution on the same day prohibited the payment of claims against the government to any person unable to establish consistent wartime Unionism, deliberately contradicting the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Garland case. Stanton distributed copies of this resolution through the Army as quickly as possible. Point by point, Johnson was forcing the Army into an utter dependence upon Congress.22

  On March 4, Johnson and the cabinet met at 10 a.m. at the Capitol to deal with the last remaining bills of the congressional session. The President wanted to make a last-ditch stand against the army appropriations measure, contai
ning Stanton’s riders on the commanding general’s functions and location, still unsigned before him. Again Johnson polled the cabinet. Browning had a veto message prepared, but Seward and Stanton convinced the President that a veto was unwise. Johnson said he would sign it but intended to add a protest. He turned to Stanton and asked him whether he was in favor of a protest. “I make no objection to it,” Stanton replied, according to Colonel Moore. “But,” said the President, “I wish to know whether you approve of a protest?” Stanton replied: “I approve your taking whatever course you think best.” Johnson signed it, added the protest, and the historic Thirty-ninth Congress came to an end.

  But at 1 p.m. the legislators met to form the Fortieth Congress. Stanton and Grant, among others, had pleaded that the congressmen not disperse. Uppermost in their minds was uncertainty concerning Johnson’s willingness to execute the reconstruction enactment.

  Somewhat to the surprise of extremists in both camps, Johnson soon made it clear that he would execute the reconstruction law. He knew that the Republican radicals were watching his every move in the hope that he might trip himself. Johnson became touchy, and when, on March 8, McCulloch suggested that he quickly appoint the military governors in order to prevent impeachment, “the President got very angry,” according to Browning, “and swore vehemently, and said they might impeach and be d-m-d—he was tired of being threatened—that he would not be influenced by any such considerations, but would go forward in the conscientious discharge of his duty without reference to Congress, and meet all the consequences.”23

  But despite his brave words, Johnson kept to his decision to obey the letter if not the intent of the reconstruction law. When the cabinet met on March 12, Johnson took Stanton aside, and while Welles writhed in impatient inability to eavesdrop, the President and War Secretary talked together for more than fifteen minutes. “At the close,” Welles recorded, “Stanton was unusually jubilant, had a joke or two with McCulloch, and could not suppress his feelings.” For Johnson had told him to name the military governors, and the jubilation Welles noticed derived from Stanton’s relief on learning that the President was going to execute the law and by so doing was avoiding the crisis that must come from defiance. Impeachment, as Henry Dawes noted, “is very much under a cloud, and if nothing is done to give it new life it will die of two much nursing.”24 Johnson was at last trying to dam the tide of political extremism.