Recollections of Stanton Under Johnson

ALL that one can recollect of the personal and public life of Stanton during the three years which followed the death of Lincoln is so interlaced with the vagaries of Andrew Johnson, whom he was striving to serve as he had served Johnson’s great predecessor, that it is difficult in the extreme to separate those things which spring out of the free will of the war minister from the distortions of the unbalanced mind of the President. The task is as unpleasant as it is difficult, and, if it were possible to blot out altogether the record of this administration, much more of our good name would be saved than lost. But this can never be, and therefore the duty is more incumbent that we should cull with sedulous care and preserve all that can be found which will save the period from unqualified condemnation. It will appear, when the history of the unfortunate administration shall be clarified of prejudice and doubt, that Mr. Stanton, during the three years he was part of it, spent his strength in the vain effort to stay its reckless course. The little of permanent good that can be traced to the time of his service in it was, in large measure, wrenched from its purposes by his nerve and will. The country is more indebted to him for what he prevented than for what he accomplished during that critical period.

The terrible agony which began on the night of the 14th of April, 1865, was over at seven on the morning of the 15th, when Lincoln breathed his last, and the great office he had magnified more than any who had gone before him devolved upon one who had none of his illustrious qualities or powers.

Mr. Johnson took the oath of office shortly after the closing scene at Mr. Lincoln’s death-bed. There was necessity in the peril of the hour that there should be no needless delay, for the government was without executive head, and no one knew the ground on which he stood. Few were present beyond the members of the Cabinet, all of whom, except Mr. Seward, whom the murderous blow of another conspirator had brought to the very verge of death, had gathered in a small room at the public house which was the home of the VicePresident, to be witnesses of the sad ceremony. There was hardly more formality than is observed in swearing a witness in court. Thick clouds were darkening the heavens outside, for there had been a tempest during the night and its shadows still lingered, but darker shadows settled on the brows of those present, for they could see no light in front of them nor feel assurance of anything in the future. The silence was almost oppressive ; little else was heard except the request of the new President that the Cabinet should continue at their posts. Mr. Stanton had been at his, from the moment of the fatal shot all through the night, dividing his whole thought and energy between the bedside of his dying chief and efforts to allay the panic which had seized upon the people, and which threatened at one time to pass beyond control. Mr. Johnson was at first overwhelmed with the terrible weight of responsibility thus suddenly thrown upon him, and he cast about for support from any source within his reach, like one dazed by some great blow. Opportunity was given the next morning at a room in the Treasury Department for those connected with public affairs, and happening to he in Washington in the absence of Congress, to pay their respects to the new President and tender him their support.

This was a strange meeting. I had seen before many gatherings of public men to do honor to the chief magistrate of the nation, hut none like this. In the East Room of the White House, within full sight of the room where this meeting was held, lay one President, murdered for the work he had done and the cause he had represented. Here was another President, not twenty-fours hours in the office which through this murder had devolved upon him. Those least satisfied with the moderation and deliberation which characterized the policy of Lincoln as to the future of the insurrectionary States now laying down their arms were the earliest there, and were the first and freest in their tender not only of support, but of advice upon the policy of a new administration. Nor was there any hesitancy in the responses made to these inopportune suggestions. The policy of the departed President, and the necessity of a radical departure from it, were discussed with the new chief in a manner little in keeping with the proprieties of such an occasion. I had called in company with a Senator with whom I had returned to Washington on the evening of the tragedy, from a visit to the smoking ruins of Richmond and the deserted fortifications around Petersburg. This Senator was one of those who had been a long time out of patience with the slow movements of President Lincoln, and had longed for the day of retributive justice. The week we had spent among the desolations and waste places left behind by the fleeing rebel army had not much tempered his wrath. President Johnson had also returned only five days before from the same scenes, and in much the same mood. “ I thank God you are here,” were the first words with which the Senator greeted the new President. “ Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness in his heart for this hour, and Providence has removed him to give place to one who will mete out justice to the guilty authors of this war.” The President replied in like temper, “ Treason is a crime and must be made odious,” and “ bloody handed rebels must suffer the extreme penalty for their crimes. ... I saw,” he said, “last week a judge, who had left his seat in the Supreme Court that he might aid Jeff Davis to overthrow the government. He was walking the streets of Richmond unmolested, when ho ought to have been hanging at the nearest lamppost.” We came away from this interview, the Senator feeling that at last his heart’s desire and prayer was to be answered right speedily, and his companion quite unable to penetrate the thick darkness which shrouded the present and shut out the future.

