Stanton Lincoln's war secretary

Review by Choice Review

This is a thorough, carefully documented, balanced analysis of Lincoln's secretary of war. Though a Democrat, Stanton became the president's closest, most trusted advisor and "Implementer of Emancipation." A brilliant and gifted attorney, he had a successful law career before his government service. While Lincoln and his generals managed the war, Stanton dealt with Congress to fund the war and the states to recruit soldiers. He authored and enforced the rules of military justice still in use today. During the war, he encouraged African American military enlistments, and during Reconstruction he insisted that the military occupy the South to protect all African Americans. Following Lincoln's assassination he organized the pursuit, trial, and sentencing of the perpetrators. Stanton's strong stand favoring African Americans led President Johnson to remove him in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, resulting in Johnson's impeachment and trial. Stahr's best quality is his exhaustive research and impartial rendering. As to be expected, one-third of the book covers the Civil War and early years of Reconstruction before Stanton's death in 1869. He never lived to take the seat on the Supreme Court offered by President Grant. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

---

Review by New York Times Review

DURING HIS SECOND TOUR of America, in 1867, Charles Dickens dined in Washington with the secretary of war, Edwin McMasters Stanton. The evening was something of a dream come true for Stanton: Dickens was his favorite author, a writer he read nearly every night. For the novelist, a maestro of deathbeds, it was a chance to learn of Lincoln's final hours from the man who had supervised them two years earlier. With his champion whiskers and voluble temper, Stanton could resemble Mr. Spottletoe in "Martin Chuzzlewit," but in many ways he more closely resembled Dickens himself: a difficult, self-made, emotional workaholic of prodigious achievement. Over most of the last century the sine curve of Stanton biography has exhibited the same mood swings as the man himself: Otto Eisenschiml's "Why Was Lincoln Murdered?" (1937) did the war secretary preposterous and lasting damage by putting forth the notion that he was complicit in Lincoln's assassination; decades later Benjamin Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, as well as Doris Kearns Goodwin, treated Stanton with regard and understanding; then, two years ago, William Marvel offered a severe cutting down to size. In this latest effort, "Stanton: Lincoln's War Secretary," Walter Stahr, a biographer of John Jay and William Seward, presents a judiciously sympathetic treatment that tries to calm a still-uncalmable subject. Death suffused Stanton's life: He lost his first wife, an infant daughter, a brother (to suicide), a young son. His grief, while often histrionic, was always real. It also fell to him to prosecute a war that would claim the lives of more than 600,000 Americans. Work was his master and his mental salvation, from his Ohio boyhood on. He could afford little more than a year at Kenyon College, and studied law with an attorney in his native Steubenville. An interest in politics (Ohio was a swing state even then) had him aligning with the Democratic heirs to Andrew Jackson, opposing Henry Clay, the political idol of another young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Stanton's legal career in Pittsburgh and then Washington, D.C., involved a stimulating variety of issues: patent claims, labor riots, medical body-snatching and electoral chicanery. His most notorious case had him defending Congressman Dan Sickles for the murder of his wife's lover. His most significant, according to Stahr, was the Wheeling Bridge Case, a sort of infrastructural Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, in which Stanton, for about seven years, with intermittent success and ultimate failure, fought the construction of a suspension bridge over the Ohio River as an impediment to steamboat traffic. He argued the matter in front of the United States Supreme Court before he was 40. After orchestrating the federal government's long and victorious defense against Mexican land claims, Stanton joined the Buchanan administration in its final months as attorney general. During the "secession winter" of 1861, he rejected South Carolina's bid for sovereignty, opposed the plan to abandon Charleston harbor and prevented the shipment of armaments manufactured in Pittsburgh to states in the process of leaving the Union. He may even, to his face, have compared President Buchanan to Benedict Arnold. The case for his zeal in all of this rests partly on what Stahr admits are "somewhat suspect" latter-day accounts composed by the subject himself. Because of Stanton's administrative skills and widely known probity, Lincoln installed the Democrat as a successor to his corrupt