The Battles of Spotsylvania represented the second phase of the Overland campaign, which had commenced when Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee first took each other’s measure in fighting at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5-6, 1864. After combat ended on May 6, Grant made the crucial decision to press southward, seeking to reach Spotsylvania Court House ahead of Lee and thereby cut the Confederates off from the shortest route to Richmond, Virginia. Hard marching on the night of May 7 allowed Richard H. Anderson’s Confederate corps to reach Spotsylvania just ahead of Grant’s leading units, which had wasted their advantage of marching on more direct roads.
Troops from both armies poured onto the field throughout May 8, and Union attacks failed to dislodge Confederate defenders. Lee’s soldiers rapidly built a defensive line notable for its strong field entrenchments. The most memorable feature of the Confederate line was a large salient, called the “mule shoe,” that emerged northward from near the center of the Southern position. Grant looked for weaknesses on May 9-11, starting heavy action in several places but gaining no decisive advantage.
At dawn on May 12, a massive Union assault commanded by Winfield Scott Hancock smashed through the northern arc of the mule shoe lines, threatening to cut Lee’s army in half. The most desperate fighting of the entire war ensued, as the two armies struggled to control several hundred yards of Confederate earthworks, later labeled the “bloody angle,” at the northwest corner of the salient. Action continued for nearly 20 hours and impressed even hardened veterans as uniquely hellish. “Nothing during the war has equaled the savage desperation of this struggle,” reported one Northern newspaper correspondent, while a Confederate journalist wrote that fighting “roared and hissed and dashed over the bloody angle and along the bristling entrenchments like an angry sea beating and chafing against a rock bound coast.”
As combat raged at the bloody angle, Lee’s engineers constructed another line across the base of the mule shoe. By morning of May 13, Grant once again faced a strong Confederate position. Further Union attacks over the next five days failed to gain advantage. Repeated assaults at Spotsylvania taught Union infantrymen a bitter lesson about the power of defenders sheltered by field entrenchments, and soldiers on both sides realized that from now on the shovel would join the musket and the cannon as critical tools on all their battlefields.
Neither army could claim a clear-cut victory at Spotsylvania. More than 18,000 Federals and 12,000 Confederates had been killed, wounded, or captured in the course of reaching a tactical impasse. Grant resumed his southward movement on May 21, thereby maintaining strategic momentum and forcing Lee into the unaccustomed position of reacting to rather than dictating the action.
See also Cold Harbor, Battle of.
Further reading: Gordon C. Rhea, The Bat-ties for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7-12, 1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Gordon C. Rhea, To the North Anna River: Grant and Lee, May 13-25,1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
—Gary W. Gallagher
Stanton, Edwin M. (1814-1869) lawyer, government official
Edwin McMasters Stanton, a distinguished member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, was born on December 19, 1814, in Steubenville, Ohio. Stanton briefly attended Kenyon College in 1828 and then studied law. He began his career in Cadiz, Ohio. A Democrat, Stanton worked for Martin Van Buren in the presidential election of 1840. Known for his antislavery views, Stanton found it difficult but not impossible to support James Polk’s expansionism in the Mexican-American War. Stanton’s first wife died in 1844, leaving him a widower with two children. He later married Ellen Hutchinson, with whom he had four more children.
Stanton moved to Pittsburgh in the mid-1840s, where he developed a reputation as a dynamic and hard-hitting lawyer with an unerring instinct for his opponents’ weaknesses. He often argued cases before the U. S. Supreme Court. President James Buchanan appointed Stanton the U. S. attorney general in December 1860. After Southern secession, Stanton labored long hours in his Washington, D. C., office to preserve the Union. He tried to convince the weak Buchanan to defend Fort Sumter, South Carolina, while secretly meeting with William H. Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, to forge a workable compromise. Stanton remained in Washington after Lincoln’s inauguration as legal consultant to Simon Cameron, the secretary of war. Stanton also became very friendly with Gen. George Brinton McClellan, soon to be commander of the Union army. Like many Democrats during this time, Stanton expressed contempt for President Lincoln.
That negative opinion of the president soon transformed into respect and then a deep admiration. When Cameron resigned from the War Department, Lincoln replaced him with Stanton. It proved to be a brilliant appointment. Stanton threw himself into organizing the massive war and stamped every area of military effort with his immense energy, impeccable honesty, and sincere belief in Unionism. He established a viable and respectful working relationship with Congress and modernized outmoded and corrupt War Department practices. Efficiency and fairness were the standards that he tried to bring to the military departments under his control. Stanton’s ability to successfully coordinate complex logistical movements became legendary.