This was the President into whose Cabinet Mr. Stanton carried the habits of reserve and cautious deliberation which prevailed in that of Mr. Lincoln. He encountered at the outset, and for many weeks was taxed to his utmost in the endeavor to hold in check, the spirit which had found such free utterance on this first day under the new government. It was a fierce, angry cry for “ condign punishment,” reaching beyond the perpetrators of the immediate tragedy to every leader in the rebellion. There was a determination to open wide the doors of the courts, and proceed at once with judge and jury to visit upon all on whom hands could be laid, the punishment their crimes had merited. To those imbued with the spirit which had governed the Lincoln administration, this undue zeal to proceed against those prominent in the rebellion seemed too vindictive and revengeful.

Andrew Johnson, though himself a Southerner, was nevertheless of quite another type from those who had involved the country in war. He had risen from the ranks of the “ poor whites,” a class as distinct and isolated as the blacks themselves. He had fought himself up to position and power through the most bitter opposition at every step from the very men now under the ban, and powerless at his feet. The original antagonism and hatred had been intensified beyond measure by the stern and uncompromising opposition he had from the beginning raised against all their treasonable plots. In the Senate he had denounced the ringleaders to their face as traitors worthy of the gallows, and they, in turn, in their rage had threatened him with personal violence in his seat, and promised him the doom of a “ recreant false to his people and section.” He had triumphed at last, and they had failed and were at his mercy, He was neither great enough nor good enough to forego his opportunity, and he chafed under the least restraint. In addition to all this, the assassination of Lincoln had greatly inflamed the public mind, and the cry for punishment came back from the people to intensify still further his determination to “ make treason odious,” which was the phrase most frequent in his many passionate utterances at that period. Jefferson Davis, the leader of them all, whom more than all others, because most guilty of all, he would have liked to see first on the gibbet, had been captured, and was now under close guard in Fortress Monroe. Nothing hindered Davis’s trial for treason but the restraining influence exerted over the President in his own Cabinet, and by the more moderate of the leaders of that political party of which he had become the official head.

It fell to Stanton more than to any other to be the exponent of the counter feeling of restraint and moderation. He; had in this but little aid in the Cabinet itself. Seward was disabled, and Welles alone had held place during the four years of the late administration. All the others had come in later, and most of them had seen altogether but a few months’ service. Moreover, the War Department and its tireless head had most to do with the management and direction of public affairs in the trying times of the early weeks of the new administraation. Mr. Stanton had, because there was none other, taken up the reins as they fell from the hands of Mr. Lincoln, and had brought order out of chaos. He had set on foot the pursuit of the assassins. He had ordered the funeral ceremonies of the dead President, and under the conduct of the War Department, the funeral cortège had taken its slow march to Springfield. This department had hunted down the conspirators, and was trying them by court-martial. It was the army which had brought in Jefferson Davis, and he was still a prisoner of war, awaiting the purposes of the Administration. It could hardly be said that even in the most trying moments of the war did graver responsibilities, or more exacting duties, rest upon the head of the War Department than during the first weeks of President Johnson’s administration. Nothing of all that a sense of public duty required of him at that time was so difficult of performance as the prevention of rash and unseemly proceedings against the chief men of the rebellion who had surrendered, and Avere in our power.

Mr. Stanton was not well fitted by natural temperament or by experience for the task that thus fell to him. The consequences were so grave, and the necessity pressed so hard upon him, that he was forced to interpose between the President and the victims of his wrath.

