The Impeachers Read online

  Of all people, though, President Lincoln might have understood best what motivated his secretary of war. For if Stanton had ever unburdened himself, it would have been to his chief executive. These two men—Lincoln, tall and lean and genial; Stanton, shorter, squatter, and far more volatile—were friends. Wrapped in a plaid shawl and with his hat pulled down over his forehead, during the war Lincoln would walk over to the War Department and sit in the small room next to Stanton’s office, where Lincoln kept a desk. He and Stanton waited, each of them anxious, for telegraph dispatches from the many fields of battle. Sometimes they relaxed together, occasionally driving north of the city to the leafy retreat known as the retired soldiers’ home, where the secretary of war, like Lincoln and his family, escaped from summer heat. These men truly loved each other, said Representative Henry Dawes, who knew them both.

  Edwin Stanton had also shared with Lincoln grief of a more personal sort. Like Lincoln’s boy Willie, Stanton’s young son had also died in 1862. But Stanton mainly sought relief in work, and unlike Lincoln, always appeared to be on guard, shouldering sorrows that acquaintances only sometimes glimpsed. After Stanton’s father, a well-liked physician, had died suddenly in 1827, the thirteen-year-old Stanton took charge of the Steubenville, Ohio, household that included his mother, his brother, and his two sisters. He completed only one year at Kenyon College but studied law in the office of his guardian, becoming the sort of brilliant attorney on whom nothing was lost—and who left nothing to chance. He prepared cases with a meticulous, even furious, attention to detail, and he argued with aggressive often insolent vigor. He might insult a witness or a judge, or tell the opposing counsel to quit whining. A stocky, broad-shouldered man with brown, sharp eyes under steel-rimmed spectacles that he often wiped, he was not an easy person to like, and there were a great many people who did, in fact, dislike him.

  As Henry Dawes would recall, Edwin Stanton was also “prone to despond.” When he was twenty-two, he married Mary Lamson, and after the burial of their firstborn daughter, Stanton disinterred the child and placed her remains in a metal box that he kept on the mantelpiece. When his wife died not long afterward—Stanton was thirty—he stopped eating and sleeping and in the night would rush from room to room, lamp in hand, crying out, “Where is Mary?” Not long after that, Stanton, learning that his brother Darwin had cut his own throat, ran to Darwin’s house, where blood was pooling on the floorboards. He then raced out into the freezing cold in such a hurry that friends, fearing for his life, coaxed him back and stayed with him until he calmed down. Stanton took responsibility for Darwin’s family but never seemed to recover. “I feel indifferent to the present, careless of the future—” he said, “in a state of bewilderment the end of which is hidden.”

  Yet Stanton’s law practice was thriving. He moved to Pittsburgh, where he argued on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania before the Supreme Court to prevent a bridge from being built across the Ohio River because, Stanton claimed, it would prevent tall steamboats from traveling under it and thereby restrict interstate commerce. The case dragged on for almost a decade, and though Stanton technically lost, steamboat travel continued. Then in 1856, Stanton married Ellen Hutchison, a woman from a wealthy Pittsburgh family and Stanton’s junior by sixteen years. Though Lincoln’s secretary John Hay described her “as white and cold and motionless as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her,” the marriage seems to have been happy in spite of Stanton’s working long hours—and his even longer absences.

  Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black had appointed Stanton as special U.S. counsel to inspect alleged Mexican land grants in California. During his protracted stay in the West—almost a year—Stanton immediately learned Spanish to gather the documents scattered throughout the state, or that were allegedly lost, and he exposed several bogus land grant deals, one of which actually claimed ownership of San Francisco. In early 1859, he returned to Washington, where he had moved his family, and built an impressive brick house, three stories high, on the north side of K Street. He was a prosperous, sought-after man in a country about to break apart.

