But while men fought the phantom of Stanton’s supposed availability, he was squelching a move originating in Ohio to enter him as a vice-presidential nominee. Further, when Ben Wade, who as President of the Senate would step into the White House if Johnson was convicted, confidently announced a cabinet slate in which Stanton was kept on as War Secretary, Stanton stated for publication that he was out of the running for any post. “Enough of my life has been devoted to public duties,” he said. “No consideration can induce me to … continue in the War Department longer than may be required for the appointment and confirmation of my successor.”
Meanwhile his friend Pierrepont was touting him for a diplomatic appointment under Wade, but Stanton pushed away this suggestion too. He had already prepared his letter of resignation from the war office, and he was determined to submit it once the Senate’s verdict was in, no matter how it went, thereafter to be free of all public office. This was known at the White House, for on April 25 one of the President’s spies reported to Moore that “Mr. Stanton had written to his old home at Steubenville, Ohio, asking that preparations be made for the return of himself and his family there in two weeks’ time.”
Yet historians DeWitt and Bowers assert that up to the last minutes of the trial Stanton was determined to stay in office and in politics and so exerted efforts to sway doubtful senators against Johnson. They accept as their total evidence a reminiscence of Sickles that on May 15, at Stanton’s behest, he camped all night in Senator Ross’s apartment to overawe that wavering man to a stern course when the vote came due the next day. But Stanton intended to return to private life whatever the outcome of the impeachment. He was despondently sure that Johnson would escape conviction. Considering Stanton’s nature, it is doubtful whether he would continue to seek a conviction after deciding that it was impossible to obtain one. In addition, Sickles’s recollection dates from years after the event. Evidence from sources much closer in time fails to sustain the general’s memory.14
“The hour of judgment is nigh at hand,” Stanton wrote Young on May 10, when “the great criminal” should be condemned if justice was to be done. But, he admitted sadly, “I do not hear that Fessenden & Trumbull have shown any improvement.” Stanton deeply regretted the fact that the impeachment crisis was impairing his close associations with several of his friends among the senators who believed that Johnson, though derelict in his policies, was not guilty of the charges facing him. As each day passed, Stanton’s hopes lessened that his erring friends would realize that they were on the wrong path. And he predicted that their defection might swing the scales.
On May 16, two hours before the senators were to cast their fateful ballots, Garfield wrote that “it hangs in almost an even balance. There is an intensity of anxiety here, greater than I ever saw during the war.” The tension pervaded the White House, where McCulloch, Welles, and General Thomas joined the President and Colonel Moore in a quiet group. Their irrelevant conversation failed to disguise the nervous expectancy each man felt. Seward was so sure of a conviction that, the week before, he had submitted his resignation, to take effect when the Senate voted the President guilty.
Near by, at the War Department, Stanton was alone, at his own request. He opened the windows of his office to enjoy the warm breeze, and like the nation, he waited.
At noon the senators convened to vote. The hours dragged slowly by until Republican strategists forced the balloting first on the eleventh article of accusations, designed as a catchall to entice any hesitant senator’s vote of guilty. Thirty-five voted to convict; thirty-six votes were needed to carry this verdict.
Messengers rushed the news to the White House. Later that afternoon the President learned that the impeachment managers had not given up, but had secured a ten-day adjournment, after which voting on the other charges would commence, and his jubilation lessened.
Stanton received the news from the army telegraph. A hot flush mottled his cheeks. For a moment he felt almost feverish with disappointment. Although he had expected the verdict, he had still hoped that the senators would condemn the President. Then, refusing to give any comment to the crowding journalists who sought a statement from him, Stanton ordered his office door locked and took from the files his prepared letter of resignation. But he did not send it on to the White House.15
After the first jolting shock lessened, Stanton, like most Republicans, hoped that the President might still be found guilty when the trial resumed ten days hence. He decided to wait it out that long. It seemed a good omen that midway through that waiting period, on May 21, the Republican convention at Chicago named Grant as its presidential candidate.
As soon as this information came in on the wire, Stanton ran to Grant’s office to tell him the news and, as Badeau described it, was “panting for breath lest some one else should precede him.” Stanton’s joy was sincere. He was now sure that Grant and he were as one on reconstruction, and he felt that Grant could defeat any Democrat. His pleasure increased when his friend Colfax secured the vice-presidential nomination. Commenting to Sherman, Grant reflected the reasons for Stanton’s satisfaction over the choice of the general as Republican standard-bearer. It had prevented the Democrats from choosing Johnson, Grant asserted, or other “mere trading politicians, the elevation of whom, no matter which party won, would lose to us, largely, the results of the costly war which we have gone through. Now the Democrats will be forced to adopt a good platform and put upon it a reliable man who, if elected, will disappoint the Copperhead element of their party. This will be a great point gained if nothing more is accomplished.”
However Grant may have been rationalizing personal ambitions, his patriotic motive for seeking the presidency was genuine. Johnson had secretly wanted the Democratic party nomination, but with Grant running on the opposition ticket this was impossible. Grant was sure that even if Johnson again escaped conviction when the senators voted on May 26, the people would counterbalance this verdict when they balloted in November.16 Stanton could share the sense of substantive victory whatever the final verdict of the impeachment.
