>> Welcome. Regretfully David Ferriero, archivist
of the United States, could not be here to introduce William Marvel, "Lincoln's Autocrat:
The Life of Edwin Stanton." So on behalf of the archivist, welcome to his house.
As a board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and a member of a Lincoln Book Discussion
Group of the Lincoln group of the District of Columbia, when I read that William Marvel
was going to be speaking here today on his booked on the famed Secretary of War during
the Lincoln Administration, I penciled this that I was going to come. Little thinking
that I would truly be privileged to introduce the author.
William Marvel has been writing Civil War history since the 1980s. He was born in Virginia
and is a longtime New Hampshire resident. He graduated with a B.A. in history in 1977
from New Hampshire's Kenyon State College and then in 2001 was awarded the achievement
award. His works include works on Andersonville and Appomattox, and he has written quartets
on the war: "Mr. Lincoln Goes to War," "Lincoln's Darkest Years," "The Great Task Remaining,"
"The Third Year of Lincoln's War," and "Tarnished Victory: Finishing Lincoln's War." Bill Marvel
holds a prestigious Lincoln prize from Gettysburg college as well as the Freeman Award and the
Georgia Historical Society Bell Award. As for who was William Edwin Stanton, Stanton
was an esteemed eastern lawyer who in 1855 humiliated a junior colleague, one Abraham
Lincoln. Later Stanton went on to serve in James Buchanan's
administration. Grant nominated him to the Supreme Court but death prevented Stanton
from serving. Quite a life. So fill in the details, I give you William
Marvel, the first significant biography in 50 years on Edwin Stanton.
(applause). >> William Marvel: Thank you, and good afternoon.
And thank you for a generous introduction. It's always a great boost to my selfesteem
to get out of the town where I grew up and hear myself talked about by people who haven't
known me all my life. (laughter).
It's also been good for the spirit to come down and see some green grass. We don't have
any yet. In fact, there was still snow in the yard when we left the day before yesterday.
It's been a long winter. I've been living with Edwin Stanton for a
long time ta. And he has in the been a congenial companion. It's been almost ten years since
I started collecting material about him. And I was nearly four years writing the biography
not counting a year and a half of revisions I couldn't help picking away under while my
publisher took a glacial appraisal process. Since I sent them the original manuscript,
I wrote two other books on local history - (laughter) - and both of them are now in print. They
both beat the Stanton biography. And I confess there were times when I was sorry that I had
ever heard his name. (laughter).
That put me in company with a lot of other Americans, all now dead who also wished that
they had never heard his name neither. I don't live in the academic environment.
Most of my days are spent in the town in northern New Hampshire where I grew up with people
with whom I'm far less likely to discuss American history than the superiority of Swedish chain
saws. However, thanks to a very gregarious wife,
I tend to meet a lot of new people, often that seems more than necessary. And they always
want to know what you do. And then they want to know what your latest project is. They
have all been sort of stymied by my reference to Edwin Stanton. None of them really had
ever heard of him. And when I tried to explain his role as Lincoln's
Secretary of War, I tended to get that glazedoverlook that I'm sure I was wearing while my daughter
was trying to explain to me her article in the November issue of "Computer" about something
called virtualization of home network gateways or something like that. I read it dutifully
and listened attentively and I didn't understand a word.
For the sake of those people who had never heard of Edwin Stanton, I took to the shorthand
of characterizing him as the Dick Cheney of the Lincoln administration.
(laughter). That seemed to get the point across. But,
of course, the analogy isn't perfectly accurate because Stanton actually had his defenders
and actually a few admirers. Personally, I have never met anyone who admired Dick Cheney.
It seems kind of strange when you think he once shot a lawyer.
(laughter). But the comparison between Stanton and Cheney
is apt perhaps for more reasons than their equally surly dispositions, the difference
of opinion from theirs, and the arrogance they displayed in positions of public power.
Each seem to have served a critically persuasive role in a presidency that oversaw a disturbing
degradation of first, fourth, fifth, and sixth amendment rights in the name of what had by
the latter administration come to be called national security.
When the legitimacy of such infringements is called into question as it was this the
case of the George W. Bush administration, defenders tend to justify the latest violation
by going back through a series of precedence that ultimately take them to the Lincoln administration.
