Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  The President had nothing to lose by trying out this plan. He had, however, no time to spare if he intended to make the experiment, for even as the men talked the Senate was moving toward a decision on Stanton. Yet, on Sunday, when Sherman underscored to Johnson the desirability of the plot he had helped to hatch, the general was surprised at the lack of interest on the part of the President. Sherman did not know that Johnson, confident that it was Grant’s intention not to surrender the war office to Stanton whatever the Senate decided, and that the Republicans would not dare to proceed against the idolized Grant, felt that there was no need to placate moderate opinion by advancing Cox’s nomination.24

  Of the weekend plotters, only Grant sympathized with Stanton’s political views and professed at least to respect him. No one, however, thought to warn Stanton of what they were conceiving, doubtless feeling that he would thwart Senate approval of a nomination of Cox through his friends in Congress. But it was Johnson, not Stanton, who, through inaction, destroyed the Cox scheme. On Monday morning, when Sherman went to the White House, the President made no mention of it, and he exhibited no anxiety or irritation over the fact that Grant did not appear.

  During these critical days, Stanton was nervously aware that something was going on. Apart from the uncountable rumors that floated around the capital, however, his only source of information was a soldier on duty as a White House guard. The extent of the “secrets” he was able to transmit to Stanton was the names of persons calling on the President and the duration of their visits. So Stanton knew that Grant had been closeted with Johnson on Saturday and Sherman had followed the next day. This information shocked him. His pessimistic uncertainty concerning Grant’s reliability returned. But there was nothing he could do but wait for the Senate’s action and trust that the general would keep faith.

  On Monday evening a messenger hurried from the Capitol to the Stanton home. The Senate had ordered that Stanton return to the cabinet. A flood of telegrams and callers followed during the evening, and Stanton found himself hosting an unplanned celebration party.

  At another party in Washington that night, General Sherman told Browning that the President, by rejecting the plan to appoint Cox, was responsible for Stanton’s success in the Senate. The President, greeting Grant at a White House reception, strangely did not ask him why he had not come to see him that day, as he later insisted had been promised. Grant did not tell Johnson that he had his resignation from the cabinet already written.25

  At nine o’clock Tuesday morning, January 14, Grant appeared at the War Department. He locked the Secretary’s office and, taking the key with him, went to his nearby rooms. An hour later Stanton entered the building. Smiling, he pushed through the throng of well-wishers and headed directly for his old office. Learning that Grant had the key, he sent for it, meanwhile waiting in the anteroom where so many persons had waited to see him. Although he refused to answer questions advanced by importunate journalists, Stanton was obviously in fine spirits.

  Adjutant General Townsend came in with the coveted key, and in a mock “present arms” delivered it to Stanton. Stepping into the familiar office, Stanton began to deal with the unceasing stream of callers. He drew the $3,000 due him as salary for the period of his suspension, and dictated a circular to Grant and the bureau heads stating that he was again in the Secretary’s chair.

  Despite his busyness, Stanton was filling in time. He wondered whether Grant was going to stand by. And what would the unpredictable President do now?

  At noon Grant sent the President a message stating that, owing to the Senate’s action, he was retiring from the Interim War Secretary appointment. Then, assuming that an earlier invitation from Johnson that he attend a cabinet meeting early that afternoon was still in effect, Grant went to the White House.

  The excited cabinet officers were surprised to see him. Johnson, as usual thinking of himself as a manipulator of men and, paradoxically, as an injured innocent, directed a barrage of questions at Grant to which he insisted on mere negative or affirmative replies. The President confused and unnerved the general, making it appear to the cabinet members that Grant had proved false to his trust. Their impression was that Grant had promised the President to return the preceding day but had deliberately failed to do so, had broken his promise to warn the White House that he was giving up the war office, and had throughout plotted with Stanton, a view to which they were predisposed.26

  Johnson lost a slim chance to keep Grant with him when he released slanted accounts of the Tuesday cabinet meeting to his friends of the press, impugning the general’s veracity. He ignored all indications that there had been no plotting between Stanton and Grant concerning the return of the war office.

  There had not been prearrangement. Before going to the stormy cabinet assembly on Tuesday, Grant had a lengthy talk with General William S. Hillyer, one of the few officers in the higher ranks who enjoyed the confidence of both the President and the commanding general. That evening Hillyer wrote a long letter to Johnson, the point of which was that there had been no collusion. Hillyer was convinced that Grant “never expected that Stanton would resume the duties of the War Office.” Rather, Grant had believed that Johnson would prevent the occurrence, Hillyer wrote, referring to the scheme to nominate Cox.27

  To be sure, Johnson did not receive the Hillyer letter until after the Tuesday altercation at the cabinet meeting. But Grant’s appeal to Hillyer proves that he greatly desired that his honor not be contemned. The President acted without waiting for proof of either Grant’s duplicity or his trustworthiness. By convincing the cabinet that Grant was a scoundrel, and blaring this to the world through the press, Johnson increased his sense of innocence. But he lost the only ally who might have made virtue, as the President defined it, triumph.

