Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  By October 9 he was in Cleveland, where the Republican newspaper, the Leader, reported that the city was jammed with spectators. After a flag-waving speech by Rutherford B. Hayes, Stanton castigated all Democrats for their party’s “evils and cruelties.” He brought the crowd to its feet when he asked the presiding officer to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, and then concluded by saying that Grant would harmonize the dead President’s merciful plea with the need for intelligent sternness toward the South.

  It was an immensely effective performance. Although Stanton had not played the role of campaigner before, he was proving himself a sensitive, powerful public speaker, and the Leader extolled the speech as the best one made in the whole Ohio campaign.8

  Backtracking through Steubenville, Stanton spoke of the 1864 election night, when Lincoln had expressed gratification that “Stanton’s town” had voted the Union ticket. On October 29 he was in Pittsburgh again, carefully scheduling his appearance there to follow speeches by Seymour. Then, weary almost to the point of collapse, he went on to Philadelphia, again trailing Seymour, where the Union League had reserved the Academy of Music. Later he wrote to Watson that the “Philadelphia reception would have been highly gratifying to a person who prizes such displays. The monster building … was jammed from roof to foundation by a throng of ladies and gentlemen and thousands were outside, waiting for an address to them.”

  Using a sketchy outline that he had prepared that morning, Stanton developed it on the platform into a defense of his administration of the War Department during the rebellion. It was the first time in the tour that he had troubled to answer the attacks on himself which the Democratic press, responding to the threatening popularity of his speeches, had been launching. Stanton cleverly linked Seymour with the draft riots and defeatism of the 1864 period.

  While Stanton spoke, a doctor was seated next to him holding a watch, for the physician had forbidden him to speak at all unless he promised to end within twenty minutes. Publisher McClure visited Stanton at his hotel room immediately after the speech and “found him very feeble, suffering very greatly from asthmatic disorders, and in his public address he was often strangely forgetful of facts and names, and had to be prompted by gentlemen on the stage.”9 Stanton had indeed reached the end of his strength, and in the first week of November returned to Washington, as he later admitted to Watson, “in a state of great exhaustion from the fatigue and excitement.”

  Stanton’s exertions had sorely taxed his slim store of health, but they had also been therapeutic. He snapped out of the lethargy that had marked his behavior during the past summer and autumn, now took the keenest interest in following the campaign in the newspapers, and was exultant at the Republican victory, boasting to Watson of “an increased [Republican] vote of 5,000 … [in Philadelphia] and nearly 9,000 in Pittsburgh [which] shows that the throttling of Seymour did not prejudice our cause, and he was pretty thoroughly skinned from snout to tail.” Welles, characteristically, felt that Stanton had not had influence enough to gain a vote for anyone. The fact remains, however, that Stanton was eagerly sought after as a speaker, and that he had discerned the immensely useful path of attack on Seymour—stressing Grant as a war hero rather than arguing the postwar cabinet controversies which the Democrats sought to exhume, and injecting the war-debt-repudiation and paper-money issues into the Republican campaign for the first time. Stanton felt that he had contributed something useful. This conviction of rectitude was always necessary for his happiness.

  Ellen’s health, as well as his own, concerned him. She was still suffering intensely from the dental disorder that had plagued her since the summer. Together they went to Baltimore and sought aid from highly recommended specialists there, but his condition worried his friends more than Ellen’s annoying but obviously superficial ailment. Congressman Hooper visited the Stantons in mid-November and reported to Sumner that he “is not well, and does not go out. He seems to think Wendell Phillips is the only true man we have in New England.”

  Hooper realized that Stanton was disgruntled because Grant had not visited his home except for one time when he had been too ill to receive callers; he and the President-elect had held only a brief conversation the day after the elections, when they chanced to meet on the street. But politics could hold only a back place now in Stanton’s thoughts; his health, money problems, and the preparation of law cases took precedence. It was sure, Hooper reported on December 1, that “he has not improved in health since I saw him.”10

  Ignoring his unceasing illness, Stanton was preparing to plead a case which necessitated hard work and travel, assiduous research, and imaginative argumentation. It involved disputed land titles to more than two million dollars’ worth of coal and timber lands in West Virginia. The records were confused and deficient owing to the ravages of war and the dislocations involved in the creation of the new state. Ironically, one of Stanton’s clients was R. M. T. Hunter, of Virginia, a prominent officeholder in the Confederate government. Like any private lawyer, Stanton was apolitical where a case was concerned; his antipathy toward former rebels could not interfere with his profession.

