Another Massachusetts antislavery champion, Lydia Maria Child, condemned Lincoln for being “narrow-minded, short-sighted, and obstinate,” and exclaimed: “O Lord! O Lord! How we do need a Cromwell!” She urged all opponents of slavery to sustain Frémont: “We ought never to forget that he was the first man to utter the word, which millions long to hear.”95 George Bancroft told his wife: “We suffer from the want of an organizing mind at the head of the government. We have a president without brains.”96 From Chicago, Joseph Medill wrote that Lincoln’s “frightfully retrograde” order to Frémont “comes upon us like a killing June frost—which destroys the comming harvest” and “has cast a funeral gloom” not only over the Windy City but also over “the state and the intire west.” Nothing that Buchanan ever did “received so universal censure.” Alluding to the ninety-first Psalm, Medill lamented that the “loss [of] a battle can be repaired: but this letter acts as a pestilence that walketh at noon day.”97 Medill’s newspaper alleged that “[n]o Sunday in our recollection has been so broken by general indignation and rage.”98 In Wisconsin, people were so angry that one resident told his congressman that it “is utterly impossible for you to conceive what a whirlwind of grief & indignation” Lincoln’s letter “has aroused throughout the North West.” There the president “today could not carry the vote of [a] single town.” Not even Buchanan was so roundly execrated as Lincoln now was.99 In Minnesota, the feminist-abolitionist Jane Grey Swisshelm condemned the president’s “imbecility, or treachery.”100
In Ohio, the president was accused of succumbing to pressure from “chicken-hearted politicians.”101 Some thought Lincoln resembled Mr. Feeble Mind and Mr. Ready-to-Halt in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, while Frémont seemed like Great Heart. Cincinnati Republicans were “in a state of great consternation and wrath.” A judge there reported that “no word describes popular sentiment but ‘fury.’ 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 & under Frémont, etc., etc.”102 Jacob Brinkerhoff reported that Lincoln’s action “falls like lead upon the hearts of the people of Ohio.”103
Conservative papers like the New York Herald dismissed Lincoln’s critics as “nigger-worshippers who have endeavored to make the struggle that has commenced a crusade against Southern institutions, in which oceans of blood should be shed to gratify the malice and folly of the school of which Garrison, Greeley, Gerrit Smith, Wendell Phillips and others are the prominent representatives.” Lincoln had “in his mild rebuke of Fremont” dealt “very tenderly” with the general. Those who “continue to glorify the imprudent proclamation of Fremont are counseling insubordination in its most dangerous form.” The Buffalo Courier predicted that the president’s action “will gain ten supporters for every one he loses by showing his resolute determination to stand by the Constitution and the Laws to the greatest possible extent.”104 Thomas Ewing expressed great relief, for he thought that if Lincoln had not swiftly forced a modification of the proclamation, “it would have lost us Kentucky and the war would be now raging on the banks of the Ohio.”105
In fact, to allow Frémont’s proclamation to stand would be to authorize every department commander to set policy without reference to popularly elected officials. Moreover, Lincoln was obliged by his oath of office to modify the Pathfinder’s edict. The Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican sympathized with Frémont but found it “gratifying to know that we have a president who is as loyal to law—when that is made to meet an emergency—as he is ready to meet an emergency for which no law is provided. The president is right.”106 Rather than attacking Lincoln, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper criticized Congress for passing such a halfway measure as the Confiscation Act. Other Republican journals, without taking sides, condemned the dissension within the party’s ranks that Frémont had stirred up.
