Review

William Marvel. Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 611.

 
First and foremost, Marvel’s study rests on prodigious research, and his biography of Edwin M. Stanton will be the scholarly standard on this important historical figure for years to come. As Marvel points out, despite Stanton’s outsized historical importance, the secretary of war under President Lincoln has not received as much scholarly attention as one would expect, and Harold Hyman’s two-generations-old biography (begun by noted Lincoln biographer Benjamin P. Thomas) only continues to show its age.[1] Not only does Marvel update our understanding of Stanton’s life in the context of decades of scholarship that Hyman and Thomas could not have benefited from, but he also draws from a far more thorough base of research.

Marvel portrays Stanton as a duplicitous and unprincipled autocrat, concerned primarily with the acquisition of political power and economic security for himself and his family. Stanton’s difficult personality is hardly new to historians of the era, but Marvel’s research has uncovered a secretary of war whose personality failings went far beyond irascibility. Stanton is depicted as a two-faced liar who misled his powerful interlocutors, always claiming to side with them on important issues. And he proved all too willing to trample on those less powerful than himself. Marvel traces a long history of such double-dealing and exploitation of the downtrodden throughout Stanton’s professional life and career.

For Marvel, Stanton’s duplicitous nature calls into question the former war secretary’s portrayal of several important episodes in his career and thus the treatment they have received from historians, including myself. For example, Marvel essentially demolishes the notion that Stanton staunchly opposed secession in the Buchanan cabinet, a narrative that the self-serving politician later pushed to wartime associates. Instead, Stanton feigned loyalty to Buchanan during the secession winter, even as he attempted to position himself for a job in the coming Lincoln administration. Marvel also shows that Stanton’s new wartime loyalty to the Radical cause stemmed from political expediency, not any principled sympathy with either the antislavery movement or Radical support for African American rights.

Beyond the issue of Stanton’s character, his autocratic and domineering personality contributed in large part to his ruthless suppression of domestic northern political dissent during the Civil War. Marvel’s criticism not only of Stanton but also of Lincoln’s at least tacit acquiescence to his subordinate’s methods reflects a distinctive position in the current literature. As Stanton’s latest biographer himself notes, “the most important result of subjecting Stanton to a more critical examination than he has thus far endured may be its effect on the prevailing image of Lincoln’s personal strengths. It has been suggested that Lincoln used Stanton to do his political dirty work, and that seems substantially true—sometimes to the point of leaving the gentle-spirited president uncomfortable with the results” (xiv). Not only does Marvel thus strike at the hallowed Lincoln; he also focuses on the more unsavory aspects of expanded Federal power during the war, which has been mostly obscured in recent scholarship by its necessary association with emancipation and the destruction of slavery. For example, Marvel highlights the importance of Lincoln’s Proclamation of September 24, 1862 (promulgated two days after the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation), which authorized martial law to suppress an elastic definition of disloyalty. In Marvel’s view, “It may not have been Lincoln’s conscious intention to wield his proclamation as a bludgeon against dissent, but Stanton quickly put it to such use, and the president interfered seldom enough to imply approbation with—and share responsibility for—the oppressive effect. So extensive were those first roundups that they tended to diminish the adminstration’s apparent repression when the arrests abated to what should still have been objectionable levels” (255).

On this issue, Marvel provides a useful corrective to the current trajectory of scholarship on civil liberties, although he overstates other historians’ comfort with such measures. For example, he remarks that other historians paid too little heed to this issue, saying that “public indignation over the arbitrary arrests may have been permanently desensitized” (514, n. 15). In at least my reading, however, one of the cited historians, Mark Neely, expresses ample concern about the problem of domestic civil liberties during the war. Neely’s closing lines in his standard work on the subject are that “the clearest lesson is that there is no clear lesson in the Civil War—no neat precedents, no ground rules, no map. War and its effect on civil liberties remain a frightening unknown.”[2] Indeed, Marvel’s study frequently overshoots the mark in making useful and necessary course corrections to the larger literature.