secretary of war, Simon Cameron, in 1862. For the next three years the two men, unlikely partners, made the bloody, fitful slog to Appomattox. The president exasperated Stanton, whom he called "Mars," with his humorous parables and digressions, but aides in the War Department's telegraph office would remember a camaraderie between the men, and Lincoln's young secretary John Hay assured Stanton, after the president's death, that their boss had "loved . . . and trusted" him. Stanton helped to raise and deploy an astonishingly large army. He got the troops fed, and when politically necessary he got them home to vote. Just as he had used photography to expose forged deeds in the Mexican land cases, he harnessed and micromanaged the still-new marvels of telegraphy and rail travel to become the Union's "Organizer of Victory." In September 1863 he hastily devised a train journey for 20,000 troops so that the Union might hold on to Chattanooga - a kind of Dunkirk in reverse that Stahr describes well and at some length. A year earlier Stanton had hired Charles Ellet Jr., the engineer who designed the detested Wheeling Bridge, to turn steamboats into ramming vessels. Stanton's zeal against slavery was even longer aborning than Lincoln's, but he made strenuous efforts to recruit freedmen to the Union Army and came to favor black suffrage more quickly than some of his cabinet colleagues. Early in 1865 he infuriated William Tecumseh Sherman by asking him to step out of the room so that the black leaders they were meeting with could give the secretary of war their candid opinions of the general. On civil liberties his record is worse. As the war continued, Stanton ordered an ever-increasing number of military trials for civilians and used the broad powers of arrest accorded him by the president to lock up correspondents and editors of the newspapers he was alternately censoring and cultivating. On this matter, as historians generally do with Lincoln, Stahr issues appropriate scoldings while staying aware of the overwhelming circumstances. Stahr's biography opens on the night of April 14, 1865, when Stanton ran the United States government from a tiny parlor feet away from the bedroom where Lincoln lay dying. Stahr quickly absolves him of the conspiracy innuendo that has dogged him from Eisenschiml to Bill O'Reilly, and on the vexed matter of whether he said that Lincoln now belonged to the "ages" or the "angels," Stahr suggests that Stanton most likely said nothing at all. THE ACCOUNT OF Stanton's last few unhappy years can be a bit rushed. He was blamed for not having prevented Confederate atrocities against Union P.O.W.s at Andersonville; criticized for the secrecy surrounding the military trial of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators; and mocked for trying to steer a course between the radical Republicans and the increasingly reactionary Andrew Johnson. Stahr again takes a middle position, arguing that both self-interest and principle ("he viewed himself as a critical check on Johnson") played a part in Stanton's hanging on to his office until the president tried to dismiss him and helped to trigger the impeachment crisis. Stanton finally lefthis post when Johnson was acquitted in May 1868. Late the following year, just before his death at 55, he was too sick to take up the Supreme Court seat to which President Grant named him. A man of keen emotion and contradiction, Stanton called forth a half dozen clashing adjectives from Seward ("irritable, capricious, uncomfortable . . . goodhearted, devoted, patriotic") and even more than that from the New York diarist George Templeton Strong, who had to settle for summarizing him as "strangely blended." Stahr admits that his subject was "duplicitous and even deceitful," but argues that he was "a great man" if not a good one. He was almost certainly indispensable in the preservation of a system that has since allowed us to be freely led by a long succession of good and great and awful and, finally, absurd men. A sympathetic treatment of a man once accused of complicity in Lincoln's assassination. THOMAS MALLON is the author, most recently, of "Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 27, 2017]

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Stahr (Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man) here recounts the life of Edwin Stanton (1814-69), who served as Lincoln's second secretary of war. Stanton, a successful lawyer, was a member of the Democratic Party and was also in the administration of President James Buchanan. He opposed slavery, and when asked to join Lincoln's cabinet, he agreed and helped direct the war effort through his adroit administration of the War Department. A loyal and faithful friend to Lincoln, after the president's assassination, Stanton collected evidence and pursued the murderers in order to bring them to trial. He continued as secretary of war under Andrew Johnson and was caught up in the fight between the president and Congress over Reconstruction. Stanton was appointed to the Supreme Court but died soon after being named. This volume overflows with information about the United States during the antebellum years, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The author makes extensive use of primary sources; the text is filled with quotes. VERDICT An important biography that will be readily consumed by anyone interested in the Civil War. A must for all who love Lincoln and his times. ["Highly recommended for novice and experienced Civil War readers alike": LJ 7/17 starred review of the S. & S. hc.]