Union Man

STANTON (520 pp.)--Flefcher Pratt--Norton ($5.95).

Although it would be a blunder to accept most writers at their own evaluation, Fletcher Pratt is just what he once said he was: "A literary mechanic." His tinkering has produced 46 books ranging from juveniles to a first-rate military study of World War II, The Marines' War (TIME, Jan. 19, 1948). Like a lot of self-made military experts, Author Pratt is perhaps happiest when he is refighting the War Between the States. In his new book, Stanton, he has a fine time trying to prove that Lincoln's War Secretary was a great & good man, has an even better time using his hero's biography as a battle arena where Pratt can preside as chief of tactics and strategy.

Trying to upgrade Stanton is itself a pretty formidable job. There has never been a good, balanced biography of the man, but the standard view among U.S. historians leaves him with low marks for political candor and loyalty, high scores for arrogance and dissimulation. Pratt's Stanton is not apt to change the historians' minds overnight, but he has written a spirited, readable defense of his man that should leave the pros and the antis agreeing on at least one thing: stout Unionist Stanton was a whale of a Secretary of War, who probably did as much as any one man to bring about Union victory.

Fire & Prayers. No one could have spotted the future fire-eating Secretary in the youngster who shunned fights, delivered lectures on God to his playfellows and ran prayer meetings in the family stable in Steubenville, Ohio. But as a self-made lawyer, Stanton fought cases as he was later to fight the war: to win. When Congressman Dan Sickles killed his wife's lover on a Washington street, Stanton got him acquitted on grounds never before used in a U.S. trial--temporary insanity.-In another case, he brusquely superseded an older lawyer assigned to the case and made the closing argument himself. The older lawyer was Abe Lincoln, and after he heard Stanton, he said: "I'm going home to study--study law."

To Stanton, at that time, Lincoln was "that long-armed baboon . . . that giraffe." Even after the Civil War had begun, he told the delighted General McClellan that Lincoln was the "original gorilla." But when Lincoln named him to the Cabinet, Stanton became a dynamic Secretary to the man he had once despised. He drove his subordinates mercilessly, but never so hard as he drove himself. Says Author Pratt: "He could tear up a contract and fling the pieces in the contractor's face; he could pass a white-haired father through to the bedside of his wounded son . . . He could also stand with stony face and turn away the parents of a soldier condemned to be shot for desertion. He was the man of war in the place of war."

Knots & Poetry. That Stanton was arbitrary and tactless comes through even the pages of so partisan a book as Fletcher Pratt's. Even Grant, who worked with him, once remarked that Stanton "did things for the pleasure of being disobliging." But Lincoln toward the end of the war asked a fellow Illinoisan: "Did Stanton really say I was a damned fool?" "He did, sir, and repeated it." "Then," said the President, "if Stanton said I was a damned fool, I must be one. For he is nearly always right, and generally says what he means." And at war's end, when Stanton, honestly pleading "broken health," tried to resign, it was Lincoln who said with his hands on his War Secretary's shoulders: "Stanton, you cannot go ... You have been our main reliance . . . Some knots slip; yours do not."

On April 14, 1865, it was Stanton who begged Grant and Lincoln not to go to Ford's theater. Grant took the advice. The next day it was Stanton who said of the dead Lincoln: "Now he belongs to the ages." In 1869 it was Grant, as President, who appointed Stanton to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was too late for more honors. Within a week after his confirmation, Stanton was dead. He had spent his spare time writing a book on The Poetry of the Bible.

-Thus, incidentally, sparing Dan Sickles to become a major general in the Union Army, where he fought with gallantry, lost a leg at Gettysburg.

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