by Larry Tagg
It was a bad choice at a bad moment. Frank was a hard drinker, arrogant, headstrong, and excitable, and he chose an equally overzealous military man, the fiery-haired Captain Nathaniel Lyon, to recruit, drill, and lead an army of loyalists based in St. Louis. Neither was one for the patient waiting that was producing slow success in Kentucky. Blair and Lyon struck immediately at Camp Jackson. They succeeded in chasing the secessionists into the woods.
But their rash attack set the state ablaze. Missouri descended into the worst kind of warfare, where neighbor hunted neighbor. By mid-June murderous guerrilla bands roamed across Missouri, leaving behind victims stiffening in the sun with bullets in their heads.
Lincoln knew that to bring order out of the fierce turmoil in the state, he needed a military commander of stature, a man adept in politics as well as in arms. His choice was the favorite of both the Blairs and the Radical Republicans: John Charles Frémont. “The Pathfinder,” as he was known, was an erratic, energetic explorer of international renown who had been the first Republican presidential candidate in 1856. Although Frémont was a novice at soldiering, Lincoln was eager to put the illustrious folk hero to use, and eager also for some applause from the Radicals. He made Frémont major general on July 3 and assigned him to command the vast, newly-created Department of the West, which stretched from the Mississippi to the Rockies. Lincoln gave his only instructions to Frémont in the time it took him to walk the general down the White House steps: “I have given you carte blanche. You must use your own judgment, and do the best you can.” Frémont took Lincoln at his word. No sooner did the new generalissimo arrive in St. Louis on July 25 than he installed himself in an elegant mansion surrounded by Hungarian guards in gaudy uniforms, and began wiring Washington with demands for more men, money, and arms. Within a month he was tangled in a destructive feud with Frank Blair.
Meanwhile, the military situation deteriorated. In late August, threatened by 10,000 rebels reported to be gathering in northern Missouri, overwhelmed by what he called “the tide of rebellion, rapine, and plunder which has literally swept over the State,” flouted by Blair and neglected by Washington, Frémont determined on a startling move. Through the night of August 29 and into the morning of August 30, 1861, Frémont composed a proclamation that would bring terror to his foes in Missouri. In the morning, when light broke, he read it proudly to his wife and her friend, who assured him that it was genius and would light his name down through the ages. Frémont issued the proclamation immediately, before any second thoughts could cloud his judgment.
Frémont’s proclamation—which reached Lincoln by newspaper— broadcast that all of Missouri was now under martial law, and that Frémont had assumed the powers of the governor. All civilians caught with weapons in their hands would be tried by court-martial and shot if disloyal. Rebels’ property in the state would be confiscated—and their slaves would be freed.
Of course! rhapsodized the jubilant Radicals in a common shout. They had been demanding exactly this since April. Many Republican moderates, when they read Frémont’s resolve to punish the rebels and free the slaves, admired it too. Frémont instantly became the Republican hero, eclipsing the tardy, indecisive Abraham Lincoln as the standard-bearer of the Republican war effort.
The President was stunned. He knew Frémont’s edict was unauthorized by the Confiscation Law passed only the month before, which required that a rebel’s loss of property be decided in a civilian court. He wrote the gentlest of letters to Frémont, pointing out that freeing the slaves was certain to undo all his hard work in Kentucky, turning that crucial slave state against the Union, and asked the general kindly to modify the last paragraph. He purred a final soft note: “This letter is written in a spirit of caution, and not of censure.”
Lincoln’s sweet-tempered nuance got nowhere with Frémont. The general replied that if Lincoln wanted the order reversed, he would have to do it himself—and take the consequences.
* * *
Lincoln did. On September 11 he sent a letter to Frémont ordering him to revoke the orders to shoot captured rebels and emancipate slaves.
