For all these reasons, the government at Washington appeared to be tottering.  Desperate remedies seemed imperative.  Lincoln decided to make every concession he could make without letting go his central purpose.  First, he threw over Cameron; 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.