Only the alien and sedition acts of 1800 preceded Lincoln's wartime edicts as an instance of
overt repression by the federal government and surviving antagonism toward that federalist
legislation from six decades before the Civil War may help explain why Lincoln's contemporary
defenders tended not to cite those acts in justification of his own efforts to curb effective
speech. The principal antebellum of suspending habeas
corpus was Andrew Jackson, not Jackson the President, but in an autocratic role as the
military commander in which a city he had declared martial law.
Lincoln's initial and rather limited exercise of such presumed authority came before Stanton
entered the cabinet in January 1862. But thereafter, Stanton's influence seemed evident in the
more objectionable actions of authority or in the new congressional legislation that
authorized them. So what sort of man was this Stanton? This
is a picture of him in the early 1850s with his son Edwin, Edwin L. Stanton. He was - the
boy was the only surviving child of his first marriage. This was taken seven or eight years
after the child's mother died. Stanton's last biographer Harold Heiman defended
him against the aspersions of his more critical associates by claiming they didn't like him
or actually despised of him and spoke critically of him in their diaries and letters. The notion
they may have disliked him for perfectly good reasons seems not to have occurred to Mr.
Heiman who were unusually generous to Stanton in numerous instances of questionable conduct
and who was also rather supportive in his assessment of executive excesses among wartime
Presidents in general. While Stanton did have a number of champions
among radical Republicans, his closer colleagues left a chorus of similar negative observations
about him. And I'd like to share with you a good many of them. I hope not too many.
Let's begin with Gideon Wells who was Lincoln's Secretary Of the Navy. He was Secretary Of
the Navy during the entire time of Stanton. He was fond of power and exercise. It was
more precious to him than pecuniary gain. Stanton is by nature an intriguer, not faithful
in his friendships, is given to secret underhand combination.
Hickman Browning, a senator from Illinois, met Stanton soon after he became Secretary
of War and later served with him in the cabinet of Andrew Johnson. He recorded that he had
no faith in him. He has no sincerity of character, Browning wrote. James Buchanan was not the
only person to notice Stanton's behavior when he occupied subordinate positions. He was
always on my said, Buchanan told his niece, and flattered me ad nauseam.
Andrew Johnson expressed the same impression in 1867. Johnson's personal secretary noted
in his diary that Stanton - that in speaking to Mr. Stanton, he, Johnson, often referred
to his duplicity. He did not know any man who could be more obsequious than Mr. Stanton
when he placed. There was a good deal of robe sphere in Mr. Stanton.
Edward Bates who spent three years with Stanton in Lincoln's cabinet wrote that Stanton believes
in mere force as long as he wields it. Jacob Thompson who served in Buchanan's cabinet
with Stanton confided to another of their colleagues in the administration that "I know
no man who has reached eminence in America or anywhere else who has made for himself
such a character and who deserves so well the contempt of all good and true men."
Finally, Ulysses S. Grant, for whom I hope I don't need an image, tended to soften his
vocabulary when he was criticizing of others. He said, it seems to be pleasanter to him
to disappoint than to gratify. He felt no hesitation in assuming the functions of the
executive or in acting without advising him insofar as military matter were concerned,
Grant was much more complimentary to Lincoln than Stanton. He noted Lincoln was not timid
but was willing to trust his generals in making and executing their plans. Actually Lincoln
did interfere in troop dispositions. But Stanton's own personal campaign to destroy McClellan
figured prominently in those instances of micromanagement.
Grant was aware of that in addition to remembering his own experiences with Stanton when he wrote
that the secretary was very timid. It was impossible for him to avoid interfering with
the Armies. He could see our weakness but not see that the enemy was in danger. The
enemy would not have been in danger if Mr. Stanton would not have been in the field.
Did all those men leave disparaging comments of Stanton for historians to find? I really
don't think so. They all acted independently, too. All of them had put their opinions on
paper privately and before Grant published his own memoirs. And he had no access to their
impressions. He was writing from his own direct observations and personal experience with
Stanton, as they were. With the exception of those numerous radical
Republicans I mentioned with whom Stanton never town adequate reason to befriend. He
had scathing indictments of his habits of political treachery and path logical capacity
for double dealing. And he Holt with whom Stanton remained in
what I call close cahootership accused Stanton of infidelity to him. Although in that case,
he was trying to - Stanton pretended to be the best friend of
General George McClellan. That would be him on the left.