On September 10, Frémont’s headstrong wife, nèe Jessie Benton (daughter of the eminent Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton), called at the White House and administered a tongue-lashing to the president. An admirer likened her to a dangerous, mammoth ironclad warship, “a She-Merrimac, thoroughly sheathed, & carrying fire in the genuine Benton furnaces” and armed with “guns enough to be formidable to a whole Cabinet.”107 Lincoln later remembered that she “taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarrelling with her. … She more than once intimated that if Gen Fremont should conclude to try conclusions with me he could set up for himself.”108 Lincoln told one congressman that Mrs. Frémont, after “opening her case with mild expostulation,” departed “in anger flaunting her handkerchief before my face, and saying, ‘Sir, the general will try titles with you. He is a man and I am his wife.’ ”109 Two years later she would refer to Lincoln’s “sly slimy nature.”110
When Elizabeth Blair Lee chided Jessie Frémont for acting like Catherine the Great, she shot back: “Not Catherine but Josephine.” Mrs. Lee replied, “you are too imperious for her.” Mrs. Frémont warned that her husband would challenge Frank Blair to a duel.111 Frank’s father told her she was acting “in very bad taste” and urged her to return to her family in St. Louis. He loftily added that in Washington “we make men and unmake them.” She snapped: “I have seen some men of your making, and if that is the best you can do, I would advise you to quit the business.”112
On September 12, the president wrote Jessie Frémont insisting that he entertained no doubts about her husband’s “honor or integrity” and protesting “against being understood as acting in any hostility towards him.”113 (Three decades later, Mrs. Frémont implausibly reported that Lincoln treated her rudely, failing to offer her a seat, and accepting the letter she handed him “with an expression that was not agreeable.” After she defended her husband, the president allegedly replied in a “sneering tone” that she was “quite a female politician.”)114
Of the many protests deluging Lincoln, one from his friend Orville H. Browning surprised him most. In April, the conservative Browning had uncharacteristically, urged the president “to march an army into the South, and proclaim freedom to the slaves.”115 Frémont’s “proclamation had the unqualified approval of every true friend of the Government within my knowledge,” said Browning, who had just been appointed senator from Illinois to complete the term of the recently deceased Stephen A. Douglas. “I do not know of an exception. Rebels and traitors, and all who sympathize with rebellion and treason, and who wish to see the government overthrown, would, of course, denounce it. Its influence was most salutary, and it was accomplishing much good. Its revocation disheartens our friends, and represses their ardor.”116
In the president’s view, Frémont had acted unconstitutionally. Patiently Lincoln explained to Browning that the general’s “proclamation, as to confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity. If a commanding General finds a necessity to seize the farm of a private owner, for a pasture, an encampment, or a fortification, he has the right to do so, and to so hold it, as long as the necessity lasts; and this is within military law, because within military necessity. But to say the farm shall no longer belong to the owner, or his heirs forever; and this as well when the farm is not needed for military purposes as when it is, is purely political, without the savor of military law about it. And the same is true of slaves. If the General needs them, he can seize them, and use them; but when the need is past, it is not for him to fix their permanent future condition. That must be settled according to laws made by lawmakers, and not by military proclamations. The proclamation in the point in question, is simply ‘dictatorship.’ It assumes that the general may do anything he pleases—confiscate the lands and free the slaves of loyal people, as well as of disloyal ones. And going the whole figure I have no doubt would be more popular with some thoughtless people, than that which has been done! But I cann
ot assume this reckless position; nor allow others to assume it on my responsibility. You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government. On the contrary it is itself the surrender of the government. 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? I do not say Congress might not with propriety pass a law, on the point, just such as General Fremont proclaimed. I do not say I might not, as a member of Congress, vote for it. What I object to, is, that I as President, shall expressly or impliedly seize and exercise the permanent legislative functions of the government.”
