Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Audiobook27 hours
Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton
Written by William Marvel
Narrated by Norman Dietz
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
Edwin M. Stanton (1814-1869), one of the nineteenth century's most impressive legal and political minds, wielded enormous influence and power as Lincoln's secretary of war during most of the Civil War and under Johnson during the early years of Reconstruction. In the first full biography of Stanton in more than fifty years, William Marvel offers a detailed reexamination of Stanton's life, career, and legacy. Marvel argues that while Stanton was a formidable advocate and politician, his character was hardly benign. Climbing from a difficult youth to the pinnacle of power, Stanton used his authority-and the public coffers-to pursue political vendettas, and he exercised sweeping wartime powers with a cavalier disregard for civil liberties.
Though Lincoln's ability to harness a cabinet with sharp divisions and strong personalities is widely celebrated, Marvel suggests that Stanton's tenure raises important questions about Lincoln's actual control over the executive branch. This insightful biography also reveals why men like Ulysses S. Grant considered Stanton-who was unashamed to use political power for partisan enforcement and personal preservation-a coward and a bully.
Though Lincoln's ability to harness a cabinet with sharp divisions and strong personalities is widely celebrated, Marvel suggests that Stanton's tenure raises important questions about Lincoln's actual control over the executive branch. This insightful biography also reveals why men like Ulysses S. Grant considered Stanton-who was unashamed to use political power for partisan enforcement and personal preservation-a coward and a bully.
Author
William Marvel
Award-winning historian William Marvel is the author of many books about the American Civil War, including Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton and, most recently, Lincoln's Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during the Civil War.
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Reviews for Lincoln's Autocrat
Rating: 3.6249999 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In as much as Edwin Stanton is inevitably a controversial figure, I was curious as to learn more about the man and how he handled his war-time role. Well, William Marvel has much more to tell you about Stanton; mostly that every bad thing ever written about Lincoln's Secretary of War was true. This book goes so much for the throat that at a certain point I had to settle back and wonder why I should take such a slash-and-burn examination of Stanton's life seriously. To put it another way this is very much a history of Stanton's political and legal intrigues, which were many, but Marvel really doesn't answer in a satisfactory fashion my main question; was Stanton, for all his faults, an indispensable man? The implication is certainly no, but I don't know enough about Marvel's own feelings on the general course of the war as to whether I'm buying this. At the very least this is not going to be the last word on Stanton. It also might be noted that this biography is very much in the contemporary vein of situating the roots of the corroded state of American civil liberties in how the American Civil War was conducted.