This Hallowed Ground (12 page)

To a general who was trying to improvise command arrangements in a hurry — a general known in Europe as a fighter for freedom, his name a magnet to displaced revolutionaries, titled idealists, and plain adventure-seekers — much could be forgiven. Yet the broken-English bustle and gold-laced glitter, the sheer ostentatious foreignness around headquarters, made a queer contrast with unvarnished Missouri reality, and what Frémont had surrounded himself with was sharply out of key with the men he commanded. Frémont’s army was not an army at all, as a European would understand the word. It was just the Middle West, unexpectedly in uniform and under arms, getting ready in its own way to take charge of a little history.

It was, for instance, the 43rd Ohio, whose members in their camp by the Mississippi found life dull and felt homesick for something that would remind them of familiar things back in Ohio and so built birdhouses out of cracker boxes and nailed them to trees and posts all around, attracting a huge population of martins; and the regiment for the rest of the war was known as the Martin Box Regiment, all through the western armies.
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It was the 8th Wisconsin Infantry, parading before a general under an officer not long off the farm. Passing the general, the column was supposed to swing to the right, but its commander found himself suddenly unable to think of the proper command and so in desperation at last bawled out: “Gee! God damn it,
gee!”
Farmers to a man, the regiment understood and made the right turn snappily enough; but the general did ask the officer afterward if he customarily steered his command about as if it were a team of oxen.
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It was the 15th Illinois, restless in a Missouri outpost, complaining angrily about the colonel who commanded the post because, outranking the 15th’s own colonel, he ordered a detail from the regiment to clean his own regiment’s camp. They had not, said the 15th, enlisted to do
menial labor like so many slaves, and they would not on any account do it. They protested so stoutly that the colonel at last shrugged and canceled his order, but for some months thereafter the 15th had no use for him. His name, as it happened, was Ulysses S. Grant.
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It was the 51st Indiana, which liked to yell just because it was young and yelling was fun, and set the pattern for the whole army. A veteran recalled that the 51st yelled at everything it saw or heard, and added: “When another regiment passed, they yelled at them; they scared the darkies almost to death, with their yelling; as they tumbled out to roll-call in the morning, they yelled; as they marched out of camp their voices went up in a muscular whoop; when they returned, after a hard day’s scouting, they were never too tired to yell. If a mule broke loose and ran away his speed was accelerated by a volley of yells all along the line; and if a dog happened to come their way they made it livelier for him than could the most resonant tin can that ever adorned his tail. Indeed, our whole army was blessed with this remarkable faculty. Sometimes a yell would start in at one end of the division, and regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade would take it up and carry it along; then send it back to the other end; few knowing what it was about, or caring.”
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 … Into St. Louis toward the end of August came a plump balding young regular army officer, Major John M. Schofield, who had been Lyon’s chief of staff; a serious-minded officer deeply interested in physics, whose spare-time pursuit it was to try to “work out the mathematical interpretation of all the phenomena of physical science, including electricity and magnetism,” and who was approaching now to tell the commanding general about what had happened at Wilson’s Creek. Schofield came to headquarters with Frank Blair (who owned a colonel’s commission by now), and after some delay the two were admitted to Frémont’s presence. To their surprise, Frémont asked not a question about the recent battle or about Lyon. Instead he led them to a big map spread out on a table and for a solid hour he talked enthusiastically about the great campaign he was going to have just as soon as he got everything ready — a march down through southwestern Missouri and Arkansas to the valley of the Arkansas River, a swing thence to the Mississippi, and eventually the capture of Memphis. This would turn all of the Rebel defenses on the lower river, the Confederate armies would be scattered, and the watchword for Frémont’s command this fall and winter would be: “New Orleans, and home again by summer!”

Somewhat dazed, Schofield and Blair got out at last and went off down the street. Blair finally asked the inevitable question: “Well, what do you think of him?” Schofield took a deep breath and replied in
words which, he confessed later, were too strong to print. Blair nodded and said that he felt the same way himself.
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It was an evil omen for Frémont. Missouri was a Blair fief, as far as the administration in Washington was concerned. Blair had struck the first blow there; he had raised Lyon from infantry captain to brigadier general and he had had distinguished General Harney deposed. The commander in St. Louis, whatever else he might do, had better show that he could get along with the Blair family. Frémont had come to St. Louis with Blair support, but he had already lost some of it. During the next few weeks he was to show a positive genius for losing all the rest of it.

For one thing, there were contracts to be signed. Of necessity, Frémont was buying enormous quantities of goods — doing it in a most irregular manner, the old-line quartermasters complained, with improperly commissioned officers signing orders that no right-minded quartermaster or disbursing officer could honor, and with rumors of graft and waste and favoritism spreading all across the Middle West. This was bad, although in view of the general disorganization and the imperative need for haste, it is probable that no officer in Frémont’s position could have avoided trouble. What was worse, as far as Frémont’s personal fortunes were concerned, was the fact that the innumerable contractors who bore Frank Blair’s endorsement could not seem to get aboard the gravy train at any price. Blair’s rising distaste for Frémont began to harden into active opposition.
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Then, too, there was Jessie.