-Patricia Ann Owens, formerly with Illinois Eastern Community Coll., Mt. Carmel © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

An exhaustive biography of the most controversial figure in Abraham Lincoln's cabinet.Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) has not lacked historical attention. Already an expert on the president and his era, historian Stahr (Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man, 2012, etc.) seems reluctant to leave out any piece of his expansive research, but readers will forgive him. A self-made lawyer and pugnacious litigator, Stanton was well-known by the 1850s. While previous historians have turned up anti-slavery credentials in Stanton's life, Stahr is skeptical. He notes that Stanton was on friendly terms with national figures on both sides but remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which tried to remain neutral. In December 1860, President James Buchanan appointed him attorney general. The author dismisses efforts to portray Stanton as a hard-liner, placing him among those who tried, tactfully, to discourage the dithering president from giving away the store. He left office in March 1861 and returned as secretary of war in January 1862, when he efficiently oversaw an immense military effort. He was overbearing, widely detested, and prone to arresting officials and harassing newspapers for endangering the Union. When Lincoln was shot, he took charge. He remained in office under Andrew Johnson, who tried to fire him for refusing to withdraw troops from the South. After Johnson's failed impeachment trial in 1868, Stanton resigned, dying the following year, days after the new president, Ulysses Grant, appointed him to the Supreme Court. Readers may prefer to skim lengthy quotes from speeches and letters in this massive tome, but they will agree that Stanton lived in exciting times. The author provides a chronology and 8-page cast of characters to help keep names and dates straight. A lively, lucid, and opinionated history, and his research supports his skepticism on some historical claims. The book should be Stanton's definitive biography for some time to come. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Stanton Introduction Not long after eleven o'clock on the night of April 14, 1865, a short, burly, bearded man pushed his way through the crowd on Tenth Street, up the curved front steps of a three-story brick boardinghouse, and into the small back bedroom where Abraham Lincoln was stretched on a bed, bleeding and dying. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton soon learned that an assassin had shot the president in the back of the head from point-blank range. The president was not conscious and would not live for more than another few hours. Stanton did not linger. He went into the adjoining parlor, sat down at a small table, and went to work. He launched an investigation to determine who had shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre and who (at almost the same time but about ten blocks away) had stabbed and nearly killed Secretary of State William Henry Seward. Stanton ordered a massive manhunt to find and catch the assassins and those who had assisted them. He assumed that the attacks on Lincoln and Seward were part of a Confederate plot against the Union leadership, perhaps against Washington itself, so he issued orders to protect the leaders and the city. By a series of messages to the press, Stanton informed the nation about the attacks and the president's condition. He did not announce that he was taking charge: he simply was in charge. The first telegram Stanton sent, at about midnight, was to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Union armies, who had left Washington earlier in the evening, bound by train for a few days with his family in New Jersey. Stanton informed Grant that Lincoln had been shot and would not live. Seward and his son Frederick, the assistant secretary of state, had also been attacked and were "in a dangerous condition." Stanton ordered Grant to "return to Washington immediately." A few minutes later one of Stanton's assistants sent a follow-up message, urging Grant to beware of attacks against himself. Stanton's next message was to the commander of the defenses of Washington. "The Secretary desires," an aide wrote for him, "that the troops turn out; the guards be doubled; the forts be alert; guns manned; special vigilance and guard about the Capitol Prison." Stanton soon sent more specific orders to army officers in the region and beyond: close the bridges out of Washington, question those arriving from Washington, arrest any suspicious persons. 