Letters back and forth between St. Louis and Washington were now followed by visitors each way, passing en route: Lincoln sent Postmaster General Blair and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs to St. Louis to report on and give advice to the command in the West, while Frémont sent his articulate wife to Washington to give unsought advice to the commander in chief.
The president learned about the extraordinary proclamation issued by his putative subordinate out in St. Louis not through channels, not directly from Frémont, but from the newspapers. Lincoln responded by sending a surprisingly gentle letter, strictly private and carried by a special messenger, quietly arguing against “two points in your proclamation” that “give me some anxiety.” Both at the time and since, the emancipation feature has so usurped attention as to obscure the stunning additional point in Frémont’s ukase, which Lincoln took up first: his proposal to shoot to death any men “caught with arms in their hands within these lines.” Lincoln wrote that that would surely mean that “the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation; and so, man for man, indefinitely.” So Lincoln ordered Frémont not to allow any man to be shot without first gaining Lincoln’s consent.
On Frémont’s proposed emancipation, on the other hand, Lincoln requested a modification by Frémont himself. (“Allow me…to ask, that you will, as of our own motion…”) Lincoln asked Frémont to modify the proclamation to bring it into line with the Confiscation Act just passed by Congress, which provided for the confiscation only of property (slaves included) actually used in combat against the Union. The president of the United States, by no means sure that his general out in St. Louis was following national legislation closely, took the trouble to send Frémont a copy of the act.
Lincoln tried to get Frémont to see the larger picture as he had to see it as president: thus abruptly liberating slaves by proclamation “will alarm our Southern Union Friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.”
Instead of doing as Lincoln asked, Frémont wrote an argumentative letter insisting, about his emancipation order, “If I were to retract it of my own accord, it would imply that I thought myself wrong.” He asked Lincoln, if he really disagreed, to “openly direct me to make the correction.”
Up to this point the Lincoln-Frémont exchange had been private; by this move Frémont forced it into public view, casting himself as the opponent of slavery and leaving it to Lincoln to overrule him and incur the wrath not only of abolitionists but of many others in the North.
When Frémont began issuing personal deeds of manumission (he was now spending his time doing little else, they heard in the White House), it rang sudden loud bells in the North. But the bells that sounded celebration in the North rang with desperate alarm in Kentucky. Lincoln received torrents of mail and telegrams full of anger from his native state, telling him that if the Frémont proclamation prevailed, “Kentucky is gone over the mill dam,” as one telegram briskly put it. Lincoln’s old friend, once his closest friend, Joshua Speed, after sleepless nights, sent an anguished letter giving Lincoln potent comparisons: “You had as well attack the freedom of worship in the North or the right of a parent to teach his child to read—as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.” Perhaps the most effective of the arguments he received was the sheer practical one he got from the Sumter hero Robert Anderson, telling him that on hearing of Frémont’s order a whole company of Kentuckians who had volunteered to fight for the Union “threw down their arms and disbanded.” Lincoln himself would add, “I was so assured, as to think it probable, that the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us.”
When Lincoln publicly ordered Frémont to change the proclamation, the bell ringings and alarm soundings reversed themselves. Now there came new torrents of editorial and public outrage at Lincoln for quashing Frémont’s order. A string of powerful newspapers hailed Frémont’s action, then condemned Lincoln for undoing it; an abolitionist reported that public mention of Lincoln’s name would now be greeted with groans. Lincoln’s action was said to be a worse defeat for the Union than Bull Run. James Russell Lowell asked, “How many times are we to save Kentucky and lose our self-respect?” But Lincoln thought we could, with prudence and with time, save both. (Would Kentucky joining the Confederacy really boost the Union’s self-respect?) Lincoln took comfort from the other side of the reversal of opinion: the rejoicing among Kentucky Unionists at his modifying of Frémont’s order.
Frémont’s decree had come at a dangerous moment, just when Kentucky’s legislature had been meeting to consider disavowing “neutrality” the legislature refused to do that unless Frémont’s decree was modified; Lincoln ordered that it be modified, and Kentucky’s legislature abandoned neutrality and called for forty thousand volunteers for the Union.
A scholar in a still useful book on the “Borderland,” written more than three-quarters of a century ago, introduced his discussion of Frémont’s proclamation by saying that “the cause of the Union [in Kentucky] was placed in serious jeopardy by the stupid and high-handed act of a federal general in a neighboring state.” He followed his treatment of that topic with a paragraph beginning, “Fortunately for the national government, it did not have a monopoly of military commanders who were incapable of foreseeing the political consequences of their acts. The Confederates had Leonidas Polk.” Polk as a bishop might have been expected to have political sense, this writer said, but Polk was not only an Episcopal priest and bishop but also a graduate of West Point, before he went into the ministry, and he was not alone in bearing responsibility for the Confederacy’s Kentucky fiasco. Jefferson Davis, another graduate of West Point and a classmate of Polk, had countermanded the orders of his secretary of war, supported Polk, and declined to order him to withdraw. These two West Pointers could see that the line of bluffs at Columbus, the “Gibraltar of the West,” was the only good point for many miles from which to command the Mississippi and hence a military objective of the highest priority. What they could not see, as Lincoln could, was that the “indeterminate qualities, the political elements” in the Kentucky struggle, were vastly more important than any military objective, however well situated it might be on the Mississippi River.
