on; he compelled him to resign though he saved
his face by appointing him minister to Russia. But who was to take his
place? At this critical moment, the choice of a new Secretary of War
was a political problem of exacting difficulty. Just why Lincoln chose
a sullen, dictatorial lawyer whose experience in no way prepared him for
the office, has never been disclosed. Two facts appear to explain it.
Edwin M. Stanton was temperamentally just the man to become a good
brother to Chandler and Wade. Both of them urged him upon Lincoln
as successor to Cameron.(9) Furthermore, Stanton hitherto had been a
Democrat. His services in Buchanan's Cabinet as Attorney-General had
made him a national figure. Who else linked the Democrats and the
Jacobins?

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 trie