Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Many of these complaints reflected nothing more than the inability of a young republic to understand that an overburdened executive must shield himself if he is to get any work done. (After all, this was the era when the White House itself was open to the general public, so that any persistent citizen could get in, shake the hand of the President and consume time which that harassed official could have used in more fruitful ways.) But it is also true that Frémont brought a great many of these complaints on himself by his inability to surround himself with the right kind of assistants.

  Frémont had a fatal attraction for foreigners—displaced revolutionists from the German states, from Hungary and from France, fortune hunters from practically everywhere, men who had been trained and commissioned in European armies but who knew nothing at all about this western nation whose uniform they wore and whose citizens they irritated with their heel-clickings and their outlandish mangling of the American idiom. Frémont was taking part in a peculiarly American sort of war—Price’s backwoods militia was wholly representative—and Missouri had felt from the beginning that the German-born recruits from St. Louis were a little too prominent. Now headquarters had this profoundly foreign air, and when a man was told that he could not see the general—to sell a load of hay or a tugboat, to apply for a commission, to give a little information about Rebel plots, or just to pass the time of day—he was given the bad news in broken English by a dandified type who obviously belonged somewhere east of the Rhine. It was all rather hard to take.2

  To add to his troubles, Frémont made enemies of the Blair family. These aggressive manipulators were largely responsible for his appointment in the first place; Lincoln remarked that Frémont went to Missouri as “their pet and protégé,”3 and the Blairs expected a protégé to stay in line. Also, he had been no better than the Blairs’ second choice. Nathaniel Lyon was the man they really wanted for the Missouri command, and when Lyon died at Wilson’s Creek the Blairs felt bitterly that Frémont had failed to give him proper support, and they complained that he sadly lacked Lyon’s flaming drive and aggressive spirit.4 Worst of all, Frémont had sorely offended Frank Blair in the matter of army supply contracts.

  The supply problem would have made trouble in any case. Frémont had to buy enormous quantities of every conceivable kind of military equipment and he had to get delivery in a thundering hurry; buying things so is both expensive and wasteful, and unless some very good watchdogs are on hand it is apt to be honeycombed with graft to boot. Frémont had little business sense and almost no administrative capacity, and he had practically no watchdogs at all. His chief quartermaster was Major Justus McKinstry, another Blair protégé who had wandered off the reservation, a man who was blamed (whether justly or unjustly) for all manner of malpractices. Also, Frémont innocently surrounded himself with various businessmen whom he had known in California before the war and who were delighted now to make money be helping their old friend get horses, mules, beef, rifles, forage, tents, and other necessities. William Tecumseh Sherman had been a San Francisco banker in Gold Rush days and he had seen something of these men on their home soil; seeing them now in St. Louis, and reflecting that tall stories about corruption and extravagance were going the rounds, Sherman was minded of the old saying: Where the vultures gather there is sure to be a carcass. Sherman knew vultures when he saw them.5

  So the supply situation was becoming an open scandal, partly because the overtaxed Frémont was unable to keep a good grip on affairs and partly because it was impossible to spend so much money so fast without irregularities. The whole War Department, in point of fact, was getting into trouble for the same reason, and Secretary Simon Cameron himself would be forced out within six months; but Frémont’s case was made immeasurably worse by the fact that Frank Blair’s friends were not getting what they considered their fair share of the spoils. What good is a protégé, if he cannot steer business to one’s friends? Frank Blair made complaint, with lungs of brass; Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas prepared to look into the situation, and so did a committee of Congress, and Frémont definitely was under a cloud.6

  All of this might have been passed over if there had been a general feeling that Frémont was getting on with the war, but after the tragedy at Wilson’s Creek this feeling disappeared. The Blairs, estranged by the matter of contracts, were even more vexed because the whole war effort was lagging, in Missouri and everywhere else. Impatient Frank Blair spoke for many when he wrote angrily: “How long O Lord, how long, is the despairing cry of all who wait on the inexplicable and fatal delays of the administration.”7 General Winfield Scott himself was losing favor because he appeared to favor a leisurely sort of war. Frémont’s only chance for salvation was to start winning victories. He knew this as well as anyone, and to the best of his ability he tried to get things moving.

  In one respect his luck was in: the Confederates failed utterly to follow up on their victory at Wilson’s Creek. What was left of the Federal Army had to make a 110-mile retreat to the town of Rolla. Lyon had considered it impossible to do this successfully even before the army had been beaten; now, defeated and having lost a fourth of its numbers, the army had to move through a country where its friends were few and where the recent battle had given vast encouragement to all Southern sympathizers. It was encumbered with a big wagon train, and a hostile army twice its size, possessed of several thousand mounted men, was in position to take it apart. The little army could have been destroyed, and Sterling Price knew it, but he never could make Ben McCulloch see it; the retreating Federals were not pursued at all, and the big chance was lost. McCulloch had not wanted to enter Missouri in the first place, and now he flatly refused to go any farther. The victorious army lay idle at Springfield; then, presently, McCulloch took his brigade and followed Pearce’s Arkansans (whose time was expiring) off to the southwest, clear out of the state. Price led his militia northward to see if he could not destroy a Federal garrison which occupied Lexington, far up the Missouri River. The result of all of this was that what Lyon had won by making his campaign stayed won. The Union cause had lost a man it could have used, but it had not lost the state.8

