Lincoln's Autocrat

The Life of Edwin Stanton

William Marvel

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781469636153
  9781469622491
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469622507
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Edwin M. Stanton (1814–1869), one of the nineteenth century’s most impressive legal and political minds, wielded enormous influence and power as Lincoln’s secretary of war during most of the Civil War and under Johnson during the early years of Reconstruction. In the first full biography of Stanton in more than fifty years, William Marvel offers a detailed reexamination of Stanton’s life, career, and legacy. Marvel argues that while Stanton was a formidable advocate and politician, his character was hardly benign. Climbing from a difficult youth to the pinnacle of power, Stanton used his authority — and the public coffers — to pursue political vendettas, and he exercised sweeping wartime powers with a cavalier disregard for civil liberties.

Though Lincoln’s ability to harness a cabinet with sharp divisions and strong personalities is widely celebrated, Marvel suggests that Stanton’s tenure raises important questions about Lincoln’s actual control over the executive branch. This insightful biography also reveals why men like Ulysses S. Grant considered Stanton a coward and a bully, who was unashamed to use political power for partisan enforcement and personal preservation.

1: BANKS OF THE OHIO

At midwinter of 1862 most of Virginia remained undisturbed by Union armies. In the six months since the battle of Manassas the counties of Fauquier and Culpeper had seen little of war beyond the passage of Confederate troops to and from their encampments and hospitals. A gentleman the caliber of John Murray Forbes could still travel unmolested wherever business interests and legal proceedings took him, just as he had before the war. In pursuit of such matters he frequently rode from his farm near Warrenton to Culpeper Court House, from which he sometimes continued on to Fredericksburg, and when he did he liked to rest his horse at Zimmerman’s Tavern, in Stevensburg, run by a widow named Martha Wale. She seemed to know everyone in the vicinity, and everything about them.

If Squire Forbes related the story faithfully, it was probably late in January when he dropped in at the tavern to find the old woman in a dither over news that had filtered down from above the Potomac. President Lincoln had recently installed Edwin M. Stanton as his secretary of war, and Mrs. Wale interpreted the appointment as evidence that the war would now escalate into a long, bitter struggle, from which the Lincoln government might never relent. Stanton was the grandson of Thomas Norman, from right there in Stevensburg: Norman’s home, “Fairfield,” lay just a short distance from the tavern, and the widow remembered him as the most stubborn man ever to inhabit Culpeper County. She suspected that Norman’s grandson shared his ancestor’s obstinacy, and thought it boded ill for the Confederacy’s bid for independence.¹

Thomas Norman had lived his entire life in the watershed of the upper Rappahannock. In the American Revolution he served in the Western Battalion of the Virginia Line, with which he descended the Ohio River in bateaux to the falls of the Ohio, between Kentucky and the Illinois country. There the battalion built a fort and garrisoned it until December of 1781, never encountering the British but losing a fair number of officers and men in skirmishes with the Shawnee.² Afterward, Norman returned to his home below the Rappahannock, where he accumulated substantial property in different parts of the county. His first wife bore him a host of children before she died; when he remarried, his daughter Lucy moved into the household of David McMasters, a Methodist minister who had married a friend of hers. Folks in Culpeper remembered that Lucy “ran away” from her father’s home, but she appears to have left with his blessing. McMasters and his wife then migrated to Ohio, settling in the town of Mount Pleasant, and Lucy moved there with them.³

Mount Pleasant lay a league or two from the Ohio River, in Jefferson County. It consisted of a few hundred residents, many of them Quakers from eastern Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and even England, some of whom were drawn there by the ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory. One such family was the Stanton clan, the matriarch of which had led most of her children and sons-in-law there from North Carolina: after the death of her husband Benjamin, in 1798, Abigail Macy Stanton had sold off his shipyard and much of his land in Carteret County to finance the family’s passage. The Stantons retained their membership in the Society of Friends, carrying certificates of their worthiness from the Core Sound Monthly Meeting to the Westland Meeting, in western Pennsylvania, which admitted the entire family on May 14, 1800; four years later the Westland Meeting transferred authority over Jefferson County Quakers to the newly formed Short Creek Monthly Meeting. Abigail and her sons established themselves in that community with the proceeds of her husband’s estate, and over the years more cash came from North Carolina as cousins there sold their remaining lands for them.⁴

