The previous president, James Buchanan, had already appointed Stanton as his attorney general.

When Honest Abe became the sixteenth president, he decided to talk to Stanton about joining his cabinet.

That lawyer happened to be on his own climb from obscurity to ever-higher offices.Īs he rose, Abraham Lincoln stayed in touch with the man who kept winning big settlements and earning nationwide press coverage. He wins handily, impressing an ambitious attorney who has watched the adroit legal tactics from his seat in the courtroom. In another trial, Stanton represents the inventor of the McCormick reaper in a patent suit. Among these is an early use of the “insanity defense” to secure a not-guilty verdict for Daniel Sickles (later General Sickles) who had killed his wife’s lover. With a combination of infighting, intelligence, and toadying to the prominent, Stanton becomes the lead attorney in a number of high-profile cases. He truly mourns his young wife when she dies in childbirth almost 16 years go by before he remarries, this time to a 26-year-old heiress who provides emotional and financial support on his ultimate ascent to power. Biographer William Marvel spares no details as he tracks the short, asthmatic lawyer from Steubenville, Ohio to the corridors of the White House.Įn route, Stanton rises from obscurity, works his way through law school, marries, fathers two children, and becomes active in local politics.

Lincoln’s Autocrat shows that both factions have enough ammunition to ignite a second Civil War. To his enemies, however, he was a treacherous schemer, graceless in defeat and malign in victory. postage stamps-with two exceptions, Benjamin Franklin and Stanton). Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton by William Marvel (University of North Carolina Press, 611 pp., $35)Īccording to his allies, Edwin Stanton was a gifted manager and a true patriot (until the late nineteenth century, only presidents appeared on U.S.

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