The situation was rendered still more serious by other complications. Mr. Johnson made no discrimination in the men of the rebellion against whom he was pressing proceedings, unless it was that the more conspicuous of the leaders with whom he had come in personal contact were to be first arraigned. Proceedings had already been commenced against Jefferson Davis, and attention was turned next to General Lee, and the officers of the army which surrendered with him at Appomattox. But when it came to the knowledge of General Grant, that it was contemplated to disregard the pledge given by him to General Lee on his surrender that “ each officer and man will be allowed to return to their home, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they preserve their parole and the laws in force where they reside,” he interposed with an indignant protest, couched in such terms as made the President, though his constitutional superior, hesitate and at last recede from his purpose. Those who saw General Grant when he raised his voice against this attempted breach of the plighted faith of the nation, tendered and accepted in the most trying hour of its existence, will never forget the fire in his eye and the fixed determination written in every lineament of his countenance as he faced the man whom the constitution had put over him, and declared that if the faith and honor of the nation were not to be held sacred and secure in the keeping of the President, he would himself appeal to the people themselves for their preservation ; that while he held a commission under this government, its sacred pledge given by him on the battlefield should be maintained at all hazards. The President struggled with the situation for several days, and the anxiety was most intense in the breasts of those who had knowledge of this conflict between the head of the state and the head of the army, so long as there was doubt as to the result. Mr. Stanton was the chief obstacle in the Cabinet in the way of these vindictive schemes of the President, and, in the controversy with General Grant over his pledge to General Lee at Appomattox, he was compelled to go so far in maintenance of the inviolability of the pledge, that the relations between the President and Secretary became from that time painfully strained.

The trial of Jefferson Davis for treason was found to be impracticable and was abandoned, and that of General Lee or any of the officers who laid down their arms with him was impossible without national dishonor. Johnston and his army had surrendered to Sherman on the same conditions, and were entitled to the same immunity. Talk in executive circles of other prosecutions began from this time to be less frequent, and soon ceased altogether. But it was only to give place to other causes for anxiety and alarm of quite an opposite character. There were unmistakable signs of a change in the temper of the Executive, and in his attitude towards those for whose condign punishment be had but yesterday been striving. So rapid was this change that, in less than two months after his accession to office with the cry upon his lips that “ treason was a crime and must be made odious,” he issued a free pardon to all who had participated in the rebellion, a few only excepted, and these mostly officials in the civil service of the Confederacy, to all of whom he also offered pardon on the most liberal terms, “ if personally applied for.”

The Secretary, whose position in the Cabinet was becoming every hour more and more uncomfortable and uncertain, found no relief in this change of ground on the part of the President, although compelled by it to a change of base on his own part. He saw all too plainly that quite new influences were dominating the course, and, he feared, the purpose also of the President in reference not only to those who had participated in the rebellion, but towards the insurrectionary States themselves. Congress had differed quite seriously with President Lincoln during its last session upon the question of reconstruction, each claiming exclusive jurisdiction of all questions pertaining to the restoration of those States to their proper relations to the Union. The last session had closed less than six weeks before his death with a pocket veto by Mr. Lincoln of a hill, which had passed both Houses, prescribing fixed and definite conditions applicable alike to all the States, on compliance with which alone they were to be recognized as a part of the Union; until such compliance, they were to he governed substantially as military provinces. This difference was largely on constitutional grounds, and was persisted in with great tenacity and some bitterness in certain quarters. Nothing hut the unbounded confidence, even of those who had differed most with him, in tilt! purity of motive and high purposes of the President had prevented an open rupture.

President Johnson seemed to have become intoxicated with the power which, in the strange vicissitude of the war, he now found himself to possess over those who had fought him so relentlessly all his life. He had been thwarted in bis attempt to display that power in the personal punishment of their leaders, but the Tempter held up before him another way which might lead to a triumph not only over them, but also over those later friends whom his recent shortcomings, personal as well as political, had alienated. He was the constitutional head of the nation. What hindered his so exercising his constitutional powers as to bring all the States back into full communion, and to make his friends and supporters ready to secure by their suffrages his future hold upon an office which now was his only because of a foul crime ? This was the way into which he turned, and, seizing upon Mr. Lincoln’s claim that reconstruction was the constitutional prerogative of the Executive and not of Congress, he proceeded at once to carry out this plan, but upon a basis so widely different from that of his predecessor as to cause the gravest apprehension not only among those who claimed this power for Congress alone, hut even among those who had always maintained that reconstruction was a prerogative of the Executive. They saw in the methods and conditions of reconstruction laid down by the President indications of a disposition to draw back from the results of the war, especially in its making secure what had been already gained for those lately in bondage. They had never doubted Lincoln on this point, however much they had differed with him as to the best way of reaching an end for which they were sure he was striving no less than they were. But in his successor there was never from the beginning any such confidence. He could not differ without quarreling, and in all his quarrels he arraigned the motives of those with whom he differed, and begot in turn distrust of his own, which he seemed to take pains to intensify. With full knowledge of the attitude of Congress at its adjournment in March upon the question of reconstruction, he nevertheless attempted to take the matter entirely into his own hands, and to proceed with it at once in all the insurrectionary States with a rapidity which indicated a design of putting it beyond the power of Congress to interfere when it should meet in December.

