Authors: Stephen B. Oates
Around the core of fact about Lincoln's assassination has grown an elaborate web of conspiracy theories, some bordering on lunacy (the papal-plot theory comes to mind), all testifying to the desperate human need to see vast intrigues behind events too large to comprehend.
In the case of Lincoln's murder, the most popular and persistent conspiracy theory points to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton as the ringleader of a government plot that involved Thaddeus Stevens and other so-called radicals, or advanced Republicans. Over the years, proponents of this theory have fervently argued that Stanton was an unscrupulous schemer who wanted to punish the conquered South, as the advanced Republicans did, and that a tender and forgiving Lincoln stymied them. So Stanton conspired with Stevens and his cronies to murder Lincoln and clear the way for a harsher reconstruction program than the President planned. And Booth, to use modern argot, became their hit man.
Here is how the plot supposedly worked. Stanton prevented his own chief clerk from escorting Lincoln to Ford's Theater, so that the President would be left unguarded except by the incompetent Parker, whom Stanton or others in the conspiracy arranged to become Lincoln's special guard that night. Thus, when Parker vacated his post (as Stanton had figured he would), Booth had unimpeded access to the state box to shoot the President. After he did so, Stanton had Washington's communications severed and deliberately obstructed the pursuit, leaving improperly
guarded the one road the assassin was certain to take out of the capital. In the end, though, one of Stanton's detectives (not Boston Corbett) shot Booth in the Garrett barn to keep him from talking.
Alas for Stanton, Booth's diary turned up. Since thirty-six pages are missing, purveyors of the Stanton thesis conjecture that the Secretary of War must have hacked them out in order to destroy incriminating evidence. Then to silence Booth's accomplices, Stanton rigged a secret military trial that sent them swiftly to the gallows. Thanks to his cover-up, Stanton and the other plotters of Lincoln's assassination went free.
Then in 1977 one Joseph Lynch of Worthington, Massachusetts, made the startling announcement that he had discovered the “eighteen” missing pages of Booth's diary while appraising documents of Stanton's heirs. These pages, he said, indicated Booth's intrigues with Lincoln intimates, Stanton specifically. The news media, of course, broadcast Lynch's claims across the Republic; syndicated journalist Jack Anderson devoted an entire column to the story. Spotting a potential box-office windfall, Shick Sunn Classic Productions went to work on a movie based on the “missing” diary pages as well as “recently discovered” Booth letters and other “data.” The result was
The Lincoln Conspiracy
, a wretched motion picture which not only belabored the Stanton thesis, but served it up as one of several wide-ranging plots to kill the President. To capture the mass reading market, Sunn Classic also brought out a paperback book by the same title. To make it look legitimate, the company even appended footnotes.
It was all a hoax, as several Lincoln and civil-war scholars pointed out. The news media ignored themâwhy publicize the boring truth when sensationalism was available? The “missing” diary pages, of course, were never released and doubtless do not exist (there are thirty-six of them anyway, not eighteen as claimed). No newly discovered documents implicating Stanton, or revealing any conspiracies beyond Booth's own, have ever come to light because no such documents exist. As historian Thomas
Reed Turner has stated, those who manufactured
The Lincoln Conspiracy
must “bear a large responsibility for perpetrating this fraud on the American public.”
The whole Stanton thesis is a fraud. It rests on the misassumption that Lincoln and the advanced Republicans were at odds over reconstruction and that Stanton stood with them against his chief. No such thing ever happened. As we have seen, the President sided with the advanced Republicans on nearly all crucial reconstruction issues. In short, they had no earthly reason to kill him. There is no evidence that any of them ever even contemplated so monstrous a thing. As we have seen, Lincoln was no softy when it came to reconstructing southern rebels. He was considering an occupying army to keep them in line. Nor was Stanton in conflict with the President in reconstruction matters. On the contrary, he wholeheartedly endorsed Lincoln's military approach to southern restoration, so much so that the President asked Stanton to draft a tentative plan for military reconstruction, which the Cabinet discussed on Good Friday. Finallyâand this is a crucial pointâStanton had been exhausted and sick, and he had promised himself that he would step down when the war ended. After Lee surrendered, Stanton took his resignation to the President. “Stanton,” Lincoln said with his hands on the Secretary's shoulders, “you have been a good friend and a faithful public officer and it is not for you to say when you will no longer be needed here.” Reluctantly, Stanton agreed to remain a while longer, because when it came to reconstruction he thought that Lincoln would need a tough and experienced administrator at his side.
