Ignoring Thomas’s known limitations, the President decided to use him in a grander way than Welles had suggested, and to attack on two fronts at once. He matched his order sending Thomas to resume charge of the adjutant bureau with another on February 12 calling Sherman to Washington to head the proposed new eastern command, despite Tecumseh’s earlier expression of unwillingness to have anything to do with such an assignment. Sherman, the President hoped, would bring to his cause the distinction that Grant offered to his congressional champions and that Thomas so evidently lacked. If Sherman soon thereafter accepted the war office portfolio, as the President still planned for him to do, then Grant’s power among the army hierarchy and popularity with the public might be countered. Further, Grant would be sandwiched helplessly between Sherman as Secretary and Thomas as adjutant controlling army records and officer assignments. The scheme might have succeeded, for with elections hovering within the year, probably few senators would have dared to refuse approval of a nomination of Sherman to the war office. Johnson should have made sure, however, that Sherman was willing to play his game.3
But the President was following the dictates of emotion rather than the guidelines of logic. He could no longer stand the thought of Stanton in the war office and was determined to remove him regardless of the Senate’s ruling. Johnson confided to Colonel Moore that “self-respect demanded it; and … if the people did not entertain sufficient respect for their chief magistrate to uphold him in such a measure then he [Johnson] ought to resign.”
Thomas took over the adjutant duties on the fourteenth without incident. The President was happy that “Aunt Nancy” Townsend now knew that “Brute Stanton has a superior, whose orders he must obey,” as Johnson’s daughter phrased it. But when he issued the order elevating Thomas, the President had not heard from Sherman concerning the general’s willingness to accept an eastern command and so be on hand for the larger play.
A letter from Sherman arrived at the White House later that same day after clearing through channels at the War Department, where obviously Grant and Stanton had read it. Sherman absolutely refused the eastern assignment and the promotion in rank that went with it; he wanted no part in Johnson’s plan. The President could do nothing but revoke his order.
Now knowing that Sherman, the only general who could act as a counter to Grant, would not play his game, that Stanton and Grant were aware of Sherman’s refusal to enlist, and that Thomas was a lightweight, the President recklessly persisted in going ahead with the part of his plan that concerned Thomas. He would not backtrack. But it is difficult to see what safe advantage he hoped to gain from advancing now that he was shorn of his major weapon.4
On the nineteenth, Thomas, in his indiscreet, bumbling manner, further warned the opposition. He asked Townsend to look up the records on the tenure law and told him confidentially that the President intended to supersede Stanton and place Thomas in the war office. The records Thomas wanted were filed in an open room of the adjutant’s division, where the activity of the clerks assigned to obtain them was clearly apparent. Johnson might as well have hoisted a signal.
Yet no one could believe that Thomas’s assertions were true or that the President relied on this man. Stanton, sharing the contempt for Thomas that was common in army circles, and having convinced himself that the existing equilibrium, however unpleasant, would continue until Johnson finished his term, underestimated the intensity of the President’s emotions.5
Johnson called Thomas to the White House at nine o’clock in the morning on Friday, February 21, and calmly lectured him on the tenure law. Then he gave Thomas two orders, one ordering Stanton to vacate the war office and the other naming Thomas to succeed him as Secretary of War ad interim. With an officer of the adjutant division accompanying him as witness, Thomas hurried to the War Department, informed Townsend of the change, then moved on to the Secretary’s room. It was almost eleven o’clock when he knocked at the closed door and heard Stanton tell him to enter.
Stanton was seated on the worn leather couch near the window. Striding quickly across the long room, Thomas came close to him and said: “I am directed by the President to hand you this.” A long, silent minute passed as Stanton read the brief text of the message removing him from the war office. He looked up at Thomas and asked in a bland voice: “Do you wish me to vacate at once, or am I to be permitted to stay long enough to remove my property?” Thomas replied: “Certainly, at your pleasure,” and then let Stanton read the order naming him as the new Secretary. “I wish you to give me a copy,” Stanton said. Agreeing, Thomas walked happily back to Townsend’s room and had that officer make a copy of the text, certifying to it himself as Secretary ad interim.