The distrust of his sincerity was not long in ripening into conviction of betrayal, in some cases amounting to a belief in his disloyalty. Stanton had, in President Lincoln’s Cabinet, sustained his policy as against that of Congress, sure that all which had been gained by the war would be secured by the carrying out of his chief s plans. He was now, however, in the Cabinet of an Executive in whose purposes he had no such confidence, whom indeed he distrusted quite as much as those most pronounced in their denunciation. He was therefore compelled to withhold cooperation in the policy and plans of his superior in office, It was not in his nature, however, to maintain long a position of neutrality on any question, and it was as little in that of the President to tolerate such neutrality on the part of any subordinate. b rom the outset of his public career, he that was not for him had been accounted as against him, and generally as his personal enemy. When, in the early days of Ids administration, he was animated with the relentless purpose of a public prosecutor, he required unquestioned support from all holding official position under him. Equally exacting was he, a few weeks later, when he was ready to forgive all who had participated in the rebellion, whatever may have been the degree of their guilt. This change of front was too sudden and altogether the wrong way for a man of the character and convictions of the Secretary. The experience and education of the Lincoln administration and the war itself inclined him to a policy differing from either of the extremes — that of indiscriminate condemnation and that of an equally indiscriminate pardon — taken by the President in the short space of three months. The President was persistent and the Secretary unyielding. Differences between two such men were sure to engender mutual distrust. In this case they led early to discord and recrimination. The public judgment was against Johnson and on the side of Stanton. This had the effect of widening the difference, and of intensifying the bitterness with which each maintained his position.

This difference of opinion on essential questions of public policy between a President and a member of his Cabinet gave rise to another condition which called for serious consideration and determination by the Secretary himself. Could he, consistently with his own self-respect and his obligations both to the President and the country, continue a member of a Cabinet committed by its chief to a policy believed by him to be unwise and unsafe ? The public began to call upon him to resign, and abusive epithets were being hurled at him for remaining longer in official connection with the President and those who, with him, were aiding and abetting measures of reconstruction fraught, as they believed, with the gravest evils. To these attacks he was exceedingly sensitive, and he smarted grievously under the imputation that he was holding on to office for the sake of office, and that he was sinister in his retention of place. Although as yet the estrangement between the President and himself had not passed the limit that, in ordinary times, would call for his dismissal or require his withdrawal, still he could not fail to see that, sooner or later, if present measures were persisted in, one or the other of these contingencies was sure to be forced upon him. He was compelled in advance of any such contingency to answer for himself, in the light of a higher obligation to his country, the question, Can I voluntarily abandon, to be tilled by any one of uncertain or doubtful affiliations, a post by the retention of which I may avert impending danger ? There were other than mere personal questions to be considered. The policy of the President, not yet fully developed or apparent in all its relations, was still a debatable question, and by those hesitating to visit it with unqualified condemnation a withdrawal from his Cabinet, even by one of such stern loyalty as that of Stanton, would not be justified. Those who even then were not slow to denounce the President as false to his trust were loudest in calling upon the Secretary to remain at his post and fight on for the right, regardless of precedents or personal considerations. lo those whose friendship and confidence he most enjoyed he sometimes unbosomed himself, and revealed the struggles and trials of his inner life as well as the motives controlling his public course. He grieved sorely over the imputation that love of place or selfish considerations of any kind were influencing him to remain in the Cabinet of a President whose policy was at variance with all that he deemed just and right and safe. The incessant labor had told upon his strength and had sapped the source of his vitality, while yet in Lincoln’s Cabinet, to such a degree as to induce him, on the reelection of the President, to accept the result as an assurance of an end of the war, and to avow to his chief his determination to withdraw from a work in which he was no longer needed. Accordingly, on the first news of the surrender of Lee, he placed his resignation in the hands of Mr. Lincoln. This resignation the personal appeal of his chief, declaring to him, with his arms about his neck,

“ Stanton, it is not for you to say when you will no longer be needed here,” had forced him to recall. This he thought should have protected him from the insinuation that he was sacrificing duty to lust of office. Further on in the unhappy controversy this feeling broke out with greater intensity, and called forth from the Secretary, then weak in body and depressed in spirit, complaints of its blind injustice which should have silenced all his accusers.