  At the war office that Tuesday afternoon, Stanton, who had no way of knowing that the taciturn general was resigning the temporary appointment as Secretary, was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain an air of bland confidence. His slim store of patience became exhausted. He sent an officer to Grant’s rooms with a peremptory summons to report. Grant arrived still sore from the lashing he had suffered at the White House, and disgruntled at the curt tone of the summons. When Sherman looked in on Stanton’s office, he found the two men in close conversation.

  Later that afternoon Sherman talked with Stanton. The Secretary tried to flatter him, Sherman wrote to his wife; “all very loving, and I told him simply that I should not recall the past, but wanted the Army to be kept out of politics, etc., etc.” None of these “et ceteras” referred to conversation on the tenure law, Sherman disappointedly admitted. He had expected Stanton to ask his opinion “of his present status,” and Sherman was ready to tell him to resign at once; this is probably why Stanton did not ask him.

  Next morning all Washington read of Grant’s resignation and of Johnson’s attacks on his integrity, and Stanton, visiting at the Trumbull home, exulted in the reports that Johnson had “sworn and kicked the chairs around at a great rate” and that he and Grant had almost come to blows. But, reading on, Stanton learned that Grant during the preceding weekend had conspired to throw him over. He told Mrs. Trumbull that he no longer trusted the general. Once more Johnson was to pay a stiff price for having released these stories to the press, for Stanton’s renewed distrust of Grant cost the President the voluntary resignation of the War Secretary.

  Grant also read the newspapers that morning. Sherman, trying to pacify his bitter and angry friend, accompanied him to the White House, where the President untruthfully insisted that he had had no part in the newspaper onslaught. There seemed to be a lessening of tension, and some surface cordiality returned. The meeting ended with Grant and Sherman agreeing to try to persuade Stanton to resign at once now that the Senate had vindicated him. Perhaps Grant knew that this had been Stanton’s intention.

  Grant, however, had lost much of his influence over the Secretary. In his disappointment over what he felt was Grant’s betray
al, Stanton was in no mood to listen to suggestions from him that he give up the war office. Perhaps Grant sensed this, for it was Sherman who undertook to feel Stanton out on the matter. Stanton rebuffed his awkward attempts to introduce the subject. Reporting to Grant, Sherman admitted that “I soon found out that to recommend resignation to Mr. Stanton would have no effect, unless it was to incur further his displeasure; and, therefore, did not directly suggest it to him … I would advise you to say nothing to Mr. Stanton on the subject of resignation unless he asks your advice. It would do no good, and may embarrass you.”28

  Stanton had rebuffed Sherman out of pique with Grant, not because he had abandoned the idea of leaving the war office at once. Then, on January 18, he wrote Pamphila that, although his vindication in the Senate had been “full and complete,… the Republican members of Congress insist on my remaining.”

  The conclusion seems inescapable that on January 15 Stanton had every intention of giving up his portfolio within the week. But during the next three days the Republican leaders, especially Trumbull, capitalized on his anger with Grant and persuaded him to stay on. They argued that until the general’s trustworthiness was again established, Stanton could not feel free to abandon the war office to Grant or to anyone else Johnson might appoint to it.29

  Stanton was easily persuaded by the deputations, the petitions, the telegrams and letters that urged his retention of the war office, to make the personal sacrifices necessary and accede to the requests. Even news from Pamphila that their mother was ill could not make him leave the capital to visit her. He answered Pamphila on the eighteenth that he intended to stay on as Secretary only during the few remaining weeks of the winter. Then he planned to return to the life of a Steubenville lawyer, a career that he felt was within his physical resources and offered the best probability of swift prosperity. “I do not want to remain a day in the Department,” he wrote, “but do not feel at liberty to give up immediately.” He would wait out these few weeks in the expectation that the President would see the need for a moderate course and would appoint an acceptable successor.30

  So he kept quiet in the war office. He received no direct communications from the White House and attended no cabinet meetings. The Army was now tied to the presidency only by the frayed strand represented by Grant, and by the official need of some of the cabinet officers for army records and the Army’s co-operation in a number of matters.

  Seward needed Halleck’s confidential reports on British Columbia; McCulloch asked for troops to convoy gold shipments near the turbulent Mexican border; Randall wanted cavalry to patrol postal routes in northwestern Texas, where banditry was rife. These matters could not wait until someone decided who properly held the war office. McCulloch, therefore, had to pay Stanton’s salary and to approve his drafts on the Treasury if he expected co-operation from the War Department, and Johnson made no objection.

  Thus, Grant’s protest to the President on January 30 that it was impossible for him to ignore orders from Stanton, as Johnson had instructed him to do, was not, as Johnson later alleged, conspiracy on the general’s part. Rather it was an accurate reflection of the facts of intra-governmental needs. The Secretary of War had less power to initiate policies in the Army than the commanding general did. But he did have administrative resources with which to obstruct army operations if he chose, and he could adversely affect the functioning of other departments as well. Johnson, Grant felt, had instructed him not to obey Stanton in order to embarrass the Secretary. The effect, however, was to face Grant and, through him, all the Army’s officers with the poor choice of insubordination either to the President or to the restored Secretary of War.31

  The President misinterpreted the weaknesses of the situation as another opportunity to strengthen his own position. He still felt sure, he told Welles, that Stanton would quit, but if this surmise proved wrong Johnson was willing to push matters by forcing the Secretary out. Fearing this, Grant and Sherman tried to persuade Johnson not to precipitate the crisis that must follow any attempt on his part to eject Stanton from the war office. “If he will not [resign],” Sherman advised the President, “then it will be time to contrive ulterior measures. In the meantime it so happens that no necessity exists for precipitating matters.”