While Thomas was busy with this clerical diversion, Stanton called Grant in. The two men quickly decided to hold Thomas off. Encouraged to find that Grant, on whose attitude everything depended, wanted him to keep the war office, Stanton was waspish when Thomas returned. “I want some little time for reflection. I don’t know whether I shall obey your orders or not,” Stanton snapped, and forbade Thomas to issue any orders as Secretary until he decided.
Somehow Thomas missed the point. When he returned to the White House shortly after one o’clock, he failed to mention to Johnson the final acid exchange with Stanton. The President, presuming that Stanton was ready to vacate without a fight, told Thomas to take over the war office the next day. Jubilant, Thomas went off to celebrate. Meeting with the cabinet soon after, Johnson informed the surprised officials of what he had done, gloating that “Stanton seemed calm and submissive,” and sent a message off to the Senate with the information that he had replaced Stanton with Thomas.6
At least he thought he had. Johnson shared with most of his cabinet supporters the belief that Stanton was a cowardly bully who would quit under direct attack, and that Grant was an inept, untrustworthy self-seeker whose ambition would prevent him from making a public stand. But the President failed to explore the consequences that must stem from wrong estimates of the two men.
Up to the time that he was roughly ordered out of the war office, Stanton was useful to the President and the Democrats. Their supporters could malign him as a ridiculous functionary who was drawing pay without providing services. But with the ouster order, Grant moved to support Stanton in order to protect the Army from unbearable strains and to further his own ambitions. To Republican spokesmen, the War Department became a bastion of liberty resisting the encroachments of a tyrannical executive, with Stanton holding firm the ramparts and with Grant serving as a self-effacing savior keeping violence in check by his mere presence. Johnson threw both men irrevocably into the hands of the radical Republicans. They had no other place to go. Most Northerners made the same shift.
And while the President gloated over an easy victory, his supposedly cowed adversary built defenses. Messengers sped to Capitol Hill from the War Department bearing Stanton’s accounts of the morning’s events, creating uproars in both houses of Congress. Covode moved a resolution in the House to impeach the President, and even before Johnson’s message to the Senate arrived, that body was in executive session considering Stanton’s ousting.
Again Stanton was nervous, unsure of what the results would be, and doubtful of success. He sent his oldest son to Congress to obtain quick and reliable reports of his fate. At three o’clock that afternoon the youth wrote that “Senator Edmunds and Mr. Boutwell both say not to give up the office; … Senate in Executive Session now … Mr. Edmunds, Fessenden, Frelinghuysen, and all … say you ought to hold on to the point of expulsion until Senate acts.” Meanwhile, Stanton’s office was crowded with congressmen who had hurried up Pennsylvania Avenue to encourage the Secretary.7 Senators and other supporters sent notes to the war office, and the terse word from Sumner—“Stick!”—became famous.
This was what Stanton needed—a clear indication that Congress would stand by him. Without it he was helpless, both because he had no power in his own right and because, in order for him to hold
a position, he had to feel that it was respectable and legitimate. As the weak midwinter sun illuminated the excited group of men gathered around him in the war office, Stanton decided to accept Johnson’s challenge. He wrote out an order to Grant calling for the military arrest of Thomas “for disobedience to superior authority in refusing to obey my orders as Secretary of War.”
As soon as Grant received this order he hurried to the Secretary’s room. Moving out of earshot of the onlookers, he and Stanton talked for almost half an hour. Neither man ever divulged what transpired, but Grant destroyed Stanton’s order to arrest Thomas and returned to his office, where, for the rest of the afternoon, he refused callers.8
The news spread quickly. Incredulity was the dominant reaction. Even Welles privately thought that “this whole movement … has been incautiously and loosely performed without preparation. The Cabinet was not consulted. His [Johnson’s] friends in the Senate and House were taken by surprise.”
