num_pages: 480
description: Walter Stahr award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Seward tells the story of Abraham Lincolns indispensable Secretary of War Edwin Stanton the man the president entrusted with raising the army that preserved the Union.Of the crucial men close to President Lincoln Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (18141869) was the most powerful and controversial. Stanton raised armed and supervised the army of a million men who won the Civil War. He organized the war effort. He directed military movements from his telegraph office where Lincoln literally hung out with him. He arrested and imprisoned thousands for war crimes such as resisting the draft or calling for an armistice. Stanton was so controversial that some accused him at that time of complicity in Lincolns assassination. He was a stubborn genius who was both reviled and revered in his time.Stanton was a Democrat before the war and a prominent trial lawyer. He opposed slavery but only in private. He served briefly as President Buchanans Attorney General and then as Lincolns aggressive Secretary of War. On the night of April 14 1865 Stanton rushed to Lincolns deathbed and took over the government since Secretary of State William Seward had been critically wounded the same evening. He informed the nation of the Presidents death summoned General Grant to protect the Capitol and started collecting the evidence from those who had been with the Lincolns at the theater in order to prepare a murder trial.Now with this worthy complement to the enduring library of biographical accounts of those who helped Lincoln preserve the Union Stanton honors the indispensable partner of the sixteenth president. Walter Stahrs essential book is the first major biography of Stanton in fifty years restoring this underexplored figure to his proper place in American history.
language: English
title: Stanton: Lincoln's Staunch Secretary of War
publisher: Simon & Schuster