May 26 came, and early in the afternoon the Senate, now voting on the second and third articles of the impeachment list, again failed by one vote to convict, and adjourned the trial proceedings. The game was over; the tension finally ended. Although the Senate vote did not require that Stanton give up the war office, most commentators assumed that he would.
Shortly before three o’clock, Stanton had his son deliver a note to Townsend ordering him to take charge of the Department “subject to the disposal and directions of the President.” “Eddie” Stanton told the general that the Secretary had also entrusted him with his letter of resignation, which he was personally going to deliver to the White House along with a notification of Townsend’s temporary assumption of responsibility. But soon after young Stanton left for the executive mansion, he returned to Townsend’s office. A messenger from his father had intercepted him, with instructions to have Townsend deliver both messages to the President. The elder Stanton wanted no more outbreaks of temper from Johnson, and one might be provoked if a member of the family appeared in his presence.
Having heard the news of the Senate’s favorable verdict, Johnson was calm and happy when Townsend arrived. The general produced the note that he had brought, sealed, from Stanton. As Johnson read it his features took on “an expression of marked displeasure,” Townsend recalled, for in surrendering the war office Stanton bitingly alluded to the Senate’s resolution of the past February 21, which had forbade the President to remove or replace him. Now that the Senate had failed to support its earlier resolution by the needed two-thirds vote in the impeachment trial, Stanton therefore “relinquished” the War Department’s records in care of Townsend.
Observing Johnson’s angry reaction to Stanton’s impudent note, Townsend hastened to assure the President that he had not known the contents of the message he had delivered. Then the general handed over the first note Stanton’s son had given him,
which placed Townsend in charge at the war office. After reading it, Johnson at once became genial and pleasant, asking Townsend only inconsequential questions. The general, rising to leave, asked: “Have you any orders to give me, sir?” Johnson answered: “None.” Townsend concluded that Johnson did not want Lorenzo Thomas to take over the war office despite his retention of the interim title, and departed with the key to the Secretary’s door.
By specifying in the second note to the President that Townsend should maintain temporary charge at the War Department, Stanton had done a large service in keeping the unstable situation from exploding anew. Had the President sent Thomas to take over, the bitter Republicans in Congress might have felt themselves forced to take action once more. Stanton’s motive could only have been to keep alive a remnant of stability. Johnson, however, though telling Townsend that there was a reciprocity of trust between them and that he was confidently in control of the situation, actually mistrusted him, and declined to give Townsend any orders, “seeming to think,” Moore guessed, “that a trap was laid into which he might be inveigled.”
There was no trap. But Johnson’s suspicious reticence made possible a situation which almost provoked another crisis.
After leaving the White House, Townsend stopped at Stanton’s home to reassure himself that the former Secretary was still determined to give up the contest, for there were rumors that he intended to hang on. Stanton, haggard, ill, and appearing far older than his years, told the circumspect officer that he could no longer sacrifice himself or his family’s interests by “contending longer for the possession of the [war] office.”17
Assuming that with Stanton’s resignation he had the President’s automatic permission to take over, Thomas the next morning asked Townsend for the keys to the Secretary’s room. Townsend told him, however, that Johnson, at the meeting of the day before, “had tacitly confirmed” Stanton’s order to Townsend to hold the keys subject only to a presidential order. Thomas proposed that he would write out the order himself as War Secretary ad interim, but Townsend insisted that it come directly from the President. Rebuffed, poor Thomas went on to the White House to learn that Johnson “would not touch the thing.”
It was an amusing situation. As one of General Sherman’s friends set the tone of reaction: “Townsend held the Keys, & no one dared to approach it—not even the ‘ad interim’!” But the President was not amused. Once again he did not know whom to appoint to this touchy office. Obviously Thomas was a useless liability, and without forewarning that hapless officer, Johnson sought to supersede him.
On May 27 he named Seward to hold the war portfolio on an interim basis, in addition to his diplomatic chores, “according to law.” After writing out this commission, Seward joked to the President: “Now, if they choose, they can find out to what law we refer.” Then caution moved Seward to check first with Senator Conkling “and see what he will have to say about it. No mischief can go on without him.” Conkling warned Seward not to play games with Congress. Tempers were high and Seward was no more acceptable for the war office than Thomas.18
If it had slipped through, the “interim” appointment of Seward undoubtedly would have lasted the remaining nine months of Johnson’s term. At the least the President would have won a symbolic victory in replacing Stanton with a man much closer to the White House’s views on the South. He would also have chanced new clashes with Grant, now wearing the added prestige of being a presidential nominee, on reconstruction matters. Almost certainly Republican congressmen would have been exacerbated once again, for Seward was anathema to a large portion of that party’s membership. The Seward plan was thoughtlessly dangerous. It was to his credit that he, not Johnson, sought out a realization of the potentialities and withdrew his name.