  Asserting to Watson that he was feeling “as strong and vigorous as at any time within two years,” Stanton pleaded the case, with Eddie serving as companion and assistant, at the Wheeling federal court, and claimed that he “never made an argument with more ease and effect and success.” But men who heard him at Wheeling had reactions different from his own. The judge on the case recorded that he had expected to see “an immense, burly, rough, and resistless man, full of health and power and ready for any emergency. Instead of my ideal, there came in, walking slowly and wearily, a feeble and exhausted invalid, whose death-like pallor shocked all beholders. His argument was delivered in low conversational style, but with wonderful clearness, directness, and completeness.” Some men there thought he would die before leaving Wheeling. One visitor had the tactless temerity to tell him that he was “failing.” “Do you think so?” was Stanton’s only response.

  The journey home further weakened him. Stanton admitted to Watson that he sickened whenever he crossed the high Alleghenies, and this time “special circumstances contributed … so that I have been without voice from sore throat and without breath from spasms of asthma.” Despite his condition, Stanton appeared at the United States Supreme Court on December 12 to lodge an appeal from the adverse decision of the lower federal tribunal at Wheeling. Three days later he was so ill that the marshal of the court, with the special permission of Chase, delivered new papers in the matter to him at his bedside. His legal acumen undiminished, Stanton was able to counter the opposition attorney’s move to dismiss the case with a request to remand it back to Wheeling for certification of the record.11

  With the Christmas season approaching, the Stantons prepared for their first family holiday together since 1861 with the father not in public office. Pamphila arrived in Washington for the seasonal celebration, but because she and Ellen did not get along well, she took rooms near by. On Christmas Eve, Stanton was too ill to come downstairs; so the family went to his bedside. In the early morning hours of Christmas Day, long after the children had retired, “Kris Kringle” dictated to Ellen a letter to them:

  I have just come from beyond the Rocky Mountains and arrived here at your home. I have a long journey yet to make before daylight, and many things to distribute among the good children between here and the Atlantic, so that I have time only to say a few words of love to you, and leave in your stockings, the gifts intended for you this Christmas.

  I am glad to see that you are all growing finely, and during the past year have been good children.

  Ellie, I am afraid, is growing too fast for me to make her any more visits, unless she turns out to be an uncommon good girl. She must learn to govern her temper and be patient to her brother and her little sister, and if she is so, I shall always be glad to stop and make her a Christmas visit.

  Lewis has been a very good boy and minds his mother v
ery well. I hope he will continue to do so, and that when I come again, he will have learned to read very well.

  Bessie has generally been as good as any little girl that I have seen on my journey, but she cries too much when she gets angry; if she quits that, she will be a great favorite of mine.

  And now, my dear children, it is time for me to be going. I give you all a kiss, wish you a Merry Christmas, and hope to see you all well and that you have been good during the year, when I make my next visit.

  Good Bye

  KRIS KRINGLE

  Kris Kringle never returned to write another Christmas letter.12

  With the new year, Stanton took stock of his situation. His earlier estimate of his earning power had proved to be excessively optimistic, he now realized, in part because of the time and energy he had invested campaigning for Grant but mainly because of his uncertain physical condition. Casting about now for some sources of income with which to keep going until he was able fully to resume law practice, Stanton was forced to a personally distasteful step.

  Just before taking on the war office responsibility for Lincoln, Stanton had loaned Watson $30,000. Obviously detesting the necessity that forced him to the move, Stanton wrote Watson on January 10 stating that “my health continues to improve, and I am busy with the cases, but straitened for money. Can you do anything for me, or must I look elsewhere?” When Watson received Stanton’s letter he was in conference with railroad contractor Stillman Witt, of Cleveland, who had worked with him and Stanton during the war. Witt immediately wrote out a draft for $5,000 in Stanton’s favor.

