Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Unimaginable as it might seem, after Stanton’s bearish behavior, at their next encounter six years later, Lincoln would offer Stanton “the most powerful civilian post within his gift”—the post of secretary of war. Lincoln’s choice of Stanton would reveal, as would his subsequent dealings with Trumbull and Judd, a singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or bitterness. As for Stanton, despite his initial contempt for the “long armed Ape,” he would not only accept the offer but come to respect and love Lincoln more than any person outside of his immediate family.
Stanton’s surly condescension toward Lincoln must be considered in the context of his anxiety over the Reaper trial, which had assumed crucial importance for him. Ever since the death of his father when he was only thirteen, Stanton had been obsessed with financial security. Until his father, a successful physician, died from apoplexy at the age of forty, young Edwin had led a pampered existence in Steubenville, Ohio, surrounded by a loving family in a stately, two-story brick house with a large yard and fruitful garden. Taught to read when he was only three years old, the precocious child had ready access to his father’s large collection of books and received an excellent education at the Old Academy in Steubenville. But when his father died, leaving no estate, Edwin was forced to leave school to help support his widowed mother and three younger siblings. First came the forced sale of the house, then the sale of his father’s library, and finally, the necessity to move to much smaller quarters. Apprenticed to a bookseller, Stanton read books in every spare moment he could find and spent his evenings preparing for entrance to nearby Kenyon College, headed by Chase’s uncle Philander. An excellent student, he enjoyed two happy years at Kenyon before his family’s scarce resources required that he return to work, this time in a Columbus bookstore.
The following year, Stanton returned to Steubenville and secured an apprenticeship in a law office, where he simultaneously studied law and helped his mother with the younger children. In later years, his adoring sister Pamphila recalled Stanton’s critical role in anchoring the entire family, tenderly nursing his ailing mother, sending his brother Darwin to Harvard Medical School, and encouraging his younger sisters to memorize dozens of poems by Byron and Whittier, all the while reading Plutarch’s
Lives
and other works of history. Success in the law came quickly, the result of an intuitive mind, a prodigious capacity for work, and a forceful courtroom manner.
When he fell in love with Mary Lamson, he enjoyed what he much later called the “happiest hours of his life.” A marvelously intellectual young woman, Mary shared his passion for reading and study, coupled with a feminist determination that women could
“regenerate the world”
if only they were rightly educated. When their marriage produced a daughter, Lucy, and a son, Edwin Junior, Stanton had every reason to believe that fortune was smiling on him. His sister Pamphila later recalled that her brother seemed perpetually “bright and cheery.” As his practice grew, he had the means not only to take care of his own family but to provide for his mother and younger siblings as well.
Stanton looked upon Mary as his life companion. They both loved history, literature, and poetry. Together, they read Gibbon, Carlisle, Macaulay, Madame de Staël, Samuel Johnson, Bancroft, and Byron. “We years ago were lovers,” he wrote her after the children were born. “We are now parents; a new relation has taken place. The love of our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. We look forward now to life, not for ourselves only, but for our children. I loved you for your beauty, and grace and loveliness of your person. I love you now for the richness and surpassing excellence of your mind. One love has not taken the place of the other, but both stand side by side. I love you now with a fervor and truth of affection which speech cannot express.”
His happiness was short-lived: his daughter Lucy died after an attack of scarlet fever; three years later, in March, 1844, his beloved Mary developed a fatal bilious fever and died at the age of twenty-nine. Stanton was so brokenhearted, his grief “verged on insanity.” Before he would allow her burial, he had a seamstress fashion a wedding dress for her. “She is my bride and shall be dressed and buried like a bride.” After the funeral, he could not bring himself to work for months. Since he was involved in almost every case that came before the court in Jefferson County, Ohio, no court was held that spring. For months, he laid out Mary’s nightcap and gown on her pillow. His sister, Pamphila, who had come to stay with him, would never forget the horror of the long nights when, “with lamp in hand,” he searched for Mary through every room of the house, “with sobs and tears streaming from his eyes,” screaming over and over, “Where is Mary?”
Stanton’s responsibilities to his family eventually brought him back to his law practice, but he could not let go of his sorrow. Fearful that his son, then only two years old, would have no memories of the mother he had lost, he spent his nights writing a letter of over a hundred pages to the boy. He described his romance with Mary from its earliest days and included extracts from all the letters they had exchanged over the years. His words were penned with an unsteady hand, he confessed, with “tears obscuring his vision” and an “anguish of heart” driving him periodically from his chair. He would have preferred to wait until the boy was older and better able to understand; “but time, care, sickness, and the vicissitudes of life, wear out and efface the impression of the mind. Besides life is uncertain. I may be called from you…. You might live and die without knowing of the affection your father and mother bore for you, and for each other.”
Stanton’s miseries multiplied when his younger brother, Darwin, who completed his studies at Harvard Medical School, developed a high fever that impaired his brain. Unhinged by his acute illness, the young doctor, who was married with three small children, took a sharp lance-head and punctured his throat. “He bled to death in a few moments,” a family friend recalled. His mother watched helplessly as “the blood spouted up to the ceiling.” Neighbors were sent to fetch Edwin, who lived nearby. When he witnessed the aftermath of the gruesome spectacle, he reportedly “lost self-control and wandered off into the woods without his hat or coat.” Fearful that he, too, might commit suicide, neighbors pursued, restrained, and escorted him home, where they took turns watching over him.
This horrific train of events transformed Stanton’s spirit. His natural ebullience faded. “Where formerly he met everybody with hearty and cheerful greeting,” said a friend, “he now moved about in silence and gloom, with head bowed and hands clasped behind.” Though he remained a tender father to his son and a loving brother to his younger sisters, he became increasingly aggressive in court, intimidating witnesses unnecessarily, antagonizing fellow lawyers, exhibiting rude and irascible behavior.