Along the way, Stanton made many enemies with his overbearing personality. He was impatient and rude, and former friends became opponents after feeling the sting of his sarcasm. As Lincoln and Stanton pushed for a harder, wider war, both became committed to emancipation and the enlistment of African-American soldiers. By mid-1863 Stanton had switched his allegiance to the Republican Party. Indeed, it was Stanton who made sure that thousands of Union soldiers could receive special furloughs so they could return to their respective states and vote in the 1864 election. As he predicted, Lincoln won the soldier vote by a huge margin.
Stanton’s position as the supervisor of internal security created controversy. From March 1862 Stanton was determined to crack down on all dissent and treason within the Northern HOMEFRONT, which was growing steadily. To ensure loyalty, Stanton expanded the suspension of the writ of HABEAS CORPUS, arrested Southern sympathizers, and created a special police force to enforce the draft laws. Late in the war Stanton pressed for the generous treatment of freedpeople and worked closely with Lincoln on RECONSTRUCTION policy. Shocked and grieving after the ASSASSINATION OF Abraham LINCOLN, Stanton and the War Department took charge of the investigation. Stanton insisted that the conspirators be tried in military court and strongly favored the death penalty.
Stanton continued in his post during most of Andrew Johnson’s administration. His logistical skills were needed in the demobilization of the huge Union army, and his concern for the rights of freedmen and freedwomen was required to counter President Johnson’s overly lenient plans for former Confederates. Increasingly, Stanton and Johnson were at odds over Reconstruction. Stanton advocated continued support for the Freedmen’s Bureau and favored the Fourteenth Amendment. He joined the Radical Republicans against the president. By summer 1867 Johnson, no longer confident of his secretary’s loyalty, wished to remove him from the cabinet. Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act to stop Johnson from firing Stanton, but the president acted anyway, replacing him with Gen. ULYSSES S. Grant. Johnson’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act became the basis for his impeachment trial in 1868. After Johnson was acquitted, Stanton resigned from his position, confident that the fruits of the Union victory had not been wasted away and that the new nation would emerge under the control of the Republican-dominated Congress.
In 1869 President Grant appointed Stanton to the Supreme Court. He died in December of the same year, before he could take his seat.
See also IMPEACHMENT OF Andrew Johnson.
Further reading: Phillip Shaw Paludan, A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Benjamin D. Thomas and Harold H. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Knopf, 1962).
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815-1902) women's rights leader, suffragist, reformer
Born into a wealthy New York family, Elizabeth Cady Stanton became a leader of the women’s movement through her involvement with abolitionism. Unhappy with the limited role granted women by abolitionists, she played a central role in the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848. After the CiviL War, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony led the faction of women’s rights advocates that split from the abolitionists and Republicans, who placed a higher priority on the rights of freedmen than on those of women. Later, Stanton and Anthony created the first independent organization of women advocating women’s suffrage.
A comfortable background did not provide full-time support for Stanton’s activities on behalf of women’s rights. The opposition of her father and husband and the demands of her seven children limited Stanton’s role. She remained at home, writing many influential petitions and speeches while Anthony traveled to spread the message.
While advocating an expanded role for women, Stanton remained allied with the abolitionists through the Civil War. After the war, abolitionists joined with the Republican Party to protect the rights of freedmen, viewing the campaign for women’s suffrage as a threat to the rights of ex-slaves. Rebuffed by their former allies, Stanton and Anthony hoped that the DEMOCRATIC Party would adopt their cause on the basis that educated women had a greater entitlement to the vote than did “illiterate” ex-slaves. A
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Library of Congress)
Deep divide within the women’s movement resulted, with those willing to postpone the vote for women until black suffrage was achieved remaining with their traditional abolitionist allies.
Stanton and Anthony became disillusioned when it became clear that Democrats were more interested in obstructing black rights than in establishing women’s rights. Efforts to join with organized labor were unsatisfactory, as skilled workers did not welcome the competition of women in their fields, and class divisions separated the interests of Stanton and Anthony from those of working-class women. Unable to find a place for their movement in any established organization, they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, which sought a constitutional amendment ensuring a woman’s right to vote as the first step in establishing women’s equal rights. Those who allied with the Republicans soon created the American Woman Suffrage Association, advocating only women’s right to vote. The split between these two factions continued for more than 20 years. Blind and in ill health, Stanton died in New York in 1902.
See also abolition; women’s status and rights.
Further reading: Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminis-m and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independen-t Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1815-1897); Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898: reprint, New York: Source Book Press, 1970).
—Martha Kadue
World History
