Terrible Swift Sword (6 page)

To
add to his troubles, Fremont made enemies of the Blair family. These aggressive
manipulators were largely responsible for his appointment in the first place;
Lincoln remarked that Fremont went to Missouri as "their pet and
protege,"
³
and the Blairs expected a protege 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 Fremont had failed to give him
proper support, and they complained that he sadly lacked Lyon's flaming drive
and aggressive spirit.* Worst of all, Fremont had sorely offended Frank Blair
in the matter of army supply contracts.

The
supply problem would have made trouble in any case. Fremont 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. Fremont 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 protege who had
wandered off the reservation, a man who was blamed (whether justly or unjustly)
for all manner of malpractices. Also, Fremont innocently surrounded himself
with various businessmen whom he had known in California before the war and who
were delighted now to make money by helping then-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
Fremont 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
Fremont'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 protege, 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
Fremont definitely was under a cloud.
⁶

All
of this might have been passed over if there had been a general feeling that
Fremont 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 desparing 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.
Fremont'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 Roll a. 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

Fremont'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.
Fremont 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, Fremont could go South. He was full of confidence: "My plan is New
Orleans straight
...
I think it can
be done gloriously."
⁸

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, Fremont 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 Fremont 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 Fremont 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 Fremont 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 Fremont 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,
Fremont 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
Fremont 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 Fremont, convinced that the air was electric with unseen menaces,
proclaimed martial law in St. Louis and sent Major McKinstry clattering through
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 Fremont 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 Fremont was an
opium eater—"his behaviour and manner, his staring and contortions prove
it." A correspondent of the elder Blair declared angrily that Fremont
"is a huge humbug," said that true Union men could not talk to him,
and concluded: "The fact is Fremont is endeavouring to play the Grand
Monarch—and so far has proven to be a man of no great capacity."
¹⁸

It was the grand monarch atmosphere that
hurt. Fremont 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 Fremont displayed "an
ardent, ambitious personality" which "obviously is inclined to
dictatorship." The place hardly seemed American. Fremont 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
Fremont 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,
Fremont 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 Fremont, 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.