Moral criticism of Lincoln has regularly featured this countermanding of Frémont’s emancipation order, as well as his later rejection of an emancipation order issued by General David Hunter. But these critics both at the time and later insufficiently appreciated Lincoln’s actual situation. Preserving the United States was and had to be for Lincoln the first priority. The morality of statecraft entails layers of action and an awareness of sequences of consequences: the great promise of the Declaration to all the world would not be realized unless its bearer, the United States of America, was preserved, and the United States would not be preserved unless Kentucky was kept in the Union, and Kentucky would not be kept in the Union unless Frémont’s order was quashed.
In his annual message in December 1861, Lincoln could claim that “Kentucky…for some time in doubt, is now decidedly, and, I think, unchangeably, ranged on the side of the Union.”
BLEEDING MISSOURI
AFTER THE WAR a lad from Hannibal, Missouri, would make himself into a great literary figure, indeed the “Lincoln of our literature,” producing among his short humorous pieces a self-mocking account of his own role in the war, “A Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” Mark Twain’s introductory jokes, before settling down to stories of youthful ineptitude in the Confederate militia, would deal with “leaning first this way, then that, then the other way” between supporting the Union or supporting the Confederacy—but being belligerently certain of the rightness of whichever side he fiercely defended this week and furious with exactly the position he had taken last week. That reciprocating intransigence would be something of a symbol of Missouri Civil War politics.
Missouri was, as a result of the famous 1820 Compromise, the only slave state that extended
above the line, a salient of slavery surrounded on three sides by freedom and a border state that, like border states Maryland and Kentucky, the Union had to retain for geopolitical and military reasons. It was a western state with at least its quota of frontier violence; a state with a complex population; and the only state in the Union in which in the election of 1860 all four parties to the contest had a significant presence.*24 Because there was a strongly antislavery German population in St. Louis, Lincoln received fifteen thousand votes in Missouri, more than in all other slave states put together. And Missouri shared a long, easily crossed border with “Bleeding Kansas.” Much of the notorious bleeding was caused by antislavery insurgents, called bushwhackers, from Missouri.
The Civil War had already begun on the Missouri-Kansas border, with barbarous guerrilla warfare, six years before Lincoln had any role except commentary. The passage of Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening Kansas to “popular sovereignty,” had set off a fierce contest: Would Kansas be a slave state or free? Back in 1854, as a rising Illinois politician, Lincoln saw that the Kansas-Missouri border would become what would be called in the following century a proxy war: “each party WITHIN, having numerous and determined backers WITHOUT, is it not probable that the contest will come to blows and bloodshed? Could there be a more apt invention to bring about collision and violence, on the slavery question, than this Nebraska project is?” He used a metaphor to illustrate the point: “if they had literally found a ring, and placed champions within it to fight out the controversy, the fight could be no more likely to come off, than it is.”
And so it would be. New England sent antislavery champions to Kansas; Missourians sent border ruffians to beat them up. “While antislavery men were the first to organize migration as a means of continuing the contest over slavery, Missourians were first openly to invoke the use of force.”
Many of the cast of characters in the guerrilla war in Civil War Missouri had been shaped by the prior battle over Kansas: Bleeding Kansas bled into Missouri. Leading Kansas antislavery activists had come to Kansas from other states after 1854 (Jim Lane, Charles R. “Doc” Jennison, Nathaniel Lyon) and often had then been further radicalized after they experienced the raids and massacres. Supporters of slavery came to Missouri and joined native Missourians in bushwhacking raids and retaliations into Kansas; they had a parallel radicalizing experience (William Quantrill, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, Frank and Jesse James).
It was a time and place of polarizing atrocities that increased in scope, sometimes with quasi-official endorsement by the embattled armies and governments, after the national war of the rebellion began.
WHEN WAR CAME, this already embattled state would be kept in the Union by a swift and unique series of irregularities that Lincoln would support at pivotal moments. The prime movers in these events were a short, intense, no-nonsense Connecticut Yankee named Nathaniel Lyon, who at the start of the war was only a captain in the Union army guarding the St. Louis arsenal, and Frank Blair, whose brother was postmaster general.
President Lincoln’s call for the state militias at the war’s beginning was disdainfully dismissed by Missouri’s utterly secessionist governor, a former bushwhacker named Claiborne Fox Jackson. Instead he sent a letter to Jefferson Davis asking for Confederate help in capturing the federal arsenal in St. Louis—the largest arsenal in the slave states—and he created a “Camp Jackson” on the edge of St. Louis for drilling a militia that would surely support the South and be used to take the arsenal. Blair and Lyon began drilling irregular volunteer bands of Union-supporting Germans in St. Louis as a counterforce. Blair then used his Washington connections to have the Union commander in St. Louis, General W. S. Harney, suddenly summoned to Washington—a decision in which Lincoln concurred. Although he was a loyal Unionist, Harney as an old-fashioned military man did not in these slippery first days clearly perceive what Governor Jackson was doing; if the governor had asked to be given control of the federal arsenal, General Harney might have yielded it.
