Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton by William Marvel (review)

William Marvel writes broadly about the Civil War, with books covering a wide range of subjects including prison life, military and naval warfare, and Abraham Lincoln. Marvel has an iconoclastic streak in him, often seeking to dispel persistent myths in the historical literature or to bring war heroes down a few pegs. In Andersonville: The Last Depot, for example, he scrupulously evaluates the reliability of various postwar prison narratives, while in Lee’s Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox he writes that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain “saw the world as one grand romantic cavalcade in which he participated prominently, and if he did anything common, he seemed unable to remember it that way.”¹ His series of four books on the Lincoln administration paints the president as a blundering politician who was largely responsible for the “bloodbath” that engulfed the nation.²

In this impressively researched and eminently readable biography of Edwin M. Stanton, Marvel seeks to set the record straight about Lincoln’s secretary of war. Previous biographers, according to Marvel, have been too sympathetic toward Stanton, treating him as a “devoted patriot” who was “compulsively truthful and dedicated to his vision of justice and the common good” (xi). Marvel will have none of this.

The Stanton who emerges in Marvel’s pages is a two-faced sycophant who flattered his superiors, showed disdain for his inferiors, and “seemed inclined to present a false face for much of his political life” (118). In 1846, for example, when Ohio lawyer Salmon P. Chase invited Stanton to participate in a case involving a man who had harbored fugitive slaves, Stanton declined, according to Marvel, because “he seemed reluctant to openly declare the antislavery views he had expressed in private to Chase” (48). Stanton, as such, was a moral coward who “never showed much courage for expressing political opinions without the strength of at least a healthy plurality behind him” (51).

Nearly every detail of Stanton’s life becomes part of Marvel’s indictment. As an attorney in the 1840s and 1850s, Stanton was a stereotypically unscrupulous lawyer, successfully defending dishonest government bureaucrats, heartless corporations, and wealthy clients against poor defendants. When he did not have a strong legal case he relied on cheap emotional courtroom antics to sway the jury. In at least two murder trials he made “the victim into the villain” (55). His law practice thus reveals how Stanton succumbed to the temptations of “material success” (54).

In Marvel’s chapter on the secession crisis, Stanton appears as a self-aggrandizing liar. Things only degenerate further during the war years. Once clothed with official authority, Stanton wielded power vindictively, like a despot bent on increasing his own dominance—often at the expense of the Union war effort. As secretary of war, he was a tyrant. He used heavy-handed tactics to eliminate political foes, tarnishing the reputations of meritorious officers, interfering with elections, and manipulating draft quotas. He disregarded the suffering of soldiers’ impoverished families while simultaneously engaging in nepotism to protect his own. In 1863 he even audaciously “snapped at the congenial Lincoln in a way he would never have dared to do to James Buchanan” in order to get his way (302).

Marvel is merciless in his denunciation of Stanton. From his youth until his death, Stanton is cold, duplicitous, dishonest, selfish, paranoid, petty, perfidious, malicious, conniving, untrustworthy, insulting, hypocritical, insincere, and surreptitious. Even Stanton’s physical appearance elicits derision. At least twice in the text Marvel quotes the same contemporary description of Stanton as “pig-faced” (14, 136).

Marvel frequently qualifies his statements with words like “probably,” “seems,” “apparently,” “evidently,” “likely,” “must have,” and “may have,” in places where the documentary record is either inconclusive or does not expressly support his interpretation. These ubiquitous qualifiers tend to undermine the force of Marvel’s thesis. In almost every instance in which Stanton could be given the benefit of the doubt, Marvel...