by Judy Alter
"Too late," John moaned, "too late. He was an outstanding officer—but intemperate, given to disobeying orders. Always thought he knew more than whoever was giving the orders."
There was outrage, of course. Lyon's body was taken from city to city, from Missouri to his home in New England, and the northern press cried out in anger and dismay. John should have sent reinforcements, he should have done this, that, or the other.
"But none of them sit where you sit," I consoled. "None of them are faced with the decisions you are, nor do they have your knowledge of actual conditions."
"Thank you, Jessie," he said quietly, but I could see that the criticism bothered him. He never made a case of his orders to General Lyon nor the reason for them, and only I understood most of it. Sometimes I wanted to shout it from the balcony of our headquarters, explaining John's position to a hostile world. But I could not do that, any more than I could tell the rabble that I didn't deserve to be mockingly called "General Jessie."
In September, Dorothea Dix came to St. Louis to tour the hospitals, and I accompanied her to Jefferson Barracks. I was curious about her, especially in light of the "General Jessie" rumors.
"Do you not," I asked, "face criticism for taking women into men's hospitals, for caring for wounded and dying men?"
"Every day," she replied, "but my work is too important to worry about that." Tall and beautiful, with black hair swept back from her face, she was always in control, whether she was facing John across a desk—as she often did, though she had his full support—or mopping up a floor after an amputation, a sight I once saw, much to my horror.
"Your nurses—" I began.
"Must be over thirty, plain, and wear only black or brown," she said crisply, moving through rows of beds where young men, too ill to feed themselves, lay with mugs of coffee and pieces of salt pork on their chests. The theory was that the food would be handy should they gather the strength to eat it.
"The sun blazes on them," I said, looking at dying men who lay in sunlight so bright it made them use what little energy they had left to squint.
"There are no funds for curtains," Dorothea said. "I have asked. I shall have to think about how to handle that."
"I'll handle it," I said quietly. "I'll see that General Frémont's office provides the funds." And I did. Blue shades were hung on the windows the next day, and bedside tables put in place so that food need not be set on patients' chests.
"They deserve civilization," I stormed at John, "not to die like barbarians when they've given their lives for their country."
Once again he said only, "Thank you, Jessie." Then he added, "I cannot be everywhere at once and see everything. You are my eyes and my ears."
Frank Blair came to see John when he first returned to St. Louis from Washington and seemed full of support. "I told them," he said, "that Lyon died of red tape." Then he got to the real business of his call. "I've got a friend, a businessman—he can provide clothing and equipment for 40,000 men. Here, Frémont, I've saved you some trouble and brought along a contract, already drawn up."
John, as he told me later, took the document and read it carefully before pushing it back across the desk to Frank. "I've let several smaller contracts to a variety of people," he explained. "If I gave all the business to one firm and it proved unable to perform, the department would be crippled. I would certainly agree to a smaller contract with your associates. Take this to the quartermaster and see what can be worked out."
Frank apparently did just that, and the quartermaster found such irregularities in the contract that he rejected the entire notion.
"I'm afraid you've made an enemy of Frank," I said when John told me all this.
He looked contrite. "His father is already leery of us, over that business of giving Frank an appointment. I'm sorry, Jessie. Francis Blair was a major supporter of mine, and I always thought it was because of your family ties. I know how important that family has been all your life, and I would not—"
"Shhhh!" I put a finger to his lips to silence him. "You must do what is right for the department, not what is right for me or my old friends. I support you wholeheartedly."
John and I were lovers again, as though the challenges of the war had energized us, taken us back to earlier days when we were more than parents, more than people struggling with an indebted mine. Now we were young—in spirit, at least—and fighting together for something we believed in. The effect in our bedroom was remarkable.
John, who got very little sleep anyway, would wake me gently in the middle of the night, stroking my head, running his hand lightly over my face, then lifting my gown to rub my back, his hand reaching ever lower until I began to moan a little. Then he would withdraw, to make a great show of removing his clothes, while I lay in the bed, my desire mounting the longer he delayed. When we finally came together, it was with a frantic urgency that I had not thought possible in midlife, a passion that surprised and amazed me. The idea of pregnancy still frightened me, but I had learned before how important it was to respond to John. The ups and downs of our marriage, the absences and the low periods, had taught me that caution was not always best, that sometimes passion had to take precedent over reason.
And a corner of me was almost grateful that John still found me that desirable, a woman nearing forty with a body thickened by childbirth. I welcomed him almost every night, with an eagerness that surprised and pleased him. Each morning we greeted each other formally in the office, our eyes twinkling as though we shared a great secret that no one else could suspect.
Two weeks after he had asked John to sign his friends' contract, Frank Blair appeared unannounced on the second floor of our headquarters.
"Frank! I wasn't expecting you. I... didn't think you had an appointment with John," I said, being as tactful as I could.