  The sick man in Washington was astounded upon receiving this check, which Witt obviously intended as a gift. He gratefully acknowledged “the first and only practical appreciation, among many thousand verbal and sincere words of affectionate respect that I have received.” He admitted that he could not resume law practice without a few months’ rest and that money must be obtained to finance this respite, but he accepted the money only on condition that Witt sent it as a loan for one year, with 10 per cent interest to him.13

  Just at this time the rumor was abroad in Washington that Grant had slated Stanton for a cabinet post. Democratic spokesmen, still sour over the impeachment and the election results, launched a counterattack on Stanton by asserting that in 1863 he had been so impatient with Grant’s slowness in capturing Vicksburg that he had ordered Banks to succeed him in command. For once Stanton retorted publicly, and asserted that he had never thought Banks fit for any military command, much less over Grant.

  So far as Grant’s cabinet choices were concerned, Stanton insisted to Congressman Shellabarger, of Ohio, a frequent visitor, and to others, that he would never go into Grant’s cabinet even if invited; “says he has not a great while to live & must devote that to his family—spoke of the cuffs and knocks he had recd in official life as … a great boon,” Shellabarger wrote, the memories of which “he could not now afford to part with.”14

  Stanton was sincere concerning his lack of interest in a cabinet post, but in romanticizing the benign memories he retained of his public career, he was trying to cloak his deep disappointment over the fact that Grant was still ignoring him almost entirely. Ellen realized how utterly despondent her husband was when he sent for Reverend William Sparrow, who had taught Stanton at Kenyon and now led a congregation at nearby Alexandria, to baptize him into the Episcopal Church, and brought Surgeon General Barnes to his bedside to confer concerning a burial plot. She desperately sought to lift his failing spirits, and held a series of small dinners and receptions at the Stanton home, inviting persons of status such as Justice Swayne, in order to impress her husband with the continued high regard in which he was held by the social leaders of the capital. For whatever reason, his condition improved.

  Against the advice of Barnes, who was treating Stanton as a private patient, Ellen permitted her husband an unlimited number of visitors, and the result was beneficent. The man required activity and stimulation. His inner resources were too few to sustain loneliness. A lifetime of ceaseless expenditure of energy in work and in public office could not so quickly come to a halt. Since his youth he had rushed through life in a tireless search for wealth, success at the bar, and concrete results as a public official. Now he could not rest though he knew that his life literally depended on it.

  During the last weeks of 1868, news of election riots, lynchings, and murders in the South filled the newspapers. Stanton’s reaction was to nurture his distrust of Grant. He was again uneasy concerning the President-elect’s views toward the Negro; unsure of his willingness to suppress the upsurging Klan organization and to check the increase of Democratic strength in a Dixie that would not admit that its cause was lost.

  “I am sorry to know that Stanton has not seen Grant since the election,” Sumner noted to the poet Whittier late in February 1869; the senator marveled that Stanton still asserted confidence in Grant’s plans for economy in government, “but nothing about the rights of man to be maintained in all their fullness.” With Sumner, Stanton hoped for the best, and his son Eddie echoed these mixed feelings: “Events here seem to be in a transition stage,” he advised Rutherford Hayes. “No one seems to know what will be the definite form of the outcome, but Republicans are confident of the future.”15 Not all Republicans; not his father.

  1 Intelligencer, May 27, June 30, 1868; William Salter, The Life of James W. Grimes (New York, 1876), 361; Fessenden, op. cit., II, 221.

  2 Johnson, “Reminiscences of Hon. Edwin M. Stanton,” loc. cit., 87; Ellen to Bessie Stanton, Sept. 13, 1868, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen; Flower, Stanton, 344, 350; Stanton to Young, June 24, 1868, Stanton MSS.

  3 Ellen to “My dear little Daughters,” Sept. 13, 1868, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen; Pierrepont to Stanton, June 24, July 12, and Chandler to same, July 8, 1868, Stanton MSS; Flower, Stanton, 394.

  4 Schenck to Stanton, Aug. 27, 1868, Stanton MSS; W. H. Hudson to Sickles, Sept. 16, 1868, Sickles Papers, LC; Stanton to Young, Sept. 19, 1868, Young Papers, LC; Stanton to Ellie Stanton, Sept. 19, 1868, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen.

  5 E. L. Stanton to Schofield, Sept. 26, 1868, WD, Letters Received, XCIII, S358, RG 107, NA; Stanton to Ellen, Sept. 27, 1868, owned by Edward S. Corwin; A. D. Sharon in Washington Evening Star, March 16, 1900; Dr. Alexander M. Reid ms reminiscence, owned by Alexandra Sanford; Shotwell, op. cit., 100; Doyle, op. cit., 26.