(laughter). He was the general in chief of the U.S. Army
when McClellan took over as well as the commander of the Army. Stanton's devotion seemed to
last so long as Stanton felt he needed an enthusiastic endorsement from McClellan in
order to cover all thinks bases in getting the nomination from the President.
On his first day in the War Department, Stanton arranged a meeting with McClellan's worst
enemies. The most combative of the radical Republicans who were rapidly gaining political
momentum and were turning nearly as antagonistic toward the President as the Democrats. They
included Ben Wade, chairman of the joint committee on the conduct of the war. Zach Chandler,
another member of the committee on the conduct of the war. That first evening of his career
as Secretary of War, Stanton called Wade, Chandler, and the joint committee into his
office. No minutes of that meeting were taken. But messages passed between Wade and Stanton
the next day indicated their initial discussions had already touched on the discussion of removing
McClellan as the commander. The radicals despised Stanton. Once Stanton
confirmed nomination, he didn't need the general engaging the importance to his future of McClellan
and the radicals, Stanton undertook a clandestine campaign to reduce McClellan's role and ultimately
to remove him all together by whatever means were needed.
As any close student of the military history of the war knows, McClellan had his own failings.
The worst of which probably was his tendency toward hesitation when what was needed most
was bold action. Considering how early Stanton detected the
hostility, we will never know to what degree the general's timid behavior was based on
his justifiable fear that his immediate superior in the War Department would use whatever disaster
befelled his Army as a means to eliminate him. Stanton did take preliminary steps asking
ominous leading questions toward having McClellan court martialed, just as he did later court
martial McClellan's best friend John Porter and for offenses that might have carried the
death penalty. Stanton would have done the same for McClellan
if it could have found someone else to press the charges as he did in the case of Porter.
The first indication of how far Stanton would go to gratify his new radical friends came
with the arrest of Brigadier General Charles P. Stone a talented soldier who eradicated
the sentiments in the militia of the District of Columbia. Stone was a Democrat and he observed
the laws regarding runaway slaves in the loyal state of Maryland and he returned them to
loyal owners or owners who claimed to be loyal. That was enough it make him an anathema Republicans.
Charles Sumner insulted Stone on the floor of the Senate. Stone responded with a private
note called, Sumner a wellknown coward in reference to the beating he took on the floor
of the Senate in 1856 without defending himself or avenging himself.
Stanton who had been secretly colluding with Sumner since his first days in James Buchanan's
cabinet pleased both Sumner and Wade in particular and the radicals in general by having Stone
arrested and placed in Fort Lafayette. And the general remained there six more months
without any files charged against him and, therefore, no trial. Ultimately, it took an
act of Congress to force Stanton to release Stone and he waited until the last possible
day specified in that congressional bill. Then once Stone had been released, Stanton
refused to assign
him to another command. When General Grant tried to use Stone later
in the war, Grant was commander of all U.S. Armies, Stanton had Stone mustered out of
his volunteer rank of brigadier general and, therefore, reduced him to his regular Army
rank of colonel and limited the importance of any role he might have played. So Stone
resigned in frustration. That wasn't the worst example of Stanton's
unjust and spiteful nature but it was one of the best remembered. And it reflecting
negatively on Lincoln to whom Stone appealed in vein for some vindication. Lincoln's half-finished
reply to Stone's request indicates he appears to have been aware of the injustice. Although
it was an egregious wrong, Lincoln seemed to let it stand rather than to bring into
question the arbitrary arrests he had allowed Stanton to exercise so broadly.
Within weeks of taking over the War Department, Stanton mythically and quietly consolidated
as much of the executive branch power in his own hands as he dared. First he persuaded
the President to relieve Stewart now of the authority to make extraordinary arrests. That
is, arrests without due process, often without evidence. And to transfer that power to Stanton.
