Episode Details

Edwin Stanton, born in 1814 in Steubenville, Ohio, suffered severe asthma, left school at 13 when his physician father died, and passed the bar in 1835. After his wife Mary died of fever in 1844, he had her burial clothes altered to match their wedding day and wandered the house at night asking for her. In court he had a steamboat ram its smokestack into the Wheeling Bridge, used a reaper part rusted with salt and vinegar in the 1855 McCormick case, where he snubbed Abraham Lincoln as a long armed ape, and won Daniel Sickles an acquittal with a temporary insanity defense.

As Buchanan's attorney general he resisted abandoning Fort Sumter, and in 1862 Lincoln made him Secretary of War. Stanton voided bad contracts, moved the telegraph office next to his own, sent 20,000 troops 1,200 miles in 10 days to relieve Chattanooga, and furloughed soldiers to vote in 1864. On the night Lincoln was shot he directed the government from the Petersen House. He later publicly attacked William T. Sherman's lenient surrender terms, then barricaded himself in the War Department when Andrew Johnson fired him, leading to Johnson's impeachment.

• In California he exposed forged signatures and fake Mexican government stamps behind a land claim to parts of San Francisco.
• He pressed for George McClellan's removal and lobbied to replace Joseph Hooker before Gettysburg.
• At the Grand Review in Washington, Sherman refused to shake Stanton's hand.
• Johnson survived removal by a single Senate vote, and Stanton resigned.
• Confirmed to the Supreme Court on his 55th birthday, December 20, 1869, he died four days later.