Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [267]
After settling matters with Cameron, Lincoln asked George Harding, whom he had made head of the Patent Office, to bring his old law partner Stanton to the White House. Stanton was then forty-seven, though the grizzled brown hair and beard made him look older, as did the glasses that hid his bright brown eyes. Harding was afraid that disagreeable recollections from the Reaper trial would cast a pall on the meeting. Both Lincoln and Stanton seemed to have put the past behind them, however, leaving Harding “the most embarrassed of the three.”
The urgency of the situation left Stanton little time to deliberate. He consulted his wife, Ellen, who, according to her mother, “objected to his acceptance.” The move to the War Department would substantially diminish the lifestyle of the Stanton family, slashing a legal income of over $50,000 a year to $8,000. Stanton, too, tormented all his life by fears of insolvency, must have been concerned about the drastic diminution of income. Nevertheless, he could not refuse to serve as secretary of war in the midst of a great civil war. And if he served with distinction, his life, however short in years, might be made “long by noble deeds,” as Chase had once prophesied. He accepted the post, on the condition that he could retain Peter Watson, his old friend and assistant on the Reaper trial, “to take care of the contracts,” for he realized he would “be swamped at once” without Watson’s aid.
The announcement of Cameron’s resignation and Stanton’s appointment took the majority of the cabinet by surprise. “Strange,” Bates confided in his diary, that “not a hint of all this” was discussed at the cabinet council the previous Friday, “and stranger still,” the president had sent for no one but Seward over the weekend. Welles heard the dramatic news from Monty Blair, whom he met on the street. Neither one of them, Welles confessed, had been “taken into Lincoln’s confidence.” Indeed, Welles had never even met Stanton. Stanton’s nomination dismayed radical Republicans on Capitol Hill. The powerful William Fessenden, fearful that Stanton’s Democratic heritage would incline him toward a soft policy on both slavery and the South, worked to delay the Senate confirmation until he ascertained more about Stanton’s position. He conferred with Chase, who assured Fessenden that “he, Secretary Chase, was responsible for Mr. Stanton’s selection,” and that he would arrange a meeting that very evening between the Maine senator and Stanton. Seward’s role in the selection was not publicized, allowing the radicals to assume that Chase, their man in the cabinet, was the chief architect of the appointment. After a lengthy conversation with Stanton, Fessenden told Chase that he was thoroughly convinced that Stanton was “just the man we want.” The senator was delighted to find that he and Buchanan’s former Attorney General concurred “on every point,” including “the conduct of the war” and “the negro question.” The Senate confirmed Stanton’s nomination the next day.
News of Stanton’s replacement for Cameron met with widespread approval. The public generally assumed that Cameron had retired voluntarily. “Not only was the press completely taken by surprise,” Seward told his wife, “but with all its fertility of conjecture, not one newspaper has conceived the real cause.” Cameron’s reputation was preserved until the House Committee on Contracts published its 1,100-page report in February 1862, detailing the extensive corruption in the War Department that had led to the purchase of malfunctioning weapons, diseased horses, and rotten food. According to one newspaper report, the committee “resolved to advise the immediate passage of a bill to punish with death any person who commits a fraud upon the Government, whereby a soldier is bodily injured, as for