Radical Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana wrote later that Frémont’s proclamation stirred and united the people of the North during its ten days of life far more than any other event of the war. When Lincoln yanked them back to political reality after the heady elation of Frémont’s liberation of the slaves, Republicans everywhere were furious. Already tired of the war and alert for a smart stroke that would bring it to a quick end, Frémont had lifted their hopes. Lincoln dashed them. A tempest of revolt shook the party in contempt of his moral authority. Lincoln’s own mail was three to one in favor of Frémont. There were widespread prophecies that Frémont, not Lincoln, would be the nominee in 1864. A Cincinnatian wrote to Horace Greeley that if a cheer were hip-hipped for Lincoln there, the response would be a groan. The Germans of St. Louis, fervently antislavery, rallied en masse for Frémont.
Elsewhere across the North, Republicans addressed outraged letters to Washington. “It would have been difficult to have devised a plan to more effectually dispirit the People of this section than your order,” a Wisconsin man wrote to Lincoln. An Iowan wrote to Seward that Frémont’s fate was causing “extreme dissatisfaction” there, and predicted volunteering would end in the Northwest. A Connecticut man who had polled friends from four Midwest states told Gideon Welles, “They unanimously condemn the President’s letter [overruling Frémont] & as unanimously approve of Frémont’s Proclamation.” Another spoke for many Radicals: “It is said that we must consult the border states… . Now with all due respect … , permit me to say damn the border states… . A thousand Lincolns and Sewards cannot stop the people from fighting slavery.” Cincinnati Judge George Hoadly wrote to Chase:
My wife expressed the common feeling about Lincoln’s letter to Frémont, by saying it seems to her to be the old conflict of Mr. Feeble-Mind and Mr. Ready-to-Halt [Lincoln and Seward] with Mr. Greatheart [Frémont]. I have heard men of sense, such as are called conservative, advocate the wildest steps, such as the impeachment of Mr. Lincoln, the formation of a party to carry on the war irrespective of the President and under Frémont, etc. For myself, I must say that if the letters of Mr. Lincoln to Magoffin and Frémont are any fair indication of his character and policy, I pray God to forgive my vote for him. General Frémont is thus far the favorite of the Northwest, because he has come up to the standard. And if the election were next fall, to displace him would be to make him President.
Even Lincoln’s old law partner William Herndon voiced disgust. “Does [Lincoln] suppose he can crush—squelch out this huge rebellion by pop guns filled with rose water?” he grumbled. “He ought to hang somebody and get up a name for will or decision—for character. Let him hang some Child or woman, if he has not Courage to hang a man.”
From pulpits in every Northern town poured alleluias for Frémont and tirades against Lincoln. Horace Greeley scolded the President like a schoolchild in the pages of the New York Tribune: “Mr. Lincoln and his advisers may not yet be aware of the fact; but there is war in Missouri. A desperate, unscrupulous, bloodthirsty foe is over-running the State … Gen. Frémont’s policy was simply a matter of military necessity.” The editors of Chicago’s Tribune also hated Lincoln’s annulment: “My own indignation is too deep for words,” stormed its editor Horace White; “Our Pres has broken his own neck if he has not destroyed his country.” Joseph Medill, one of the original engineers of Lincoln’s nomination in Chicago, thought this breach of faith was worse than another Bull Run disaster because it took away the penalty for rebellion and left the war “a mere scheme for mutual assassination.” “The President’s letter to Gen. Frémont has caused a funeral gloom over our patriotic city,” Medill wrote to Salmon Chase. Medill would thereafter look to Chase for right-thinking Republican leadership.
The Democratic journals that usually flayed Lincoln after any pronouncement happily laid low during the Frémont imbroglio, savoring the spectacl
e of the attack on Lincoln by the Radical wing of the Republican Party. When the Anti-Slavery Standard angrily called Lincoln “the unlooked-for assistant of Beauregard and Davis,” the Democratic Chicago Times editors printed the article without comment.
