Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  Over the country, the reports of Stanton’s nomination received mixed reactions. Pierrepont was naturally enthusiastic, and he makes it clear that Grant had not appointed Stanton merely as a gracious gesture to a dying man, in the expectation that Stanton would probably never take his seat on the Court. In Pierrepont’s view, and he was close to the White House, Grant planned for Stanton to become Chief Justice if Chase later stepped down to run in 1872 for the presidency as a Democrat.

  Another indication of the seriousness of the nomination is evident from the cases the Court had at hand for decisions. The first major question Stanton would face on the bench involved the legitimacy of the government’s wartime paper-money issues; indeed, Grier’s instability on this matter was part of the reason for the pressure for his resignation. In view of the fact that Stanton had taken a cabinet post under Lincoln as a means of halting the government’s descent to bankruptcy, and that his view on the nation’s power to protect itself from rebellion was of the most expansive kind, his position on the money-issue question would undoubtedly be to sustain the greenbacks as legal tender, and this was one reason why Grant chose him. At least this was Lieber’s view as expressed to Sumner; Lieber had agreed with Stanton in every instance where the lives of the two men had crossed, and Sumner was now Stanton’s closest friend. Probably Stanton had expressed this opinion to his intimates.

  Agreeing with the sense of Lieber’s conviction that Stanton was “a potent element” as a jurist, Justice Joseph Bradley recalled that his new colleague had been an outstanding private lawyer, Buchanan’s Attorney General, and “the great War Secretary.” Stanton, Bradley believed, “with the exception of Grant and Seward and Sumner and Chase,… was undoubtedly the most conspicuous figure in American public life.”

  Chase himself expected Stanton to be “a great and honest Judge,” capable of strengthening the Court in every way. It seems sure that Grant’s naming of Stanton to the high bench was the result of the widespread conviction that he was the best man for the place, as well as a gracious though belated acknowledgment of his services and abilities. Certainly it was not a mere gesture.12

  Across town on Capitol Hill, congressmen approved the nomination without the usual committee referrals. A steady stream of callers left cards of congratulation at the Stanton home: old friends Joseph Holt, General “Ed” Townsend, ordnance chief A. B. Dyer, and Senator Edmunds; his new colleagues Justices Swayne and Field; and several of Grant’s cabinet. On the twenty-first, after his doctor had firmly refused to permit him to go personally to the White House to thank Grant, Stanton penned a note of acceptance to the President whose key phrase was: “It is the only public office I ever desired and I accept it with great pleasure.” Stanton expressed his gratification at receiving the appointment from Grant, “with whom for several years I have had personal and official relations, such as seldom exist among men.”

  Her husband was happier now than Ellen remembered having seen him in years. She took his note to the White House and then stopped at a bookseller to buy Christmas gifts. Bessie was to get Baby’s Christmas and Eleanor would enjoy Our Dumb Companions, while for her husband, Ellen purchased a lined memorandum pad in leather covers for him to use for taking notes while hearing cases. A new life was to begin for the Stanton family; ease, dignity, security, were to be theirs at last.13

  But when Ellen returned home she found Edwin complaining of weakness induced by severe coughing. No one was alarmed, for his discomfort had become part of living for them. Next day, Stanton was too weak to write out a note of thanks to a congratulatory telegram he had received and General Thomas Vincent, who was calling on him that morning, had to act as amanuensis. As the afternoon hours passed, his coughing increased in violence, wracking the man’s frame almost without cessation. His mother and sister, in Washington to celebrate the Christmas holiday and the Court appointment, were called from their nearby lodgings and sat in the parlor, while upstairs a group of doctors sought to alleviate his suffering. Midnight came. Barnes sent for the minister of the nearby Church of the Epiphany, but before the clergyman arrived, Stanton became unconscious.

  Ellen, seated next to the bed, watched her husband. The children—tall, mature young Edwin, adolescent Eleanor, whose sophisticated poses now dissolved in tears, nine-year-old Lewis, and untamable little Bessie—huddled on a bench in a corner of the room. Then, at three in the morning, their father died.

  Christmas Day passed in preparations for the funeral. Ellen arranged for interment in the Georgetown cemetery where their infant son lay buried. Next day Stanton’s body was placed in a casket in the upstairs sitting room.

