Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Stanton refused to be trapped. Of course, he stated, the generals must obey presidential orders, so long as those instructions fitted in with Congress’s laws. The legislators had intended the army commanders to modify or abolish the laws of the Southern states; therefore, the President might not forbid the generals to exercise this power, but rather should see to it that Congress’s will was done. Resorting to the argument of unreal horrors, Johnson asked whether the general could modify decisions of state and federal courts. This had not happened, Stanton pointed out bitingly, but a general had the same power over a state court as over all other parts of the civil administration in the South.

  Once again Stanton underestimated Johnson’s stubbornness. The President still hoped to gain from the cabinet members a formal expression of unanimity of opinion in his favor. If he succeeded, then the officers on occupation duty, becoming confused concerning Stanton’s position despite Grant’s assurances, might well defer to orders from the White House from fear that protection from the War Department was too uncertain to depend on. Johnson suggested that a preamble to the order he intended issuing to the generals in the South, asserting that he and all the cabinet were in agreement on its terms, would be appropriate.

  Attention fixed on Stanton. He spoke up without hesitation. The cabinet was not agreed, he said. Did not a majority vote constitute agreement, Johnson asked? Not in the cabinet, Stanton quite correctly retorted, for it was merely an advisory body and the head of one department could not be bound by the opinions of other cabinet officers, whose responsibilities were in other areas of government.

  On this last point, Seward agreed with Stanton. Encouraged, Stanton said that he would not transmit such a preamble to the Army even if Johnson insisted on it. And so, after five weeks of steady pressure on Stanton at the cabinet table, the President lost. Stanton refused to abandon his ramparts. Retreating, Johnson lodged a final and petty shaft. He assigned Stanton to work with Stanbery on the presidential instructions to the generals in the South.15

  By noon the next day the instructions were completed, and Stanton released them for transmission to the Army and to the press. The President went off on a trip, and Stanton collapsed.

  His physical deterioration, combined with reports of the cabinet squabbling, inspired new rumors that he was resigning, which Greeley’s Tribune denied on the basis that Stanton was one of a breed that “rarely die and never resign.” Indeed, Stanton had no thought of quitting now. After talking with him, Hay recorded that “he said the newspapers must have their little item now and then. I don’t think he is going just yet.”

  Meanwhile Johnson was touring the Democratic strongholds of the northeast, and from the reception he enjoyed he concluded that he had gained public favor. He also thought that his instructions to the occupation commanders, even without the suggestion of cabinet unanimity, had won the obedience he desired from them. Grant, however, was countering him secretly by advising the district commanders to shrug off the restrictive opinions from the White House.

  Therefore, the generals were not confused, as Johnson had hoped they would be. But they were angry at being forced to disobey either him or Congress. Sheridan was most outspoken in his bitterness. Grant advised the youthful officer to comply nevertheless with the President’s instructions and thus “silence all charges of attempting to defeat the Attorney-General’s construction of the Reconstruction Act.” But he also advised Sheridan to procrastinate. “In the meantime,” Grant wrote, “Congress may give an interpretation of its own, differing possibly from those given by the Attorney General.”16

  The President then made a grave error. His friends in the War Department supplied him with a copy of a private communication that Sheridan had sent to Grant. In it, the younger officer vilified Johnson and derided Stanbery’s opinion as a “broad macadamized road for perjury to travel on.” Johnson released this to the Democratic press. Now taking care to guard his lines of communication from the President’s spies, Grant had General Horace Porter write encouragingly to Sheridan that “Congress … will undo the mischief that has lately been done,” and predicted that Stanbery’s opinion “will therefore have no more weight than that of any other good lawyer.”

  In the first days of July, with Johnson returned from his tour and Stanton back at work, the cabinet considered Sheridan’s publicized communication. Although Stanton agreed that it was disrespectful, he argued that Sheridan could say what he wished in private correspondence, and the Secretary wondered how the offending missive had come out of the War Department’s files. Johnson, irresolute and afraid to come to blows with Congress, let slide this chance to remove Sheridan from command. And he still made no move to demand Stanton’s resignation.