This is a man involved in a heinous plot to murder his own President?
By Lincoln's own testimony, Stanton was “a good friend” and public servant, and he deserves to be remembered that way. He was a short, thick-chested man with a prodigious beard and a constantly irritated look in his bespectacled eyes. A native Ohioan, born of parents with abolitionist leanings, he had become a successful lawyer and a northern Democrat. In the 1840s, he lost a daughter, a wife, and a brotherâa succession of tragedies that
hurt him permanently and caused him to turn “a stern face to the world,” as his modern biographers put it. In 1856, he and his second wife moved to Washington, where Stanton became a government lawyer and James Buchanan's last Attorney General. After the war broke out, Stanton was extremely critical of Lincoln, as were a great many others. But he had exceptional skill and an unswerving loyalty to the Union, which was why Lincoln chose him to replace the inept Simon Cameron as War Secretary.
The President expected a lot of his new Secretary, and Stanton did not disappoint him. Working at a killing pace, he took a department tangled with corruption and inefficiency and transformed it into a superbly competent agency. He saved the government some $17 million in adjusted war contracts, reorganized the entire supply system, and assimilated a mass of technical military data that Lincoln found indispensable.
As an administrator, Stanton was an iron-fisted martinet who drove his staff as hard as he drove himself. “My chief,” grumbled one subordinate, “is narrow minded, full of prejudices, exceedingly violent, reckless of the rights and feelings of others, often acting like a wild man in the dark, throwing his arms aroundâ¦. His idea of energy is altogether physical.” Brusque, efficient, and brutally honest, Stanton made a lot of implacable enemies. The “outer crust of his harsh manner,” said one government official, “was very thinâbut it was thick enough to incense the many that could not pierce it.”
Lincoln was one who pierced it. “Folks come up here and tell me there are a great many men who have all Stanton's excellent qualities without his defects,” the President once remarked. “All I can say is, I haven't met 'em; I don't know 'em.” Because of the war, Lincoln and Stanton spent a great deal of time together. In fact, the Secretary of War became one of Lincoln's closest subordinates, accompanying him on his carriage rides, huddling with him in his White House “shop,” standing at his side in the War Department during military campaigns. They both loved the Union's volunteer army, and they developed a mutual respect and trust for one another. In all, Stanton was an incorruptible and
thoroughly loyal administrator whom Lincoln could count on to obey orders.
Because Stanton lacked a sense of humor, Lincoln could never joke with him as he did with Seward. Contemporaries recalled that when Lincoln was telling a story and Stanton entered the room, the story and the laughter both died. Yet Lincoln had immense affection for this gnomelike man and defended him in characteristic ways. Once when a delegation confronted Lincoln in a huff and reported that the War Secretary had called him a fool, the President responded with mock amazement. “Did Stanton call me a fool?” he said. “Well, I guess I had better go over and see Stanton about this. Stanton is usually right.”
By war's end, few men were on such intimate terms with Lincoln as the Secretary of War. Few men could write the President such chatty, personal letters as those Stanton dispatched while Lincoln visited the Virginia front in 1865.
March 25:
“We have nothing new here; now [that] you are away everything is quiet and your tormentors vanished. I hope you will remember Gen. Harrison's advice to his men at Tippecanoe, that they âcan see as well a little further off.'”
March 26:
“Your military news warms the blood or we would be in danger of a March chill.”
April 3:
“Allow me respectfully to ask you to consider whether you ought to expose the nation to the consequences of any disaster to yourself in the pursuit of a treacherous and dangerous enemy like the rebel armyâ¦. Commanding Generals are in the line of their duty in running such risks. But is the political head of a nation in the same condition[?]”