Abigail had named her eighth child David. He was only ten when his father died, and barely twelve when his mother brought him to Ohio, but he was not the last of Abigail’s children by far: the youngest of her brood was still a toddler during the hegira to the free country of the Old Northwest. David was old enough, however, to imbibe an early hatred of slavery from his parents, who had evidently adopted the predominant Quaker scruples against it. The expensive and arduous journey to free territory from their well-established community illustrates the Stantons’ collective aversion to slavery, which drove many Southerners into the free states above the Ohio. Eventually David Stanton imitated antislavery Friends by shunning coffee and other fruits of slave labor, and as a young man he would inevitably have encountered Benjamin Lundy, a zealous antislavery newspaperman who sojourned for a time among the Quakers of Mount Pleasant.⁵ More than half a century later, after David Stanton’s son Edwin had allied himself with the political descendants of such militant abolitionists, he told at least one of them that Lundy frequently visited the Stanton home, and that the perennially straitened David Stanton contributed money for his cause.⁶

No one bothered to record how David Stanton passed his bachelor years at Mount Pleasant. In his mid-twenties he met Lucy Norman, who was still in her teens, and early in 1814 he married her, with David McMasters conducting the ceremony.⁷ According to John Murray Forbes, Mrs. Wale maintained that David Stanton was working as a tailor when he met Lucy, and that the two married hastily to disguise a pregnancy. Clearly they did wed without pausing for David to seek his Quaker meeting’s sanction to marry an outsider, and for that he was expelled from the Society of Friends, to which his ancestors had belonged for a century. The omission may simply have reflected Lucy’s refusal to accept Quaker doctrine, and the date of his expulsion, on March 22, 1814, is consistent with the official record of their February 25 wedding. Family tradition maintained that their first child, Edwin McMasters Stanton, was born nearly ten months later, on December 19. Fragments of garbled truth cling to the Culpeper profile of the couple as told by Mrs. Wale through Forbes, but Edwin could not have been conceived out of wedlock unless his parents postdated his birth, for which there is no contemporary documentation.⁸

Edwin M. Stanton arrived in the midst of turbulent times. The country was at war with England for the second time, and during Lucy’s confinement Andrew Jackson was preparing to defend New Orleans against a British army sailing up the Mississippi River. Far away in Belgium, representatives of the United States and Britain sought the restoration of peace and were nearing a settlement. At the same juncture, Federalist delegates from New England were meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss their future relations with the rest of the states: New England lacked enthusiasm for the war, the consequences of which had fallen heavily on that coastal region, and the debate included talk of seceding from the federal union. The final resolutions from the convention omitted that provocative notion, focusing instead on complaints about the political power exercised by the Southern states.⁹

The Stantons were then renting a small, plain, two-story brick house at the corner of Market Street and Fifth in the growing shire town of Steubenville, on the banks of the Ohio River twenty miles from Mount Pleasant. Slaveholding Virginia lay not half a mile from their front door. A traveler visiting Steubenville less than two years later found the place thriving, with an iron foundry, cotton and woolen factories, a steam mill, a brewery, and its own newspaper, the Steubenville Western Herald.¹⁰