  6 Speech in Doyle, op. cit., 304–7; other data in Flower, Stanton, 396; Nation (Oct. 1, 1868), 262; Stanton to Ellen, Sept. 27, 1868, owned by Edward S. Corwin. In 1872, Sumner asserted that on his deathbed Stanton told him that out of distrust for Grant he had never supported the general’s candidacy. Either Sumner was in error or Stanton’s mind was playing him false; probably the former, for Stanton was always proud of this Steubenville speech. See Pierce, Sumner, IV, 526; Everett Chamberlain, The Struggle of ’72 (Chicago, 1872), 555–6.

  7 On Sherman, T. Ewing, Sr., to Jr., Ewing Papers, LC; Stanton to Chandler, Oct. 1, 1868, Chandler Papers, LC; Conkling’s letter, in Gorham, Stanton, II, 468, was probably inspired by Pierrepont; see Morse, Welles Diary, III, 452. On Grant and Republican candidates, D. A. Ward to Doolittle, July 14, 1872, Doolittle Papers, LC.

  8 Wolcott MS, 209; Bodine, op. cit., 286; Leader, Oct. 9, Nov. 12, 1868; Flower, Stanton, 396, confuses the Steubenville speech with this one in Cleveland.

  9 Doyle, op. cit., 308; Steubenville Daily Chronicle, Oct. 30, 1868, and Wolcott MS, 215, on details of second speech there. The Philadelphia speech and the letter to Watson are in Flower, Stanton, 396–9. The outlines of the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia speeches, in Stanton’s hand, in Stanton MSS, and see McClure, Lincoln, 172.

  10 Stanton to N. W. Brooks, Dec. 12, 1868, Chandler Papers, LC; Hooper to Sumner, Nov. 17, Dec. 1, 1868, Sumner Papers, HU; Pierce, Sumner, IV, 369; Flower, Stanton, 399; Morse, Welles Diary, III, 508.

  11 Flower, Stanton, 400; ms record of James Evans v. Samuel McClean, Jr., #5254, U. S. Supreme Court. Stanton subsequen
tly secured a favorable verdict from the Wheeling court.

  12 Kris Kringle letter, with Ellen’s notation that Edwin dictated it, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen; Pamphila to Holt, ca. Dec. 24, 1868, Holt Papers, LC.

  13 Ellen to Andrew Wylie, April 9, 1870, on Watson’s debt, and note of indebtedness to Witt, Feb. 1, 1869, in Stanton’s hand, owned by Craig Wylie; Stanton to Witt, Jan. 29, 1868, Stanton MSS, which is more complete than the version in Jones, op. cit., 140–1.

  14 To Watson, Flower, Stanton, 401; to Witt, Jan. 29, 1869, Stanton MSS; Shellabarger to James Comly, Feb. 20, 1868, Comly Collection, OHS.

  15 Swayne to Ellen, Jan. 22, 1869, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen; Edward S. Jerome, Edwin M. Stanton, the Great War Secretary (n.p., n.d.), 14; Flower, Stanton, 402; Pierce, Sumner, IV, 369; Eddie to Hayes, Jan. 8, 1869, HML.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  THE OBSEQUIES HAVE BEEN ENLARGED

  AS THE milder mood of spring replaced the dour gray of the winter months, there was improvement in Stanton’s health. He still felt it necessary to decline to serve as leading orator at a forthcoming Gettysburg memorial meeting, but he was pleased that he had been invited before Colfax, the Vice-President-elect. He summoned enough energy to appear before a congressional committee inquiring into wartime ordnance practices; out of this inquiry there emerged plentiful evidence from other witnesses that Stanton had wrought miracles of co-operation from manufacturers and given the Union troopers a flow of weapons greater than any army in the history of the world had known.

  His obvious improvement in health and reappearance in public revived rumors that Stanton was due for recognition from Grant, now in the White House. Stanton had outspokenly criticized the trend of negotiations with England concerning American claims for damages done to Union shipping during the war by raiders built in British yards. Republican leaders saw this approach as an opportunity to sway Anglophobe Irish Americans away from their traditionally Democratic party allegiance, and began to tout Stanton as Grant’s logical choice for the significant English mission.