The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (50 page)

Despite the example of Frémont, or perhaps because he thought that the furor which had followed Frémont’s dismissal would have taught Lincoln a lesson, Cameron reasoned that by ingratiating himself with the Jacobins he would insure himself against any action by the President, who would not dare to antagonize them further by molesting another man who had won their favor. Any attack on slavery was the answer. Emancipation was the issue on which Lincoln was treading softest, since it was the one that cut sharpest along the line dividing the
Administration’s supporters and opponents. Accordingly, with the help of his legal adviser Stanton, Cameron drafted and included in his annual Department report a long passage advocating immediate freedom for southern slaves and their induction into the Union army, thereby adding muscle to the arm of the republic and weakening the enemy, who as “rebellious traitors” had forfeited their rights to any property at all, let alone the ownership of fellow human beings. Without consulting the President—though it was usual for such documents to be submitted for approval—the Secretary had the report printed and sent out to the postmasters of all the principal cities for distribution to the press as soon as it was being read to Congress.

So far all was well. Even when Lincoln discovered what had been done and recalled the pamphlet by telegraphic order, for reprinting without the offensive passage, things still went as Cameron had expected. Critics of the President’s tread-easy policy, comparing the original with the expurgated report—some copies of course escaped destruction, so that both versions appeared in the papers—were harsh in their attacks, charging Lincoln simultaneously with dictatorship and timidity. The Jacobins reacted as expected by taking the Secretary to their bosoms and pronouncing him “one of us.” Other praises came his way, less vigorous perhaps, but no less pleasant. “You have touched the national heart,” a friend declared, while another, in a punning mood, wrote that he much preferred the “Simon pure” article in the
Tribune
to the “bogus” report in the
World
. From Paris a member of the consulate, hearing of the dissension in the President’s official family, wrote home asking: “Are Cameron and Frémont to be canonized as martyrs?”

Cameron might be canonized, at any rate by the antislavery radicals, but it did not appear that he would be martyred by anyone, least of all by Lincoln, who seemed to have learned a dearly bought lesson in martyring Frémont. The report had been published in mid-December, and now in January he still had made no further reference to the matter. Outwardly the relationship between the two men remained cordial, though Cameron still felt some inward qualms, perhaps because he sensed that Lincoln’s measure was not so easily taken. The thing had gone
too
well.

Then on January 11, a Saturday—the date of the second of the three conferences with McDowell and Franklin, none of which Cameron had been urged to attend, despite his position as Secretary of War—he learned that he had been right to feel qualms. He received a brief note in which Lincoln informed him curtly, out of the blue: “I … propose nominating you to the Senate next Monday as Minister to Russia.” Almost literally, he was being banished to Siberia for his sins.

The sins were political, and as a politician he could appreciate the justice of his punishment. He suffered anguish, though, at the manner in which it was inflicted. To be rebuked thus in a brief note, he complained,
“meant personal as well as political destruction.” So Lincoln, who cared little for the manner of his going, just so he went, agreed that Cameron might antedate a letter of resignation, to which he would reply with a letter of acceptance expressing his “affectionate esteem” and “undiminished confidence” in the Secretary’s “ability, patriotism, and fidelity to the public trust.” It was done accordingly and Cameron’s name was sent to Congress for confirmation as Minister to Russia. There, however, he encountered opposition, not only from members of his own party, the Democrats, but also from some of the radical Republicans who so lately had clustered round him and proclaimed him “one of us.” At last the nomination was put through; Cameron was on his way to St Petersburg, having earned not martyrdom and canonization, as some had hoped or feared, but banishment and damage to a reputation already considered shaky. One senator, a former colleague, remarked on his departure: “Ugh! ugh! Send word to the Czar to bring in his things of nights.”