  Ellen was close to breaking. She derived some comfort from a letter which young Edwin read to her, and which both of them came to treasure. It was from Robert Lincoln, who wrote: “I know that it is useless to say anything … and yet when I recall the kindness of your father to me, when my father was lying dead and I felt utterly desperate, hardly able to realize the truth, I am as little able to keep my eyes from filling with tears as he was then.”14

  Seeking a last remnant of privacy for a life that for too long had been exposed to public contention, Ellen closed the house before the funeral to all save the family and a handful of intimate friends. Her secretiveness gave credence to rumors circulating almost immediately that Stanton had committed suicide out of remorse for Mrs. Surratt, cutting his own throat as his brother Darwin had done, and that Ellen had sealed the coffin to prevent observation of the wound. These rumors were uncritically accepted by men who hated Stanton, and are still offered as the truth in some accounts of Stanton’s life.

  But the evidence is absolutely convincing that his death was caused by his asthmatic ailment. Stanton’s heart could no longer sustain the strain of a ravaged respiratory system and the effects of years of overwork and worry. Those who were with him only a few hours before the final collapse began saw a happy, confident man in full possession of his mental faculties and expressing thoughts in which the grim specter of self-guilt had no place. On the evening before he died he momentarily roused from his coma and asked when the next Supreme Court session was scheduled so that he could prepare in time. “No one,” Hooper recalled, “entertained any serious apprehension of any immediate danger.” Life, not death, was on Edwin Stanton’s mind.15

  For the last time Stanton traveled the familiar route from K Street to Georgetown that he and Lincoln had taken together so many times. Now he rested on a somber artillery caisson, and proceeded at the slow pace set by soldiers who, with rifles reversed in the heraldic symbolism of grief, flanked the conveyance. More than one hundred carriages followed in a line so long that sight of the rearmost vehicles was lost in the steady rain that fell all day. His family, high officials of the national government, representatives from the states and from foreign nations, military and naval officers, and delegates from veterans’ and Negro welfare organizations were at hand to see Stanton buried. Onlookers crowded the streets as the procession made its slow way through the capital, for Grant had ordered the public offices closed and public buildings draped in the raiments of sorrow. Flags flew half-staffed in Washington, New York, Pittsburgh, and Columbus. At the President’s command, salute guns were firing at every army camp in the country, and the sound of these martial compliments echoed from military installations near the path of the funeral procession. In the overwhelming monochrome of mourning created by the sad purpose of that wintry day, only the floral tributes on a carriage behind the hearse provided a flash of color.

  Other important men had died recently—General Rawlins, Henry J. Raymond, William Pitt Fessenden, and Edward Bates, who, like Stanton, had served in Lincoln’s cabinet. But the unexpectedness of Stanton’s death at a moment of triumph for the man inspired spectators and commentators with a feeling of shocked disbelief and a consciousness of analogy to Lincoln’s fate, and years later Grant was to say that Stanton “was as much a martyr to the Union as [Generals] Sedgwick or McPherson.”

  This was
the funeral of an important man, and the presence of the President and Vice-President, of Supreme Court jurists and senators and representatives, lent the highest tone of official participation. Beyond this, however, the outpouring of eulogies from Congress, courts, state legislatures, and pulpits, bore witness that death had claimed a part of the history of the nation. Those who bore Stanton’s coffin to the grave—Generals Barnes and Townsend, Justice Swayne and Judge Cartter, Senators Sumner and Carpenter, Secretary of War Belknap, and Postmaster General Creswell—had worked with him during a decade of drastic changes, uncertain politics, and frightening dangers. A link to all this was gone.

  Grant had wanted a full state ceremony with the body on display in the Capitol Rotunda, but Ellen had insisted on as much simplicity as possible. Now she rode with Eckert and Dana; Hooper, who had quietly made all the funeral arrangements, escorted and comforted the younger Stanton children and the dead man’s mother and sister. Vice-President and Mrs. Colfax and Mrs. Grant shared a carriage with Edwin Lamson Stanton, whose grief was mixed with worry over the future of the family for which he was now responsible.

  At the grave site Reverend Sparrow conducted a brief service, thinking the while of the youth he had taught years before at Kenyon. The soldiers fired three volleys in final salute, and it was finished.16

  1 Testimony, March 16, April 22, 1869, Dyer Court of Inquiry, II, 127, 140, RG 153, NA; Hooper to Sumner, Nov. 17, 1868, June 13, 1869, HU; Stanton to Hamilton Fish, April 15, 1869, Fish Papers, LC.

  2 To Watson, Flower, Stanton, 403; to D. P. Brown, July 6, and Pierrepont to Stanton, June 23, 1869, Stanton MSS; E. L. Stanton to Creswell, June 16, 1869, owned by Ralph Newman.