The critical Mrs. Wale (or Mr. Forbes) insinuated that Thomas Norman frowned on his new son-in-law’s humble vocation. In fact, Stanton family lore remains curiously silent about David Stanton’s early occupation, and whatever work he did follow at the time of his marriage must have proven inadequate to support a family. About the time he turned twenty-seven, while Edwin was an infant, David began “reading” medicine with an established physician whose name, along with most of David Stanton’s early life, remains unknown. A year into his studies Lucy bore a second boy, whom they called Erasmus Darwin Stanton, and the year after that David made a roundabout 400-mile trek with his wife and sons to visit Thomas Norman and his third wife at “Fairfield,” in the section of Culpeper County then called St. Mark’s. They made the trip in their own carriage, covering much of the distance on the new Cumberland Road that was then approaching Wheeling, and on the return they brought Lucy’s oldest sister Elizabeth, who stayed with them for several years. Subsisting perhaps on contributions from David’s mother or from Lucy’s father, or both, they remained in the rented Market Street house until May 13, 1818, when David passed an examination by a panel of doctors representing the State of Ohio Medical District.¹¹ At the age of thirty he opened his own practice in a furnished house he had bought on Third Street, six doors from the Jefferson County courthouse. The $1,600 purchase price of the home appears to have come from no cash reserves of David Stanton’s, and may have followed from his recent introduction of two healthy grandsons to Thomas Norman.¹²

The family remembered Edwin being able to read by the age of three, and credited his aunt, Elizabeth Norman, with helping him achieve that feat. He then went to a “dame school,” taught by a local woman—the informal environment where most children of that era learned their letters. A neighbor whose son attended with him came in one day and found the two of them leaning fast asleep against their teacher; she concluded that Edwin and her boy were both too young for school. Private schools like that, all within a few hundred yards of his home, grounded him in grammar and ciphering. The curriculum broadened a bit when he gravitated to a frontier academy on the next street, where male teachers claimed a measure of education themselves and followed teaching as a vocation. An older classmate later described attending an evening grammar school where an itinerant teacher instructed a group of boys and young men, of whom he remembered Edwin as the youngest of them and the puniest—but a serious student. Recollections solicited from childhood acquaintances by Stanton’s first two biographers and by his adoring younger sister, Pamphila, portray him almost entirely in a positive light: he was courteous and devout, studied hard, shunned games, avoided fisticuffs even in self-defense, and was never abusive, although one playmate admitted that Edwin could be “imperious.”¹³

Forty years later, after President Lincoln had chosen Edwin Stanton to head the War Department, the antagonistic editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, inquired into the new secretary’s early history. Perhaps through acquaintances in the newspaper business, Bennett learned of a terse criticism that he thought illustrated the fundamental aspect of Stanton’s personality, although it may have been no more reliable than the retrospective accolades of Stanton’s friends and kin. Bennett shared the story with James Steedman, a former newspaperman and Union general, and in 1873 Steedman revealed Bennett’s unpleasant observation to a professional in gravestone biography, who enthusiastically wrote it down: when Stanton was young, Bennett’s informant claimed, “he kissed the [asses] of the big boys and kicked those of the little ones!” Hatred or hindsight may have spawned the recollection, but that uncomplimentary schoolyard characterization is not inconsistent with the experiences of many whom Stanton encountered during his years in public office. Two of the three presidents Stanton served under remarked on his excessively flattering, obsequious manner with them, while numerous subordinates, supplicants, and peers viewed him as a bully—dictatorial, mean, and vindictive.¹⁴

The shadow of genteel poverty stalked Edwin’s youth. Evidence of local economic difficulties surfaced almost as soon as his father began treating his first patients. Businesses in Steubenville began advertising for customers to settle their accounts, and tradesmen who had produced or repaired goods for delinquent customers warned them that those items would be sold if the bills were not settled within a short, specified period; merchants began offering discounts to patrons who paid cash on their orders. At least one of the major factories changed hands, apparently to rectify a financial embarrassment, while nearly every week’s issue of the Steubenville newspaper during 1819 included the sheriff’s announcement that he would be forced to sell someone’s land or belongings. Those broad hints of economic constriction reflected Steubenville’s share in the Panic of 1819—which started with an epidemic of speculation and worsened after the Bank of the United States attempted to repair the consequences of its own inflationary policies by contracting its currency. Hard cash all but disappeared in Ohio, launching an epidemic of business failures and personal penury. The first hope of relief came in the summer of 1820, when newly appointed commissioners began laying out the next segment of the Cumberland Road, westward from opposite Wheeling.¹⁵