And then as the Army was about to take the field, he removed the telegraph lines and
all the equipment from Army headquarters in Washington and installed it in the War Department
next to his own office. So McClellan could not communicate with anyone within the government
and perhaps the President more than anyone without going through Stanton. That allowed
him to control McClellan's communications and everybody beneath him.
Stanton took military possession of the nation's telegraph lines which allowed him to exert
considerable control over the news. He telegraphed the major newspapers where it first appeared
to be a mere suggestion that they should not report on the movements of the Army. He soon
started calling that suggestion an order. His motive laid more than security. Supportive
newspapers like "The New York Times" were perfectly immune.
In his recent back on Lincoln in the press for which I have to congratulate him on tomorrow
night's Lincoln prize. I hope that's not revealing any secret, Harold Holzer portrayed Stanton
as an equal opportunist who would shut down a newspaper as he would one of a democratic
sentiment. Holzer cited Stanton's first action which he intended to establish a quick precedent
without risk of a challenge. On March 17th, 1862, at the outset of the
peninsula campaign, Stanton directed the commander of Washington's defenses to arrest the printers
and publishers of the Washington Sunday Chronicle for revealing the composition and movements
of the Army of the Potomac which was then moving down to Fort Monroe and coming up the
peninsula. If the story about that incident in the "Philadelphia
Press" is true and the press was owned by the same man who owned "The Chronicle," the
editor was taken into custody but was released as soon as he apologized. Mr. Holzer commented
that the War Department resumed publication after a day of rare silence. But there was
no day of rare silence. As its name indicates, the Washington Sunday Chronicle was then a
weekly published on Sunday and this affair was taken care of by Monday or Tuesday. So
the paper was back in operation for the next edition. It did no harm to the chronicle and
made Stanton look nonpartisan. The owner of the chronicle was John Forney
who was as close a crony in the administration as the press. He has have participated in
what was essentially a drama orchestrated to intimidate other editors and particularly
opposition editors. Thereafter, Stanton confined the exercise
of his presumed power to shut down newspapers almost exclusively to the opposition press. While friendlier publications revealed militarily damaging information without any consequence. Robert E. Lee said his plans for the Gettysburg campaign were based on intelligence he gathered from the Philadelphia inquirer was a newspaper that
was also supportive of the Lincoln administration and suffered no repercussion for regular transgressions
of that nature. "The New York Times" revealed march to the sea. General Grant complained
to Stanton. And Stanton blew it off as the fault of Sherman's own talkative staff officers.
Reporters who wanted ready access to the Army found they were better off to avoid topics
that reflected badly on the administration and especially those that might embarrass
Mr. Stanton and his War Department. The same lesson applied to their editors. As the press
often finds today, at least in small or corrupt environments where the authorities can still
get away with it, media credibility can be compromised by the shutoff of official information.
Only six weeks after he assumed his duties in the War Department and what may have been
his most devastating blow to the Union war effort, Stanton decided on his own to close
down all the recruiting stations. At that same juncture, the Confederate government
was imposing subscription on its population. So the spring campaigns began with a Confederate
Army expanding and the Union forces shrinking. That deprived Union commanders of the overwhelming
force that mate have helped them to crush the rebellion a little more quickly.
And by mid summer, both the major Union Armies in the eastern and western theater were on
the defensive, essentially on the retreat. President Lincoln and Secretary Seward
went to unusual lengths to save the administration embarrassment by disguising the magnitude
by Stanton's blunder to the point of staging a charade in which the state governors pretended to offer troops on their own initiative . Even as the President, Seward and Stanton were orchestrating that pantomime Wilson of Massachusetts, the chairman of the
military affairs committee, was shepherding legislation through Congress, tending executive
authority to call out the militia. It was ostensibly a militia bill but it was really
the nation's first national, federally administered inscription law. And Lincoln signed it on
July 17th. The language of the will, the precautionary
details of it and Stanton's close collaboration with will son legislation suggests that Stanton's
hand was heavily involved in the composition of that legislation.
Less than three weeks later, Stanton used that law as his authority to call out 300,000
ninemonth militia in addition to the volunteers that the governors offered.
In conjunction with that draft, he issued another order on his own initiative to arrest
any person or persons who may be engaged in discouraging volunteer enlistments or giving
aid or comfort to the enemy or any other disloyal act against the United States. With his inclusion
of the deliberatively vague reference to discouraging volunteers enlistments and especially by inserting
the word speech or writing, Stanton altered the constitutional definition of treason and
the new congressional interpretation of it to include the voicing of opinions contrary
to executive policy. To be certain that such dissidents were not
released by quibbling over annoying legal details, he added that any prisoners should
be held for trial before military commissions. Newspaper editors, congressional candidates,
many discharged soldiers were rounded up under this order that required the affidavits of
two person who is claimed to have heard of disloyal sentiments expressed.
In Iowa, citizens were denounced under this order for being very saucy to federal martials
or state officials or for laughing at the drill practice. Among the newspaper editors
arrested and dragged off to Washington was Dennis Mahoney of the "Dubuque Herald" who
had complained that the burden of military service fell disproportionately to immigrant
Irishmen. In New Hampshire, a doctor was locked in a
cell in a coastal fort for two months because he interrupted a recruiting rally to declare that the volunteers were more interested in bounty money than in their country. And he added as well that nothing awaited them but death and damnation. For the first time since 1800 and
Only for the second time in American history, the federal government imprison the people
for the opinions they expressed. To give his order legitimacy and relieve himself of possibility
in case of lawsuits for false arrests, Stanton asked the President to reissue the order under
his own presumed war powers and to make it last for the duration of the war, suspending
habeas corpus for the assorted crimes Stanton had enumerated and subjecting the accused
to the rigors of martial law. We'll have to look at Senator Wilson for a
long time. In the increasingly eulogist atmosphere, it
can be downright risky to one's reputation to offer any especially new criticism of these
administrations or to resurrect old criticism. And he historians who recognize what Mark
Neely called the low tide of liberty tend to handle the subject with kid gloves since
fewer than 20,000 people appear to have been arrested by the administration under that's
orders, and no one knows how many there were, it is presumed that Stanton's authority was
employed rather than judiciously. But the United States population now is about
ten times what it was in 1862, maybe a little more. And a proportionate crackdown would
sweep up 200,000 people over the course of four years.
Well, how chilling an effect might the arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention of 200,000
American citizens today have on the expression of political opinion?
Worse yet, in terms of the precedent set by the Lincoln administration mostly through
Stanton, even though scholars who find all those arrests the least pernicious can see
that most of them probably weren't even necessary. Anyone who doubts how influential Stanton's
declarations and practices have been on the exercise of liberty in the United States might
consider his twopart order of August 8th, 1862, the one ordering the year of arrest
and the indefinite detention by military authority without appeal of habeas corpus who anyone
by act, speech or writing seem to be giving comfort to the enemy.
Sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 reiterate the two
halves of that order. They could have been written by someone looking at Stanton's order
in the official record. Section 1021, authorizes the arrest and indefinite
confinement without benefit of habeas corpus for anyone suspected under the catchall category
of terrorism or of aiding, harboring or supporting such terrorists while the second section,
1022, prescribes as did the second part of Stanton's order that they should be confined
and tried by military authority. Those provisions conflict directly with fourth, fifth, and
sixth amendments. And if they were interpreted as loosely as Stanton did his own orders,
they could also be used to subvert the First Amendment. They haven't been challenged yet.
It is a chilling vision for the future especially when as Stanton's contemporaries town anyone
might find himself subject to such an accusation. Almost any of us might have two enemies willing
to file an affidavit claiming they heard us say something. Certainly I do.
(laughter). The revisions to the militia law for most
of which Stanton had probably offered Senator Wilson his own language included enabling
legislation for the new position of judge adjutant general. And for that position, he
appears to have had a candidate already in mind. And that candidate was his own former
colleague in the Buchanan administration, Joseph Holt. He called Holt into the War Department
one day in early September for a chat and the next day the President issued Holt his
commission as judge advocate general which he held the rest of his working life this
will late this the Grant administration. Like Stanton, Holt had become dependent on
public office. Like Stanton he had reversed his political tact when the wind turned against
the democratic machine on which he had relied. Converts tend to be the most virulent advocates
of their new creed because they feel the need to dispel any doubts with their sincerity.
