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April 21 - June 15, 2019
He prepared cases with a meticulous, even furious, attention to detail, and he argued with aggressive often insolent vigor. He might insult a witness or a judge, or tell the opposing counsel to quit whining.
Edwin Stanton was also “prone to despond.” When he was twenty-two, he married Mary Lamson, and after the burial of their firstborn daughter, Stanton disinterred the child and placed her remains in a metal box that he kept on the mantelpiece. When his wife died not long afterward—Stanton was thirty—he stopped eating and sleeping and in the night would rush from room to room, lamp in hand, crying out, “Where is Mary?” Not long after that, Stanton, learning that his brother Darwin had cut his own throat, ran to Darwin’s house, where blood was pooling on the floorboards. He then raced out into the
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Yet Stanton’s law practice was thriving.
Daniel Sickles, the Democratic congressman from New York who had recently shot and killed District Attorney Philip Barton Key.
Sickles had served as James Buchanan’s secretary when Buchanan was minister to the Court of St. James’s during the Franklin Pierce administration. The good-looking District Attorney Key was the son of Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He also happened to be the lover of Sickles’ wife.
Along with six other lawyers, Edwin Stanton defended Sickles before a packed Washington courtroom eager for salacious details about the affair. Sickles admitted he’d killed Key but pleaded not guilty by reason of “temporary insanity,” the first time such a plea had been offered in the United States. Sickles had to be insane, his lawyers contended; what man wouldn’t be driven crazy by his wife’s infidelity? The all-male jury voted to acquit Sickles, another triumph for Edwin Stanton.
One biographer described his “pantherlike pursuit of the evildoer.”
he’d rather “make a tour of a smallpox hospital” than ask Stanton for a favor.
His library contained over 2,500 volumes.
Such hostility should, however, be accounted a crown of honor,” Representative James G. Blaine observed.
He smoked cigars to open up his bronchial passages. (He wasn’t the only one who thought this would help.)
traduced
he may have deliberately appeared to seem all things to all men. Later, he would characterize himself as “in-betweenity.”
He was the bulwark of confidence to the loyal North,”
For despite the trappings of success—the huge house, the large receptions—and his crusty, well-defended exterior, Stanton possessed an endearing humility.
Stories of Stanton’s capacity for work are legion. He promptly read as much as possible about the administration of armies, for he had to raise a huge one.
He was prone to be suspicious of those who did not work as he did,”
Stanton was painfully sensitive to the responsibility he bore for hurling men, hundreds of thousands of them, into battle. Yet he followed the rules with rigidity, believing as he did in organization and discipline.
One afternoon, after coldly turning down a family’s heartrending pleas for clemency for a soldier who had deserted, Stanton walked into his office and, according to his clerk, broke down. “God help me to do my duty,” he cried. “God help me to do my duty!”
Lincoln firmly backed his war secretary, whom he called
his “Mars.” To President Lincoln, Stanton was the rock “against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing.” “I do not see how he survived,” Lincoln added, “why he is not crushed and torn to pieces.”
during his inauguration as Vice President, Johnson gestured extravagantly and delivered such a long, incoherent speech that Senator Zachariah Chandler groaned. “I was never so mortified in my life,” he said. “Had I been able to find a hole I would have dropped through it out of sight.”
For whatever anyone had previously thought of Andrew Johnson, if they thought of him at all, many people expressed relief that in this sad hour, there was the warhorse Edwin Stanton, battered but unbowed.
By the late spring of 1865, some 40,000 freed blacks had arrived in Washington looking for work. A number of them found jobs and homes in Maryland or Virginia, thanks in large part to the ministrations of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was set up to provide just that: work, education, assistance, even in some cases land. Four hundred acres in Arlington had been divided into small lots for rent. But many people were housed in shanties, stables, cellars, or improvised homes knocked together with tarpaper, and they had no wood, no blankets in winter, no means of subsistence.