Such a downturn would have weighed heavily on a doctor anxious to nurture a new practice. Turning away patients would have been unthinkable, but indigents who had already accumulated debts with the established physicians in the neighborhood would naturally flock to the newest one, and David Stanton seems to have been an easy mark for the poor and underprivileged. In what may have been an effort to improve his profession and the economic vitality of his community, Dr. Stanton joined a new medical society and accepted a position on a committee to promote Jefferson County industry.¹⁶

For the office of a fledgling physician, the Stanton home on Third Street bore the unfortunate distinction of having originally belonged to Steubenville’s coroner. Perhaps no potential patients were superstitious enough to shun Dr. Stanton on that account, but some may have lost confidence when he failed to save three of his own children. In 1820 he and Lucy lost Lucretia, a two-year-old girl. On April 13, 1821, they greeted another “sweet little daughter” who could not be made to breathe regularly for an hour or two, and when she finally did she betrayed severe brain damage from the prolonged anoxia, lapsing into convulsions. She died the following morning, yet they named her Lucy, after her mother, who did not recover as quickly as she had after the births of her boys. Elizabeth Norman, who still lived with the Stantons, could not tend her sister, either, for she was recuperating from something Dr. Stanton was only able to identify as “an inflammatory fever.”¹⁷

The newborn Lucy may have inherited the respiratory ailment that killed her so quickly. Thomas Norman struggled with severe asthma for most of his life, according to one of his younger daughters. Lucy suffered increasingly from it herself, and Edwin showed early symptoms, but if his father prescribed any remedies or palliatives, no one made note of it. Traditional treatments involved a range of vile concoctions containing pulverized vegetable matter and animal ingredients as revolting as skunk’s scent glands and powdered fox intestines, usually dissolved in generous drafts of rum or brandy, none of which would have offered much relief beyond intoxication. The realization that asthma was related to dietary and environmental allergies lay many decades in the future. Those born with the condition therefore usually died with it—or of it.¹⁸ Barely a year after the death of this little girl, Lucy bore David another daughter, whom they called Oella. A third boy, Theophilus, died in 1824, and their last child, a girl named Pamphila, arrived in the summer of 1827.¹⁹

Three nights after Christmas that year, guests had left the Stantons’ modest home and the family had retired when Dr. Stanton collapsed with a violent stroke. Soon the seizure subsided, but he lay unconscious through the next day, Saturday. At 10:00 A.M. on Sunday, December 30, at the age of thirty-nine, he breathed his last. Forty-eight hours later, on New Year’s Day, the bell rang in Steubenville’s Presbyterian meetinghouse, calling the teachers and students of the various Sunday schools to form in procession for a last visit to Dr. Stanton’s home. When pallbearers brought out his coffin, all these mourners followed the hearse to the cemetery, on the northwest corner of South Street and Fourth, to bid him farewell.²⁰

The turnout reflected high regard for the doctor, but his obituary hinted how little he had profited from his practice by emphasizing his “kind and benevolent” behavior toward the needy, which helped account ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Lincoln’s Autocrat
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• MAPS & ILLUSTRATIONS
• EPIGRAPHS
• PREFACE
• 1: BANKS OF THE OHIO
• 2: THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH
• 3: THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
• 4: THE PRINCESS OF PENN STREET
• 5: THE CALIFORNIA MISSION
• 6: AN HONORABLE MURDERER
• 7: THE COURT SPY
• 8: METAMORPHOSIS
• 9: BEST FRIEND TO ALL
• 10: THE CABAL
• 11: THE WAR WITHIN
• 12: ORGANIZING VICTORY
• 13: PRISONERS OF CIRCUMSTANCE
• 14: MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA
• 15: THE GIFT OF MARTYRDOM
• 16: AVENGING ANGEL
• 17: THE TROJAN HORSE
• 18: END OF THE TETHER
• 19: THE STEALTHY APPLICANT
• APPENDIX : THE CINCINNATI SNUB
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX