Edwin M. Stanton

Edwin M. Stanton was the United States secretary of war for most of the American Civil War. He managed mobilisation, military communications and the War Department under Lincoln, then became a central figure in conflict between President Andrew Johnson and Congress.

The wider career recorded for Edwin M. Stanton also included service as United States Attorney General. The biographical record places the beginning of Edwin M. Stanton’s life at Steubenville and the end at Washington, D.C., giving the career a geographical span that is not apparent from the headline events alone.

Gore Vidal’s Lincoln places Edwin M. Stanton inside the wartime cabinet as one of the powerful, difficult men through whom Abraham Lincoln has to govern. As Secretary of War, Stanton belongs to the novel’s machinery of mobilisation, patronage, military command and political rivalry, giving Vidal a way to show how the Civil War presidency depended on contentious subordinates as well as on Lincoln’s own judgement.