In their zeal, Holt followed Stanton's lead. They worked closely together for the next
success years with Holt holding the authority to approve or disapprove the findings of military
commissions and thus offering a semblance of an appeals process. Holt used that as politics
or Stanton's own wishes dictate as he did in the court martial of John Porter and William
Hammond. Holt also cooperated with Stanton in continuing
the tactic of trying prisoners long after peace had been restored. Better to control
the outcomes and trials and to impart political punishment where civil courts would have dismissed
the charges for lack of evidence or even for lack of a crime.
Students of political repression under the Lincoln administration and particularly repression
of the press will often discount its severity by pointing out some of the venomous comment
to which Lincoln was subjected in the opposition newspapers. And there was plenty of it. But
the acrimony of such rebuke was of less concern to Lincoln or the administration than was
the effectiveness of that criticism. Pundits like Dennis Mahoney who seems to have been
as persuasive as he was decisive. The tone of dissent tended to soften with the severity
of periodic crackdowns which often fell at critical political junctures.
Stanton's 1862 order and the President's reiteration of it preceded the biennial elections of that
year which in Republicans were expected to do very badly and did but might have done
even worse were it not for such intimidating orders.
Mederi, the editor of the independent crisis of Columbus, Ohio was not molested during
the gubernatorial election during 1863 because no one was worried about that. Union battlefield
successes and vigorous propaganda gave Ohio Republicans the greatest majority, a landslide
victory of any state in the war, any election in the war.
With the presidential campaign of 1864 just beginning and very much in doubt, Mederi was
arrested and his editorial voice was silenced. Not many such arrests were necessary either
to initiate an epidemic of considerable selfcensorship and not many students have looked at that
selfcensorship very closely. I will jump ahead a little here and say that
Stanton betrayed all three all three of the Presidents he served. As attorney general
under Buchanan, he ingratiated himself to the incoming President's administration by
tales of confidential cabinet discussions to Stewart who then passed them on to Lincoln.
Once installed as Lincoln's Secretary of War, he secretly aligned himself with Lincoln's
critics among the radicals. And when chased, allowed to be a challenge to Lincoln in the
1864 election, Stanton played both sides of the fence. He gave War Department advertising
and he met secretly with Henry Winter Davis, a radical who - I am coauthor of the Wade
Davis manifesto that supposed a specific challenge to Lincoln's presidency.
I think I will wrap up here. We have already discussed Mr. Chase.
Let me conclude by saying that I can't tell you Stanton was without redeeming qualities.
I can tell you that direct evidence of such qualities is difficult to find.
(laughter). They are more easily inferred than proved.
He was good to his mother. (laughter).
I'm pretty sure he never beat his wife. But in the realm of public service, his motives
seemed more often selfish than benevolent. He cowed opposition to the Lincoln administration.
Probably not enough to make a difference in the outcome of the war with you certainly
enough to leave us with a greater legacy of wartime repression than is comfortable today
or was necessary then. And with that, I think I'll close and give
you the opportunity to ask questions. I understand there will be microphones going around. It
seems to be my fate to answer questions about subjects that I have long since abandoned
in favor of others. But if you happen to get the advantage of
me that way, and I don't the answer to your questions, I'll try to make up something that's
plausible and entertaining. (applause)
Are those the microphones that I understand the questions are coming from? Very good.
>> I wonder if I might get in two questions for the price of one. First of all, where
are the Stanton papers? >> William Marvel: They are in the Library
of Congress, and they are in the second drawer of may file cabinet. They're on microfilm,
and they can be had different places if you have about $1,400 to throw away.
That one's free. >> Okay. Just to clarify, you mentioned Jacob
Thompson among the Stanton critics. >> William Marvel: Yes.
>> Was this the same man who was - >> William Marvel: Yes.
>> He was? Associated with Confederate? >> William Marvel: He was a Confederate minister
of sorts with portfolio, I guess, but secret portfolio. He was a member of the Buchanan
cabinet and remained a member of it until he suspected Buchanan of secretly breaking
a promise to him to forewarn him of any change in his policy towards Fort Sumter.
>> Thank you. >> William Marvel: You're welcome.
