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it is my duty to submit. I cannot add to Mr. Stanton’s troubles. His position is one of the most difficult in the world. Thousands in the army blame him because they are not promoted and other thousands out of the army blame him because they are not appointed. The pressure upon him is immeasurable and unending. He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry waters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land. Gentlemen, I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him I should be destroyed. He performs his task superhumanly. Now do not mind this matter, for Mr. Stanton is right and I cannot wrongly interfere with him.”

At the same time, Lincoln expected Stanton to be aware of the special burdens he faced as president. For weeks, Lincoln wrote Stanton, he had been pressed by relatives of “prisoners of war in our custody, whose homes are within our lines, and who wish…to take the oath and be discharged.” He believed that “taking the oath” was an act of honor, that “none of them will again go to the rebellion,” though he acknowledged that “the rebellion again coming to them, a considerable per centage of them, probably not a majority, would rejoin it.” With “a cautious discrimination,” however, “the number so discharged would not be large enough to do any considerable mischief.” Moreover, looking forward to the day when the two sides would once again be united, he thought the government “should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.” With all these considerations in mind, it would provide “relief from an intolerable pressure” if he could have Stanton’s “cheerful assent to the discharge of those names I may send, which I will only do with circumspection.” Stanton replied the following day: “Your order for the discharge of any prisoners of war, will be cheerfully & promptly obeyed.”

Lincoln’s liberal use of his pardoning power created the greatest tension between the two men. Stanton felt compelled to protect military discipline by exacting proper punishment for desertions or derelictions of duty, while Lincoln looked for any “good excuse for saving a man’s life.” When he found one, he said, “I go to bed happy as I think how joyous the signing of my name will make him and his family and his friends.”

Stanton would not allow himself such leniency. A clerk recalled finding Stanton one night in his office, “the mother, wife, and children of a soldier who had been condemned to be shot as a deserter, on their knees before him pleading for the life of their loved one. He listened standing, in cold and austere silence, and at the end of their heart-breaking sobs and prayers answered briefly that the man must die. The crushed and despairing little family left and Mr. Stanton turned, apparently unmoved, and walked into his private room.” The clerk thought Stanton an unfeeling tyrant, until he discovered him moments later, “leaning over a desk, his face buried in his hands and his heavy frame shaking with sobs. ‘God help me to do my duty; God help me to do my duty!’ he was repeating in a low wail of anguish.” On such occasions, when Stanton felt he could not afford to set a precedent, he must have been secretly relieved that the president had the ultimate authority.

When Stanton thought he was right, however, he tenaciously pursued his purpose. When a group of Pennsylvania politicians received the president’s assent for discharging some prisoners of war in their district who were willing to take the oath and join the Union army fighting Indians in the West, Stanton flatly refused to execute the order. The order specified that the discharged prisoners would receive a bounty and be credited against Pennsylvania’s draft quota, thus reducing the number of troops required of the Keystone State. “Mr. President, I cannot do it,” he asserted. “The order is an improper one, and I cannot execute it.” Lincoln was equally firm in his reply: “Mr. Secretary, it will