  Working closely with Grant, Stanton prepared a bill designed to embody their views on the President’s lack of power to direct army officers on reconstruction duty, and which would counter Stanbery’s opinion on the standards for disfranchisement. Republican congressmen hurried it through both houses, whereupon Johnson blasted it in a veto message as an incitement to insubordination in the Army. But Congress easily surmounted this weak obstacle. On July 19, Stanton’s measure became law, whereupon Congress adjourned. This third reconstruction act specifically gave district commanders the independence of the White House that Stanton and Grant had claimed derived from the first two laws, and implicitly recognized the existence in the South of a separate army under Congress’s control.17

  Stanton and Grant were satisfied that they had warded off crisis while at the same time protecting the nation’s and the Army’s interests. At last the President seemed cowed. He uncomplainingly returned the troublesome Sheridan letter when Stanton, at Grant’s request, asked for it. It seemed that an equilibrium had been achieved. Perhaps Johnson was ready to serve out the remainder of his term without seeking to alter his present relationship with Congress and the Army.

  Things grew so quiet as the torpid midsummer heat blanketed the capital that Stanton returned the War Department to the prewar schedule of working hours, the last government agency to relax from the wartime tempo. He proudly hung the honorary Doctor of Laws degree which Yale awarded him next to the one he had previously received from Kenyon. Ellen and he, knowing what little interest he had in elective office, were amused but flattered at assertions that, after Grant, he was the front runner for a Republican presidential nomination.

  Now that the district commanders could openly proceed in their disfranchising policies, Grant decided to go off on a vacation. The general, concerned over Stanton’s health, insisted that Stanton seek recreation in turn when he returned to Washington. “Things might have been so different now,” Grant noted regretfully to the Secretary, if Johnson had gone the right way “and given repose to the country and consequently rest to all interested in administering the laws.”

  Stanton’s relationship with Grant had grown exceedingly close. They agreed that the President, though seemingly submissive, was still not to be trusted. Therefore, though Stanton did plan to take a vacation as soon as Grant was back in the capital, he would keep the war portfolio for another six months. If by the year’s end Johnson had maintained his present tractability, then Stanton would feel free to resign.18

  Andrew Johnson had other plans. Rejecting clear evidence that he had lost the game, politically weak yet thinking himself strong, Johnson still thought he could turn matters to his own advantage.

  Stanton, the President concluded, had been directing Grant. He felt that he understood and could control men with ambition, and all Washington now understood that Grant was bent on the presidency. Johnson saw no reason why, if Stanton were gone, he should not pick up the reins and maneuver the general. Once in control of Grant, the real center of the Army, Johnson could throw Republican strategy back on itself. And he guessed that, with Grant in apparent sympathy with him, the general’s suitability as a Republican standard-bearer must diminish, and his own increase in the eyes of the Democrats, an outcome he deeply desired.19
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  Passion added its blinding effects to Johnson’s conceits. Revived talk of Stanton’s alleged duplicity in the Surratt clemency petition, of the Secretary’s participation in drafting the third reconstruction act, and of Sheridan’s publicized impertinence, proved to be more than the President could stand. He hinted about that he was ready to relieve Sheridan, but he told no one as yet that Stanton, too, was to go.

  Army officers were distressed by the rumors concerning Sheridan. General George Thomas wrote Stanton that “the relief of Genl. Sheridan will be sure to revive the energies of the opponents of reconstruction … and in a like proportion embarrass the efforts of his successor.” Grant cut his vacation short and hurried back to Washington.