Nobody in government worried more about Lincoln's safety and did more to ensure it than Edwin Stanton. It was Stanton who made certain that a company of Ohio cavalry guarded the President on his carriage rides, Stanton who ordered Pennsylvania troops to encamp on the White House lawn, Stanton who saw to it that the Washington Metropolitan Police Force provided Lincoln constant protection, Stanton who assigned a military escort to accompany the President on his nocturnal walks to and from
the War Department, Stanton who surrounded him with detectives on special occasions like the Second Inaugural, Stanton who begged Lincoln to take care of himself and who became agitated and angry when he did not. Lincoln finally consented to a military escort, mainly out of concern for the soldiers. If Stanton learned that they had let him out of their sight, Lincoln told the men, “he would have you court-martialed and shot.”
Lincoln protested all the guards and detectives because they made him feel like a king, and he hated it. He kept saying that anybody who really wanted to could murder him, and there was nothing Stanton or anyone else could do to prevent it.
In the closing months of the war, rumors of assassination and abduction plots swept Washington, and Stanton and his department made every attempt to investigate the more plausible reports. But “warnings that appeared to be most definite,” recalled Lincoln's personal secretaries, “when they came to be examined proved too vague and confused for further attention.” One warning did touch on Booth himself: a War Department clerk named Louis J. Weichmann told a fellow employee that he had seen suspicious activities at the Surratt boardinghouse, where he had a room. The tip made its way up to Stanton, and his department may have put the conspirators under surveillance. Why nothing more came of this is not known. But Stanton was not guilty of negligence. He investigated all the reports he could, did all he could to protect the President. Had he known about Booth's plottings, no man would have moved faster to stamp them out.
Which brings us to the assassination itself. Stanton had nothing to do with assigning John Parker to guard Lincoln; that came about through an administrative fluke in the Metropolitan Police Force. On Good Friday, Stanton did dissuade his chief clerk from accompanying Lincoln to Ford's Theaterâbut only because Stanton disapproved of the President's theatergoing and wanted him to stay at home in the evenings lest he get himself killed. During those terrible hours in the Petersen House, with Lincoln mortally wounded and the government paralyzed, Stanton did not cover up Booth's trail, was not guilty of “criminal negligence” in getting
up a pursuit. As I have tried to show, Stanton was the only high-ranking official who acted. His colleagues, in fact, spoke of his conduct with “undimmed praise.” Corporal James Tanner, who helped take down testimony in the Petersen House, said that “through all that awful night Stanton was the one man of steel.” Yet no official was more stricken by what had happened. “I knew it was only by a powerful effort that he restrained himself and that he was near a break,” Tanner said. When the Surgeon General told him that Lincoln would never recover, Stanton protested, “Oh, no, General; noâno,” and sat down and cried.
Somehow he drove himself on, furiously mobilizing the pursuit of Booth, literally running the government. Yet he had the sensitivity to soothe Robert Lincoln when the President's end finally came. Years later, Robert told Stanton's son, “I recall the kindness of your father to me, when my father was lying dead and I felt utterly desperate, hardly able to realize the truth.”
Stanton's own grief was inconsolable. Robert recalled that “for more than ten days after my father's death in Washington, he called every morning on me in my room, and spent the first few minutes of his visits weeping without saying a word.” The assassination had a profound impact on Stanton. Filled with apprehension, certain that plots against him and his associates lurked everywhere, he kept a guard around his house and seldom left without a strong man to accompany him. Yet the Secretary of War responded tenderly when Mary Lincoln, in her terrible anguish, reached out to him for help and comfort.
This is a man who plotted Lincoln's murder? The whole notion is so preposterous that it boggles the mind that even the rankest cynic could believe it. To borrow Lincoln's famous remark, “Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?”
Yes, the Stanton thesis is a staggering fraud on the public. Yet I am under no illusion that what I've said here will put an end to it. For as long as there is a gullible public with an appetite for sensationalism, there will be hucksters to peddle this crass and
irresponsible tale. There will be more crackpot conspiracy books, more films like Sunn Classic's, more television shows like CBS's
They've Shot Lincoln!
, which was aired in 1972 and which rode the Stanton thesis through cheap rhetorical questions and innuendo. But I will say this about what has been done so far. Every television and movie producer, every publisher, manuscript appraiser, and news editor, every script writer, journalist, historian, and harebrained conspiracy buff who has helped promote this shoddy business is guilty of slandering a decent man, a Union patriot, and a loyal friend and subordinate of Abraham Lincoln.