  He was also involved in legal spectacles, serving on the defense team for Daniel Sickles, the Democratic congressman from New York who had recently shot and killed District Attorney Philip Barton Key. There was no doubt as to Sickles’ guilt, but the trial was something of a circus, featuring two of Washington’s well-known political creatures, the flamboyant Sickles and the deceased Philip Key. Sickles had served as James Buchanan’s secretary when Buchanan was minister to the Court of St. James’s during the Franklin Pierce administration. The good-looking District Attorney Key was the son of Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He also happened to be the lover of Sickles’ wife.

  Along with six other lawyers, Edwin Stanton defended Sickles before a packed Washington courtroom eager for salacious details about the affair. Sickles admitted he’d killed Key but pleaded not guilty by reason of “temporary insanity,” the first time such a plea had been offered in the United States. Sickles had to be insane, his lawyers contended; what man wouldn’t be driven crazy by his wife’s infidelity? The all-male jury voted to acquit Sickles, another triumph for Edwin Stanton.

  The next year, 1860, during the last days of his presidency, James Buchanan reshuffled his cabinet and appointed Stanton as attorney general. But unlike President Buchanan, who dithered over how to handle the threat of secession, Stanton was firm. America was the only democracy in the world, Stanton asserted more than once, and he was committed to its preservation—even if that meant leaking information to Republican Senator William H. Seward about President Buchanan’s intentions toward a besieged Fort Sumter in 1860. Little wonder that among his enemies, Stanton earned a reputation as disingenuous, if not downright duplicitous.

  When Lincoln appointed Edwin Stanton his secretary of war, there were many people who still distrusted him. During the war many men distrusted many other men, but Stanton was a favorite villain: he could be satirical, contemptuous, impatient, and just plain rude. One biographer described his “pantherlike pursuit of the evildoer.” John Hay thought Stanton an energetic “man of administrative scope and executive tact,” but Hay also said he’d rather “make a tour of a smallpox hospital” than ask Stanton for a favor. Still, Stanton’s assistant in the War Department, Charles Anderson Dana, said Stanton was far more than an aggressive patriot. He was a student of the Bible, of history, and of literature; he read every book he could find on Napoleon and he adored Charles Dickens. During the war, he kept Dickens’ Pickwick Papers near his bed because it never failed to soothe him. His library contained over 2,500 volumes.

  Although Stanton, a former Democrat, was now a Republican, Democratic friends praised him as an honest man sworn to protecting the country from extremists of any stripe. He hated both abolition and secession. And though as a child Stanton had reportedly sat on abolitionist Benjamin Lundy’s knee, or so a colleague wishfully recollected, the adult Stanton had steered clear of the abolitionists. He did maintain for many years his friendship with Salmon Chase, the celebrated fugitive slaves’ lawyer, but refused to join the abolitionist cause. Yet in Washington, Stanton frequently visited the home of Gamaliel Bailey, editor of The National Era, which had published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in serial form. Slowly his moderate views—if they had been moderate—about slavery and emancipation changed. Or, perhaps more likely, he started to express views long held but that he’d kept to himself. It’s hard to know—he was always canny. “Stanton is a character such as Plutarch would have liked to describe,” political scholar Francis Lieber said.

  While in Lincoln’s cabinet, Stanton encouraged the deployment of black troops; he supported the Emancipation Proclamation; he endorsed the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery. His detractors perceived these positions as disloyal because they seemed to contradict his earlier allegiance to the Democratic party and called into question his earlier contempt for abol
itionists. They began branding Stanton a traitor. “Such hostility should, however, be accounted a crown of honor,” Representative James G. Blaine observed.

  Stanton’s friend Jeremiah Black initially rose to Stanton’s defense. “My own personal knowledge,” Black said, “does not enable me to accuse him of any mean or disgraceful act.” Later, Black would reconsider. If Stanton had been merely posing as an anti-abolitionist, good states’ rights Democrat—if he was a man to “run with the hare and hunt with the hounds”—then Edwin Stanton was nothing more than an oily, beady-eyed trickster of the most unscrupulous sort.

