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Johnson, Maj. A. E. H.
Johnson, President Andrew
Johnson, Reverdy

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A Life of James Buchanan, as president, ends with the opening chapter of Secession, and many of the most vital facts in even that pregnant movement have been omitted by his biographers.

A Life of Abraham Lincoln, as president, begins after Secession had become so far an accomplished fact as to possess a formal government with Jefferson Davis at its head, and ends before the Insurrection had fully subsided, or Reconstruction had been begun.

A Life of Andrew Johnson, as president, covers the constructive portion merely of the turbulent era of Reconstruction.

A Life of Edwin M. Stanton, however, embraces all of the periods named and gives, as by a search-light from within, the only story of those prodigious epochs that is not disconnected or fragmentary, or in some feature misleading.

Since this is true it is exceedingly unfortunate that Mr. Stanton kept no private letter-books and (purposely, as I believe,) left no material for the use of biographers which they cannot find in the official records or see in his public acts. This peculiarity rendered the labor of compiling even a single volume that was planned to give a true picture of what he really did, prolonged and difficult.

Fifty volumes like this would hardly suffice to tell all that might be told, but enough that is new has been squeezed into these covers to annihilate much that heretofore has been accepted as "history" and reverse the positions of many of the foremost actors of the century. Every important statement is founded upon incontrovertible public records or the testimony of actual witnesses of the highest character.

Personal evidence is given in the language, essentially, in which it was communicated. Such information as was not furnished in writing, but orally, was invariably reduced to manuscript and submitted to the givers for revision and approval, and appears herein thus revised and approved.

The Stanton letters, nearly all of which are new to the public, were, in the main, contributed in the original by persons to whom they were written; otherwise in the form of copies carefully corrected by comparison with the originals.

The story is given in epochs, or is subdivided according to momentous subjects, for the express purpose of enabling the reader to study Stanton's Desperate Struggle to save the Union under Buchanan, the Emancipation and Arming of Slaves, the Autocratic Management of Railways and Telegraphs, the unique feature of an Independent War-Department Navy, the Exasperating Contest with General McClellan, the Exchange of Prisoners of War, the Assassination of Lincoln, the Broil with President Andrew Johnson, and so on, without being distracted in any instance by the presence of matter having no pertinence to the subject immediately in hand.

I shall be glad to hear from any person who can suggest corrections or offer new matter.

Washington, D. C., March, 1905.

F. A. F.

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