Some appointment, however, had to be made, for in the absence of a Secretary the War Department machinery was grinding to a halt. Since Stanton’s unceremonious departure from the office, Townsend, refusing to do anything that might be misconstrued as an assumption of top-level duties, had even ordered incoming mail addressed to the Secretary to remain unopened. The President, informed of this by Townsend, admitted that “there might be some business that ought to be transacted,” commended him for refusing to turn over the keys to “Ad Interim” Thomas, and asked him to retain charge of the Department for the present. Johnson was still expecting the Seward scheme to succeed. But it fell through even while he was speaking so confidently to Townsend.
For once, however, the three major actors in this complex drama worked toward the same end. The President dropped the dangerous idea of pushing Seward and decided to accept Schofield; his nomination had been in suspense before the Senate since April 23. Grant convinced doubtful legislators that he could control Schofield, and from the seclusion of his home Stanton let it be known that he was in favor of that officer “to succeed” to his place.
On May 30, after a daylong session of heated, partisan debate, the Senate confirmed Schofield as War Secretary in a curious manner. The resolution stated that Stanton had not been legally removed from his office, “but inasmuch as … Stanton has relinquished his place as Secretary of War,” the Senate accepted Schofield. The word “relinquished”—a carefully chosen, lawyerlike phrase—had angered the President when Stanton used it in his letter resigning the war portfolio. It now provided the Senate with a way to get off the hook, for Congress had impeached and almost convicted Johnson for violating a law designed to prevent the President from removing Stanton, and now, by approving Schofield, the Senate was acquiescing in Johnson’s choice of his successor.19
Thus the President and Welles felt that even in retreat Stanton had scored a point on them. “He goes out without respect,” Welles believed, “except on the part of ignorant and knavish partisans.” But a few days later the Senate passed a resolution, in which the House subsequently concurred by a vote of 102 to 25, praising Stanton’s wartime services and postwar efforts to enforce the laws “provided by Congress for the restoration of a real and permanent peace.”
Despite these gripings the President was happy to have won the war office fortress. On June 1 he and Schofield walked there together from the White House. Townsend gave the new Secretary the coveted key to the rooms Stanton had labored in for six years. As Johnson entered the Secretary’s office, he laughed aloud, and turning to Townsend, remarked: “It is some time since I was in this room before!”
It was a Pyrrhic victory. Johnson won only a shell, a powerless symbol. For the brief months remaining to him in the White House he would not interfere again in army policies or with army personnel. Grant would remain effectively in charge of the execution of the reconstruction laws, and he ran the Army almost as if the White House did not exist. President and commanding general were now admittedly personal enemies; Grant despised everyone in the cabinet, kept his official communications with them to an absolute minimum, and cut himself off from all social intercourse with the White House and the cabinet, except for Seward. Schofield performed in the tradition of prewar Secretaries: as a glorified clerk transmitting papers from army headquarters to the White House and back again. By the end of 1868, the centrifugal tendencies inherent in the Army’s administrative structure became evident when the bureau heads published their annual reports without even referring them to the Secretary of War’s office.20
This inefficient equilibrium between White House, Congress, and war office did maintain peace until Grant took over the presidency. It was precisely such a caretaker stability that he and Stanton had sought since mid-1866 and that Johnson had refused to accept until impeachment frightened him off from his quest for domination. Considering the corrosive effects of the war years, it is doubtful whether the country could have survived much more strain had not some compromise, however acrimonious, been achieved. Impeachment not only climaxed and decided the dangerous debate concerning reconstruction policy. It also subdued the President, so that stability of a sort became possible. In losing his office, Stanton had helped the nat
ion win the larger game.
Johnson, mistaking the Senate’s narrow verdict as being heavily in his favor, never realized that it signified a defeat, however temporary, for his cherished principles of white supremacy and state autonomy regarding the suffrage. He always insisted that he had been the victim of a conspiracy by which Stanton and Grant, in company with the Republican congressmen, had upset the unchangeable constitutional fabric woven by the Founding Fathers. The President could not conceive that his rigid constitutionalism had set up such strains in the fabric of the dynamic federal system that the intrusion of Congress had been necessary to prevent a rupture.21
There had been no conspiracy. But Johnson’s insistence on the existence of a plot has helped to set the character of Stanton in history.
“Stanton’s reputation rests a good deal on his quarrel with President Johnson, and in this his character is treated unfairly,” Grant confided years later to his friend Young. “Stanton’s relations with Johnson were the natural result of Johnson’s desire to change the politics of his administration and Stanton’s belief that such a change would be disastrous to the Union.… Of course a man of Stanton’s temper, so believing, would be in a condition of passionate anger. He believed that Johnson was Jeff Davis in another form and he used his position in the Cabinet like a picket holding his position in the line.” The general did not see fit to expose the fact that he had secretly used his position as head of the Army for the same purpose and because of similar convictions.
Grant’s analysis is convincing. It seems clear that from his nightmare memory of the assassination night, Stanton drew the conclusion that the South as a region was irrevocably tarred by the deed. What followed, however, was not an unbalanced search for vengeance, but rather a dedicated insistence that a reconstruction bring forth the results for which Lincoln and thousands of blue-clad martyrs had died. Stanton could never forget “the starvation of 100,000 men at Andersonville under the orders of Jeff Davis,” said General Meigs, who knew the Secretary well.
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