Jessie was Mrs. Frémont — Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of the famous Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a strong-minded and imperious woman who was completely devoted to her husband’s advancement and who was used to having her own way. She was often in view at headquarters; she liked to be there, she found it “a stirring, eager, hopeful time,” and she liked to see the halls and offices “humming with life and the clank and ring of sabre and spur.” She worked with her husband, a cross between confidential secretary and executive assistant. When he was away Jessie actually seemed to be in charge of the army, and she wrote fondly of her husband’s habit of “referring all manner of work and duties to me as acting principal in his absence.” She would issue orders in his name, and he would send messages to her: “Thank you for the sabres and guns; send any such things forward as best you can.” She shared his belief that a great victory was in the making. To her he confided: “My plan is New Orleans straight … I think it can be done gloriously.”
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It could be done gloriously. The adverb was to be emphasized; war was still a matter of romance and great words, it went to “the clank and
ring of sabre and spur,” officers with golden sashes and foreign titles swung naturally in the orbit of the daring Pathfinder, and if the Pathfinder and his wife felt impelled to take the general direction of things out of the hands of the President in Washington, the times were, as General Scott had admitted, revolutionary. Also, the general had once been a candidate for Lincoln’s own office, he was still the great hero of the anti-slavery men, and anyway, it was time to give tone and definition to the nation’s war aims. General Frémont must issue a proclamation.

General Frémont did so, on August 30; a turgid document, issued on a to-whom-it-may-concern basis, composed the night before by an inspired general by the midnight oil, cups of strong tea at hand. It announced that rebellion in Missouri would be put down with a heavy hand. Martial law was proclaimed, enemies of the Union found with arms in their hands inside the Union lines would be shot, and the slaves of all Missourians who favored secession were declared to be free men. Immediate emancipation, in short, was to be the price of rebellion.
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Admittedly the situation was confused. Mrs. Frémont had written that “St. Louis was the rebel city of a rebel state,” and it was easy for a Federal commander there — reflecting that the devoutly anti-slavery Germans were the hard core of loyalist support — to feel that the war needed to be put on an anti-slavery basis. Yet Missouri was not in fact a Rebel state. It had flatly refused to become one. Lyon could never have got away with his high-handed program if it had not, somewhere and somehow, touched majority opinion. Nor was St. Louis necessarily a Rebel city. The 8th Wisconsin Infantry, equipped by its native state with uniforms of gray instead of blue, was showered with bricks, eggs, dead cats, and other things when it disembarked there that fall and marched through the streets to its barracks; the citizens mistook it for a Confederate regiment and would have none of it, and the mob scene ended only when the soldiers remembered that they were carrying overcoats of proper Union blue and put them on in spite of the heat.
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Indeed, the whole point of everything that had happened in the border states thus far was the demonstration that a deep, mystic feeling for an undivided country did exist and that even in slave territory it could rise above all other feelings. Men who would have no part of an attempt to fight against slavery would take up arms to fight for the Union. By his proclamation Frémont was in effect telling them that they were wrong, was saying that the whole of Lincoln’s winning gamble along the border was a mistake that had to be canceled.

From Washington to St. Louis came a hurry-up message for Frémont
over Abraham Lincoln’s signature. The business of shooting civilians would lead to reprisals of indefinite extent and was altogether too risky: therefore, the general would execute no one without referring the case to Washington and getting specific authority. Also, the emancipation proclamation would probably cancel out the substantial patches of Union sentiment in the South and along the border and “perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” Would not the general, therefore, voluntarily withdraw it?
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Frémont would not. He had thought this up by himself, he had done it because he believed it to be right, he still felt that way about it, and if he took it back now it would look as though he were admitting an error. He would withdraw the offending proclamation only if the President publicly ordered him to do so. Having put all of this down on paper, Frémont sealed the letter, gave it to Jessie, and told her to set out for Washington at once and deliver it personally to President Lincoln.

Thus far into unreality could posturing and a sense of drama carry a man. Jessie made the trip and had what appears to have been an extremely unpleasant interview; for the man she met in the White House was not the kindly sentimentalist of legend but a coldly furious executive who was not going to let any general, not even one whose fame exceeded his own, tell him how to shape the top policy of the war. He greeted her with a cold “Well?” and did not invite her to sit down. She gave him the letter, argued her husband’s case, and hinted broadly that if the people had to choose between Lincoln and Frémont they would choose Frémont. Then she left, and off to St. Louis went the orders Frémont had specified: orders from the President, revoking the premature proclamation of emancipation.
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It was beginning to be pretty clear by now that in a military sense nothing much was apt to be accomplished in Missouri under Frémont. The Confederates themselves were the first to catch on; a bit later their Secretary of War was to write contemptuously of Frémont, “whose incompetency, well known to us, was a guarantee against immediate peril.”
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From the War Department in Washington came a top-level mission to look into the charges of graft and corruption that were piling up around the St. Louis headquarters. (The mission found much real waste and mismanagement, much probable graft, but no dishonesty involving Frémont personally; the man was a romantic made dizzy by his own altitude and dazzled by his own reputation, but he was never a grafter.) Meanwhile the break between Frémont and the Blair family became complete. Ever since Frank Blair and Schofield had paid their visit Blair had considered Frémont a dithering incompetent. In return, Frémont looked on Blair as an unscrupulous alcoholic, and
he presently put him under arrest for insubordination. Rookie soldiers of the 16th Ohio Artillery, marking time disconsolately because Frémont was unable to provide them with any cannon, were assigned to stand guard over Blair’s tent. They found him a pleasant sort of prisoner; one rainy night he even invited the soldier who was guarding him to come into the tent and have a drink, and he appears to have been mildly shocked when the soldier virtuously refused.
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Only one thing could keep Frémont in command: a speedy and decisive victory over a Confederate army in the field. This Frémont set out to achieve. He had plenty of troops by mid-September, and if all sorts of equipment were still lacking there was enough to get moving. (After all, in Hungary the revolutionists had campaigned without tents; and, as Jessie recorded, it was considered that the army could seize cattle and corn along the way and so could move without an extensive supply train.) So by the early part of October an army of forty thousand men set off for southwest Missouri, where the Rebel forces were somewhat loosely concentrated under Sterling Price. Frémont was still thinking in terms of the capture of New Orleans, and he wrote to Jessie (who was in effective charge of army headquarters at St. Louis) that this “would precipitate the war forward and end it soon and victoriously.”
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