In this case Lincoln engaged in no fruitless search for “somebody” to replace him. The somebody was ready and very much at hand: Edwin McMasters Stanton, who as his predecessor’s legal adviser had helped to charge and fuse the bomb that blew him out of the War Department and the Cabinet, while Stanton himself was sucked into the resultant vacuum and sat ensconced as successor before all the bits of wreckage had hit the ground. Whether he had proceeded with malice aforethought in this instance was not known; but it was not unthinkable. Stanton had done devious things in his time. A corporation lawyer, he delighted also in taking criminal cases when these were challenging and profitable enough. His fees were large and when one prospective client protested, Stanton asked: “Do you think I would argue the wrong side for less?” For a murder defense he once took as his fee the accused man’s only possession, the house he lived in. When he had won the case and was about to convert the mortgage into cash, the man tried to persuade him to hold off, saying that he would be ruined by the foreclosure. “You deserve to be ruined,” Stanton told him, “for you were guilty.”

And yet there was another side to him, too, offsetting the savagery, the joy he took in fixing a frightened general or petitioner with the baleful glare of his black little near-sighted eyes behind small, thicklensed, oval spectacles. He was a bundle of contradictions, his father a New Englander, his mother a Virginian. In private, the forty-seven-year-old lawyer sometimes put his face in his hands and wept from the strain, and if his secretary happened in at such a time he would say, “Not now, please. Not now.” He was asthmatic, something of a hysteric as well, and he had more than a touch of morbidity in his nature. His bushy hair was thinning at the front, but he made up for this by letting it grow long at the back and sides. His upper lip he kept clean-shaven
to expose a surprisingly sensitive mouth—a reminder that he had been considered handsome in his youth—while below his lower lip a broad streak of iron-gray ran down the center of his wide black beard. His body was thick-set, bouncy on short but energetic legs. His voice, which was deep in times of calm, rose to piercing shrillness in excitement. One petitioner, badly shaken by the experience, described a Stanton interview by saying, “He came at me like a tiger.”

He came at many people like a tiger, especially at those in his Department who showed less devotion to work than he himself did. Soon after he took office he received from Harpers Ferry an urgent call for heavy guns. He ordered them sent at once. Going by the locked arsenal after hours, he learned that the guns were still there: whereupon he ordered the gates broken open, helped the watchmen drag the guns out, and saw them loaded onto a north-bound train. Next morning the arsenal officer reported that he had not found it convenient to ship the guns the day before; he would get them off this morning, he said. “The guns are now at Harpers Ferry!” Stanton barked. “And you, sir, are no longer in the service of the United States Government.”

He would engage in no secret deals. Whoever came to him on business, as for instance seeking a contract, was required to make his request in the sight and hearing of all. Stanton would snap out a Yes or No, then wave him on to make way for the next petitioner. He did not care whose toes he stepped on; “Individuals are nothing,” he declared. To a man who came demanding release for a friend locked up on suspicion of treason, Stanton roared: “If I tap that little bell, I can send
you
to a place where you will never hear the dogs bark. And by heaven I’ll do it if you say another word!” He brought to the War Department a boundless and bounding energy. “As soon as I can get the machinery of the office working, the rats cleared out, and the rat holes stopped,” he told an assistant, “we shall
move.”
Lincoln himself was by no means exempt from Stanton’s scorn. Asked when he took office, “What will you do?”: “Do?…” he replied. “I will make Abe Lincoln President of the United States.”

The government could use such a man, despite his idiosyncrasies, his sudden judgments and hostile attitude. So could Lincoln use him in his official family, despite the abuse he knew that Stanton had been heaping on him since they first met in Cincinnati, when the big-time lawyer referred to the country one as “that long-armed creature.” More recently he had been employing circus epithets; “the original gorilla,” he called him, “a low, cunning clown,” and “that giraffe.” Lincoln knew of some of this, but he still thought he could use him—provided he could handle him. And he believed he could. Stanton’s prancing and bouncing, he said, put him in mind of a Methodist preacher out West who got so wrought up in his prayers and exhortations that his congregation was obliged to put bricks in his pockets to hold him down. “We
may have to serve Stanton the same way,” Lincoln drawled. “But I guess we’ll let him jump a while first.”

The bricks were applied much sooner than anyone expected. One day the President was busy with a roomful of people and Stanton came hurrying through the doorway, clutching a sheet of paper in his hand. “Mr President,” he cried, “this order cannot be signed. I refuse to sign it!” Lincoln told him calmly, “Mr Secretary, I guess that order will have to be signed.” In the hush that followed, the two men’s eyes met. Then Stanton turned, still with the order in his hand, and went back to his office and signed it.

