The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-10-21
SPIRIT OF TzH RRuss.
: ditoriaI Opinions Of the Leading Journals
upon Current ies-cempfled Every
Day for the Evening Telegraph.
STANTON UPON STANTON.

his grave, innocent people as usual are made
to suffer. If there were two men among the
quick or the dead to whom Stanton was under
peculiar obligations, they we're the late Pre-
sident Buchanan and the living Judge Black;
and these are the two men whom Stantons
posthumous flatterers most villify. Down to
1860, when the Attorney Generalship was
offered TO him, Mr.. Stanton, politically speak
ing, was an obscure man. He had some local
reputation as lawyer on the Pennsylvania
frontier of Ohio; he had defended Sickles
when tried for his Sunday morning murder,
and in doing so had gained no credit and at
tracted no attention except for his vulgar fero-
city; be had argued few railroad cases in the
East, and a patent case or two IN the West, in
which Mr. Lincoln, whom then and always he
persistently ridiculed, had been his colleague.
He had also, with great pecuniary profit to
himself, represented the Government for
time in California. On the reorganization of
Mr.. Buchanan's Cabinet rendered necessary
by General Cass' resignation, and at the
instance of Mr. Black, he was made At
torney-G General. This was on or about the
10Th of December 1860. 1t was the highest
professional honor, save perhaps one, which
a President could bestow, aud for it Mr..
Stanton professed to be profoundly grateful.
So far as was apparent to the world to his
colleagues, and to the President, he con-
tinued contentedly in officesfrom that time
till MIR. Lincoln's accession in March. He
never uttered an audible whisper of COM
plant. He never hiuted a suspicion. 70
Judge Black he seemed friendly and grateful.
To the President he was not exactly obse-
quious for he was too mOrose in nature and
too rough in manners for that, but con-
spicuousy respectful and anxiousIy devoted
Yet now, we have seen, the batteries
of New England are opened to prove that
all this fidelity was sham, and that while
MIR Stanton was member of Mr.. Buchanan
Cabinet lie was plotting against him
and holding secret conferences with his
bitteIest enemies. He meeting Mr.
Sumner at midnight; plotting by deputy with
Mr. Seward; writing lotters secretly to
Dawes, to be read stealthily by the light of
street lamps; framing inculpatory resolutions
against his colleagues for Howard; and then
going with unrutlled face to the Cabinet
councils to meet these cOlleagues-Mr. Tou-
cey included--with a cordial smile, and to
profess devotion to his patron. This infa-
nous behavior, too-such is the deterora-
tion of New England moras-is imputed by
New Englanders to Stanton as a claim upon
the respect of the nation.
We have more than once had occasion to
express our profound Indifference as to
whether the Boston gloss on Stanton be just
or not, and we have no desire to meddle with
the pending controversy between Mr. Wilson
and his hackers and Judge Black. The latter
Our aim now is simply to clear the innocent
in all this. No one familiar with the history
of the anxious months of the winter of 1860
81, and with the controversies which have
sprung from it, needs to be told how strong
current of prejudice was then set running,
and still runs, against the dead President,
Mr.. Buchanan. "Poor, weak old man." is
the mildest phrase that Boston hings at
him. 1T was," said Mr.. Hoar, ''his
timid, trembling imbecility' which Stanton
had most desperately to contend with. 1t was
because of the Presidents 'semi-treason, +"
especially in the matter of Fort Sumter, that
Stanton was forced to plot with Sumner and
Wilson and Dawes. If to them he ever
spoke even respectfully of the President who
trusted him, they have been base enough to
suppress the fact The theory of their case
requires that Stanton should have despised
and dist trusted him. Mr.. Buchanan then,
after all, is the chief victim of all these
Vaccinations. And this his family and friends,
though grieved and angered-for Let us
say in passing that Mr.. Buchanan was
dearly beloved by his friends and neigh
bors, and that Wheatland was g home
o. tranquil familiar eniOyment-all this
his family and friends have borne patiently
till now. Not word of defense has been
uttered. Mr.. Horatio King, Republican,
and an office-holder, if we mistake not, under
MIR. Lincoln, has recently and of his own
accord published some private letters from
the late President, written during the war,
which to a certain extent showed the wrong
that had been done. But what care the Bos-
ton conspiTators for this or any other evidence
except such as they cook in the atlantic
stewpan-its hash of history and giblets of
rhetoric? 1t was their business to defy
Stanton and to use record, genuine
or forged of his acts as evidence
against Mr.. Buchanan They did SO
without remorse; aud, like the weird
sisters in Macbeth, one seems to see them
hideously dancing around the caldron; yet.
For whom the CHASTITY broth they are brew
ing will in the end be found TO have been
brewed is not SO certain, perhaps, as they
have fancied. They have evoked the ghost
of Stanton, and by its witness they must
abide. They have given us good deal of
testimony as to what other people thought
and wrote about Stanton's views and feel
ings, They must permit us now to call their
attention and that of our readers to Stanton's
own spoken and written testimony about
himself
One of their witnesses makes it out thai
Stanton was a thorough-going anti-slavery
mana radical abolitionist-when the wal
broke out, and had for twenty years been SO
In the record of the Sickles trial we read
that Stanton not only denounced the putting
of slaves on a par with freemen as witnesses
but boasted of his own pro-slavery connec
tions. 81 have" he said, proudly, ''thc
blood of slaveholding parents in my veins
NY father was North Carolnian, my mother
Virginian" This was in 1859, only tive
years before the outbreak of the civil war
In November, 1861 hardly six months after
the practical commencement of our troubles
his views of the negro were still by nj