Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (24 page)

Stone needed this job desperately. He had essentially fled America in 1870 and had returned only a month before the job began. This project not only would offer Stone financial security but was an opportunity to reclaim his public persona from grief and shame.

His life had begun with promise. Descended from Massachusetts Puritan stock, Stone was related to General Benjamin Lincoln, George Washington’s second in command. Stone himself from an early age had wished to be a soldier, graduating from West Point in 1845 seventh in his class.

As a boy, he was impulsive and determined, and these qualities were manifested in odd expressions of adoration for his country when an opportunity presented itself. Serving in the Mexican-American War in his early twenties, he planned to climb the glacier-capped volcano of Popocatépetl with a small group of companions. His comrades probably anticipated only the challenge of a trek to the highest point in the region, but Stone wished to plant an American flag at El Popo’s summit—and did so, plunging the pole and flag into the summit’s crust. If it were not for his companions’ insistence that he stay in continuous motion until they were back at camp, he surely would have died of hypothermia and oxygen deprivation.

After the Mexican-American War, in which he was twice brevetted—temporarily promoted—for gallant and meritorious conduct, Stone requested time to travel to Europe to study troop organization there, as well as in Syria and Egypt. His intellect, though, could not save him from a life where misfortune seemed to follow his every step. The government ordered him to California to build ammunition depots. He chose Benicia, near San Francisco. The government, by law, funded only wood construction, but Stone thought that the changeable air, which was sometimes dank, sometimes dry, would be disastrous to the preservation of weapons and ammunition. He knew the storehouses must be erected quickly. If he were to wait for lumber shipments, he would be exposing the armaments to the elements. He decided instead to quarry stone right there and use it for the storehouses.

The government halted Stone’s pay.

Looking to relieve his financial stress, he resigned from the army and became a banker in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the treasurer of the bank embezzled its funds.

He then went to Mexico as chief of a commercial scientific commission to survey the state of Sonora, but the Mexican authorities learned that he and his employers had embarked on this private project without their consent and ran him out of the country.

The Civil War came next. When the possibility of a conflagration between North and South could no longer be ignored, General Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the U.S. Army, called up Mexican-American War veterans to support the relatively small standing army in America. He approached Stone on December 31, 1860, and Stone became the first soldier sworn into the volunteer service, on January 2, 1861. Stone was appointed colonel and inspector general of the militia of the District of Columbia, charged with protecting the capital and the president from the general rebellion. Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the prior November, but would not be sworn in until March. Meanwhile, southern states one by one had begun announcing their intention to secede, anticipating the effects of a Lincoln presidency.

The challenges for Stone began immediately. Before Lincoln set out on his journey from his home in Illinois to Washington for the inaugural, Stone learned of a plot to assassinate the president-elect. He secretly changed Lincoln’s travel schedule, confounding the plotters. A confidant of Lincoln’s praised Stone for his work and told him the good reviews would be reported back to the president.

Stone replied: “Mr. Lincoln has no cause to be grateful to me. I was opposed to his election, and believed in advance that it would bring on what is evidently coming, a fearful war. The work which I have done has not been done for him, and he need feel under no obligation to me. I have done my best toward saving the Government of the country and to insure the regular inauguration of the constitutionally elected President, on the fourth of next month.”

Lincoln did not take offense. In fact, the president promoted Stone to colonel of the regular army and brigadier general of volunteers on May 17, 1861. Stone took forces into Alexandria, Virginia, and captured the city, thus creating a safer border for the capital. Stone felt so satisfied about the security of Washington that when a reporter went to visit him at Ball’s Bluff, overlooking the Potomac from the Maryland side, in October 1861, Stone chatted amiably even as he stood sentinel.

Not far to the west, on the Virginia side, about 1,700 Confederate forces camped at Leesburg. Stone had his own 6,500 Corps of Observation soldiers lined twenty miles down the Maryland side. A deep forest ran nearly up to the edge of the cliff along the bluff on the Virginia side. The 350 yards of Harrison’s Island lay below, narrowing the water obstacle to, at most, eighty yards for the enemy. Stone kept a small division on the island to prevent the Confederates from using it as a launchpad for an attack.

A battle between the Leesburg Confederates and Stone’s Maryland troops could have broken out at any moment, but to the visiting reporter the scene on the Union side seemed bucolic. For several months, Stone had made camp there, running regular route marches and shooting practice.

The conversation between Stone and the reporter that evening was interrupted by an orderly announcing the arrival of Senator Edward Dickinson Baker of Oregon, Stone’s subordinate and a friend of Lincoln. Baker commanded one of the battalions under Stone’s control.

“Stone was an inveterate cigarette smoker,” the reporter recalled, remarking that, at the time, “a boy with a cigarette in his mouth would have been a Barnum’s Museum curiosity.” With Baker’s arrival, Stone lit a cigarette, held it daintily in his yellow-stained fingers, and wryly said, “I wonder if he comes as senator or officer. Ask the gentlemen to walk in.”

Baker, in full uniform as a colonel, made his way through the tent flap, holding in one hand a barleycorn liquor offered by one of Stone’s minions, and blurted out: “General, the public demand a fight. It is better that we should fight and be whipped than sit idle here, the target of universal criticism.”

Stone, his cigarette still dangling between his fingers, took measure of the remark. He seemed to put his annoyance at the insubordination aside and told Baker he would send a message the next morning: “I trust that you will be refreshed and ready to give us your cooperation.”

That next day, Stone sent word for Baker and his troops to move across the river. General George McClellan, who commanded the Army of the Potomac, had sent a scout to the other side. In a field fairly close to the bluff, the scout spotted a small enemy encampment. Stone’s standing order had been to take out any Confederate advance that closed in on the Potomac, so the encampment, by order, automatically triggered a troop movement.