  Sherman was right. The existing situation, awkward as it was for all, at least maintained an uneasy equilibrium that presumably could have endured until another popular verdict was rendered in November. But the President would not wait. He was encouraged by reports of bad feeling between Stanton and Grant, and “he thought he would let them fight it out.” Yet, still convinced that Grant had conspired to let Stanton return to the war office, he continued to fan the fires of this controversy in the partisan press.32

  Grant was indeed angry with Stanton; he confided to Schofield that the Secretary’s attitude was rude and officious. It was common gossip in Washington that Stanton did not use some of the clerks who had served Grant, for he thought that they might be spies for the general and perhaps for the President. Young Eddie Stanton now became his father’s assistant, and Eckert assumed a second place of power in the Department. According to Charles Benjamin, a clerk who was displaced in the shuffling, Eckert and Eddie Stanton “imitated Stanton’s arrogance, and both were petty tyrants instead of big ones, like their model.” Stanton had the volumes of wartime telegraphic dispatches placed in Ford’s Theater, which was still under armed guard. But Grant could also see that, except for these manifestations of distrust for everyone on Stanton’s part, army administration was going on as before.33

  Therefore, though Stanton and Grant nursed a resentment toward each other, they both distrusted the President more, and Johnson’s unthinking assault on Grant’s veracity pushed him and the Secretary back into accord. By the end of January, Grant was convincing Republican leaders that the President was in error, if not lying, concerning a conspiracy on Grant’s part to return the war office keys to Stanton. He had Rawlins go nightly to the home of General G. M. Dodge so that Dodge’s guest, Senator Wilson, might examine beforehand Grant’s replies to Johnson’s unending accusatory letters. Through Wilson, Stanton’s confidence in Grant increased, though their former cordiality was never regained.34

  Social life functioned at an accelerated pace during these tense weeks. The Stantons joined the Grants at receptions in private homes. Sumner was now Stanton’s particular friend in Washington, and he invited the Stantons to a small dinner party on February 2 in honor of Charles Dickens, then visiting the capital to offer readings of his popular works. Moorfield Storey, Sumner’s young secretary, was a bemused witness to the scene, and recorded that “Mr. Stanton came out wonderfully and Mr. Sumner said that he had never seen him so agreeable, and that I might meet him for a winter without getting any but the very shortest replies from him.”

  Stanton’s tongue loosened in the warm glow of his admiration for the visitor. He showed off his familiarity with the author’s works by accurately quoting from memory long passages from Pickwick, which he said had provided an invaluable source of diversion during the worst days of the war. As the men sipped brandy and the candles flickered lower, Stanton at Dickens’s request offered his recollections of the nightmare night when Lincoln was shot.

  It was an impressive gathering of talent, young Storey remembered. “Mr. Dickens, whose nature is emotional, sensitive; Mr. Sumner, the man of intellect and principle; Mr. Stanton, the intensely energetic and practical.” They were “as different types as could be imagined.” His impression of the controversial War Secretary was not totally pleasant. “Stanton strikes me as a man of coarse mental fibre, not a man of sentiment or impressionable. There is something in his voice, thick and with a suspicion of the nose about it, a drawl at the end of words, that sounds unpleasantly,” Storey recalled, in reaction to Stanton’s nasal tone of speech caused by his asthmatic complaint and his flat midwestern accent, which grated harshly on an ear attuned to the New England way. “In fact he is not a refined or cultivated man,” Store
y continued, “but he strikes you as a man of energy, and firmness, and perhaps the very dullness of his nervous organization enabled him to stand the tremendous wear and tear of the war, for after all it is the vibration rather more than the strain which snaps a string.” Sumner and Dickens were far higher types, Storey concluded.

  Yet the Massachusetts senator and the Englishman took pleasure in Stanton’s company, and Dickens, years later, remembered the meeting in fond terms. The three men walked through the streets of the capital so that Dickens could see the sights, and Washington hostesses envied Ellen her husband’s success with the social prize of the season.35

  The pleasant interlude of the Dickens visit failed to relieve Stanton’s uncertain tension. Still contemplating resigning the war office within a few weeks, he considered a speculation in Nebraska lands. In mid-February the promoter wrote that the deal was ripe, and to spur the hesitant War Secretary to a decision, needled him: “I see that if the official party can throw you out of the War Office they intend to do it & I venture to say you have not made enough in this war to keep you above want for time to come.” If Stanton wanted to participate in the lucrative scheme, he had to decide immediately to pull up stakes in Washington and head westward. But Stanton answered that he could not take part. By this time Congress had taken a hand, and Stanton decided to hold on a while longer; he could not, as Bigelow realized, be tempted “to enter into any covenants.”