In focusing on Stanton’s many and obvious personal failings, Marvel pays too little attention to the man’s achievements and the challenges he faced as a member of Lincoln’s cabinet. Indeed, as Marvel himself shows, Stanton’s difficult personality was hardly a secret during his own life. Nevertheless, he continued to command respect among many of his peers for his administrative achievements. In chronicling the many faults of the Union’s secretary of war during the sectional conflict, Marvel loses sight of Stanton’s steady competence as the civilian administrator most intimately connected to the victorious Union war effort. As George Templeton Strong put it, “Good and evil were strangely blended together in the character of this great War Minister. He was honest, patriotic, able, indefatigable, warm-hearted, unselfish, incorruptible, arbitrary, capricious, tyrannical, vindictive, hateful, and cruel.”[3] Marvel also acknowledges, for example, Secretary of State William H. Seward’s long friendship with Stanton, despite the former’s relatively conservative political outlook. In addition to ideological differences, it is unlikely that a political operator as savvy as Seward would have been fooled by Stanton. It seems more reasonable to conclude that Stanton, for all his faults, made important contributions to the Union war effort that his peers recognized and respected.

But Marvel rarely praises Stanton, explicitly commending the late secretary of war only for helping to energetically direct the expedition that captured Norfolk in May 1862 and for making the complex logistical arrangements necessary to move the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps from Washington to Chattanooga in the fall of 1863 (303). As for Stanton’s administrative talents, Marvel qualifies his praise with a litany of caveats: “Stanton showed abundant organizational ability, to which he added marathon days and his churlish, intimidating manner to keep the cumbersome department operating steadily, if not altogether smoothly. No one is indispensable, however, and inevitably there were others who could have managed the position—or who could have grown into it, for in 1862 no one had any experience at the head of so massive and complex an organization, and least of all Stanton” (355). Marvel then lists possible alternatives, including Generals McClellan, Halleck, and Dix, and Governors Edwin Morgan, Andrew Curtin, and Oliver Morton, who could have done the job. Here Marvel starts to exceed the interpretive boundaries established by his prodigious research: for example, McClellan and Halleck, the two most prominent and plausible alternatives he offers for secretary of war, had mixed administrative records themselves. McClellan had the same tendencies toward micromanagement and tunnel vision Marvel criticizes in Stanton, and Halleck’s passivity as general-in-chief provides a poor recommendation as to his possible merits as secretary of war.

Indeed, Marvel finally acknowledges that “probably no one could have done a better job than Stanton, however: he was available at the time and proved capable of ‘running the machine,’ as some phrased it. That explains much of Lincoln’s reluctance to part with him, despite his unpleasant personal and political traits” (356). Marvel is too competent a historian to ignore the importance of Stanton’s contribution to the Union war effort, even as he strains to downplay those accomplishments. In a world of hypotheticals, others could have managed the War Department competently enough to help guide the Union to victory, but in the actual lived history of the war, it was Stanton who accomplished that feat. And an amazing feat it was, to supervise a mobilization without precedent in American history. Stanton obviously made his fair share of errors, especially in his premature end of military recruiting in the spring and summer of 1862, but he was hardly alone in his overconfidence at that point of the war. Every capable leader of the Union war effort at one time or another made serious errors of judgment. In evaluating their abilities, the historian should obviously look at their careers in their entirety, and an evaluation of Stanton’s career should present no exception, despite the litany of personality flaws Marvel has so persuasively uncovered and documented.

Nevertheless, however one wishes to assess Stanton’s overall career, no one can gainsay Marvel’s breadth of research and thoroughness of coverage. For that reason, he has made a valuable contribution to our larger understanding of both the American Civil War and one of its most important civilian leaders.

1. Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).

2. Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 235.

3. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong: Post-War Years, 1865–1875 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 266.