  Frémont’s great design was to invade the deep South, but first he had to secure Missouri. The northeastern part of the state, along the line of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railway and on up nearly to the Iowa line, was racked by guerrilla warfare, with innumerable bands of night riders swirling sporadically cross country, wrecking bridges, despoiling the farms of Unionists, and in general stirring up trouble. Federal troops were bringing this area under control, their efforts directed by a blustery, tall-talking brigadier general named John Pope, who had a skyrocket’s career (fast up and fast down) not far ahead of him. It is possible that some of the regiments that were kept busy on this constabulary duty might have been spared to help Lyon, but it was too late to worry about that now; John Pope had lots of drive, and this part of the state no longer offered any great problems.

  Radiating out from St. Louis toward Confederate territory were three railroads. One followed the Missouri River to Jefferson City, sending a tentacle sixty miles beyond to Sedalia; the second went southwest to Rolla, haven for the defeated army; and the third ran seventy-five miles south to Ironton, in the hills. Frémont resolved to hold these railroads by fortifying and garrisoning Rolla, Jefferson City, and Ironton. He would protect the Mississippi River by planting a force at Cape Girardeau, he would strengthen Cairo itself, and he would fortify St. Louis. With all of this done—with the effervescent guerrillas suppressed and the discontented secessionists in St. Louis brought under firm control—this end of the border would be firmly anchored. Then, with the army of maneuver which would be forming while these security measures were being taken, Frémont could go South. He was full of confidence: “My plan is New Orleans straight … I think it can be done gloriously.”9

  All in all, the idea was not bad, although it was an idea rather than a plan. Despite the pomp, the confusion of tongues, and the men on the make at
department headquarters a fairly good foundation was laid. Looking ahead to the move down the river, Frémont bought two steamers and had them converted into gunboats, and he ordered a fleet of mortar boats for the bombardment of secessionist forts. He sent espionage agents inside the enemy’s lines, to get maps and other data that would be useful later on. Also, he made one appointment that was going to have far-reaching effects. Casting about for the right man to command the important post at Cairo, he selected an unobtrusive, seemingly colorless brigadier general named Ulysses S. Grant.

  Perhaps it was important, just here, that Frémont had never belonged to the club—the closely knit little corps of West Pointers in the prewar army, men who had known one another for years, whose professional standards were rigid and sometimes narrow, and who tended to follow judgments based on the eternal round of gossip, small talk, and rumor that filled the air at every post and cantonment. In this circle Grant had been typed: a drifter and a drunkard, a man who had had to leave the Army because he drank too much, who had gone from one civil-life failure to another for half a dozen years thereafter, who had had trouble getting back into the service when the Civil War began and who owned a brigadier’s commission now only because Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, who had taken a fancy to him, had a great deal of influence in Washington. Everybody in the Old Army liked Sam Grant, but nobody seemed to have much confidence in him. But Frémont was an outsider, to whom the Old Army’s verdicts meant nothing, and he could look at Grant with his own eyes. He had considered sending John Pope to Cairo, but Major McKinstry took Grant in to see him, and after the war Frémont wrote that he saw in Grant the qualities of “unassuming character not given to self elation, of dogged persistence, of iron will.” Grant got the appointment and at the end of August set out for Cairo to take charge.10

  Yet if Frémont had done some things well, the summer as a whole was frustrating, to him and to his superiors. Washington was far away, the Blairs were enemies and the President was uncommunicative, and mutual misunderstandings and suspicions were sprouting. Once, just when the need for troops in Missouri was greatest, Frémont was ordered by General Scott to send 5000 infantry to Washington. The order was quickly modified, but the mere fact that it had been issued struck Frémont as ominous.11 So did the new provisional government of Missouri, thoroughly Unionist but representative of Democrats and slaveowners, conciliatory in a spot where the general was preparing a mailed fist. Governor Gamble was reassuring the planters about the security of their animate property and at Lincoln’s suggestion he had recently proclaimed amnesty and protection for all secessionists-in-arms who would lay down their weapons and go home; and Frémont, convinced that the air was electric with unseen menaces, proclaimed martial law in St. Louis and sent Major McKinstry clattering though the street with cavalry patrols by night to overawe the treasonous.12

  From Washington the view was depressing. Lyon was dead and unavenged, the uproar about graft, favoritism, and extravagance was rising day by day, and the extensive fortifying and garrisoning of cities and railheads began to look like undue caution and a devotion to defensive warfare; and the Blairs, who had to be listened to, were muttering audibly, just off-stage. Odd rumors drifted about; it was said that when Frémont did move south he would take a leaf from Aaron Burr’s book and try to set up an independent principality in the Southwest, and Missouri loyalists complained that he cared nothing about the future of the state. One credulous citizen of St. Louis assured skeptical Attorney General Edward Bates that Frémont was an opium eater—“his behaviour and manner, his staring and contortions prove it.” A correspondent of the elder Blair declared angrily that Frémont “is a huge humbug,” said that true Union men could not talk to him, and concluded: “The fact is Frémont is endeavouring to play the Grand Monarch—and so far has proven to be a man of no great capacity.”13