  There, on the last day of July, the President summoned him to the White House, and told him that Stanton as well as Sheridan was to be ousted. Johnson wanted Grant to take over the war office. Grant hedged. The next day he wrote Johnson asserting that the tenure law protected Stanton. “The meaning of the law may be explained away by an astute lawyer,” he warned, “but common sense and the views of loyal people will give to it the effect intended by the framers.” Why, he asked, had the President delayed a decision on ousting Stanton and Sheridan until just after Congress adjourned? Grant, in frank, outspoken terms, told Johnson that loyal men in both the North and the South might not submit “to see the very men of all others who they have expressed confidence in, removed.”

  This admonition made Johnson hesitate, and he brought some of the cabinet members and a few other intimates into his confidence. Seward reminded him of the respect in which Stanton was held across the country and revived Johnson’s concern over impeachment. But Welles spurred him on, and Chief Justice Chase, whose political ambitions had long since cut the ties of friendship that had once bound him to Stanton, also encouraged the President. Johnson decided to push.20

  And so, on the hot, sticky Monday morning of August 5, 1867, the President’s secretary appeared at Stanton’s office with a message for the war minister: “Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.” Stanton was not surprised. Grant had told him of his interview with the President six days before, and Stanton had urged Grant to take on the war portfolio if Johnson carried through his determination. But Stanton had scarcely believed the threat would ever come to pass. Nevertheless, he was prepared for it. Later that morning Stanton sent his reply to the White House. In accordance with his earlier confidence to Grant, he refused to resign before the next meeting of Congress in December.

  Reading Stanton’s reply, the President boasted that he would leave the stubborn Secretary “hanging on the sharp hooks of uncertainty for a few days, and then suspend him from office.” But unless Grant was willing to take over in Stanton’s place, Johnson could gain nothing from suspending Stanton except the pleasure of his absence from August to December. For it was certain that the Senate would confirm no one in Stanton’s place except Grant. After a conversation with the President on August 10, Montgomery Blair admitted to his wife that “I hardly know what to advise. He [Johnson] is a very unhappy man & in a very helpless pitiable condition. I told him to send for Grant.”21 Blair and Johnson were to regret this suggestion.

  At the war office, Stanton wrestled with the unsettlement in army circles caused by the President’s request for his resignation. Johnson had already taken advantage of his absence from the cabinet to shift from the Army to the Interior Department the responsibility for control of the western Indian tribes. Pope and George Thomas had white Southern civilian prisoners in their charge awaiting trials before military commissions. The generals feared that any successor Johnson appointed to the war office would share Johnson’s views on reconstruction and that consequently military trials would be rendered uesless.

  Outwardly Stanton maintained his habitual icy demeanor. But in private he exhibited a turbulent emotional stress. Hitchcock realized that he was deeply wounded by the vitriolic journalistic treatment of the cabinet crisis, especially as many of the articles came from men who had fallen afoul of wartime security arrangements and were now gaining revenge. Grant and Senator Wilson, talking with him about some abusive newspaper articles, saw the Secretary suddenly break into tears.22

  It was not the contumely he experienced that depressed Stanton. His distress was occasioned by contradictory fears and hopes. He was eager to leave a cabinet situation that had long been irksome and was now impossible. Learning that Montgomery Blair, now a frequent White House caller, might replace him, Stanton again pressed Grant to take on the war portfolio if Johnson discharged him, in order to prevent such a national disaster.

  Yet Stanton wondered why Grant seemed so eager. He became suddenly distrustful of the general. Stanton jumped to the conclusion that Johnson would never suspend him unless Grant were willing to step into the war office. Perhaps, after all, Johnson might overawe the general once he came into the administration. Then all the risks and efforts of years might be undone.

  Stanton was incapable of expressing these fears to Grant. In turn, the general, as secretive and indrawn as ever, kept to himself his conviction that he had no choice but to safeguard the Army’s welfare and the nation’s interests by moving into the war office if Stanton moved out. Grant recognized that accepting a place in Johnson’s cabinet might wither the political laurels he coveted. Failing to share his own fears with Stanton, he did not suspect that the Secretary questioned his motives.