  3 Smithson v. Stanton, Records of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, RG 21, NA; Stanton to Bayne, May 17, June 26, 1869, Stanton MSS; Flower, Stanton, 403.

  4 Wolcott MS, 220–1, to Stanton’s mother; Sherman to Stanton, July 28, 1869, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton (misdated 1867 in LC copy); Stanton to Black, July 17, 1869 (misfiled under 1857), Black Papers, LC.

  5 Stanton to Ellen, July 8, ca. July 16, and to Hooper, Aug. 3, 1869, owned by Edward S. Corwin; Mary Bailey to Ellen, Dec. 28, 1869, Stanton MSS; Ellen to “My dear children,” Sept. 10, 1869, owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen. Flower, Stanton, 403, is incorrect on the itinerary of the trip.

  6 Ms memo by Ropes, Feb. 1870, of the Sept. 1869 conversation, Woodman Papers, MHS; Conkling to Stanton, Sept. 6, 1869, Stanton MSS; Wolcott MS, 222, to his mother; Flower, Stanton, 403.

  7 Hooper to Sumner, Sept. 22, 24, 27–9, Oct. 2, 1869, Sumner Papers, HU; Stanton to Bayne, Nov. 27, 1869, Stanton MSS; medical and tuition bills owned by Craig Wylie.

  8 Stanton to Conkling, Nov. 4, 1869, Conkling Papers, LC; George Innis to Edwin L. Stanton, Nov. 2, Stanton to Bayne, Nov. 27, and Watson to Stanton, Dec. 22, 1869, Stanton MSS; same to Gail Sanford, Nov. 7, 1869, owned by the estate of Foreman M. Lebold; Flower, Stanton, 403–4; notes of indebtedness Dec. 1, 1869, owned by Craig Wylie.

  9 Anderson to Stanton, Dec. 9, 1869, Stanton MSS; Stanton to Simpson, Oct. 26, Nov. 3, 1869, LNLF. Substantiation of Childs’s role as a consistent enemy to Stanton is in Lieber to “My Dear Sir” (probably Benson J. Lossing), Dec. 25, 1865, Lieber Papers, LC.

  10 Pierrepont to Hamilton Fish, Nov. 18, 1869, Fish Papers, LC; same to Stanton, Nov. 21, 1869, Stanton MSS; Detroit Post, Chandler, 299–300; Colman, op. cit., 54; Pierce, Sumner, IV, 526.

  11 World, Dec. 14, 1869; Tribune, Dec. 25, 1869; Flower, Stanton, 405–6; Gorham, Stanton, II, 471–4; Grant’s card owned by Mrs. Van Swearingen.

  12 Pierrepont to Stanton, Dec. 20, 21, 1869, Stanton MSS; Lieber to H. Woodman, Jan. 6, 1870, Woodman Papers, MHS; to Sumner, Feb. 9, 1870, Lieber Papers, HL; Charles Bradley (ed.), Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Hon. Joseph P. Bradley (Newark, 1901), 57; Chase to Schuckers, Dec. 27, 1869 (misfiled in 1867), Chase Papers, 2d ser., LC.

  13 Contrary to the statement in Flower, Stanton, 406, Stanton did not take the note to Grant and thereby contract the cold that killed him. Calling cards in Stanton MSS; letter of acceptance in Stanton’s hand is owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton, from which the printed texts vary in minor ways; on Ellen, see Dec. 22, 1869, memorandum of purchases, owned by Craig Wylie.

  14 R. Lincoln to E. L. Stanton, Dec. 24, 1869, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton; death scene in correspondence between A. Wylie, Ellen, and Pamphila, owned by Craig Wylie.

  15 Vincent, Abraham Lincoln and Edwin M. Stanton (Washington, 1890), 20, and Townsend, Anecdotes, 140–2, on refutation of suicide. The best account of Stanton’s death is in a ms reminiscence by A. E. H. Johnson, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton. On suicide rumors, see Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, 289–90; ms reminiscence by Col. W. M. Nixon in George Fort Milton Papers, LC; Poore, Trial, II, 301–5; and Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction (New York, 1879), 294; Hooper to Woodman, Dec. 25, 1869, Woodman Papers, MHS.

