[26] In Pittsburgh, Stanton formed a partnership with a prominent retired judge, Charles Shaler, while maintaining his collaboration with McCook, who had remained in Steubenville after returning from service in the Mexican–American War.

[30] May 1850 saw the case handed over to Reuben H. Walworth, the former Chancellor of New York, who returned a vivid opinion in February 1851 stating that the Wheeling Bridge was "an unwarranted and unlawful obstruction to navigation, and that it must be either removed or raised so as to permit the free and usual passage of boats."

However, to assure a win, Watson opted to use duplicity—he employed a model maker named William P. Wood to retrieve an older version of McCormick's reaper and alter it to be presented in court.

One such claim was made by Joseph Yves Limantour, a French-born merchant who asserted ownership of an assemblage of lands that included important sections of the state, such as a sizeable part of San Francisco.

Nonetheless, Stanton's affairs in Washington paled in comparison to the excitement he had experienced on the other side of the country—at least until he found himself defending a man who had become fodder for sensationalists and gossipers around the country.

[58] In late 1860, President Buchanan was formulating his yearly State of the Union address to Congress, and asked Attorney General Black to offer insight into the legality and constitutionality of secession.

However, on the day that Stanton assumed his position, Maj. Robert Anderson moved his unit to Fort Sumter, South Carolina, which the Southerners viewed as Buchanan reneging on his promise.

Lincoln's inauguration did give Stanton a flickering of hope that his efforts to keep Fort Sumter defended would not be in vain, and that Southern aggression would be met with force in the North.

Lincoln wanted to bolster Northern numbers afterwards, with many in the North believing the war would be more arduous than they initially expected, but when more than 250,000 men signed up, the federal government did not have enough supplies for them.

Lincoln wanted the portions containing calls to arm the slaves removed, and ordered the transmission of Cameron's report be stopped and replaced with an altered version.

When newspapers published the document in its entirety, Lincoln was excoriated by Republicans, who thought him weak on the issue of slavery, and disliked that he wanted the plea to arm slaves removed.

[86] The department also had strained relations with Congress, especially Representative John Fox Potter, head of the House's "Committee on Loyalty of Federal employees", which sought to root out Confederate sympathizers in the government.

He appointed John Tucker, an executive at the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and Peter H. Watson, his partner in the reaper case, to be his assistant secretaries,[90] and had the staff at the department expanded by over sixty employees.

Stanton worked with Senator Wade to push through Congress a bill that would codify the ability of the President and his administration to forcibly seize railroad and telegraph lines for their purposes.

The press, angered by Stanton's strict measures regarding journalistic correspondence, unleashed torrents of scorn on him, furthering the narrative that he was the only encumbrance to McClellan's victory.

[113] In the final days of August 1862, Gen. Lee scourged Union forces, routing them at Manassas Junction in the Second Battle of Bull Run, this time, against Maj. Gen. Pope and his Army of Virginia.

[114] McClellan's success at Antietam Creek emboldened him to demand that Lincoln and his government cease obstructing his plans, Halleck and Stanton be removed, and he be made general-in-chief of the Union Army.

[125] Stanton affirmed in a letter to a friend that Meade would have his support unreservedly, but that "since the world began no man ever missed so great an opportunity of serving his country as was lost by his neglecting to strike his adversary."

After the two-day Battle of Chickamauga in late September, Maj. Gen. Rosecrans, the commander of the Army of the Cumberland, was left trapped in Chattanooga, Tennessee and beset on all sides by Gen. Braxton Bragg's forces.

In late November, Grant, with good efforts from Thomas and Hooker, broke Gen. Bragg's siege at Chattanooga, while Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman failed to achieve his stated objective.

Nevertheless, Grant pushed on, secretly moving his army across the James River in a masterful display of engineering, but failed to take Petersburg, the important rail junction south of Richmond.

[154] Stanton had the lower deck of the monitor USS Montauk, which was placed near the Washington Navy Yard,[155] host several of the conspirators, Lewis Powell, Michael O'Laughlen, Edmund Spangler, and George Atzerodt.

President Johnson instructed Stanton to tell Sherman his deal had been rejected, and that "hostilities should be immediately resumed after giving the Confederates the forty-eight hours' notice required to terminate the truce".

[170] To this end, in the North, Stanton reorganized the army into two sections; one to handle "training and ceremonial chores", and another to quell the American Indians in the west, who were agitated and blusterous as a result of the war.

[174][Note 5] On May 29, 1865, Johnson issued two proclamations; one appointed William Woods Holden as the interim governor of North Carolina, and another pardoned individuals involved in the rebellion, with a few exceptions, if they agreed to loyalty and acceptance of all laws and edicts regarding slavery.

Grant, fearing the Act's prescribed penalty of $10,000 in fines and five-years of prison, doubly so because of his high likelihood of being the Republican presidential nominee in the upcoming election, turned the office over immediately.

"No longer able to bear the congressional insult of an enemy imposed on his Official family," Marvel says, "Johnson began to ponder removing Stanton outright and replacing him with someone palatable enough to win Senate approval.

[198] Afterwards, Stanton took to arguing a case in the Pennsylvania federal court involving disputed West Virginia lands, which were valued in the millions of dollars because of their coal and timber.

[204] In the later half of the year, after hearing that Congress had created a new associate justice seat on the Supreme Court, Stanton decided that he would lobby Grant to name him to that position.

The following day, Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier announced his resignation, with the effective date of February 1, 1870, thus creating another vacancy for Grant to fill.