  It was the grand monarch atmosphere that hurt. Frémont had managed to surround himself with a gang that made western America fear the worst, and the posturing of his aides and guards apparently affected his own judgment. A European army officer, visiting St. Louis early in September, felt that he was seeing something common enough in Europe but extraordinary in America. The glittering display suggested “both a commander-in-chief and a proconsul,” and Frémont displayed “an ardent, ambitious personality” which “obviously is inclined to dictatorship.” The place hardly seemed American. Frémont was “French, but revolutionary French,” he disliked not only the Democrats but “all governmental parties,” and all West Pointers to boot, and the European summed him up in words that would have interested Abraham Lincoln: “He is one of those men who serve a government, not according to official instructions but rather with an understanding of its hidden intentions, men who understand in half-words what is expected of them.”14

  That was the real trouble. All of the men suddenly raised to high place in 1861 were supposed to understand hidden intentions, to know how to act on half-words, to see far below the surface and to learn what the times required of them before the requirement was actually stated. This called for both vision and balance, and Frémont had only the vision. The balance was gone, distorted by the proconsul’s trappings and the immeasurable ambition, by the sense of isolation from Washington, by the unending pressures of administrative chaos, probably also by the feeling that the Missouri situation was slipping out of control. Swollen with the need to perform a drastic act that would set everything straight, Frémont moved on to an act of immense folly—an act which his government would quickly disavow, but which nevertheless had at its haunted center something that must eventually be attended to.

  Very early on the morning of August 30 the general sat at his desk at one end of a broad upper hall at headquarters; alone, for the day’s routine had not begun and the big building was silent, with gray dawn light coming in through the tall windows. The general had been at work, and there was a sheaf of papers in front of him. He finished his morning coffee and then sent for two people—Edward Davis of Philadelphia, a friend who was visiting him at the time, and Jessie Benton Frémont, the general’s wife, personal secretary and often his guiding spirit: an excessively energetic and self-confident lady who at times seemed to be executive officer and second-in-command for the entire Western Department. These two came, and the general picked up the papers and read to them what he had written.

  What they heard was a proclamation, signed by Frémont and addressed to the public at large. It began by asserting that because of the general disorganization in Missouri—“the helplessness of the civil authority, the total insecurity of life, and the devastation of property by bands of murderers and marauders” who were out to settle old scores with private foes and “who find an enemy wherever they find plunder”—it was necessary for the commanding general to “assume the administrative powers of the state.” The commanding general was therefore proclaiming martial law throughout Missouri. Within the lines of the “army of occupation”—the area, that is, which was enclosed by the chain of fortified towns, running from Cape Girardeau through Ironton, Rolla, and Jefferson City all the way up to the northwestern tip of the state—it was decreed that all persons found with weapons in their hands should be court-martialed and, if convicted, shot to death. In addition: “The property, real and personal, of all persons in the state of Missouri who shall take up arms against the United States, or who shall be directly proven to have taken an active part with their enemies in the field, is declared to be confiscated to the public use, and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared freemen.” The proclamation went on to warn everybody not to engage in treasonable correspondence, to destroy railroad tracks, bridges, or telegraphs or to circulate “false reports or incendiary documents,” and closed with the assertion: “The object of this declaration is to place in the hands of the military authorities the power to give instantaneous effect to existing laws and to supply such deficiencies as the conditions of war demand.”15

  Nothing ever really daun
ted Jessie Frémont, but Mr. Davis was somewhat stunned, and he got to his feet to warn the general: “Mr. Seward will never allow this. He intends to wear down the South by steady pressure, not by blows, and then make himself the arbitrator.” Frémont calmly replied that the thing went beyond any question of what Seward might or might not approve. It was a war measure, and he proposed to “bring the penalties of rebellion home to every man found striving against the Union.” There was a printing press at headquarters, and without further ado the general had the proclamation printed and made public. He also sent a copy to Washington, for the President’s guidance.

  Secretary Seward might well disapprove of this document, as a matter of policy, if his opinion was asked. But Frémont’s vein was much the vein of Seward himself, in that letter which had startled Charles Francis Adams. He was making explicit what Seward had elaborately hinted at … the slow development, deep in this war for reunion, of an uncontrollable and undesigned war for human freedom.

  4: End of Neutrality

  And so the war had changed its character, a thousand miles from Washington. If a general in the field could displace the civil government, set the bondsmen free, and bring in firing squads to settle neighborhood disturbances, the struggle might quickly be what Wisconsin’s Governor Randall had feared it might become—an unlimited war, far greater than a mere fight to put down rebellion. It was a peculiarity of the situation that although this had happened because of the unvarnished energy with which the border folk made war, it was nevertheless the people of the border whom Abraham Lincoln had most in mind when he tried to keep the war limited. They would fight for the Union, he believed, but they would not fight to suppress slavery, which was where Frémont’s proclamation unquestionably would take them; and on September 2 the President sent the general a firm but not unfriendly letter.