However,for almost any one but Lincoln,there was an objection that it would have been hard to overcome.No one has ever charged Stanton with politeness.A gloomy excitable man,of uncertain health,temperamentally an over-worker,chronically apprehensive,utterly without the saving grace of humor,he was capable of insufferable rudeness--one reason,perhaps,why Chandler liked him.He and Lincoln had met but once.As associate council in a case at Cincinnati,three years before,Lincoln had been treated so contemptuously by Stanton that he had returned home in pained humiliation.Since his inauguration,Stanton had been one of his most vituperative critics.Was this insolent scold to be invited into the Cabinet?Had not Lincoln at this juncture been in the full tide of selflessness,surely some compromise would have been made with the Committee,a secretary found less offensive personally to the President.Lincoln disregarded the personal consideration.The candidate of Chandler and Wade became secretary.It was the beginning of an intimate alliance between the Committee and the War Office.Lincoln had laid up for himself much trouble that he did not foresee.
The day the new Secretary took office,he received from the Committee a report upon General Stone:[10]Subsequently,in the Senate,Wade denied that the Committee had advised the arrest of Stone.[11]Doubtless the statement was technically correct.
Nevertheless,there can be no doubt that the inquisitors were wholly in sympathy with the Secretary when,shortly afterward,Stone was seized upon Stanton's order,conveyed to a fortress and imprisoned without trial.
This was the Dreyfus case of the Civil War.Stone was never tried and never vindicated.He was eventually released upon parole and after many tantalizing disappointments permitted to rejoin the army.What gives the event significance is its evidence of the power,at that moment,of the Committee,and of the relative weakness of the President.Lincoln's eagerness to protect condemned soldiers survives in many anecdotes.Hay confides to his diary that he was sometimes "amused at the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact which would justify"clemency.And yet,when Stanton informed him of the arrest of Stone,he gloomily acquiesced."I hope you have good reasons for it,"he said.Later he admitted that he knew very little about the case.But he did not order Stone's release.
Lincoln had his own form of ruthlessness.The selfless man,by dealing with others in the same extraordinary way in which he deals with himself,may easily under the pressure of extreme conditions become impersonal in his thinking upon duty.The morality of such a state of mind is a question for the philosopher.The historian must content himself with pointing out the only condition that redeems it--if anything redeems it The leader who thinks impersonally about others and personally about himself-what need among civilized people to characterize him?Borgia,Louis XIV,Napoleon.If we are ever to pardon impersonal thinking it is only in the cases of men who begin by effacing themselves.The Lincoln who accepted Stanton as a Cabinet officer,who was always more or less overshadowed by the belief that in saving the government he was himself to perish,is explicable,at least,when individual men became for him,as at times they did,impersonal factors in a terrible dream.
There are other considerations in the attempt to give a moral value to his failure to interfere in behalf of Stone.The first four months of 1862are not only his feeblest period as a ruler,the period when he was barely able to hold his own,but also the period when he was least definite as a personality,when his courage and his vitality seemed ebbing tides.Again,his spirit was in eclipse.Singularly enough,this was the darkness before the dawn.June of 1862saw the emergence,with a suddenness difficult to explain,of the historic Lincoln.
But in January of that year he was facing downward into the mystery of his last eclipse.All the dark places of his heredity must be searched for clues to this strange experience.
There are moments,especially under strain of a personal bereavement that fell upon him in February,when his will seemed scarcely a reality;when,as a directing force he may be said momentarily to have vanished;when he is hardly more than a ghost among his advisers.The far-off existence of weak old Thomas cast its parting shadow across his son's career.
However,even our Dreyfus case drew from Lincoln another display of that settled conviction of his that part of his function was to be scapegoat."I serve,"which in a way might be taken as his motto always,was peculiarly his motto,and likewise his redemption,in this period of his weakness.The enemies of the Committee in Congress took the matter up and denounced Stanton.Thereupon,Wade flamed forth,criticizing Lincoln for his leniency,venting his fury on all those who were tender of their enemies,storming that "mercy to traitors is cruelty to loyal men."[12]Lincoln replied neither to Wade nor to his antagonists;but,without explaining the case,without a word upon the relation to it of the Secretary and the Committee,he informed the Senate that the President was alone responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of General Stone.[13]