  Were there two different Stantons? A Democrat who didn’t much like him would say that there were. Or were Democrats and Republicans just duking out their differences, using the war secretary as their foil? Surely Stanton had been torn between loyalty to Democrats like Buchanan and Jeremiah Black and his growing recognition that slavery was an unpardonable sin—and that secession, as a way to preserve slavery, was an unpardonable error. Perhaps that’s why he drove himself so hard. Asthmatic since boyhood, his attacks at times had become so severe that he would double over, wheezing and gasping. He smoked cigars to open up his bronchial passages. (He wasn’t the only one who thought this would help.) He pretended to take fresh air in order to pacify his friend the surgeon general, who begged him to relax. “Keep me alive till this rebellion is over,” Stanton replied, “and then I will take a rest!” He added, a bit more seriously, “A long one, perhaps.”

  Certainly Edwin Stanton was the most enigmatic man in Lincoln’s cabinet, and, during Andrew Johnson’s administration, the ultimate thorn in Johnson’s side. Yet Stanton never defended himself publicly against those who traduced him, even when his critics were George McClellan and William Tecumseh Sherman. Then again he may have deliberately appeared to seem all things to all men. Later, he would characterize himself as “in-betweenity.” But whether as Democrat or as newly minted Republican, Stanton wanted to protect the law of the land—the Constitution—even when he seemed to take the law into his own hands. A clerk in the War Department thought that Stanton prosecuted the war as if it were a case he was arguing in court: “He seemed to regard himself as holding a brief for the Government and to be bent on bringing his client out successful, leaving everybody else to look out for himself and to get in the way at his peril.”

  Brilliant and prickly, Edwin McMasters Stanton was secretary of war during the Lincoln and Johnson administrations; but resisting Johnson’s attempts to subvert Reconstruction laws, “Stanton is coming to be regarded as the champion of Congress,” colleagues observed just before Johnson dismissed him.

  Yet if he perplexed or antagonized people, he also inspired them. “He was the bulwark of confidence to the loyal North,” one of his secretaries declared. “In the dark hours he was the anchor which held fast the destiny of the republic.” For despite the trappings of success—the huge house, the large receptions—and his crusty, well-defended exterior, Stanton possessed an endearing humility. Each day he walked over to the general market, a basket on arm, to banter with Confederate sympathizers, from whom he picked up information as well as fruit or bread from their stalls. If a Union man was selling produce, Stanton gently provided a scrap of encouraging news. Secretary of State William Seward’s daughter once commented on the “merry twinkle” in Stanton’s eye. When her father was severely injured in a carriage accident in 1865, Stanton tenderly bathed Seward’s face “like a woman in the sickroom,” she said. “He loved those he trusted, and he trusted without question those he loved.” One of General Meade’s aides, terrified to meet Stanton, reported that he found the secretary of war “mild as drawn butter.”

  He could also throw an inkstand at you; he could dismiss you as an imbecile, which was his early estimation of Lincoln, although Stanton rapidly changed his mind (he could do that too) and considered the President in all ways his superior. The two men had met as early as 1855, when Stanton was already a prominent attorney and Lincoln a backwoods lawyer, or so Stanton thought, and they were briefly brought together in a patent infringement case. Stanton snubbed Lincoln and according to one journalist referred to him as a “giraffe.” But Lincoln admired Stanton, and in 1862 chose him to succeed the ineffective and scandal-ridden Simon Cameron as war secretary. In all likelihood his appointment was promoted by Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, who remembered that Stanton had divulged intelligence about cabinet decisions during the Fort Sumter crisis. It was a very small world.

  The instant that Stanton took over the unvarnished war office in 1862, with its odor of stale tobacco and panic, he rolled up his sleeves. “As soon as I can get the machinery of the office working,” he said, “the rats cleared out, and the rat-holes stopped, we shall move,” he declared. He did not mince words. Nor stop. Stories of Stanton’s capacity for work are legion. He promptly read as much as possible about the administration of armies, for he had to raise a huge one. With an efficiency bordering on genius, he consolidated control over the telegraph lines, tightly censoring war information, and from time to time he tried to censor the newspapers. He oversaw the standardization of extensive railroad track; he updated the signal systems. During the day, in order to rest, he might lock the door to his office, lie down on his couch, and scan British newspapers sympathetic to the Confederacy. “I consider him one of the heroic elements in our war,” Francis Lieber declared.