1 As an experienced lawyer, Stanton knew the value of interviewing witnesses while their memories were fresh. Through his aides he summoned some of those who had seen the attack on Lincoln to the small back parlor at the Petersen House. Stanton himself, aided by the local district judge, posed the questions. When it proved impracticable to make notes in longhand, Stanton had his staff find him someone who could take notes in shorthand. James Tanner, a clerk who lived nearby, was soon seated next to Stanton, scribbling in shorthand. Those whom Stanton questioned that night were certain that Lincoln's assassin was the famous actor John Wilkes Booth. Tanner wrote that after fifteen minutes of this question and answer session, Stanton had enough evidence to convict Booth of Lincoln's murder. 2 In the midst of the Civil War, Stanton had developed a system for informing the nation of key military events: telegrams nominally sent to John Dix, the general in charge in New York City, were in practice sent directly to the Associated Press. Although the term "press release" would not be used for fifty years, Stanton's messages to Dix were in effect government press releases. His first message on this night, sent about one in the morning, started, "Last evening, about 10.30 p.m., at Ford's Theatre, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, Miss Harris, and Major Rathbone, was shot by an assassin, who suddenly entered the box and approached behind the President." This detailed and remarkably accurate message, composed only a few hours after the attacks upon Lincoln and the Sewards, was followed with three other messages. In one of these Stanton informed the press that investigators had found a letter among Booth's papers referring to the need to consult with Richmond. Stanton's messages were how the nation first learned of the assassinations and of the suspected role of the Confederate leaders. 3 Charles Dana, one of Stanton's assistant secretaries, later recalled how Stanton dictated and scribbled order after order in Petersen's parlor. "It seemed as if Mr. Stanton thought of everything, and there was a great deal to be thought of that night. The extent of the conspiracy was, of course, unknown, and the horrible beginning which had been made naturally led us to suspect the worst. The safety of Washington must be looked after. Commanders all over the country had to be ordered to take extra precautions. The people must be notified of the tragedy. The assassins must be captured. The coolness and clear-headedness of Mr. Stanton under these circumstances were most remarkable." Charles Leale, one of the doctors attending Lincoln, described Stanton during those hours as being "in reality the acting president of the United States." 4 Others have taken a far darker view of Stanton. Otto Eisenschiml even suggested that Stanton himself organized the assassination of Lincoln. Eisenschiml argued his case against Stanton mainly through questions: Why was there not a better guard for Lincoln at Ford's Theatre? Why did Stanton not mention Booth in his first message to the press? Why did Stanton not close the bridge by which Booth left Washington and fled into rural Maryland? Why, when federal soldiers finally located and surrounded Booth, was he killed rather than captured and questioned? Bill O'Reilly, in his recent best-selling book on Lincoln's death, has raised these questions again: "Did [Stanton] have any part in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln? To this day there are those who believe he did. But nothing has ever been proved." No serious scholar believes that Stanton helped Booth to kill Lincoln. But historians have accused Stanton of many other errors and crimes, ranging from misrepresentations to "some of the more shameful injustices in American history." 5 Who was Edwin McMasters Stanton? How did this lifelong Democrat become the secretary of war for the first Republican president? Why was Stanton so controversial, both in his life and after his death? Born on the banks of the Ohio River, in Steubenville, Ohio, Stanton attended Kenyon College for two years, then studied law with a Steubenville lawyer. He practiced law with increasing success, first in Ohio, then in Pittsburgh, and then in Washington, D.C. By the eve of the Civil War, Stanton was one of the nation's leading lawyers, famed both for his trial work, including the successful defense of a congressman accused of murder, and for his work in the Supreme Court, especially the high-profile challenge to the erection of a bridge at Wheeling, Virginia. Especially during his Ohio years, from roughly 1837 through 