Lincoln's autocrat

[RJNorton]

Many thanks, Richard, for noting this review! Here is the article:

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Character Assassination

Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, was fierce, conniving and unlikable. But he built the army that won the war.

By
Harold Holzer

Forget the “Team of Rivals” camaraderie on view in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”—particularly the scene showing the president and his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, grasping hands in the telegraph office as they breathlessly await news from the battlefront. The Stanton whose portrait William Marvel paints in “Lincoln’s Autocrat”—or more accurately, defaces—in this scathing biography seems incapable of holding hands with anyone, except perhaps to take his own political pulse.

The pig-faced, bespectacled, portly, long-bearded Stanton—so fierce that Lincoln almost timidly dubbed him “Mars”—has never been easy for writers or readers to like. But he emerges from this latest study not only as the “autocrat” of its title but as a conniving, obsequious, social-climbing, duplicitous, abusive self-promoter, loyal to nothing but his own ambition. Stanton manifested what his onetime Buchanan administration colleague John C. Breckinridge delicately called a “duplex character,” and Mr. Marvel has uncovered countless examples of how Stanton “ingratiated himself to opposing factions by privately voicing support for each, at least until he could determine which side might prevail.”

The trouble is, Mr. Marvel offers us few leavening virtues. His Stanton lacks even the prodigious administrative talent that previous biographers, like Harold Hyman, have ascribed to him. Mr. Marvel actually faults his subject for hiring more clerks than any previous secretary of war, discounting the fact that Stanton’s bureau, responsibilities and workload grew exponentially as the Civil War progressed.

From time to time writers, including Otto Eisenschiml, and, more recently, Bill O’Reilly have advanced the absurd notion that Stanton conspired in the Lincoln assassination. Serious scholars dispute that calumny, and Mr. Marvel will have none of it either. But that is about the only crime he does not accuse Stanton of committing.

That Stanton rose because of his enormous legal skills is something the author does not dispute. He even puts the lie to the long-held myth that Stanton once gruffly insulted fellow attorney Abraham Lincoln when the Illinoisan traveled to Cincinnati in 1855 to serve as co-counsel in a patent case. Generations of historians have cited the story to demonstrate Lincoln’s magnanimity in appointing such a boor to his cabinet seven years later. Mr. Marvel convincingly shows why the incident could never have occurred.

A Democrat in politics, Stanton gravitated to Washington before the war in search of bigger cases and wealthier clients. As James Buchanan’s last attorney general during the first throes of the secession crisis, Stanton tried steering that vacillating lame-duck president to the defense of the Union, as Mr. Marvel concedes. He reminds us, however, that earlier in his career, eager to please the powerful, Stanton had flattered secession-minded slavery advocates and assured them that he believed firmly in states’ rights. In 1862 Stanton got his second chance to serve in a presidential cabinet, this time replacing incompetent, corrupt Simon Cameron at Lincoln’s war department. Over the next three years, Stanton becomes, in Mr. Marvel’s portrayal, a power-mad Rasputin, cracking down harshly on dissent (arguably with Lincoln’s approval) while ridiculing the president behind his back.

Most members of Lincoln’s official family found Stanton as irascible and self-important as Mr. Marvel does—always the last to arrive at cabinet meetings and making melodramatic entrances to boot. Attorney General Edward Bates thought him “a bullying coward.” Postmaster General Montgomery Blair loathed him so thoroughly that even Mr. Marvel dismisses Blair as a reliable source. Noah Brooks, the journalist Lincoln would likely have named his chief of staff had he lived, thought Stanton “coarse, abusive and arbitrary” but conceded that he was also “industrious and apparently devoted to the interests of the Government.” Lincoln himself believed Stanton “terribly in earnest.” That did not inhibit Gen. William T. Sherman from committing one of the era’s most shocking public acts of insubordination, shunning Stanton’s outstretched hand at the otherwise joyful May 1865 Army Grand Review in Washington. The petulant Sherman was seething because Stanton had rejected his overgenerous post-Appomattox peace offering to Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston—a capitulation that well deserved to be overturned.

Mr. Marvel cannot even bring himself to endorse the claim that Stanton declared, at Lincoln’s deathbed, “Now he belongs to the ages”—the inspiration for an entire recent book by Adam Gopnik. “If Stanton actually uttered such a haunting and memorable phrase, it seems odd that no reporters quoted it at the time,” Mr. Marvel concludes, conceding only: “He did draw the window shades closed.”

Along the way, a few errors creep into the well-written text. By the tradition of the day, Lincoln gave his first inaugural address before being sworn in, not after. Constitutional amendments require three-fourths of the states for ratification, not two-thirds. The journalist behind the bogus 1864 presidential proclamation on further conscription, the publication of which ignited a New York press crackdown, was Joseph, not James, Howard, and he no longer worked for the New York Times but for the Brooklyn Eagle.

In the end, Mr. Marvel allows his readers a momentary twinge of sympathy when, in 1869, a fatally ailing Stanton yearns for and belatedly receives appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, only to die before he can assume the seat. But quickly we learn that Stanton has cruelly disinherited his only son. Almost gleefully, Mr. Marvel reports the ultimate comeuppance: Stanton’s longtime orders that he be interred alongside the boy’s mother, his first wife, are ignored by his second. Long before that moment arrives, however, Edwin Stanton has been effectively buried by William Marvel.

Mr. Holzer, winner of the 2015 Lincoln Prize for “Lincoln and the Power of the Press,” is the editor of “President Lincoln Assassinated!!”

Lincoln’s Autocrat

By William Marvel
North Carolina, 624 pages, $35


SOURCE: http://www.wsj.com/articles/character-as...1433715026