Most of the high-placed criticism of Lincoln came from Republican leaders who felt betrayed by Lincoln’s about-face on slavery. Ben Wade could be counted on to weigh in—and he did, in a philippic to Zack Chandler:
What do you think of Old Abe’s overruling Frémont’s proclamation? So far as I can see, it is universally condemned and execrated in the North, and I have no doubt that by it he has done more injury to the cause of the Union by receding from the ground taken by Frémont than McDowell did by retreating from Bull Run. I shall expect to find in his first annual message a recommendation to Congress to give each rebel who shall serve during the war a hundred and sixty acres of land. Unless the President shall divest himself of such squeamishness, all the mighty exertions of the North to subdue this rebellion will be paralyzed… . The President don’t object to Genl Frémont’s taking the life of the owners of slaves, when found in rebellion, but to confiscate their property and emancipate their slaves he thinks monstrous… . Such ethics could come only of one born of “poor white trash” and educated in a slave State.
“Union and Fremont Proclamation.” Lincoln—“I’m sorry to have to drop you, Sambo, but this concern won’t carry us both!”
Likewise Charles Sumner, in a letter to Francis Lieber:
To me the Presdt’s letter [to rescind Frémont’s proclamation] is full—too full of meaning. It means that Slavery shall only be touched by Act of Congress & not through Martial Law. This weakens all our armies.
The London Times is right. We cannot conquer the rebels as the War is now conducted. There will be a vain masquerade of battles,—a flux of blood & treasure & nothing done!
Never has there been a moment of history when so much was all compressed into a little time & brought directly under a single mind. Our Presdt is now dictator, Imperator—what you will; but how vain to have the power of a God if not to use it God-like.
“He is not a genius,” said Wendell Phillips of Lincoln. “He is not a man like Frémont, to stamp the lava mass of the nation with an idea.” William Lloyd Garrison called Lincoln’s action “timid, depressing, suicidal” and accused him of “dereliction” for prolonging the war and subverting the government, an impeachable offense. Lincoln may be 6 feet 4 inches tall, cried Garrison, but he was “only a dwarf in mind.” Schuyler Colfax of Indiana predicted that Lincoln’s policy would lose the party thousands of votes in the West. When the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society met in late October, Lincoln was compared to Pharaoh.
It was the letter of his Illinois friend, Senator Orville Browning—a man so conservative that he had supported Bates over Lincoln at the convention—that provoked Lincoln’s best defense of his part in the Frémont affair. “Mr. President,” began Browning,
It is in no spirit of fault finding that I say I greatly regret the order modifying Genl Frémont’s proclamation.
That proclamation had the unqualified approval of every true friend of the Government within my knowledge. I do not know of an exception… . Its revocation disheartens our friends, and represses their ardor… . I am very sorry [your] order was made. It has produced a great deal of excitement, and is really filling the hearts of our friends with despondency… . [Frémont] has a very firm hold upon the confidence of the people… .
There has been too much tenderness towards traitors and rebels.
We must strike them terrible blows, and strike them hard and quick, or the government will go hopelessly to pieces.
Lincoln’s reply was a model of patience, lucidity, and good sense. “Coming from you, I confess it astonishes me,” he began, “[t]hat you should object to my adhering to a law [the Confiscation Act], which you had assisted in making, and presenting to me, less than a month before … .” As usual, Lincoln cut to the heart of the issue: these matters, he insisted, “must be settled according to laws made by law-makers, and not by military proclamations.” Frémont’s proclamation, he said, “is simply ‘dictatorship.’ … Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S.—any government of Constitution and laws,—wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?” (On this point, Lincoln would famously change his mind. Exactly one year later, on September 22, 1862, he would make just such a proclamation, known to posterity as the Emancipation Proclamation.) From property, Lincoln turned to policy. To free Missouri slaves would be to lose Kentucky, which, he was convinced, would be fatal. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” he wrote to Browning. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol [sic].”
