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for the first time since the war began. He was also pleased by the fact that his own handsome face would appear in the left-hand corner of every dollar bill. He had deliberately chosen to place his picture on the ubiquitous one-dollar bill rather than a bill of a higher denomination, knowing that his image would thus reach the greatest number of people. His mood quickly darkened when he contemplated his own strained finances, however, and feared that his personal investments with Jay Cooke and his brother, Henry, might be misconstrued. Their virtual monopoly over the government bond business was beginning to attract negative newspaper comment, though they had succeeded brilliantly in selling the war bonds to the public.

The stormy and irascible secretary of war also seemed unable to relax or distract himself from the incessant pressures of his office. Stanton’s clerk, Charles Benjamin, recalled that “a word or a gesture would set [Stanton] aflame in an instant. He would dash the glasses before his eyes far up on his forehead, as though they pained or obstructed his vision; the muscles of his face would become agitated, and his voice would tremble and grow intense, without elevation.” Though “the storm would pass away as quickly as it came,” and though Stanton would quickly make amends to victims of his ill humor, the employees in the War Department, while respecting Stanton greatly, never loved him as Lincoln’s aides loved their president.

Stanton also lacked Lincoln’s ability to put grudges behind him. When asked why he disliked the Sanitary Commission, which had done so much to promote healthy conditions in the army camps, Stanton replied that the commission had persuaded the president and the Senate to appoint a surgeon general against his vigorous objections. “I’m not used to being beaten, and don’t like it,” he said, “and therefore I am hostile to the Commission.” In fact, Stanton admitted, he “detested it.”

Those who worked with Stanton attributed his “nervous irritability” to the combination of overwork and poor health. At times, his asthma became so severe that he collapsed in “violent fits of strangulation.” Still, he refused to take a break. When doctors pleaded with him to get some rest and exercise, he insisted that he wanted only to be kept alive until the war ended and then, and only then, would he consent to seek rest. Though he loved good conversation and had built his large house in order to gather interesting people around his table, he stayed in the War Department day and night, rarely enjoying the convivial evenings that replenished Seward and Lincoln or that Kate provided for Chase. And while he enjoyed reading novels, with a special preference for Dickens, Stanton seldom found the time to unwind with a book. Instead, one of his clerks recalled, when he wanted “an hour’s rest,” he would lock his door, lie on his couch, and peruse English periodicals sympathetic to the Confederate cause, endeavoring to better understand the British attitude to the war.

Unlike Seward, who had promptly brought Fred into the State Department and relished the professional and personal support of his own son, Stanton had no family member or intimate friend to rely upon for daily counsel. Except for the initial appointment of his brother-in-law Christopher Wolcott as assistant secretary of war, Stanton refused to bring any of his relatives into his department. When Senator Ben Wade recommended an appointment for Stanton’s capable cousin William, the secretary angrily declared that no relative would have any “office in his gift” so long as he remained at his post. John Hay went so far as to remark that he “would rather make the tour of a small-pox hospital” than be forced to ask Stanton for a favor. Even when Stanton’s own son, Edwin Junior, wanted to serve as his private secretary after graduating from Kenyon, Stanton refused to bend. Only after months of unpaid labor for an assistant secretary did the boy receive his father’s consent to an official appointment.

Stanton rarely returned to Steubenville during the war. During