  The suspense was becoming unendurable for Stanton. Then, on Sunday morning, August 11, the President summoned Grant to the White House and offered him an interim appointment as War Secretary while continuing in his status as commanding general. Grant said he would obey orders, and disavowed any personal antipathy toward the President. Both men avoided the unpleasant subject of their differences of opinion on reconstruction. Johnson then went happily off to church.23

  All during that long hot Sunday, Stanton had been speculating with Ellen and their guest, Pierrepont, concerning the probable course of events. After dinner they took seats by the open front door of the Stanton home to enjoy the twilight coolness. Grant appeared in the doorway. He seemed hesitant, and awkwardly asked Stanton for a private interview in the library.

  Fifteen minutes passed. Both men reappeared, flushed with emotion and uncertain in their attitudes toward each other. After brief pleasantries, Grant left. His “good evening” had barely been uttered when Stanton told Pierrepont that the President next day would suspend him from the war office, in conformity with the tenure law.

  Stanton lost control. He admitted to Ellen that she had been right in advising him for two years to leave the cabinet and take up private legal practice. Now he faced an uncertain future, with his private fortune gone and his health ruined. But at least the months of suspense were ended.

  Next morning, his outward composure regained, Stanton went to his office to wait for what he knew was coming. Colonel Moore arrived at ten o’clock and gave Stanton a letter from the President suspending him and ordering him to transfer all records and authority to Grant. Stanton slowly read the brief text. “I will send an answer,” he told Moore. The colonel went on to Grant’s room. After reading the order assigning him to Stanton’s place, Grant said: “Very well,” and dismissed the President’s agent. He then penned a note to Stanton expressing his “appreciation of the zeal, patriotism, firmness, and ability with which you have ever discharged your duties as Secretary of War.”

  Meanwhile Stanton prepared his answer to Johnson. He denied the President’s right to suspend him without the Senate’s prior approval. But as Grant was now his successor as well as commanding general, “I have no alternative but to submit, under protest, to superior force.”

  As always, he tried to shield Ellen. “I congratulate you,” he wrote her immediately after dispatching a messenger to the White House with his rejoinder; “I am out of office and Grant is in. We can now make such arrangements for our norther
n trip as you may desire.” Later that day, after he had left the War Department perhaps for the last time, Stanton and Ellen began to prepare for a lengthy vacation. He tried to convince her that he was happy and confident.

  She knew better. As a chorus of opinions on the legality, morality, and wisdom of his ousting filled the nation’s press, Stanton became moody. He brooded on the accusations hurled against him and worried over Grant’s trustworthiness. The Washington Intelligencer hit closer to home than its pro-Johnson editor knew when he wrote:

  Now is the winter of my discontent,

  For Andy seems upon my ruin bent,

  And Grant and Seward, whom I thought were friends,

  Have lent themselves to carry out his ends.

  Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness,

  Sic transit gloria Stanton.24

  1 Morse, Welles Diary, III, 59–63; memo, March 5–11, 1867, Welles Papers, LC.

  2 Badeau, Grant, 60–1, 102; exchange between Johnson, Stanton, Grant, and Sheridan, March 27-April 13, 1867, Johnson Papers, LC.

  3 Leader, May 6, 1867; Morse, Welles Diary, III, 77–8; April 5 (misdated July 5), 1867, Moore notebook, Johnson Papers, LC; Lieber to Sumner, April 15, 1867, Lieber Papers, HL; Browning, Diary, II, 142; Bigelow, Retrospections, IV, 57; Mississippi v. Johnson, 4 Wallace 475 (1867).

  4 Georgia v. Stanton, 6 Wallace 50 (1867); McGhan v. Clephane, in WD, Letters Received, CLXIII, 175, RG 107, NA, surveys precedents, with which the President had earlier agreed.

  5 To Sheridan, April 7, 1867, Sheridan Papers, LC; Badeau, Grant, 62.

  6 Stanton to John H. Clifford, May 7, 1867, NYHS; T. Shankland to Holt, April 30, 1867, Holt Papers, LC.