Wrong in principle, Frémont’s proclamation was ruinous in practice. “No doubt the thing was popular in some quarters,” Lincoln told Browning, “and would have been more so if it had been a general declaration of emancipation. The Kentucky Legislature would not budge till that proclamation was modified .… I was so assured, as to think it probable, that the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us.” The president hastened to add that Browning “must not understand I took my course on the proclamation because of Kentucky. I took the same ground in a private letter to General Fremont before I heard from Kentucky.”117
To another defender of Frémont’s proclamation Lincoln replied: “We didn’t go into the war to put down Slavery, but to put the flag back; and to act differently at this moment, would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause, but smack of bad faith; for I never should have had votes enough to send me here, if the people had supposed I should try to use my power to upset Slavery. Why, the first thing you’d see, would be a mutiny in the army. No! We must wait until every other means has been exhausted. This thunderbolt will keep.”118
Lincoln’s fear was justified, for the public was not yet ready for emancipation. As the National Anti-Slavery Standard acknowledged in September, if he were to announce his intention to free the slaves, “nearly one-half of the people of the loyal States would utterly refuse to aid in carrying on such a war, and at least one-third of the army would lay down its arms.” The abolitionist journal’s Washington correspondent warned that a “premature movement of this kind might simply pave the way for the rule of Jeff. Davis over the whole land.”119 Eventually, antislavery idealism in the North would grow dramatically, but in the summer of 1861 George William Curtis accurately observed that some opposition to the peculiar institution was rooted in “abstract philanthropy,” some in “hatred of slaveholders,” some in “jealousy for white labor,” but “very little” in “a consciousness of wrong done and a wish to right it.”120
Lincoln was dismayed to learn from Frank Blair that Frémont let out contracts carelessly, secluded himself in his expensive mansion-headquarters, busied himself with trivial matters, and refused to draw up action plans. Blair regretted his earlier support of Frémont and now urged his dismissal. After Lincoln received numerous similar complaints from leading Kentucky and Missouri Unionists, he dispatched Montgomery C. Meigs and Meigs’s brother-in-law, Montgomery Blair, to St. Louis to investigate. On their way, they stopped in Chicago to hand David Hunter a letter from Lincoln, written at the suggestion of General Scott: “Gen. Fremont needs assistance which it is difficult to give him. He is losing the confidence of men near him, whose support any man in his position must have to be successful. His cardinal mistake is that he isolates himself, & allows nobody to see him; and by which he does not know what is going on in the very matter he is dealing with. He needs to have, by his side, a man of large experience. Will you not, for me, take that place? Your rank is one grade too high to be ordered to it; but will you not serve the country, and oblige me, by taking it voluntarily?”121 The accommodating Hunter proceeded to St. Louis with the quartermaster general and the postmaster general.
After conferring with Frémont, Montgomery Blair recommended his removal, explaining that the Pathfinder seemed “stupified & almost unconscious, & is doing absolutely nothing. I find but one opinion prevailing among the Union men of the State (many of whom are here) & among the officers, & that is that Fremont is unequal to the task of organizing the defences of the State.”122 (Blair’s sister heard from a member of the Pathfinder’s staff that his “seclusion & torpor” resulted from “the fact of his being an opium eater.”)123 Meigs discovered that Frémont was “living in state with bodyguards sentinels” and “building fortifications about the City at extravagant cost. He has built more gun-boats than directed. He is buying tents of bad patterns … at prices fixed by himself—not by the purchasing officers. The impression among the regular officers is that he is incapable, and that he is looking not to the Country but to the Presidency; he is thought to be a man of no principle. The rebels are killing and ravaging the Union men throughout the state; great distress and alarm prevail; in St. Louis the leading people of the state complain that they cannot see him; he does not encourage them to form regiments of defence, but keeps his eye fixed upon Cairo and the expedition down the Mississippi, while he leaves the state unprotected. Some talk of his intending to set off—like Aaron Burr—for himself with an independent empire. He lives in great style in a fine house. … A general atmosphere of distrust and suspicion pervades the place; none of the regular officers seemed to think him honest.”124 The Pathfinder ignored Hunter, whose military expertise could have helped him.
Even Frémont’s admirers were appalled at his conduct. One wrote from St. Louis “that he fears all is going wrong, that Fremont has surrounded himself with a set of corrupt broken-down speculators from California, and is playing the very devil with the public money—that he is almost inaccessible to the best men. On one occasion Gov. Gamble could not get access to him for a week.”125
Egged on by his hyperambitious, headstrong wife, known as “General Jessie,” Frémont committed a major blunder by arresting Frank Blair immediately after his brother Montgomery had departed St. Louis. Frank Blair had criticized the general’s failure to send reinforcements to Lexington. The bitter, vindictive Frémont denounced Blair’s “insidious & dishonorable efforts to bring my authority into contempt with the Govt & to undermine my influence as an officer.”126 This high-handed act created an uproar in the national press. When the St. Louis Evening News came to Blair’s defense, Frémont made matters worse by suppressing it and jailing the editor.