During the following weeks of September and October, Frémont imprisoned himself in the palace of his empire in Missouri. With carte blanche from Lincoln, the Pathfinder surrounded himself with cronies who got rich off contracts granted like boons from a prince. Rumors of scandal became commonplace. It was whispered he was planning to establish a “Northwest Confederacy.” The Blairs hardened their opposition to him. At the same time, a mountain of details crushed him. Envoys from Lincoln returned to Washington and shook their heads as they reported his towering ineptitude.
When, on November 2, Lincoln replaced Frémont with General Henry Halleck, a Democrat, he had to weather a new gale of protest. In fact, there was some question at first whether his letter of dismissal would even be obeyed. “The german people have talked about making [Frémont] Dictator,” Lincoln’s friend Leonard Swett warned from Missouri. “Some of his officers in quite high standing have talked so too.” When Frémont did step down, William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post lamented that Lincoln’s decision “smote the community like a loss in battle.” New Yorkers massed at the Cooper Union to hear Massachusetts Senator Sumner praise Frémont, and to adopt a resolution glorifying the general and his antislavery stand. The Cincinnati Gazette reported that citizens there were pulling portraits of Lincoln from their walls and trampling the face of the President underfoot. A Treasury agent, returning from a tour of the Midwest as far as Iowa, wrote, “I have never seen such excitement, such deep indignant feeling everywhere I have traveled.” The Democratic Chicago Times laughed and pointed from the sidelines. “[The Republicans’] attitude towards [Lincoln],” it told its readers, “is that of absolute abandonment of his administration … . We cannot now count more than two or three republican journals of any prominence which support him cordially … . Thus Mr. Lincoln is deserted by his party before he has been a year in office.”
* * *
In his hundred days in command, Frémont had made himself a champion of the enemies of slavery in the North. He had proclaimed the slaves free in Missouri. Even though that freedom had been only on paper, and even though it had been short-lived, his heroic gesture had heartened crusaders everywhere. It had also accomplished something even more important, and more long-lasting: it had recast the image of the abolitionists and their friends in government, the Radical Republicans. No longer were they perceived as merely a lunatic fringe, a fanatical splinter led by Puritan preachers from New England. The events of the summer and fall of 1861, climaxed by Frémont’s short tenure in Missouri, had solidified the antislavery leaders as legitimate patriots. For this to be accomplished, Lincoln—the man of moderation, the man who waited, the man who had to consider all sides, the man who was sworn to uphold the Constitution—had to take a beating in the Republican press and in the halls of power in Washington, the two places where Radicals dominated. The Jacobins were now no longer looked on merely as martyrs and zealots, but full partners in the War of the Rebellion—and they were fully arrayed against the Lincoln government.
Chapter 19
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br /> The Phony War of 1861
“We want the President to kill somebody.”
In the fall of 1861, while Lincoln endured the wrath of Frémont’s supporters, Northerners began to mutter at the lack of news from the Eastern army. All eyes were again drawn to the banks of the Potomac.
At Bull Run, Northerners had learned that the war could not be won in a rush by an armed gang pushed into battle by headlines in New York. Bull Run taught the country that success would only come by patient attention to strict military principles—and at a high price. So when April’s three-month volunteers went home in the days after the battle, they were replaced and exceeded by new men signed up for three years. The hillsides around Washington were bleached with their tents, and the glow of their campfires could be seen from the White House every evening, spangling the twilight. Because the unlucky General McDowell was tainted by the rout at Bull Run, the new army would fight under a new commander.
* * *
There was no controversy over who that man would be. By late July 1861, only one Union general had won any battles. These lone victories—small ones, against outnumbered foes, but yet victories—had been won earlier in July in the mountains of western Virginia by Major General George McClellan. McClellan had heralded his tiny triumphs in Napoleonic style, and the Northern press, desperate for any good news and without any reporters on the scene, had printed McClellan’s puffed-up versions. The day after the Bull Run battle, Lincoln sent a telegram to McClellan: “Circumstances make your presence here necessary. Charge some other general with your present department and come hither without delay.” McClellan was thus summoned to Washington as a savior.
