Ohio lawyer and politician Edwin M. Stanton was appointed attorney general by President James Buchanan in 1860. He was politically opposed to Lincoln during the 1860 campaign, but after Lincoln became president, Stanton agreed to serve as legal advisor to Secretary of War Simon Cameron. In January 1862, he replaced the ineffectual Cameron and remained Secretary of War through the Civil War and most of the Reconstruction era. This daguerreotype of Stanton with his eldest son, Eddie, was made in the early 1850s.