Whether or not McClellan could handle him, too, was one of the things that remained to be seen. At the outset, the general had good cause to believe that the change in War Department heads would work to his advantage. For on the evening of January 13—the one on which he rose from his sickbed to confront the men who had been conferring behind his back—Stanton came by his quarters and informed him that his nomination as Secretary of War had gone to the Senate that afternoon. Personally, he went on to say, he considered the job a hardship, but the chance of working in close harness with his friend McClellan persuaded him to undergo the sacrifice involved. If the general would approve he would accept. McClellan did approve; he urged acceptance on those grounds. Two days later the nomination was confirmed. Stanton took the post the following day. And almost immediately, from that January 16 on, McClellan found the doors of the War Department barred to him. The Secretary, suddenly hostile, became at once the Young Napoleon’s most outspoken critic. McClellan had been given another lesson in the perfidy of the human animal. One more had been added, at the top, to that “set of men … unscrupulous and false.”

What he did not know was that, all this time, Stanton had been working both sides of the street. While his name was up for approval in the Senate, Charles Sumner was saying: “Mr Stanton, within my knowledge, is one of us.” Ben Wade thought so, too. And on the day the new Secretary moved into office their opinion was confirmed. After saying that he was going to “make Abe Lincoln President,” Stanton added that as the next order of business, “I will force this man McClellan to fight or throw up.” Later that same day he said baldly, “This army has got to fight or run away. And while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.”

Formerly he had run with the fox and hunted with the hounds. Now he was altogether with the latter. On January 20, at his own request, he appeared before the Joint Committee, and after the hearing its members were loud in his praise. “We are delighted with him,” Julian of Indiana exclaimed. In the Senate, Fessenden of Maine announced: “He is just the man we want! We agree on every point: the duties of the
Secretary of War, the conduct of the war, the Negro question and everything.” In the
Tribune
Horace Greeley hailed him as the man who would know how to deal with “the greatest danger now facing the country—treason in Washington, treason in the army itself, especially the treason which wears the garb of Unionism.”

Treason was a much-used word these days. For Greeley to use it three times within a dependent clause was nothing rare. In fact it was indicative. The syllables had a sound that caught men’s ears, overtones of enormity that went beyond such scarehead words as rape or arson or incest. Observing this, the radicals had made it their watchword, their cry in the night, expanding its definition in the process.

Many acts were treasonous now which had never been considered so before. Even a lack of action might be treason, according to these critics in long-skirted broadcloth coats. Delay, for instance: all who counseled delay were their special targets, along with those who favored something less than extermination for rebels. Obviously, the way to administer sudden death was to march out within musket range and bang away until the serpent Rebellion squirmed no more. And as a rallying cry this forthright logic was effective. Up till now the Administration’s opposition had been no more than an incidental irritant. By mid-January of this second calendar year of the war, however, so many congressmen had discovered the popular value of pointing a trembling finger at “treason” in high places that their conglomerate, harping voice had grown into a force which had to be reckoned with as surely as the Confederates still intrenched around Manassas.

Lincoln the politician understood this perfectly. They were men with power, who knew how to use it ruthlessly, and as such they would have to be dealt with. McClellan the soldier could never see it at all, partly because he operated under the disadvantage of considering himself a gentleman. For him they were willful, evil men, “unscrupulous and false,” and as such they should be ignored as beneath contempt, at least by him. He counted on Lincoln to keep them off his back: which Lincoln in fact had promised to do. “I intend to be careful and do as well as possible,” McClellan had said. “Don’t let them hurry me, is all I ask.” And Lincoln had told him, “You shall have your own way in the matter, I assure you.” Yet now he seemed to be breaking his promise to McClellan, just as he had broken his word to Frémont, whom he had told: “I have given you carte-blanche. You must use your own judgment, and do the best you can.” Frémont had used his judgment, such as it was, and been flung aside. McClellan was discouraged.