On September 17, Thomas S. Ewing, who had served in the senate with Frémont, wrote Lincoln that the Pathfinder was “a man of imperfect military education & no military experience & habitually jealous of those who possess these qualifications which he has not—Those who knew him in California represented him to me as having there assumed state & pomp & ceremony under circumstances and in a style calculated to provoke ridicule—and that he was withal arrogant & jealous of power, quite disposed to combine the Russian autocrat with the Turkish Sultan—The sooner you call him to Washington for the purpose of consultation & dispose of him in a quiet way, the better.”127 Elsewhere Ewing described Frémont as “a vain pompous blatherskite.”128
On September 19, Lincoln had General Scott draft an order instructing Frémont to turn over his command and report to Washington immediately. At Seward’s suggestion, however, the president did not send it. It was feared that the popularity of Frémont and his proclamation, along with the difficulty of finding an adequate replacement, made his removal inadvisable at that time.
Lincoln ordered the release of Frank Blair, but when that choleric congressman threatened to bring charges against Frémont, the Pathfinder once again arrested him, only to have General Scott countermand his act. Lincoln’s calm handling of the controversy pleased Frank Blair’s sister Elizabeth. She hoped that the president’s “cool way of doing things will … teach the Blairs a lesson not to rush on at things or people so violently.”129 But Lincoln was not always decorous in handling Frémont’s champions. To a friend of the Pathfinder, Lincoln abruptly declared: “Sir, I believe General Frémont to be a thoroughly honest man, but he has u
nfortunately surrounded himself with some of the greatest scoundrels on this continent; you are one of them and the worst of them.”130
The exasperated president was sorely tempted to dismiss Frémont but hesitated when Illinois Governor Richard Yates warned that “the army of the West would rebel.”131 Finally, Lincoln sent Cameron and Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to Missouri with an order relieve the Pathfinder, but only if he were not about to fight a battle. The meddle-some Chase, who informally assumed many of the war secretary’s responsibilities, urged Cameron to “bear in mind that we must have vigor, capacity and honesty. If F[rémont] has these qualities sustain him. If not let nothing prevent you from taking the bull by the horns. We have had enough dilly dallying, temporizing and disgraces.”132
When Lincoln asked General Samuel R. Curtis, commanding in St. Louis, his opinion of Frémont, he replied that the Pathfinder “lacks the intelligence, the experience & the sagacity necessary to his command.”133 (Curtis told Lorenzo Thomas that Frémont was not only “unequal to the command of an army” but also “no more bound by law than by the winds.”)134 Lyman Trumbull visited St. Louis and reported to the White House that he had “found a most deplorable condition of things there.”135
In October, Lincoln asked 77-year-old General John E. Wool, the second-highest-ranking officer in the army, to aid Frémont. When Wool demanded complete control of the Pathfinder’s department, however, the president withdrew his request. Wool sourly remarked that the country did not have “a man at the helm of state capable of directing affairs of state at this important crisis.” While he believed that Lincoln was honest and well-intentioned, the president’s “limited knowledge necessarily subjects him to be the instrument of others.”136
Upon receiving the dismissal order from Cameron, Frémont begged for a chance to prove himself in battle, for he had belatedly started to move against Confederate forces in western Missouri. Cameron agreed to withhold the order on the understanding that Frémont would attack the Rebels soon. Meanwhile, damaging reports about the general continued to pour into the White House. Adjutant General Thomas, after conferring with David Hunter and others, submitted a blistering report urging Frémont’s removal. The president received similar comments from Elihu B. Washburne, David Hunter, Charles G. Halpine, Ward Hill Lamon, John A. Gurley, Charles Gibson, John G. Nicolay, Thurlow Weed, and Josiah M. Lucas.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 37