"I don't have an appointment," he said angrily, "and I near had to fight my way through all those aides and whatever-you-call-'em downstairs. But I'm going to see John now!"
One look at his face told me this was no time to argue. "Of course," I said. "Just let me tell him you're here."
"I'll tell him myself," Frank said, storming through the door into John's office, with me at his heels.
"Frémont, we've got to talk," he said to John, and then, turning to see me, added, "and we don't need you, Jessie."
Quietly, controlling his temper, John said, "Jessie stays. She is my closest adviser."
Frank opened his mouth to protest, then closed it suddenly and threw himself into a chair. I wondered if he had been about to say something mean about "General Jessie."
"I'm hearin' all kinds of things I don't like, John."
John stared at him without saying a word, almost daring him to go on.
"You know," Frank said, "that Lincoln walks around the streets of the capital by himself? Anybody who wants to can come up and shake his hand, talk to him. But what do I hear about you? No one can see you, can't get an appointment. I damn near didn't get in here myself today."
I opened my mouth to protest, but John silenced me with a look.
"And those blasted foreigners you got around you—the Garibaldians or whatever, with their feathers in their hats and all. Don't you think that's a bit pretentious, John?"
"I think it's practical," John said. "The atmosphere is hostile in this city. I cannot help how they dress—they are an excellently trained troop."
Frank began to repeat himself, and John, instead of talking openly with the man who had once been his strong supporter, became more close-lipped and imperious—there was no other word for it—as the minutes ticked by. After an hour they were open enemies, all hope of peaceful solution shattered as far as I could tell.
John brooded for days afterward. Then one night, some four or five days after his visit with Frank Blair, he rushed into the bedroom where I lay sleeping. "That's it, Jessie! I've got it!"
"What's it?" I murmured sleepily. Since we'd been in St. Louis—with my energies at a pitch all day every day, and
my passions at an equal pitch many nights—I slept more deeply than I ever had in California.
He shook me, not even very gently, to make sure he had my attention. "I know how to turn things in our favor. What we've got to do is unite the Union element, keep them from fleeing. Listen to what I've written."
And so he read a proclamation that established martial law in the state—"How else can we unscramble Missouri, Jessie?" His document prescribed court-martial and the firing squad for unauthorized persons found bearing arms in the district, which he extended to cover all of Missouri and parts of Kansas, and it provided for the confiscation of all property belonging to rebel sympathizers, including their slaves who were "declared freedmen."
Fully awake now, I gasped at the last clause. "John, you would free the slaves?"
"Yes, I would."
"That... that changes the nature of the war," I said. "It makes it a war about slavery, not one to preserve the Union."
"That's what it has always been," John said quietly.
"I know," I whispered, "but no one else has dared say it before." I remembered my father's determination to preserve the Union at all costs, the cost for him being a backhanded supporter of slavery. "John," I said, tears in my eyes, "you have done a truly great thing." This, I thought, would make him the next President.
There was a small printing press in our headquarters, and copies of the proclamation were immediately made upon it and released to various newspapers. It was printed in its entirety throughout the West. Union people rejoiced, and recruitments rose, while rebels became cautious.
President Lincoln was also cautious. His reply, dated September 2 and supposedly sent by special messenger so that it might reach John speedily, was not received for six days, though it was but a journey of less than two days from Washington to St. Louis by train.
Lincoln was concerned—greatly concerned, he wrote—that John's proposed confiscation of slaves would alarm "our southern friends" unduly and turn them against us. There it was again—the preservation of the Union taking precedent over the fair and humane treatment of all men. "Allow me, therefore, to ask that you will, as of your own motion, modify that paragraph....This letter is written in a spirit of caution, and not of censure."
"I will not modify it," John announced. "To do so would indicate that I myself thought the proclamation wrong. If Lincoln thinks I'm wrong, he'll have to ask me directly to rescind the order."
John wrote the President to that effect and received a carefully worded reply, which still insisted that the confiscation of property and the liberation of slaves was in contradiction to the last act of Congress upon the subject. Lincoln again suggested, strongly, that he modify the proclamation.
"I must reply immediately," John said, while I stared out the window, lost in my own thoughts.
Suddenly I whirled. "John! I will take your message to the President myself. Look at the length of time it took you to receive his first response. I suspect you have enemies in the President's closest advisers, and that they might delay your response—or even see that it never reaches him. I think a personal reply would be best."
"You would go all the way to Washington?" he asked incredulously.
"I would," I said firmly, "and I will."
"You will be well received," John said thoughtfully. "After all, Jessie, Lincoln knows of your work with your father and with me. He must know that you understand these matters as well as I do."
"I would hope so," I agreed.
I took the next train east, riding for two days in a dusty, hot car that was as crowded as a streetcar in New York. Arriving in Washington late at night, I was met by John's good friend, Judge Coles of New York, who escorted me to the Willard Hotel.