  He drove subordinates as hard as he drove himself. “He was prone to be suspicious of those who did not work as he did,” Henry Dawes noted. His dark eyes were rimmed with weariness. Trails of gray ran down his long, full beard; his lips folded into a grimace. A web of lines appeared on his once-smooth face because for all his thunder and granite, Stanton was painfully sensitive to the responsibility he bore for hurling men, hundreds of thousands of them, into battle. Yet he followed the rules with rigidity, believing as he did in organization and discipline. One afternoon, after coldly turning down a family’s heartrending pleas for clemency for a soldier who had deserted, Stanton walked into his office and, according to his clerk, broke down. “God help me to do my duty,” he cried. “God help me to do my duty!”

  When the administration took the remarkable step of suspending habeas corpus, Stanton acted as its front man. He was excoriated as a tyrant, a ruffian, a dictator, an ogre. Supposedly he had withheld reinforcements from his former friend General George McClellan, causing McClellan’s devastating defeat in the Peninsula campaign. There was also the matter of his decision to shut down recruiting offices in the summer of 1862. Wrongly, he had thought victory near—and that he would not have to deliver more men to their deaths. But always Lincoln firmly backed his war secretary, whom he called his “Mars.” To President Lincoln, Stanton was the rock “against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing.”

  “I do not see how he survived,” Lincoln added, “why he is not crushed and torn to pieces.”

  General Ulysses S. Grant, a man not given to overstatement, and not always fond of the secretary, nonetheless praised Stanton as “one of the great men of the Republic.”

  During the election of 1864, Stanton was bedridden for three weeks, and he may have recovered sooner had he been appointed to the Supreme Court that fall. It was the only position Edwin Stanton really wanted, but Lincoln said he could not manage without him. After Lee surrendered, when Stanton wanted to resign from the cabinet, Lincoln asked him to remain. “It is not for you to say when you will no longer be needed here,” the President said to him. So Stanton stayed, and he stayed, and he stayed. It may be accurately said that, after the war, Edwin Stanton was but one more casualty of it.

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  ON APRIL 14, 1865, Edwin Stanton had been undressing for bed when he heard a loud knocking at the front door. His wife hurried into the room, incredulous. Lincoln had been shot. Secretary of State William Seward had been stabbed. Suddenly the Stanton house
was teeming with people. Someone begged the secretary not to go out—someone else said a man was outside lurking in the shadows—but Stanton had to go to Bill Seward’s home, where he found Seward barely conscious on bloody bedsheets.

  The early terrified rumors in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination suggested Secretary of State Seward had died as well.

  Seward’s son Frederick too had been severely wounded, as was George Robinson, the army nurse who’d been assigned to Seward after Seward’s recent carriage accident. Stanton tried to soothe Mrs. Seward. He ordered a soldier to guard the premises, and he posted sentries at the homes of other cabinet members. Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, arrived, and Stanton and Welles drove together to the Peterson house, across from Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln lay.

  The city was already in an uproar. Soldiers everywhere were patrolling, alert, frightened, angry.

  The next morning, in a dull and misty rain, the dazed capital city began to wrap itself in black crepe. Government offices did not open. Drinking establishments closed. Theaters canceled performances. Pictures of Lincoln appeared in store windows. Men and women, black and white, milled in front of the White House. There were some arrests of former rebels. The homes of cabinet officers remained guarded. Police had banged on the door of a Washington boardinghouse, where they had been told conspirators may have secretly met. Wagons filled with produce were turned away from the city, and cavalry watched for suspicious persons: there may have been more assassins sneaking about, waiting to strike.