With Harney deftly lifted out of the picture, there came a truly extraordinary, and pivotal, order from the president. The recipient of these instructions, Captain Nathaniel Lyon, was “commanding in the West” only because Harney was gone.
Sir: The President of the United States directs that you enroll in the military service of the United States the loyal citizens of Saint Louis and vicinity, not exceeding, with those heretofore enlisted, ten thousand in number, for the purpose of maintaining the authority of the United States…and you will, if deemed necessary for that purpose by yourself and by [six loyal citizens including Blair] proclaim martial law in the city of Saint Louis.
This remarkable order to a mere infantry captain, signed by the secretary of war, has two “endorsements.” One is “Approved, April 30, 1861 A. Lincoln.” The other, signed by the initials “W. S.,” for General in Chief Winfield Scott, speaks volumes: “It is revolutionary times, and therefore I do not object to the irregularity of this.”
This irregular order was endorsed by Lincoln on April 30, just eight days after the cabinet meeting at the Navy Department at which a series of other “irregular” actions were taken. It was indeed, as General Scott said, “revolutionary times,” and Lincoln took the actions that in his view the preservation of the United States required.
Lyon himself reconnoitered in Camp Jackson (as legend has it, disguised as a woman) and found weapons recently lifted from the arsenal at Baton Rouge. He surrounded the camp with his new troops and forced its surrender, then marched the captured militia through the streets and set off a skirmish with a mob.
General Harney returned, resumed his command, and made a truce with Governor Jackson and the ex-governor, now general, Sterling Price, an old army acquaintance. On May 12 Nathaniel Lyon, “Captain, Second Infantry, Commanding,” sent to the army in Washington another in the series of remarkable messages that are sprinkled throughout the event, explaining “with great delicacy and hesitancy” that Harney’s taking over would ruin the plans that Lyon had made to anticipate threatened actions against the U.S. government. Harney didn’t get it; Harney trusted Price and others and was no anticipator.*25
In Washington Lincoln had to decide whether to support the distinguished army man Harney or the upstart Captain Lyon. The contest had partisans in the innards of the cabinet: Attorney General Bates was for Harney, while Frank Blair’s brother Montgomery was for Lyon. General Scott was an old army friend of Harney, an honorable professional. The gulf in rank was ridiculously large: Harney an experienced brigadier general, Lyon a mere captain. But Lincoln made a revealing, significant decision: he decided that Lyon was to be jumped all the way to brigadier general and, if necessary, given command.
Lincoln himself wrote Frank Blair telling him that the War Department was sending him an order to relieve General Harney. With his usual political tact, Lincoln explained that Blair should use or not use it at his discretion: “We had better have him a friend than an enemy.” Blair did not present the order right away. But Harney, who had had and would have a distinguished career as a professional army man, was too trusting a soul for Missouri politics in 1861. Lincoln sent Harney a message through channels:
The president observes with concern that, notwithstanding the pledge of the state authorities… loyal citizens in great numbers continue to be driven from their homes…The professions of loyalty by the state authorities of Missouri are not to be relied upon.
But Harney did rely upon them. He knew General Sterling Price as a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War and a sometime governor of the state: “My confidence in the honor and integrity of General Price, in the purity of his motives, and in his loyalty to the government remains unimpaired.”
But General Price was one of those who was loyal to Missouri and to the United States only as long as it did not “coerce” Missouri. Later he would become a Confederate general. On May 29 Blair handed Harney the presidential order relieving
him of command.
The state authorities now had to deal with Brigadier General (recently Captain) Nathaniel Lyon and asked for a meeting. Blair and Lyon, Jackson and Price met for four hours, in a gathering famous in Missouri folklore. Would Lyon disband that (Lyon-commanded) Union home guard? Promise no more Union troops? Lyon said no. Would he disarm that rebel state guard? Allow federal troops to go anywhere in the state? Jackson said he should not. Legend reports that Lyon announced, “This is war!” Jackson and Price hastened back to the capital, Jefferson City, burning railroad bridges on the way. Lyon immediately took his battalions by steamship as fast as they could go to Jefferson City, took possession of the town, and raised the Union flag. Jackson and his government fled, taking with them the state seal so they could try to be official wherever they would end up. General Price gathered a state rebel force up the river at Booneville; Lyon reembarked with his troops and routed them on June 17, 1861, in an actual skirmish, the first battle of the Missouri Civil War. Governor Jackson fled still farther south, holding on to his seal.
And so how to restore a civic government? In the first days of the war Governor Jackson had called a state convention, expecting that it would vote for Missouri to secede and join the Confederacy. But although Union sentiment in the state was sharply divided and fractious, it came together to oppose the vote to secede. The convention then did something else: it provided for an emergency recall of itself. It was now reassembled, with a quorum, even though many members had joined the rebellion, and that quorum set up a provisional government, with the conservative (a “conditional Unionist”) Hamilton Gamble as governor. That makeshift Union government remained in authority for the entire war.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 17