When the Congress met in December, there was at once open war between the executive and the legislative branch of the government over the question of reconstruction, each claiming exclusive jurisdiction, and each bent on thwarting every attempt at interference. President Johnson had already carried forward his own policy as far and as fast as was possible for him. He had by proclamations revoked all of the executive orders, and removed, as far as he was able, all other restrictions and prohibitions imposed during the war not required by positive law and beyond his reach. He had also issued a proclamation to all of the insurrectionary States, putting them under military governors of his own appointment, and prescribing terms of his own, upon conformity to which alone they could be restored to their proper place and function in the Union. It had been the effort of Mr. Stanton, during the preparation of these terms, to secure in them all that was possible of what had been won by the war, especially in regard to the future of the freedmen. He felt, however, that his influence was on the wane, that an open rupture could not long be avoided, and that his post must soon, unless extraordinary legislative measures interposed, be surrendered into a custody in whose loyalty even he was fast losing confidence. Congress saw things as he did, and took up the glove. They challenged all that the President had done, and passed an act taking the whole matter out of his hands, prescribing their own terms of reconstruction and making unlawful all other methods. This act became a law over a veto, and fell, for execution, into the hands of a hostile Executive, who denounced it as both unjust and unconstitutional. Many of its provisions were to be executed through the War Department, in which Congress had most confidence. These provisions were especially odious to Mr. Johnson, and aroused in him increased hostility to Mr. Stanton. It soon became evident that he contemplated relief from the restraints which the presence of this officer in the Cabinet imposed upon his actions, either by a voluntary or an enforced retirement of the obnoxious Secretary.

In this emergency Stanton took counsel of his friends as well as of his own conscience. The situation, as he saw it, was laid before them in frequent interviews and their advice sought. Those who knew him in the dark days of the war saw again an anxious and troubled spirit, ready still for any sacrifice and any duty which could be made plain to him. He laid before these friends the evidence of dangerous movements that had come to his knowledge, and took no step they did not sanction. Congress, alive to this new danger, took the side of the loyal and fighting Secretary, and insisted upon his standing by his post.

They undertook to throw over him the shield of law, so that he should be secure in his office while discharging the duties required of him by the Reconstruction Act, placed upon the statute book in spite of President Johnson, and for the very purpose of subverting his policy. In carrying out this design they enacted laws which could find no other justification than a pending exigency, assumed to be so pressing and perilous as to justify legislation for an occasion and not for permanent rule. In the Tenure of Office Act they took away from the President the power to remove, without the consent of the Senate, any officer whose appointment had been confirmed by that body, and enacted that no Cabinet officer should be removed, without the consent of the Senate, till one month after the expiration of the term of the President under whom he held that position. And as if it were not a sufficient humiliation of the President to take away from him the power to say who should he his advisers, they boldly attacked his constitutional prerogative of commander-in-chief of the army and navy by the enactment into law of a most extraordinary army regulation, that all orders and instructions in relation to military operations issued by the President or Secretary of War should he issued through the general of the army, whose headquarters should be in Washington, and who should not be removed or suspended or assigned to duty elsewhere, except at his own request, without the approval of the Senate; and that all orders not thus issued should be null and void, their issue a crime, and their execution by any officer of the army a penitentiary offense. That there might not be a moment when the President would he without a Congress to watch or check him, it was also enacted that each new Congress should meet on the 4th day of March, immediately on the expiration of the preceding term.