>> Since I focus on medical aspects of the period, there's one guy who probably would
like Stanton a lot and that was General Dan Sickles even though his biography is called
American scoundrel, Edwin Stanton got him off on the temporary insanity defense, or
at least he headed the legal team. >> William Marvel: That's the legend. American
scoundrel was a welldeserved title. (laughter).
Stanton was a member of the legal team. >> Right.
>> William Marvel: He was one of eight lawyers. >> It was the dream team of the day. It was
like O.J. >> William Marvel: Yes. And very similar circumstances.
(laughter). And Stanton was not, I think, the person who
came up with the insanity defense. Not only that, it was not as is often alleged the first
instance of the use of that defense. It had been used in the same courtroom one year before.
But I think it was James Brady who came up with that idea because in his own harangue
to the jury, Stanton arranged so widely away from the insanity defense that he sort of
cast some doubt on it. It was just that he was a member of that team that has led.
>> The other thing you mentioned briefly was the court martial of William Hammond which
Stanton was at least complicit in. He tried to get rid of poisonous drugs and they court
martialed him. Stanton certainly probably had something to do with that because the
guy who replaced him, Joseph barns, was not only a friend of Stanton but probably his
personal physician. Barns was criticized by the guy that stuck his finger in Peterson's
house. >> William Marvel: Did this come up during
Harold Holzer's? >> It did.
>> William Marvel: Not Harold Holzer. I saw there was another program of that tape. Yes,
Hammond - >> That was Mr. Abel's book.
>> William Marvel: Right. Hammond was getting ready of things like mercurylaced medicines
that were doing more harm than good. When Stanton had him court martialed and replaced
him with Barns, he restated the as you of those harmful medicines for 20 years.
>> William Marvel: Are there any more questions? Did we have time for one more?
>> In the 1930s, there was a circumstantial case for some complicity in Lincoln's assassination
by Stanton. Is that too far even for Stanton? What do you think of that?
>> William Marvel: That is too far for Stanton. Whatever Eisenshimel's research may have been
and however much of it Bill O'Reilly used, it was sheer poppycock. Lincoln was Stanton's
principal defender in the administration. He was the most powerful advocate of Stanton's
incumbency which was the most important thing to Stanton. He had no reason to want Lincoln
dead. He had such a reputation for sly and treacherous
behavior that it was plausible to Eisenshimel and others that Stanton might have had a hand
in it but it is preposterous. Sir?
>> You noted that David Davis and Stanton were classmates at Kenyon College. David Davis
bought the election for Lincoln in Chicago even which Goodwin admits was a bought nomination.
Whether Stanton knew it was bought by his classmate, I don't know.
I looked in your book for any mention of the Emancipation Proclamation and McClellan's
position on that was quite clear. He was opposed because he loves southern cadets at West Point.
He was very biased in favor of the south and didn't really want to make the end of slavery
a war objective. And he actually gave Lincoln his middle finger at the Harrison landing.
I think the splint between Stanton and McClellan was inevitable from the beginning when, although
I think it is true that Stanton they were friends originally in 1861. But there is no
question Stanton wanted to force out McClellan and Lincoln came to the same conclusion.
>> William Marvel: Is there a question in there?
>> The question is: You don't really give a balanced picture of McClellan and the Stanton
relationship, I don't think, this the book. >> William Marvel: I think Steven Sears did
a pretty good job of balancing McClellan's image. Although McClellan didn't - and, by
the way, Steve would probably object to your characterization as McClellan is my hero.
I think it is a mistake to assume that because someone doesn't specifically criticize a character
for any numerous motivational variations, that they're a supporter of that person.
I think that McClellan's opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation probably was similar
to that of many other mainstream Democrats, much like during the recent conflicts when
we have begun to war for a supposed purpose. Many people doubt the motive and I think McClellan
doubted the motive. Do we have time for another question?
>> Brigadier general Thomas Harris and Charles Chinnekway wrote that the conspiracy of the
assassination went into the Vatican. It has been said that Stanton shared that perspective.
In his papers, did you find any indication of that?
>> William Marvel: None. And I will give you the same opinion that Harold Holzer did. I
think it's not plausible. Any others? I think we are finished. Thank
you very much. (applause)