Dusk fell. At the Senate, bright windows showed that the executive session concerning Stanton was still under way. Tension mounted as wild rumors of violence circulated in the capital and flashed across the wires to all parts of the country. At a dinner party that evening in Washington, young Edgar Welles was shocked to hear his host, General William Emory, commander of the local garrison, order all officers to their posts. Republican senators, hotly debating a reply to the President’s message on Stanton, were thrown into confusion by reports from journalists that Thomas was threatening force and that Stanton had already vacated the war office. “What are the facts? We desire to know,” Senator John Conness scrawled hurriedly, and sent the note off to the War Department. Stanton replied: “I … mean to continue in possession unless expelled by force. Lorenzo Thomas is not, so far as I know, issuing any orders as Secretary of War.”9
But what if the rumors concerning Thomas were true? Probably at Stanton’s suggestion, a committee of Republican senators hurried to Grant’s office to ask his intentions. “He asked,” Sumner told Bigelow later that night, “how or when the President would get the … soldiers to remove Stanton [by force], implying that his orders could not be obtained for such a purpose.” Grant was safe.
Embellished accounts of Thomas’s bellicose intentions soon reached Stanton. Again fearing that the President would employ force against him, and feeling sure that Thomas would test the issue the next morning instead of waiting out the holiday weekend, Stanton, at nine o’clock Friday night, sent an urgent message to his Senate supporters. “I am informed that … Thomas is boasting that he intends to take possession of the War Office at 9 tomorrow morning,” he wrote. “If the Senate does not declare its opinion of the law, how am I to hold possession?” Less than an hour later the Senate by a party vote resolved that Johnson could not legally oust Stanton or replace him with Thomas.10
Now in possession of the Senate’s sustaining resolution, Stanton announced his intention to stay in the war office night and day until some decision was reached. Any attempt to eject him by force, or to remove the seals of the Department from his charge, must lead to confusion and inevitably to violence, if troops under orders from Thomas and the President clashed with other soldiers obeying Grant and himself. Stanton would hold possession in order to forestall a contest by arms.
There were other ways to fight. Ever the lawyer, Stanton willingly entered the arena of the courts, where Johnson always after claimed to have wanted the affair to go. Stanton knew that Grant would not sanction a military arrest and court-martial for Thomas, for that would pit the Army against itself. The civil courts were another matter. Calling in his friend David Cartter, the partisanly Republican Chief Justice of the District’s Supreme Court, Stanton issued a complaint against Thomas for violating Congress’s tenure law and asked Cartter to invoke the penalties the law prescribed for the violation.
Stanton’s action indicates the absence of any conspiring on his part to avoid a judicial test of the tenure law. He and Cartter, while filling out the complaint, discussed the probability that the President, through Thomas, would seize the opportunity that Stanton was now offering, to allege the unconstitutionality of the statute. And it was Stanton who insisted that they go ahead.11
It was one o’clock Saturday morning, the twenty-second, when the judge left with the paper. Of the crowd that had filled Stanton’s office all day, only Nebraska’s Senator John M. Thayer, who had volunteered to stay, remained to share the first long night of what promised to be a siege of uncertain duration.
The stillness oppressed Stanton. He nibbled nervously at a light meal which an armed soldier brought in, then abandoned it to peer anxiously out the windows at the sentries Grant had stationed around the buildings. Stanton asked Thayer whom he thought the commander of the guard, General E. A. Carr, would obey if contrary orders came from Thomas or the White House. Thayer realized that Stanton was really inquiring whether Grant would stick or jump again to Johnson’s support; a question “uppermost in the minds of all,” Thayer recalled. The senator decided to test the matter by inquiring of Carr what he would do in the event of contradictory orders, and Carr, in what Stanton took as a good omen, replied that he would obey Grant and Stanton. Thereupon the Secretary wrote a request for Grant to give Carr permanent responsibility for the security of the War Department building and army records.
