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CHAPTER XXIV

THE FAILURE OF FREMONT LINCOLN'S FIRST DIFFICULTIES WITH MC CLELLAN—THE DEATH OF WILLIE LINCOLN

THE most popular military appointment Lincoln had made before McClellan had been that of John C. Frémont to the command of the Department of the West. Republicans appreciated it, for had not Frémont been the first candidate of their party for the Presidency? The West was jubilant: Frémont's explorations had years before made him the hero of the land along the Mississippi. The cabinet was satisfied, particularly Postmaster General Blair, whose "pet and protégé" Frémont was. Lincoln himself "thought well of Frémont," believed he could do the work to be done; and he had already had experience enough to discern that his great trouble was to be, not finding major-generals-he had more pegs than holes to put them in, he said one day-but finding major-generals who could do the thing they were ordered to do.

Frémont had gone to his headquarters at St. Louis, Missouri, late in July. Before a month had passed, the gravest charges of incompetency and neglect of duty were being made against him. It was even intimated to the President that the General was using

his position to work up a Northwestern Confederacy.* Mr. Lincoln had listened to all these charges, but taken no action, when, on the morning of August 30, he was amazed to read in his newspaper that Frémont had issued a proclamation declaring, among other things, that the property, real and personal, of all the persons in the State of Missouri who should take up arms against the United States, or who should be directly proved to have taken an active part with its enemies in the field, would be confiscated for public use and their slaves, if they had any, declared freemen.

Frémont's proclamation astonished the country as much as it did the President. In the North it elicited almost universal satisfaction. This was striking at the root of the trouble-slavery. But in the Border States, particularly in Kentucky, the Union Party was dismayed. The only possible method of keeping those sections in the Union was not to interfere with slavery. Mr. Lincoln saw this as clearly as his Bor

*Dr. Emil Preetorius, editor of the "Westliche Post" of St. Louis, Mo., said of this charge, in an interview for this work: "I know that Frémont gave no countenance to any scheme which others may have conceived for the establishment of a Northwestern Confederacy. I had abundant proof, through the years that I knew him, that he was a patriot and a most unselfish man. The defect in Frémont was that he was a dreamer. Impractical, visionary things went a long way with him. He was a poor judge of men and formed strange associations. He surrounded himself with foreigners, especially Hungarians, most of whom were adventurers and some of whom were swindlers. I struggled hard to persuade him not to let these men have so much to do with his administration. Mrs. Frémont, unlike the General, was most practical. She was fond of success. She and the General were alike, however, in their notions of the loyalty due between friends. Once, when I protested against the character of the men who surrounded Frémont, she replied: 'Do you know these very men went out with us on horseback when we took possession of the Mariposa? They risked their lives for us. Now we can't go back on them.' It was the woman's feeling. She forgot that brave men may sometimes be downright thieves and robbers."

der State supporters. It was well known that this was his policy. He felt that Frémont had not only defied the policy of the administration, he had usurped power which belonged only to the legislative part of the government. He had a good excuse for reprimanding the general, even for removing him. Instead, he wrote him, on September 2, a kindly letter:

"I think there is great danger that the closing paragraph [of the proclamation], in relation to the confiscation of property and the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends and turn them against us; perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky. Allow me, therefore, to ask that you will, as of your own motion, modify that paragraph so as to conform to the first and fourth sections of the act of Congress entitled, 'An act to confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes,' approved August 6, 1861, and a copy of which act I herewith send you.

"This letter is written in a spirit of caution, and not of censure. I send it by special messenger, in order that it may certainly and speedily reach you."

But Lincoln did more than this. Without waiting for Frémont's reply to the above, he went over carefully all the criticisms of the General's administration, in order to see if he could help him. His conclusion was that Frémont was isolating himself too much from men who were interested in the same cause, and so did not know what was going on in the very matters with which he was dealing. That Mr. Lincoln hit the very root of Frémont's difficulty is evident from the testimony of the men who were with the General in Missouri at the time. Colonel George E.

Leighton of St. Louis, who became provost-marshal of the city in the fall of 1861, says:

"Frémont isolated himself, and, unlike Grant, Halleck, and others of like rank, was unapproachable. When Halleck came here to assume command and called on Frémont, he was accompanied simply by a member of his staff; but when Frémont returned the call, he rode down with great pomp and ceremony, escorted by his staff and bodyguard of one hundred men.'

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General B. G. Farrar recounts his experience in trying to get an important message to Frémont from General Lyon, who was at Springfield with an insufficient force:

"Word was returned to me that General Frémont was very busy, that he could not receive the dispatch then, and requested me to call in the afternoon. I called in the afternoon, and was again told that General Frémont was very busy. Three days passed before I succeeded in obtaining an audience with Frémont. As commander of the department Frémont assumed all the prerogatives of an absolute ruler. The approach to his headquarters was through a long line of guards. There were guards at the corners of the streets, guards at the gate, guards at the door, guards at the entrance to the adjutant-general's office, and a whole regiment of troops in the barracks adjacent to his headquarters. I saw his order making Colonel Harding of the home guard a brigadier-general. This was done without consultation with the President and without authority of law. The Czar of Russia could hardly be more absolute in his authority than Frémont assumed to be at St. Louis. . . . Frémont never asked Washington for authority to do a thing. While at St. Louis Frémont visited nobody, so far as I know. When he went forth from his headquarters at all he went under the escort of his bodyguard and a staff brilliantly uniformed.

When he removed his headquarters to Jefferson City he went on a special train, with all the trappings and surroundings of a royal potentate. . . ."

Having made up his mind what Frémont's fault was, Lincoln asked General David Hunter to go to Missouri. "He [Frémont] needs to have at his side a man of large experience," he wrote to Hunter. "Will you not, for me, take that place? Your rank is one grade too high to be ordered to it, but will not serve the country and oblige me by taking it voluntarily?" At the same time that Hunter was asked to go to Frémont's relief, Postmaster General Blair went to St. Louis, with the President's approbation, to talk with the general, "as a friend."

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In the meantime, Lincoln's letter of September 2 had reached Frémont. After a few days the General replied that he wished the President himself would make the general order modifying the clause of the proclamation which referred to the liberation of slaves. This letter he sent by his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, a woman of ambition and great energy of character. "While Frémont was in command of the Department, Mrs. Frémont was the real chief of staff," says Col. Geo. F. Leighton. "She was a woman of strong personality, having inherited much of the brains and force of character which distinguished her father, Senator Benton." "Mrs. Frémont was much like her father," says Judge Clover of St. Louis. "She was intellectual and possessed great force of will." She started East deeply indignant that Mr. Lincoln should ask her husband to modify his procamation. When she reached Washington, she learned

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