Part 13 (2/2)
It can now be seen that still a third element--geography--intervened to give shape and sequence to the main outlines of the Civil War. When, at the beginning of May, General Scott gave his advice, the seat of government of the first seven Confederate States was still at Montgomery, Alabama. By the adhesion of the four interior border States to the insurrection, and the removal of the archives and administration of Jefferson Davis to Richmond, Virginia, toward the end of June, as the capital of the now eleven Confederate States, Was.h.i.+ngton necessarily became the center of Union attack, and Richmond the center of Confederate defense. From the day when McDowell began his march to Bull Run, to that when Lee evacuated Richmond in his final hopeless flight, the route between these two opposing capitals remained the princ.i.p.al and dominating line of military operations, and the region between Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River on the east, and the chain of the Alleghanies on the west, the primary field of strategy.
According to geographical features, the second great field of strategy lay between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi River, and the third between the Mississippi River, the Rocky Mountains, and the Rio Grande. Except in Western Virginia, the att.i.tude of neutrality a.s.sumed by Kentucky for a considerable time delayed the definition of the military frontier and the beginning of active hostilities in the second field, thus giving greater momentary importance to conditions existing and events transpiring in Missouri, with the city of St. Louis as the princ.i.p.al center of the third great military field.
The same necessity which dictated the promotion of General McClellan at one bound from captain to major-general compelled a similar phenomenal promotion, not alone of officers of the regular army, but also of eminent civilians to high command and military responsibility in the immense volunteer force authorized by Congress. Events, rather than original purpose, had brought McClellan into prominence and ranking duty; but now, by design, the President gave John C. Fremont a commission of major-general, and placed him in command of the third great military field, with headquarters at St. Louis, with the leading idea that he should organize the military strength of the Northwest, first, to hold Missouri to the Union, and, second, by a carefully prepared military expedition open the Mississippi River. By so doing, he would sever the Confederate States, reclaim or conquer the region lying west of the great stream, and thus reduce by more than one half the territorial area of the insurrection. Though he had been an army lieutenant, he had no experience in active war; yet the talent and energy he had displayed in Western military exploration, and the political prominence he had reached as candidate of the Republican party for President in 1856, seemed to fit him preeminently for such a duty.
While most of the volunteers from New England and the Middle States were concentrated at Was.h.i.+ngton and dependent points, the bulk of the Western regiments was, for the time being, put under the command of Fremont for present and prospective duty. But the high hopes which the administration placed in the general were not realized. The genius which could lead a few dozen or a few hundred Indian scouts and mountain trappers over desert plains and through the fastnesses of the Sierra Nevada, that could defy savage hostilities and outlive starvation amid imprisoning snows, failed signally before the task of animating and combining the patriotic enthusiasm of eight or ten great northwestern States, and organizing and leading an army of one hundred thousand eager volunteers in a comprehensive and decisive campaign to recover a great national highway. From the first, Fremont failed in promptness, in foresight, in intelligent supervision and, above all, in inspiring confidence and attracting a.s.sistance and devotion. His military administration created serious extravagance and confusion, and his personal intercourse excited the distrust and resentment of the governors and civilian officials, whose counsel and cooperation were essential to his usefulness and success.
While his resources were limited, and while he fortified St. Louis and reinforced Cairo, a yet more important point needed his attention and help. Lyon, who had followed Governor Jackson and General Price in their flight from Boonville to Springfield in southern Missouri, found his forces diminished beyond his expectation by the expiration of the term of service of his three months' regiments, and began to be threatened by a northward concentration of Confederate detachments from the Arkansas line and the Indian Territory. The neglect of his appeals for help placed him in the situation where he could neither safely remain inactive, nor safely retreat. He therefore took the chances of scattering the enemy before him by a sudden, daring attack with his five thousand effectives, against nearly treble numbers, in the battle of Wilson's Creek, at daylight on August 10. The casualties on the two sides were nearly equal, and the enemy was checked and crippled; but the Union army sustained a fatal loss in the death of General Lyon, who was instantly killed while leading a desperate bayonet charge. His skill and activity had, so far, been the strength of the Union cause in Missouri.
The absence of his counsel and personal example rendered a retreat to the railroad terminus at Rolla necessary. This discouraging event turned public criticism sharply upon Fremont. Loath to yield to mere public clamor, and averse to hasty changes in military command, Mr. Lincoln sought to improve the situation by sending General David Hunter to take a place on Fremont's staff.
”General Fremont needs a.s.sistance,” said his note to Hunter, ”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, and allows n.o.body 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?”
This note indicates, better than pages of description, the kind, helpful, and forbearing spirit with which the President, through the long four years' war, treated his military commanders and subordinates; and which, in several instances, met such ungenerous return. But even while Mr. Lincoln was attempting to smooth this difficulty, Fremont had already burdened him with two additional embarra.s.sments. One was a perplexing personal quarrel the general had begun with the influential Blair family, represented by Colonel Frank Blair, the indefatigable Unionist leader in Missouri, and Montgomery Blair, the postmaster-general in Lincoln's cabinet, who had hitherto been Fremont's most influential friends and supporters; and, in addition, the father of these, Francis P. Blair, Sr., a veteran politician whose influence dated from Jackson's administration, and through whose a.s.sistance Fremont had been nominated as presidential candidate in 1856.