It was now almost two o’clock in the morning. A soldier brought in the card of Methodist bishop Simpson, whose sermons had delighted Lincoln and Stanton during the war years. Stanton had the minister admitted. He was gratified when Simpson asserted that the Secretary had the support of the “God-fearing portion of the people,” and told of a dinnertime conversation with Grant the evening before in which the general was unreserved in his compliments to Stanton. With this the Secretary was “in fine spirits,” Simpson recorded. They had a “very long religious talk … with prayer,” and after a final benediction for Stanton’s well-being, the bishop left.
Now elated, but soon oscillating between deep depression and buoyancy, Stanton failed to find the sleep he needed. He started from the couch where he lay at the sound of marching feet outside and wakened the dozing senator with a whispered warning: “I believe the troops are coming to put me out.” Thayer peered at his watch. It was four o’clock, and the noise came from the changing of the guard in the chill dark. He and Stanton gave up the attempt to sleep and talked until dawn. Something was sure to happen.12
Many men slept poorly that night. Deducing from reports in the late evening newspapers on Friday that Stanton was giving up the war office, Johnson’s secretary, Colonel Moore, had retired, thinking the whole affair finished. About two o’clock Saturday morning, a messenger from the White House got him up, for the President was worried by reports that Thomas was talking and drinking too much. Moore promised to stay with Thomas constantly the next day to keep him in check, slept awhile, then breakfasted hurriedly and rushed to Thomas’s home, where he learned that the general “had gone away with two gentlemen.” The frustrated colonel returned to the White House to learn what was going on.
General Thomas, too, had little sleep. He had returned early Saturday morning from a dance and was suffering from the early stages of hangover when, at eight o’clock, a district marshal and a deputy, the “two gentlemen” Moore heard of, wakened him with an order from Judge Cartter calling for his arrest. Thomas notified the President of this development. Appearing breakfastless before the judge, Thomas learned that he was subject to imprisonment for violating the tenure law but that $5,000 bail, in the form of surety pledges, was acceptable to guarantee his appearance in court the following Wednesday. The general’s lawyer, Richard T. Merrick, who heard of the arrest as the news spread swiftly through the city, arrived too late to do more than witness Thomas’s signature on the bail agreement.
Moore, after reporting to the President that he could not find Thomas, went out again in search of the elusive general. He missed him at Cartter’s rooms, for Thomas, after leaving there, had gone to his
attorney’s office, where Moore found him. The two officers hurried to the White House. Thomas gave the President the details of his arrest, and Johnson said: “Very well, that is the place I want it in—the courts.” Johnson was later to allege that the purpose of his next move was to force the constitutional issue now that Thomas’s arrest made possible a resort to the courts. He sent Thomas to the Attorney General. Stanbery advised the general to return to the War Department that day and assume the office of War Secretary, and provided Thomas with a kind of script to follow.
According to Johnson, sending Thomas to eject Stanton again was the deliberate first step toward achieving a court test of the tenure law. But this argument strains the fabric of chronology and the logic of events. There could be a judicial test only so long as Stanton held the office, not if he gave it up to Thomas. The weight of evidence leaves little doubt that the President was in earnest about removing Stanton. He hoped that Stanton would yield the keys to Thomas, and did not behave as though he expected Stanton to disobey. Johnson’s plans led to the war office, not the courtroom.
Only after it was clear that Stanton would not give up the war office, and impeachment again threatened the President for having made the attempt to force him out, did Johnson seriously consider a judicial test of the tenure act. He thereafter dignified the moves he had made to oust Stanton since August 1867 by claiming they were part of a prearranged pattern of constitutional maneuvering.13
Even assuming that Johnson was sincere in his protestations, his strategy was unsound. He claimed to have expected that the Supreme Court would take jurisdiction in the matter, expand the issue from a contest between Stanton and Thomas to the question of the constitutionality of the tenure law, and then declare the law invalid. Considering that the Court at this time was intelligently backing away from involvement in related explosive issues, it is doubtful that Thomas could have got it to take jurisdiction of an appeal.
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