It is difficult at this distance of time to find justification for these extraordinary legislative measures adopted to hedge about a President and strip him of power, because the conditions which called for them have passed out of sight, and we strive in vain to realize the passions and perils which then beset the public service. Perhaps it does not become one, who voted for them all, to indulge in much severity of language in their condemnation. Moreover, we have to do, at this time, not with the laws themselves, but with Stanton forced to continue in the service by those who enacted them, and with President Johnson chafing under their restraints and bent on neutralizing their effect. No one could have felt more keenly than did Stanton the painful anomaly of the position in which this legislation had placed him. Never before had it been known in our history that a President had been forced to retain, as a Cabinet adviser, one opposed to his policy of administration and holding place to thwart that policy. Never before had a Cabinet officer permitted himself to remain for a moment as a confidential adviser to a President whose whole policy he disapproved, and in whom personally he had lost confidence. Inclination and duty were in conflict. Stanton longed for rest, but feared to take it. Who would succeed him, or what would be done by another in harmony with presidential views, if he retired, he could not answer, and he dared not risk the results possible on his resignation. Meantime the public outside of Congress, blind to the serious contingencies which hung upon the maintenance in Cabinet circles of as much as possible of the old loyal and persistent spirit which had carried us successfully to the end of the war, raised again, and louder than ever before, the call for him to leave the Cabinet, and rid the Republican party of all further responsibility for an administration false to all the principles which had brought it into power. He made no public response to these demands, but to intimate friends he talked without reserve. He would gladly leave the service, and seek rest and restoration of health now so broken and shattered as to cause grave apprehensions of serious results. But he believed the President to be led by bad passions and the counsels of unscrupulous and dangerous men, and no one could tell what course he would pursue under such influences. Duty outweighed all personal considerations. “ If that he faithfully performed,” he said, “ it matters little when or how we die. I will remain at my post, and die, if it need be, with harness on.” Turning to the criticisms of impatient men, which had reached him through the public press, he exclaimed, “These men will some time see that I am right, and appreciate my motives and vindicate my action.” Of the situation, and as justification for the sacrifice he was making of his own health and the present approval of friends, he remarked that at no time during the war had he felt more anxious about public affairs and the condition of the country than he did at that moment. Then he had known on whom to depend, but not now. Antagonisms in and out of the Cabinet only intensified the President’s persistency in his own methods of solving the problem of reconstruction. He brought into the controversy the feeling that Congress had attempted to degrade him in his office. They had, he said, put him under bonds, and it was due to the high office he held, and its constitutional prerogatives, that he should burst these bonds asunder. Thus it became a trial of strength. He made formal request for the resignation of Secretary Stanton, and, failing in that, suspended him from office under the Tenure of Office Act. That act required the approval of the Senate before the suspension worked a removal. The disapproval of that body restored him to his place. Then the President, defying the law as unconstitutional, dismissed him, and ordered him to leave the War Department. He refused to vacate the office or yield the discharge of its duties to the new appointee. An ineffectual attempt was made to force him out of it, but he held possession by main strength, abiding in it constantly for more than forty days, and until the contest over it had ended. The spectacle of the Secretary encamped in the War Office with sentinels on guard was one which will fail to find its like in history. Never before or since has the government of a great nation found itself engaged in such a struggle. It attracted a very wide attention, even beyond our own borders, and was the subject of comment in the foreign as well as domestic press. The enthusiastic and zealous who had taken strong ground against the President in the controversy now commended the Secretary and urged upon him an unflinching resistance. He was visited in his barricade by his intimate friends, who contributed in all possible ways to both his personal comfort and his determination to hold the place. Mr. Sumner wrote him from the Senate Chamber the famous letter, “ Stick. C. S.,” which after bis death was sold for a large sum in New York.

This attempt by the President to remove the Secretary, in violation of the provisions of the Tenure of Office Act, formed the basis of articles of impeachment against him, which the House of Representatives immediately presented to the Senate, and prosecuted before that body with great zeal and earnestness. The President, after a long and exciting trial, continuing for eighty-two days, was acquitted, the prosecution failing of the necessary two thirds by the lack of a single vote. This failure to convict, though a large majority, falling only one short of two thirds, had condemned the President, was deemed by Mr. Stanton a failure to justify him in a further struggle to retain the office, and he accordingly retired. Although it was only a technical adverse record against a large majority commending his course, yet he took seriously to heart the result thus forced upon him, and went into private life sore and sick, his constitution undermined by overwork, and with an incurable disease sapping his strength. Congress thanked him on his retirement for “ the great ability, purity, and fidelity with which he had discharged his public duties,” and the Senate accompanied the confirmation of his successor with the declaration that he was not legally removed, but had resigned his office.