"I must send a message to Mr. Lincoln immediately," I said, only to be met with laughing protests that it was late in the evening and surely my message could wait until morning.
"No," I replied, tired as I was, "I must at least get word to the President." And so by messenger I sent a brief note, simply telling the President that I carried a confidential letter from John and would like to see him at his earliest convenience.
The messenger returned within the hour, bearing a card on which was written, "Now, at once. A. Lincoln."
"Now?" expostulated Judge Coles. "He cannot mean it....It is nearly ten o'clock at night."
"I must go now," I said, terribly conscious that I still wore the dusty dress in which I had traveled for two days. Because of Father's death, I was in mourning, and the black dress showed the wear much more than any other color might have.
Judge Coles escorted me to the White House, and as we entered, I had a gripping attack of nostalgia, remembering the times that I had come there with Father as a child, when President Jackson used to brighten from his depression if I sat by his side, and then the triumphal visit that John and I had made at the reception celebrating President Tyler's inauguration. To hurry in, late at night and almost secretively, seemed almost a sacrilege to me.
Once announced, we were shown into the Red Room, there to cool our heels for quite some time. "His message said 'Now' as though it were urgent," I whispered to Coles, the room seeming to inspire a need for low tones.
"No excuse for this," Coles said emphatically.
At length the President entered from the other end of the room. He was taller than I expected, and every bit as gangly as I'd heard, his arms dangling almost helplessly at his sides and ending in hands too big for his body. But it was his manner that impressed me most—there was a sadness about him, a heaviness that I could not imagine lifting in any circumstances. Thinking what energy the war gave to John, I could not believe the war alone was responsible for Mr. Lincoln's sadness—or that he would have been a cheerful person were the war won tomorrow. He nodded at me but neither spoke nor offered his hand.
I introduced Judge Coles, who then retired discreetly behind a door.
"You have a message?" the President asked.
"Yes," I said, holding it out to him.
He did not sit but walked over to stand directly under a chandelier and read John's reply. More weary than I ever remembered being before, I pulled out a chair and sank into it, conscious once again that I was middle-aged and tired.
"I thought I might answer any points about which you required more information," I said haltingly, for once completely undone by the coldness of the man I faced. "I come as General Frémont's trusted adviser."
"I know who you are," he said with a smile that was not at all pleasant. "You're quite a politician—for a woman. Nonetheless, I have written the general, and he knows what I want done."
I knew instantly that he not only dismissed me because I was a woman meddling in men's business, but that he was offended that I had come.
"The general," I said, feeling obligated to press John's case in spite of the obvious prejudice against me, "feels that he is at the great disadvantage of being opposed by people in whom you have great confidence."
He appeared surprised and demanded to know who I meant, but I too could fence. At length, his patience apparently exhausted, Lincoln said, "He should have listened to Frank Blair....I sent him there to advise the general....He should never have dragged the Negro into the war."
Appalled, I could only reply, "We were not aware that Frank Blair represented you. He did not say so."
My protest brought only a glower, and it was soon apparent that the interview was at an end... and was a failure, as far as John was concerned. Lincoln said I would have his reply soon, and when I pressed, asking if it might be the next day, as I needed to return to St. Louis, he said that he was very busy with many things but he would see that the reply was sent to my hotel within two days. I could ask for no more and turned to leave. He did not bid me farewell.
Walking back to the Willard, Judge Coles, who had listened at the door, said, "This ends Frémont's part in the war. He will no longer be effective."
"Of course he will," I replied, aghast at the thought. "John h
as much left to do. I was the problem."
Coles shook his head discouragingly.
At the hotel I insisted on sending a wire to John, telling him of the outcome of my meeting.
"Is that wise?" the judge asked. "There are apparently spies everywhere." He glanced around the lobby, as though expecting to see someone watching us.
I smiled grimly. "John and I have a cipher by which we can communicate without fear of discovery." And I sent my message.
Francis Blair, Sr., came to see me at the Willard the next day. "Jessie," he said, in a voice that had once been strong but now quavered with age, "I have been fond of you since your childhood, and your father... he was one of the best men I ever met... and I supported your husband for the presidency. But now, Jessie, my heart is sick. How could you go before our President and find fault with him?"
Find fault with the President? I laughed aloud—my first reaction—and then saw that Francis Blair was not amused. Sobering quickly, I said, "I did not find fault. Indeed, if anything, he found fault with me... and treated me rudely."
Mr. Blair stayed two hours, haranguing me all the while about John's sins, until he finally got to a discussion of my own faults. "You should have stayed in Washington as I told you. It is not fitting for a woman to go with the army."
"It is fitting," I replied coldly, "for a woman to accompany her husband and to support him. That is all I have done." The fact of my being a woman seemed to keep coming up to slap me in the face, and I had little idea how to deal with such criticism. Longingly, I thought of Father, who had seen me as the inheritor of his political wisdom and thought—and had treated me like a son.
