Lincoln's Autocrat:The Life of Edwin Stanton

by William Marvel

University of North Carolina Press, 2015

Edwin Stanton, he of the Pharisaical beard and the piggy eyeglasses, the Ohio-born lawyer who served for three years as President Lincoln's Secretary of War during the American Civil War, was not a well-loved or even particularly well-liked man in his own day. During the war, he wielded his power with a mercurial enthusiasm that alienated far more people than it impressed. Even Lincoln himself, who frequently professed to finding Stanton indispensable, told most of his best jokes when Stanton was out of the room. It was Stanton's job to marshal and organize the greatest modern army of his day, and he did so with a vision that could be lonely and a rigor that could be off-putting. In all the world, it's possible that only his contemporary Otto von Bismarck would have completely understood him. It's certain that none of his contemporaries did.

Such polarizing figures have become catnip to modern-day biographers. There's no fad so widespread or so commercial as the one where some historian takes a reviled figure from the past and attempts a full-scale rehabilitation. It's been tried countless times with Napoleon Bonaparte; it's been tried with heretic-burning Queen Mary I of England; some poor slob even tried it with General William Westmoreland. There's nothing wrong with such a fad, in fact – even when the results are infuriating, they're almost always thought-provoking.

Readers opening William Marvel's long and sumptuously detailed new book Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton curious to see what kind of a rehabilitation Marvel tries to work on the man will be pulled up short almost from the first paragraph. They will gasp a little. They will raise an eyebrow. They may very well laugh aloud in surprise. Then they will do as I did and settle in, popcorn at the ready, and enjoy the fireworks from the best seat in the house. Rehabilitation? Marvel comes not to praise Stanton but to bury him. Good and deep. And maybe, when nobody's looking, spit on the grave.

“Lincoln's old friend Joshua Speed,” Marvel tells us on page xvi – that's four pages before the book proper has even started, “remarked in 1861 that the president was too honest to believe that others were not, and someone who could switch faces as easily as Stanton presented him with a particular challenge. Rigorous scrutiny of Stanton's tenure as a cabinet officer hints that Lincoln's ability to judge men was not so exceptional as some have presumed …”

“The U. S government's enthusiasm for prisoner exchanges seemed to fluctuate with the balance of prisoners,” Marvel tells us. “Stanton embodied that equivocation, and he appears to have been at least in part responsible for it.”

“For all his apparent loyalty,” Marvel tells us, talking about Lincoln's riveting decision to run for re-election in the middle of a civil war, “Stanton seems at that moment to have been the least certain of Lincoln's supporters within the cabinet … he had grown fond of his position, but more for the unprecedented power it brought him than for the pecuniary rewards.”

What about the moment for which Stanton is perhaps most famous, the way he hurried to Peterson's boarding house on the terrible night in April 1865, rushed to the bed where the wounded president lay dying, and vigorously took charge of the chaos? If you've reached page 370 of Lincoln's Autocrat expecting our author to show his subject any mercy, you've badly misjudged your man:

Stanton's emotional detachment and his domineering persona made him valuable that night, as others wallowed in anguish. Vice President Johnson stood by, but while Lincoln still breathed no one expected him to take charge. With the government headless and the capital paralyzed, it may have been one of the few appropriate moments in American history for dictatorial leadership, and Stanton assumed that role with alacrity. He conveyed an air of control and a semblance of order that staved off absolute panic, inadvertently giving the country his best few hours of service.

Not control but only an air of control … not order but only a semblance of order … and not good public service given in an hour of crisis but good public service inadvertently given in an hour of public service! O tempora! O Marvel!

And in the aftermath, during the hunt for John Wilkes Booth and during the swift justice meted out upon his co-conspirators, and during the enormous public backlash against the defeated Confederacy? Again, not so much:

It did not take Stanton long to capitalize on the popular fury against the moribund slave power that his own accusations had provoked. On the same day that the military commission first met, Stanton revealed in cabinet council that he warmly supported voting rights for freed slaves – which he had tried to persuade Charles Sumner not to press, barely three weeks previously.

But surely, you ask, as you still your unseemly giggling and take a deep breath to compose yourself, surely if there's one point in this long book where Marvel will relent, even a little, even for a moment, it's in the hour of Stanton's death, while his poor asthma-wracked body was still warm, while his widow was weeping and even his most dedicated enemies were warming up some kind words for the obituary column of the Steubenville Daily Herald or the Boston Courier? All Marvel can say to such soggy sentiments is: shut your pie hole, you filthy Stantonophile:

Stanton's eulogists inadvertently emphasized his least admirable traits in the course of their adulation. Widespread references to “the organizer of victory” would have amused those who had witnessed Stanton's panic at any threat to Washington, as well as those who remembered his disastrous closing of the recruiting stations or his divisive vendettas. Most seemed to accept the assertion that Stanton had worked himself to death, but few who ever knew his alternately obsequious and bullying nature could have swallowed the gratuitous accolade of one obituary that painted Stanton as the champion of the downtrodden.

Lincoln's Autocrat covers every incident in Stanton's life, large and small – covers them with contempt, that is. Marvel has here utilized a wider and more comprehensive array of sources than any previous Stanton scholar has done – utilized them knife in hand, that is. The book paints a vividly readable panorama of the Civil War era – in which sure, those traitorous generals and dastardly slave-owners were bad, but not nearly as bad as …

It's by far the year's most entertaining major biography to date. It's not definitive – in fact, it's one of the only cases I know of where the appearance of one authoritative biography actually increases the need for another – but when you turn its final page, you'll be certain of one thing above all others: Edwin Stanton will never work in this town again.