This was the close of a public service rendered with signal ability in the most critical period in our history, and under difficulties which confronted no other public servant. He had entered Buchanan’s Cabinet eight years before, when the Republic was in the first throes of the rebellion, and had been called into that of Lincoln when the tide of war seemed about to overwhelm us, and he had at the end struggled for three long years under Johnson to make secure the legitimate fruits of that war. It was eight years of perpetual warfare with the enemies of the Republic and their misguided followers,—years of patriotic devotion of all his faculties to the public welfare. He laid off his armor only when opportunity and strength had failed him.

It is one of the anomalies of public life that two such men as President Johnson and Secretary Stanton, of such sharp contrast in all the elements which make up character, should have fallen at a most critical juncture of public affairs into a common service, in which unity in method and spirit and purpose were indispensable to success. That a great cause, fraught with the weal of a race and the fate of the government, was not for this reason wrecked at the very end of a long and doubtful struggle is one of the many wonders which the historian of the period will have to record.

I cannot look back over those scenes, and the work concerning which these men so widely differed, I cannot recall the incidents which from day to day startled earnest and anxious men around the Capitol, without repeating an exclamation uttered by Stanton himself when light began to break through the clouds,

“ Surely God is on our side, for we have done what we could to ruin ourselves, and yet we have failed to do it.”

Mr. Stanton retired to private life an old, wornout man, although not yet fiftyfour years of age. The asthma, which had seized upon him in the midst of his work, was developing its fatal hold. He was bent and wrinkled and gray, and his voice was husky and feeble, as of one who had already passed his threescore years and ten. He had a sunny house in Franklin Square, and he strove hard to win to it the cheer and attractions of former days, but they were slow in coming. Old friends had been cut off by the war, and new ones were plunging into the active life around them. All, old and new, however, honored him for the fight he had made, and loved him for what he had suffered for their sake. He longed, however, for the companionship in which he was wont to walk the streets arm in arm, or beguile the evening hours in the free talk of the library. Altogether, the life of an invalid, in the new conditions which surrounded him, was dispiriting. I chanced to be his neighbor in these latter days, as I was when, in the beginning of his public life, be entered Mr. Buchanan’s Cabinet at the outbreak of the war, and I saw him often at his home, and in my own family circle. When he was free from asthma, and his spirits had fair play, he was intensely interesting in conversation and charming in manner. On some of these occasions, he would hold one spell-bound till the late hours of the night with thrilling war experiences which have never found place in the public records. When Johnson and the influences with which he was surrounded left Washington in March, 1869, and were succeeded by Grant and quite another atmosphere, Stanton seemed more himself, and for a while looked forward to a resumption of old-time activities and associations. But the clouds soon gathered anew over his house, and were never again dispelled. He was forced more and more into seclusion by the relentless progress of his most distressing malady. Old friends, old comrades, and old admirers kept him ever fresh in mind, though they no longer saw him in the street. Friendly messages and kind words helped him to feel that he still held his own place in their hearts. They told General Grant of his struggles with disease, and of his waning hopes, and the great warrior remembered him as became the commander of victorious armies for whose leadership he had been indebted to the indomitable energy and will of a war minister now stricken and wasted. When a vacancy occurred in the Supreme Court, the President tendered him the judgeship, a place to which his early ambition had aspired. The nomination gratified him extremely, and healed many a sore, but it came too late. He was confirmed December 20, 1869, and five days later lie died.

Thus passed into his place in history one of the great men of his time. I have heretofore written of his personal characteristics, and of his unsurpassed public labors while under Lincoln. These present observations have been confined to his troubles in the Cabinet of Johnson. From whatever side or by whatever standard he may be measured, he will still remain among the great men of a period which called for and tested great men as none other in our history. Not for what he was, but for what he did, will be be longest remembered. So long as free institutions shall be upheld among men, the record of his labor and sacrifice in their defense will be preserved in the memory of a grateful people.

Henry L. Dawes.