Should have had him on the list also, JWB.
Longtime-Democrat
Edwin Stanton was appointed Attorney General during the cabinet crisis
by Buchanan in December 1860, though at the same time hobnobbing with
Charles Sumner and other influential radical Republicans. As noted
below, freeing the slaves was not so much a humanitarian policy as much
as denying their use to the American South as soldiers or agricultural
labor -- a replay of Lord Dunmore’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1775,
and Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane’s edict in 1814, and for the
same purpose.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Stanton and His Radical Masters
“Crusades,
like politics, sometimes make strange bedfellows. Few antislavery
Radicals in 1860 would have guessed that a member of [President James]
Buchanan’s cabinet, an outspoken critic of Lincoln and the Republican
party, would become, by 1862, a valuable and enthusiastic ally. But
then, few men ever were ingenious enough to predict the course Edwin M.
Stanton might follow from one day to the next. Even today it is
difficult to assess the degree of Stanton’s Radical Republicanism.
Although
he had been a Democrat since his college days and had served in a
Democratic cabinet . . . He was in complete sympathy the Radical’s
demands for a vigorous prosecution of the war and for the emancipation
and military employment of Negro slaves. Yet, he never committed
himself clearly to the economic program of the Republican party: the
high tariff, the Homestead Act, national banking, and a sound currency.
Though
he used the considerable power of the War Department to aid Republican
candidates in wartime elections, he used it also to benefit War
Democrats, many of whom could never quite believe that he had really
deserted the old party.
Stanton,
then, was a true Union man, a partisan of any politician who believed,
as he did, that the Southern Confederacy was a conspiracy of traitors
and that total war was necessary to destroy it.
In his hands,
emancipation and the military use of Negroes became weapons of war.
Seldom
did he consider the long-term implications of the war; his concern
centered on the immediate task of defeating the Confederacy with every
means at hand. But he had the prescience enough to realize that
emancipation, though it would eliminate the problem of slavery, would at
the same time create the problem of the freed Negroes. Impetuous and
forceful , Stanton could not sympathize with Lincoln’s cautious approach
to the problem.
[Horace
Greely prophetically predicted that under Stanton] “no General or other
officer of the army will more than once return a fugitive slave.”
[Stanton’s predecessor, Simon Cameron in his final report stated:] “Can
we afford to send them forward to their masters to be by them armed
against us, or used in producing supplies to sustain the rebellion?”
Stanton
recognized in the Radicals the strongest single bloc in Congress, a
group to be cultivated and respected [as they had] worked hard to put
him in the War Department.
It
was [then] easy for the Radicals to demand publicly a war policy which
would include emancipation and the military use of freed Negroes.
[General David Hunter was rebuked by Lincoln for arming Negroes and
Stanton publicly denied any responsibility, but] General Hunter’s
subordinates charged later that Stanton had expressly authorized the
action and that he had furnished guns and uniforms for the troops.
In
spite of the Hunter affair, and without the President’s consent, he had
tolerated isolated instances of using Negroes as soldiers . . . and
few obstacles impeded the secretary’s policy of enlisting and arming the
fugitives. The entire structure of slavery, he believed, could be
transformed from a bulwark of the South agricultural economy into a
weapon on which to impale its defenders.
“The
power of the rebels rests upon their peculiar system of labor,” he
insisted, and it was the duty of the Union to strike down that system,
to “turn against the rebels the productive power that upholds the
insurrection.” Next to the armed might of the Union, he considered the
Emancipation Proclamation, with its military implications, the strongest
weapon in the Northern arsenal.”
(Blueprint
for Radical Reconstruction, John G. Sproat, Journal of Southern
History, Volume XXIII, Number 1, February 1957, pp. 25-29, 31-33)