That next morning, before dawn, the Baker regiment lumbered into the few small skiffs at the river line. They crossed the river, then trudged up the muddy slope to the plateau, clambering to the highest part of the bluff. They looked out over a field just as the sun rose. As darkness turned to dawn, the line of enemy tents revealed itself—it was a row of trees.

Baker did not wish to retreat and told the men to set up camp.

Meanwhile, a diversionary regiment crossing at another part of the river was fired upon by the Confederates. Baker, who, according to a reporter, “knew almost nothing about how to direct men in battle,” entered the fray with his men. Baker refused to lower himself to the ground during the firefight. “When you are a United States senator you will understand why I don’t lie down,” he said.

Baker was shot through the heart and killed.

With no leader, and cut off on several sides, the Union troops made a bloody retreat. The men raced down to the riverbank. Thirty feet below churned the muddy, sloppy river slush.

“Every man for himself!” someone yelled.

The Union soldiers threw their weapons into the flow. They clung to floating boughs or, if lucky, scrambled onto the few fragile flatboats, fleeing to the Harrison’s Island side. It was an easy attack for the Confederates. Of the nearly 1,000 men who crossed the river to fight, 218 were shot dead and 700 captured.

About two months later, on December 18, Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, the same man Bartholdi admired on his 1871 visit, denounced Stone in Congress for acting impetuously at Ball’s Bluff, as well as having surrendered captured slaves back to their Virginia slave owners and using Union troops to do so.

Stone read the report of Sumner’s speech in the newspaper. He would later explain that the public questioning of his command by Sumner all but gave his soldiers permission to question his command in battle, a classic and serious act of insubordination.

Stone considered two options: bring charges against Sumner for insubordination, or consider the vicious speech on the Senate floor personal and respond in kind. Stone chose to take the latter approach and fired off a retort:

“Permit me to thank you for the speech in which you use my name. . . . There can hardly be better proof in my opinion, that a soldier in the field is faithfully performing his duty than the fact that while he is receiving the shot of the public enemy in front, he is receiving the vituperation of a well-known coward from a safe distance in the rear.

“Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

“CHARLES P. STONE.”

Sumner received that letter on Christmas Day. Unbeknownst to Stone, rumors had circulated that he and his wife, who was from New Orleans, were intimate friends of slaveholders; that he was a traitor to his core; that he had sent his men into a planned death. Congress began an investigation, but Stone was not told which witnesses were testifying for or against him.

His turn to speak came in early 1862. Only days before, he had been a guest at an intimate White House gathering, but “at this fatal interview, Stone was a frantic and agonized man,” recalled a reporter. He did not know any specifics of the complaints against him, and his defense was vague. Instead Stone spoke of his abiding loyalty—his personal service to protect Lincoln the previous winter. Stone was assured that no charges would be pressed against him.

The next day, February 8, at midnight, Stone lay in his Washington, D.C., hotel room. He heard a knock at the door.

Guards transported him to Fort Lafayette, at the tip of Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge, less than four miles by water from Bedloe’s Island, and threw him into solitary confinement. He had been provided no legal counsel. Weeks passed, and though he petitioned Lincoln repeatedly for answers as to what had happened to him, the president remained silent.

The U.S. government kept him in that solitary confinement for forty-nine days. When his doctor protested that this treatment was killing him, the authorities moved him into the general prison, housing traitors, for another four and a half months. Stone repeatedly asked for a trial, and to see his wife or staff officers, but all requests were refused. The government posted soldiers at his home. When his wife tried to send him clothes, they were closely inspected.

“Those who heard her tearful remonstrance can never forget it,” recalled a reporter. “‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘is there treason in linen?’”

The matter of Stone’s sudden and unexplained incarceration so disturbed McClellan, according to a reporter, that the general spoke to Lincoln about the matter. The president was reported as saying that “he was induced to take the step by the pressure brought to bear upon him.” Sumner denied having anything to do with the jailing.

Eventually supporters in Congress managed to pass a law requiring that an arrested officer would see a list of his offenses within eight days, would be given a trial within ten more, and, if the trial was not forthcoming, would be released thirty days later.

As Stone received none of the above, he was set free. He also was given no apology, nor was there a declaration of his innocence in the press. Stone immediately traveled to Washington, D.C, and applied for military duty. He was not called up. He met with Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and other dignitaries, yet no one would explain what happened.

Friends urged him to tell his story publicly, but he chose to remain silent. He said that “it required more strength to wait for justice than to endure martyrdom,” and, smiling, added, “It will all come right some day, and someone will do me justice in the future. Someone who knows the truth will dare to speak it.”

A long year passed in this silence. Eventually Stone won the right to defend himself. On February 27, 1863, he went before the committee again and beat back all of the charges against him.

He received a commission on the Gulf of Mexico and intended, with the excellence of his conduct there, to wipe out any stain that might remain on his name. He wrote to Lincoln in early 1864: “I respectfully ask, for the sake of the service which I have loved and never dishonored, that some act, some word, some order may issue from the Executive which shall place my name clear of reproach.” Again Lincoln ignored the plea.

At Pleasant Hill, Louisiana, Stone served under a superior who clearly disliked him and seemed to consider Stone’s judgment “excessively bad.” When their forces were decimated by the Confederates on April 9, 1864, Stone was relieved of duty. He went to Mexico, while his friends denied reports that he had gone insane.

From Mexico Stone traveled to Egypt, where the khedive—just a year after he had heard Bartholdi’s proposition for the fellah
lighthouse—was looking for American officers to replace the Frenchmen in his service. He offered twenty former American Civil War generals excellent pay if they would move to Egypt. Stone took the job, traveling seven thousand miles from home for a monthly salary of $384.