1847, Stanton was active in Democratic politics. In private letters he opposed slavery, but he took no public stand on the issue, perhaps because of family connections with the South, perhaps because the Democratic Party was dominated by slave-owning Southern Democrats. When Stanton moved to Washington in 1857, he worked closely with the Democratic attorney general Jeremiah Black, representing the federal government both in California and in the Supreme Court. In late 1860 and early 1861, as the Southern states seceded and formed their Confederacy, Stanton served four months as the attorney general in the cabinet of Democratic president James Buchanan. Stanton claimed then and later that he served Buchanan only to save the Union, but it is hard to confirm just what Stanton said to Buchanan or what effect he had on Buchanan's actions. When Lincoln became president in early 1861, Stanton returned to his Washington law practice and criticized Lincoln in private letters to Buchanan and others. Stanton also, however, started to do important legal work for members of the Lincoln administration, and in early 1862, when Lincoln needed a secretary of war to replace Simon Cameron, he chose Stanton. For the next three years and three months Stanton worked night and day, raising, arming, feeding, clothing, transporting, and supervising an army of a million men. He dealt with issues great and small and with men and women ranging from the president and governors to generals and private citizens. Stanton was also responsible for the system of military arrests of civilians accused of aiding and abetting the rebellion, some of them rebel spies, some of them merely opponents of the Lincoln administration. Although Stanton's appointment as secretary was praised by almost all the papers, some were soon attacking him and insisting on his resignation. The Boston Advertiser demanded as early as the summer of 1862 that Stanton "vacate a department which he has proved himself incompetent to fill." The New York World declared in 1863, "When we see any order with Stanton's name at the bottom we are sure that if anything can by any possibility be done wrong, reasoned badly, or unfittingly expressed, we shall surely find it." The New York Times, on the other hand, near the end of the war, lauded Stanton's "indomitable industry, inflexible integrity, high courage, and devoted patriotism." Lincoln's private secretary John Hay, writing Stanton not long after Lincoln's death, said that Lincoln "loved" and "trusted" Stanton: "How vain were all efforts to shake that trust and confidence, not lightly given & never withdrawn." 6 Stanton remained the secretary of war under Lincoln's controversial successor, Andrew Johnson. Stanton, who was now a Radical Republican, and Johnson, who remained a Democrat at heart, soon disagreed about reconstruction. Johnson wanted to turn the Southern states over to the Southern white leadership; Stanton insisted that the federal government and the Union Army should protect Southern blacks and Northern sympathizers. Johnson and Stanton quarreled, first in private and then in public, and their quarrel became part of the larger political war between Johnson and the Republicans. In early 1868, finally fed up, Johnson attempted to remove Stanton and appoint Lorenzo Thomas as secretary of war. For a while the nation had two secretaries of war: Thomas, attending Johnson's cabinet meetings, and Stanton, holed up in the War Department but without access to the White House. It was Johnson's attempt to remove Stanton, which Republicans viewed as utterly illegal, that led to the impeachment and near removal of Johnson. After the Senate declined to convict Johnson, by only one vote, Stanton resigned and returned to private life. So Stanton was a critical figure not just in the Civil War but also in Reconstruction. One simply cannot understand the first impeachment of an American president without understanding Edwin Stanton. When Stanton left the War Department in the spring of 1868, his health was failing and he had only a few months to live. He devoted much of the fall of that year to Grant's political campaign, both because he favored Grant for president and because he hoped for a suitable appointment in the Grant administration. Grant eventually did appoint Stanton, but too late. In December 1869 Grant nominated and the Senate confirmed Stanton to a seat on the Supreme Court, set to open in February of the following year. Stanton never took the oath of office. He died at the age of fifty-five, of congestive heart failure, a few days after his confirmation. Stanton's name is familiar, but there is much about him that Americans, even those well versed in the Civil War, do not know. The aim of this book is to tell the whole life story of this important, interesting, contradictory, controversial man. Excerpted from Stanton: Lincoln's War Secretary by Walter Stahr All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---