Stanton
Page 87
In 1905, using materials supplied by the Lamson members of the family, Flower published a Stanton biography. Stanton’s cousin, the wartime Ohio legislator Benjamin Stanton, after reading some of Flower’s manuscript, was sure that “you hit the character of Stanton exactly.” But Flower was no more capable than Gorham of delineating character or of constructively balancing conflicting pieces of evidence. He was a warm admirer of the War Secretary, and his book is as one sided a defense of its subject as its predecessor. Also, like Gorham, Flower failed to return to the Stanton family the papers he had received from them.
Six years later, the diary of Gideon Welles went into print. Its caustic assertions concerning Stanton’s role in public affairs and his alleged inadequacies in matters of character made an immediate and lasting impression. Jesse Weik admitted that it had “completely upset my notion of Seward, Stanton, and Grant. I have always been such an admirer of all three that I sometimes regret that I ever read Mr. Welles’ estimate. But the great thing is his vindication of Andrew Johnson.”4
The vindication of Johnson continued for the next forty years, almost without contradiction. Then, in 1953, Fletcher Pratt published his study of Stanton, which, although it corrected some tenacious misapprehensions, did not provide the needed full study of his life. There, until now, the Stanton story has rested.
1 World, Dec. 25, 1869; Lamon to Black, Jan. 31, and J. Harvey to same, Oct 2, 1870, Black Papers, LC.
2 E. L. Stanton to John Schuckers, July 13, 1874, Schuckers Papers, LC; to Whitelaw Reid, May 24, 1875, Reid Papers, LC.
3 Pamphila to J. A. Howells, March 28, 1897, Howells Papers, HML; Weaver to E. S. Corwin, Dec. 29, 1927, owned by Prof. Corwin.
4 B. J. Stanton to Flower, Nov. 29, 1887, and Mendall to same, Feb. 23, 1888, WSHS; Julian in Dial, XXVII, 48–52; Weik to Horace White, ca. Nov. 1911, copy owned by the estate of Benjamin P. Thomas.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS
BENJAMIN PLATT THOMAS is generally considered to have been one of our nation’s leading authorities on Lincoln. He was born in Pemberton, New Jersey, in 1902, and attended Johns Hopkins University, where he received his A.B. degree in 1924 and his Ph.D. in 1929. After teaching history for three years at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, he served as executive secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association from 1932 to 1936, was associate editor of the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly from 1940 to 1953, and, until his death in 1956, was a trustee of the Illinois Historical Library. Before doing his own biography of Lincoln, Thomas wrote five books, of which perhaps the most outstanding was Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers, published in 1947. He was also the author of Lincoln’s New Salem (1934), Lincoln, 1847–1853 (1936), and Theodore Weld, Crusader for Freedom (1950), and edited Three Years with Grant, recollections of war correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader (1955). Mr. Thomas had also been an editorial adviser for the Abraham Lincoln Association’s “Collected Works of Lincoln.”
HAROLD M. HYMAN was born in New York City in 1924. After taking his A.B. degree at the University of California at Los Angeles, he did graduate work at Columbia University, and his doctoral dissertation, Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests during the Civil War and Reconstruction, won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1952. He has taught at Earlham College in Indiana and at Arizona State University, and is presently an associate professor of history at U.C.L.A. In 1959 he received the Sidney Hillman Award for his To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History.
Mr. Hyman is married, and the father of two daughters and a son.
January 1962