"Globe," CHAP. VIII. resolution of censure, charging Cameron, while Secretary of War, with having adopted in certain transactions "a policy highly injurious to the public service." As soon as Mr. Lincoln's attention was called to the resolution, he wrote and transmitted to the House a special message explaining that the censured "transactions" occurred during the days of the first and extreme peril of the Government, when Washington was cut off from communication with the North by the insurrection in Maryland; that the acts complained of were not done by Cameron exclusively, but were ordered by the President with the full assent of his Cabinet, every member of which, with himself, was equally responsible for the alleged irregularity. Cameron gratefully remembered this voluntary and manly defense of his official integrity. He remained one of the most intimate and devoted of Lincoln's personal friends, and became one of the earliest and most effective advocates of his renomination and reëlection to the Presidency. "Globe," Edwin M. Stanton, the new Secretary of War, who became at once a prominent and powerful figure in the Government, was born in Steubenville, Ohio, December 19, 1814. He was educated at Kenyon College, and began the practice of law in 1836. By ten years of studious industry he acquired the skill and rank in his profession which justified his removal, in 1847, to the great commercial and manufacturing city of Pittsburgh. From this point he was intrusted with a class of cases which took him so frequently before the Supreme Court of the United States that in 1856 he permanently established his office in Washington City. Being an ardent Democrat in politics, and both the CHAP. VIII President and Attorney-General of the United States being at that time citizens of Pennsylvania, his local influence and acquaintance probably secured his employment as counsel for the Government in certain important land cases in California during the year 1858. This employment necessarily brought him into confidential relations with the Department of Justice and the Attorney-General. That his services proved valuable and satisfactory is shown by the double fact that President Buchanan consulted him in the preparation of his annual message, and on the retirement of Cass from his Cabinet, about the middle of December, 1860, appointed him Attorney-General to succeed Judge Black, who was made Secretary of State. June, 1870, p. 824. There is a conflict of evidence as to Stanton's precise attitude in this new relation. Ex-Secretary Black has written that he fully adopted the noncoercion views of his (Black's) official opinion of November 20, and of Buchanan's annual message formulating the doctrine of non-coercion; also that he read and indorsed Buchanan's special message "Galaxy," of January 8, 1861, which was a virtual abdication of executive functions. But Black's own opinions and position between these dates are palpably inconsistent and antagonistic; witness his written memorandum, given to the President in the new Cabinet crisis of December 30, advising a certain course and explaining, this "is coercion." Black pp. 14-17. further explains that Stanton copied the memorandum, and freely joined in the advice. Buchanan's Cabinet was undergoing a revolutionary convulsion. Black was evidently steering between op Black, "Essays and Speeches," CHAP. VIII. posing factions till the President called him to lead the Union section and sentiment of his Cabinet, when he, for the first time, took positive and consistent ground. His own version of these transactions may be pardoned for representing himself as the directing leader in this partial transformation of Buchanan's Administration. Those who were familiar with the characters of the two men will rather conclude that Stanton's positive nature and impulsive energy were the real sources of the decided stand which Black then for the first time assumed. The same revolutionary dangers and apprehensions explain another apparent impossibility. There is direct and indirect testimony from prominent Republican leaders - Seward, Wilson, Sumner, Dawes, Howard, and perhaps others that during this period Stanton, a stubborn and prejudiced Buchanan Democrat, was in secret communication and concert with those leading spirits of the opposition. Black, who ten years afterwards wrote a bitterly partisan article questioning the facts, asks: "Did he [Stanton] accept the confidence of the President [Buchanan] and the Cabinet, with "Galaxy," a predetermined intent to betray it?" and calls pp. 824, 825. such conduct "conspiring with Abolitionists." The simple truth appears to be that Stanton, becoming a member of Buchanan's Cabinet with no suspicion of the conspiracy by which Jefferson Davis and Secretaries Cobb, Floyd, and Thompson ensnared and for the moment controlled it, was horrified at the revelation which his new duties opened to him. Seeing President Buchanan in an attitude of hopeless irresolution, amid a preponderance of treasonable advice, he entered into secret relations with June, 1870, the Republican leaders, and disclosed the facts, as CHAP. VIII. the only available rock of safety in the stress and peril of impending revolution.1 Several years before, Stanton had met the new President under peculiar circumstances. It happened that Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and George Harding were associated as counsel in a celebrated reaper patent case which was tried in the city of Cincinnati before the United States Circuit Court, though they had not met in consultation prior to the trial. It is related on the one hand that Lincoln was senior counsel, and that when the hearing came on, Stanton, undervaluing Lincoln's character and ability, with unprofessional assurance, grasped the rôle of making the argument on the law points, to which, as junior counsel, he had no claim under the custom of the bar; that as the Court would hear only two lawyers on a side, and as the review 1 In "The Works of Charles Sumner," Vol. V., pp. 459, 460, and 462, we find the following: "Yesterday I was with the Attorney-General, an able, experienced, Northern Democratic lawyer, with the instincts of our profession on the relation of cause and effect. He drew me into his room, but there were clerks there; opening the door into another room there were clerks there too; and then traversing five different rooms, he found them all occupied by clerks; when, opening the door into the entry, he told me he was 'surrounded by Secessionists,' who would report in an hour to the newspapers any interview between us; that he must see me at some other time and place; that everything was bad as could be; that Virginia would certain- "... Last evening the Attorney- from him what I cannot communi cate. Suffice it to say, he does ident has been wrong again, and Also compare, ante, Chapters "Harper's June, 1884, p. 62. CHAP. VIII. of the mechanical questions was specially confided to Mr. Harding, this arrangement deprived Mr. Lincoln, and to his disappointment, of the opporMonthly" tunity of speaking before a prominent Court and a new and distinguished auditory. On the other hand we are distinctly informed by one of the clients in that suit that Mr. Lincoln was the junior counsel, and Mr. Stanton and Mr. Harding had made so much longer and more elaborate preparation that the clients themselves determined their selection to make the arguments; that, therefore, Mr. Lincoln's displacement arose from no unfairness of any one, but simply from the fact that the Court had limited 1887. MS. the number of speakers. Ralph Emerson to the Authors, March 12, "North American Review," Nov., 1879, pp. When the new President was inaugurated, Stanton, and the other members of Buchanan's Administration, went into sudden eclipse. For months the public heard nothing from them, and in the mighty rush of events thought nothing about them. They evidently felt keenly the popular odium under which they disappeared for the moment, and were eager to magnify in their own extenuation every real or apparent shortcoming of their successors. In a series of confidential letters which did not PP. 473-483. become public till years after the war, from which we have elsewhere made quotations, we have an interesting record of Stanton's views and feelings. He watched the beginnings of the new Administration with an eye of unsparing fault-finding. It is clear that he had no high opinion of Mr. Lincoln, and no hope in the Republican party; worse than all, his faith in the ability of the Government to defend and maintain itself seems to have been seriously shaken, if not utterly gone. His com |