  16 Funeral descriptions in New York Times, Dec. 27; Tribune, Dec. 29, 1869; Nation (Jan. 6, 1870), 1; and see Young, Around the World, II, 358–9. Stanton’s family was soon faced with actual want, despite the $11,950 insurance, which was spent repaying debts; see Probate File #6255, Old Series, RG 21, NA. Congress thereafter voted Ellen a year’s salary of a Justice, perhaps, as James Parton asserts in Topics of the Times (Boston, 1871), 9, because the country felt guilty at having worked Stanton to death. John Tappan, Woodman, and Hooper arranged a private subscription—not a public one at Pierrepont’s instigation, as stated in ANJ (Jan. 1, 1870), 310–11—which realized $111,466.44—not $140,000, as Chandler states in Detroit Post, Chandler, 33, or $175,000, the amount accepted in Gorham, Stanton, II, 469. The correctives are in Lewis Stanton’s memo on the fund raised in his father’s memory, owned by Gideon Townsend Stanton, and exchanges in Woodman Papers, Dec. 1869-Jan. 1870, MHS. Ellen gallantly carried out her husband’s lifetime program of making his mother and sisters financially secure, but the Stanton women, and the estate’s executors, Wylie and Townsend, did not get along, and increasing acrimony marked their relationships. Stanton’s family began the process of dissolution which is so common when the strong element that held it together departs. See the exchanges between Wylie, Townsend, Pamphila Wolcott, and Ellen Stanton, owned by Craig Wylie.

  EPILOGUE

  A NOTE

  ON THE HISTORY OF STANTON BIOGRAPHIES

  STANTON’S death, far from quieting his enemies, gave them new voice. They became bitter at the praises lavished on the man in eulogies across the country, and determined, as a friend of Jeremiah Black’s stated it, that “the bones of Stanton should rattle in their grave.” Manton Marble set the theme in a New York World obituary on Stanton: “All men die and death does not change faults into virtues.”

  Black took on the role of architect of an anti-Stanton tradition. Within weeks after Stanton’s burial, he published a series of articles which questioned his former friend’s veracity, integrity, and consistency. These articles, wrote Ward Hill Lamon, were “such a portrayal of vice, corruption, and sycophancy, that it sickens the heart to contemplate the state of morals in high places.”1

  The abuse being heaped on the memory of his father sickened the heart of Edwin Lamson Stanton. This brilliant young man was emulating his father in his swift advancement in the law. Grant favored him with a federal attorney’s commission, and by the early 1870’s he numbered even Andrew Johnson and Montgomery Blair among his private clients. Knowing the truth of his father’s relations with Black, and wanting to correct the errors that General Sherman broadcast in his published memoirs, young Stanton decided to write a life of his father.

  But like his famous parent, Stanton’s son devoted himself to material advancement ahead of almost any other consideration. Although he collected as many of his father’s papers as he could in preparation for advancing a biography, business cares kept intruding. The book never materialized, and less than a decade after Edwin McMasters Stanton died, his promising oldest son followed him
to the grave.2

  The documents that he had laboriously assembled were scattered anew. Descendants of the Lamson branch of the family kept a portion. Some went to Lewis Hutchison Stanton, the younger son, and after much acrimony, a group came into Pamphila’s possession. As the years passed, and the chorus of criticism of her late brother increased in volume and intensity, Pamphila tried unsuccessfully to reassemble all the dispersed papers so that she could commission a biography. She then decided to go ahead on her own and prepared a “sketch” of his life, but found that “a strange fatality” attended her efforts to gain publication for the composition. Pamphila supposed that Stanton relatives, unwilling to contribute to the endless debate over his controversial career, exerted influence to prevent its appearance in print. According to a third-generation Stanton descendant, Willis Weaver, the family’s feelings did run “pretty high” concerning Pamphila’s memoir. It remained unpublished.3

  Meanwhile Lewis Stanton had commissioned his father’s friend George C. Gorham, former Secretary of the U. S. Senate, to write a biography. An intimate of the Stanton family, G. A. Mendall, confided to Frank A. Flower, a young Wisconsinite who was also interested in preparing a life of Stanton, that “Gorham is a pungent, bitter writer.… [There will be] a good deal more Gorham than Stanton in it.” And so it proved to be. When the two-volume Gorham book appeared in 1899, it fell far short of the hopes of the Stanton family and admirers, though it was a totally favorable view of its subject. In a review, George W. Julian unhappily admitted that “this is not the final Life of Edwin M. Stanton,” and concluded that Gorham had prepared “a healthy and inspiring story” for young people. Gorham’s Stanton remains, however, an indispensable source collection, for the author never returned to the Hutchison branch of the Stanton family the large number of manuscripts he had received from them to aid him in his task, some of which appear in the book.