The other embarra.s.sment was of a more serious and far-reaching nature.
Conscious that he was losing the esteem and confidence of both civil and military leaders in the West, Fremont's adventurous fancy caught at the idea of rehabilitating himself before the public by a bold political manoeuver. Day by day the relation of slavery to the Civil War was becoming a more troublesome question, and exciting impatient and angry discussion. Without previous consultation with the President or any of his advisers or friends, Fremont, on August 30, wrote and printed, as commander of the Department of the West, a proclamation establis.h.i.+ng martial law throughout the State of Missouri, and announcing that:
”All persons who shall be taken with arms in their hands within these lines shall be tried by court-martial, and if found guilty will be shot.
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 reason given in the proclamation for this drastic and dictatorial measure was to suppress disorder, maintain the public peace, and protect persons and property of loyal citizens--all simple police duties. For issuing his proclamation without consultation with the President, he could offer only the flimsy excuse that it involved two days of time to communicate with Was.h.i.+ngton, while he well knew that no battle was pending and no invasion in progress. This reckless misuse of power President Lincoln also corrected with his dispa.s.sionate prudence and habitual courtesy. He immediately wrote to the general:
”MY DEAR SIR: Two points in your proclamation of August 30 give me some anxiety:
”_First_. Should you shoot a man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best men in their hands, in retaliation; and so, man for man, indefinitely. It is, therefore, my order that you allow no man to be shot under the proclamation, without first having my approbation or consent.
”_Second_. I think there is great danger that the closing paragraph, 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 ent.i.tled, '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 a special messenger, in order that it may certainly and speedily reach you.”
But the headstrong general was too blind and selfish to accept this mild redress of a fault that would have justified instant displacement from command. He preferred that the President should openly direct him to make the correction. Admitting that he decided in one night upon the measure, he added: ”If I were to retract it of my own accord, it would imply that I myself thought it wrong, and that I had acted without the reflection which the gravity of the point demanded.” The inference is plain that Fremont was unwilling to lose the influence of his hasty step upon public opinion. But by this course he deliberately placed himself in an att.i.tude of political hostility to the administration.
The incident produced something of the agitation which the general had evidently counted upon. Radical antislavery men throughout the free States applauded his act and condemned the President, and military emanc.i.p.ation at once became a subject of excited discussion. Even strong conservatives were carried away by the feeling that rebels would be but properly punished by the loss of their slaves. To Senator Browning, the President's intimate personal friend, who entertained this feeling, Mr.
Lincoln wrote a searching a.n.a.lysis of Fremont's proclamation and its dangers:
”Yours of the seventeenth is just received; and, coming from you, I confess it astonishes me. That you should object to my adhering to a law which you had a.s.sisted in making and presenting to me, less than a month before, is odd enough. But this is a very small part. General Fremont'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 law-makers, and not by military proclamations. The proclamation in the point in question is simply 'dictators.h.i.+p.' It a.s.sumes 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 cannot a.s.sume this reckless position, nor allow others to a.s.sume 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 United States--any government of const.i.tution 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, pa.s.s 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 exercize the permanent legislative functions of the government.
”So much as to principle. Now as to policy. No doubt the thing was popular in some quarters, and would have been more so if it had been a general declaration of emanc.i.p.ation. The Kentucky legislature would not budge till that proclamation was modified; and General Anderson telegraphed me that on the news of General Fremont having actually issued deeds of manumission, a whole company of our volunteers threw down their arms and disbanded. I was so a.s.sured as to think it probable that the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us.
I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.
Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capital.”
If it be objected that the President himself decreed military emanc.i.p.ation a year later, then it must be remembered that Fremont's proclamation differed in many essential particulars from the President's edict of January 1, 1863. By that time, also, the entirely changed conditions justified a complete change of policy; but, above all, the supreme reason of military necessity, upon which alone Mr. Lincoln based the const.i.tutionality of his edict of freedom, was entirely wanting in the case of Fremont.
The harvest of popularity which Fremont evidently hoped to secure by his proclamation was soon blighted by a new military disaster. The Confederate forces which had been united in the battle of Wilson's Creek quickly became disorganized through the disagreement of their leaders and the want of provisions and other military supplies, and mainly returned to Arkansas and the Indian Territory, whence they had come. But General Price, with his Missouri contingent, gradually increased his followers, and as the Union retreat from Springfield to Rolla left the way open, began a northward march through the western part of the State to attack Colonel Mulligan, who, with about twenty-eight hundred Federal troops, intrenched himself at Lexington on the Missouri River. Secession sympathy was strong along the line of his march, and Price gained adherents so rapidly that on September 18 he was able to invest Mulligan's position with a somewhat irregular army numbering about twenty thousand. After a two days' siege, the garrison was compelled to surrender, through the exhaustion of the supply of water in their cisterns. The victory won, Price again immediately retreated southward, losing his army almost as fast as he had collected it, made up, as it was, more in the spirit and quality of a sudden border foray than an organized campaign.
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