He derived his only satisfaction from his growing reputation and his increasing wealth, which allowed him to care for his son, his widowed mother, his sisters, and his dead brother’s wife and children. The Reaper case was the biggest case of his career, “the most important Patent cause that has ever been tried,” he told a friend, “and more time, labor, money and brains have been expended in getting it ready for argument, than any other Patent case ever has had bestowed upon it.” If all went well, it would open doors for Stanton at the highest level of his profession.
When he arrived at the Burnet House, he discovered that Harding “had been unwell for several days” and might not be in a position to go to court. Terrified that in addition to the legal argument he had fully prepared, he might now have to present the “scientific part of the case to which [he] had given no attention,” Stanton stayed up all night in preparation. He was greatly relieved when Harding recovered, but anxiety and lack of sleep compounded the irascibility that had marked his demeanor since the multiple deaths in his family.
Beyond the breaking pressures of the case, Stanton had become involved in a turbulent courtship. The young woman, Ellen Hutchison, the daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, was the first woman who had attracted his interest since the death of his wife more than a decade earlier. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Ellen was, by Stanton’s description, “radiant with beauty and intellect.” While Stanton was smitten with Ellen immediately, she was slow to respond to his affections. She still suffered from a romantic disappointment that had left her heart in “agony” and convinced her that she could not love again.
Stanton understood, he told her, that “the trouble of early love fell like a killing frost upon the tree of your life,” but he was confident that “enough life still remains to put forth fresh blossoms.” Despite his encouragement, Ellen was vexed by some of the qualities others noted in Stanton: his obsessive concentration on work, his impatience and lack of humor, and, most worrisome, “his careless[ness] and indifferen[ce] to the feelings of all.” Addressing these concerns, Stanton admitted that “there is so much of the hard and repulsive in my—(I will not say nature, for that I think is soft and tender) but in the temper and habit of life generated by adverse circumstances, that great love only can bear with and overlook.” If the last decade of his life had been different, he assured her, if he had been “blessed with the companionship of a woman whose love would have pointed out and kindly corrected my errors, I would have escaped the fault you condemn.”
After the successful conclusion of the Reaper trial, Ellen was finally persuaded to marry Edwin on June 25, 1856. Happier years followed for Stanton. The Manny patent was sustained not only by the Cincinnati court but by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal. With this huge victory behind him, Stanton moved his practice to Washington, D.C., where he argued important cases before the Supreme Court, achieved substantial financial security, and built a brick mansion for his new wife.
A
S
L
INCOLN’S OWN HOPES
were repeatedly frustrated, he wistfully watched the progress of others, in particular, Stephen Douglas, his great rival with whom he had often debated around the fire of Speed’s general store. “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted,” he confided in a private fragment later discovered in his papers. “We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With
me
the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with
him
it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
At this juncture, some have suggested, Lincoln was sustained by his wife’s unflagging belief that a glorious destiny awaited him. “She had the fire, will and ambition,” his law partner John Stuart observed. When Mary was young and still being courted by many beaux, she had told a friend who had taken an old, wealthy husband, “I would rather marry a good man—a man of mind—with a hope and bright prospects ahead for position—fame and power than to marry all the houses—gold and bones in the world.” Stephen Douglas, who had been among her suitors, she considered “a very little,
little
giant, by the side of my tall Kentuckian, and intellectually my husband towers above Douglas just as he does physically.” Quite simply, in Mary’s mind, her husband had “no equal in the United States.”
In an era when, as Mary herself admitted, it was “unladylike” to be so interested in politics, she avidly supported her husband’s political ambitions at every stage. Although she undoubtedly fortified his will at difficult moments, however, Lincoln’s quest for public recognition and influence was so consuming, it is unlikely he would have abandoned his dreams, whatever the circumstances.
O
NCE AGAIN,
at a moment when Lincoln’s career appeared to have come to a halt, Seward and Chase were moving forward. Chase’s leadership during the political uprising in the North that followed the passage of the Nebraska Act had proved, in the words of Carl Schurz, to be “the first bugle call for the formation of a new party.” Under the pressure of mounting sectional division, both national parties—the Whigs and the Democrats—had begun to fray. The Whig Party—the party of Clay and Webster, Lincoln, Seward, and Bates—had been the first to decline as “conscience Whigs,” opposed to slavery, split from “cotton Whigs,” who desired an accommodation with slavery. In the 1852 election, the divided Whig Party had been buried in a Democratic landslide. But the passage of the Nebraska Act brought serious defections in the Democratic Party as well, as Northerners unwilling to sanction the extension of slavery looked for a new home, leaving the party in control of the Southern Democrats.
The political upheaval was enormously complicated by the emergence of the Know Nothing Party, which had formed in reaction to an unprecedented flood of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1845, about 20 million people inhabited the United States. During the next decade, nearly 3 million immigrants arrived, mainly from Ireland and Germany. This largely Catholic influx descended on a country that was mostly native-born Protestant, anti-Catholic in sympathy. The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting. In the early 1850s, they won elections in several cities, swept to statewide victory in Massachusetts, and gained surprising ground in New York. Newspapers and preachers assaulted “popery”; there were bloody anti-Catholic riots in several Northern cities.
Lincoln had nothing but disdain for the discriminatory beliefs of the Know Nothings. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” he queried his friend Joshua Speed. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that
‘all men are created equal.’
We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal,
except negroes.’
When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes,
and foreigners, and catholics
.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance.”