Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Meanwhile, Meigs and Monty Blair had assessed affairs in Missouri and were heading home. Meigs had come to the clear conclusion that Frémont was not fit to command the Department of the West. “The rebels are killing and ravaging the Unionmen throughout the state,” he wrote; “great distress and alarm prevail; In St. Louis the leading people of the state complain that they cannot see him; he does not encourage the men to form regiments for defence.” Monty Blair agreed. After what he described to Lincoln as “a full & plain talk with Fremont,” he claimed that the general “Seems Stupefied & almost unconscious, & is doing absolutely nothing.” Rumors circulated that Frémont was an opium-eater. “No time is to be lost, & no mans feelings should be consulted,” Blair concluded.
The day after Monty Blair and Meigs departed for Washington, Frémont imprisoned Frank Blair, claiming that the letter he had written his brother on September 1 was an act of insubordination. By criticizing his commanding officer “with a view of effecting his removal,” Frank was guilty of conduct “unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”
Frémont and Jessie had concluded that the Blairs had betrayed them. Monty interceded, writing a conciliatory letter to Frémont that led to Frank’s release from jail. Frank insisted on fighting the charges, however, and was soon arrested again. Opinion in Missouri was equally divided between Frank Blair and General Frémont, each intent on destroying the other. General Scott had finally stepped in, ordering a suspension of Frank’s arrest and postponing the trial, which would never take place. But the quarrel between the two old allies would have serious consequences in the years ahead.
Lincoln’s public abrogation of Frémont’s proclamation produced a sigh of relief in the border states but, as Lincoln had apprehended, it profoundly disappointed radical Republicans and abolitionists. Only days earlier, Frances Seward had happily asked her sister, “Were you not pleased with Fremont’s proclamation?” Now Lincoln had once again dashed her hopes. In Chicago, Joseph Medill lamented that Lincoln’s letter “has cast a funeral gloom over our patriotic city…. It comes upon us like a killing June frost—which destroys the comming harvest. It is a
step backwards.”
Senator Ben Wade blamed Lincoln’s “poor white trash” background for his revolting decision, while Frederick Douglass despaired: “Many blunders have been committed by the Government at Washington during this war, but this, we think, is the largest of them all.”
While radicals hoping to make emancipation the war’s focus rallied behind Frémont, his antislavery credentials could not compensate for his flagrant mismanagement of the Department of the West. On September 18, Monty Blair and Meigs delivered their negative report to the cabinet. Still, Lincoln hesitated. The president “is determined to let Fremont have a chance to win the State of Missouri,” the frustrated postmaster general told Francis Blair, Sr. Bates, too, was irritated by the president’s lack of resolution. With much of his large family still in Missouri, Bates had followed the state’s troubles closely. He had spoken against Frémont on numerous occasions in the cabinet, certain that Frémont was doing “more damage to our cause than half a dozen of the ablest generals of the enemy can do.” Having assured Unionist friends in his home state that Frémont’s removal was imminent, Bates felt “distressed & mortified” by the president’s inaction.
Anxious about Missouri’s troubles and anguished by the illness of his wife, Julia, who had suffered a slight paralytic stroke, Bates uncharacteristically lashed out at Lincoln. “Immense mischief is caused by his lack of vim,” he wrote his brother-in-law, the former governor of Missouri; “he has no will, no power to command—He makes no body afraid of him. And hence discipline is relaxed, & stupid inanity takes the place of action.”
Frank Blair was more scathing in his criticisms of Lincoln and his cabinet. “I think God has made up his mind to ruin this nation,” he wrote his brother Monty. “The only way to save it is to kick that pack of old women who compose the Cabinet into the sea. I never since I was born imagined that such a lot of poltroons & apes could be gathered together from the four quarters of the Globe as Old Abe has succeeded in bringing together in his Cabinet.” His anger was focused on Seward and Cameron, and indirectly, of course, on Lincoln himself.
In fact, Lincoln had already dispatched Secretary of War Simon Cameron, accompanied by Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, to St. Louis to examine the situation once more and deliver, at his discretion, “a letter directing [Frémont] to surrender his command to the officer next below him.” When Cameron arrived in St. Louis, he talked with Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, who “spoke very freely of [Frémont’s] qualities and conduct” and warned the secretary of war that Missouri’s safety could be guaranteed only by the termination of Frémont’s command. Upon receiving the letter of dismissal, Frémont “was very much mortified.” He told Cameron that “he was now in pursuit of the enemy, whom he believed were now within his reach, and that to recall him at this moment would not only destroy him, but render his whole expenditure useless.” Cameron was swayed to withhold the order until he returned to Washington and talked with the president.
By this point, Lincoln had little doubt that Frémont should be discharged. In addition to the impressions of Meigs, Monty Blair, and Cameron, he had received a blistering report from Adjutant General Thomas detailing the sorry “constitution of Fremont’s army, its defective equipment and arming, its confusion and imbecility, its lack of transportation,” a catalogue of items leading to the unassailable conclusion that “its head is wholly incompetent and unsafe to be instructed with its management.” Yet Lincoln still “yielded to delay,” Bates angrily confided in his diary, holding Seward responsible when the president hesitated a few days longer. “The President still hangs in painful and mortyfying doubt,” Bates wrote. “And if we persist in this sort of impotent indecision, we are very likely to share his fate—and, worse than all,
deserve it.”
The Attorney General’s impatience was understandable, but Lincoln’s reasoning behind the delay was far shrewder than Bates realized. Two days after Bates made his angry entry, Lincoln dispatched his friend Leonard Swett to hand-carry a removal order to Frémont. Before Swett reached St. Louis, however, the War Department released the damning report of Adjutant General Thomas to the press. Published on October 31, the detailed report was considered by the
New York Times
“the most remarkable document that has seen the light since the beginning of the present war.” So damning were the revelations about Frémont, the
Times
continued, that it was mystifying why the Lincoln administration had allowed their publication.
In fact, the decision to publicize the report was both calculated and canny. By the time the message was delivered to Frémont, the public had been primed with powerful arguments for his dismissal. Had Lincoln acted earlier, people might have concluded that Frémont was sacrificed to the Blairs or, worse still, cashiered because of his proclamation emancipating the slaves. By leaking the facts in the report, Lincoln had adroitly prepared public opinion to support his decision.
When Swett reached Missouri, he wisely anticipated that Frémont would suspect his mission and refuse him entry into camp. So he gave the dismissal order to an army captain, who disguised himself as a farmer. With the document sewed into the lining of his coat, the messenger reached Frémont in person shortly after dawn on November 1, the same day that General Scott’s resignation was announced. When Frémont opened the order, the captain recalled, a “frown came over his brow, and he slammed the paper down on the table and exclaimed, ‘Sir, how did you get admission into my lines?’”
By November 2, when the news was made public, the general reaction was that Lincoln was “justified” in his decision. Frémont no longer had “apologists or defenders” in Washington, the correspondent for the
New York Times
wrote; “the evidences of his unfitness for command have naturally so accumulated here—the headquarters of the army—that no defence of him is possible.” The
Philadelphia Inquirer
agreed. “Slowly and reluctantly we are forced to the conviction that General Fremont is unequal to the command of the Western army. The report of Adjutant-General Thomas, which we publish this morning, settles the question in our judgment.” In an unusually pro-administration editorial, the Democratic
New York Herald
noted with approval that while “Lincoln is not the man to deal unjustly or ungenerously with any public officer,” his firing of Frémont “had become a public necessity, to which the President could no longer shut his eyes; and this tells the whole story.”
Even Chase had to admit that Lincoln had handled the tangled situation admirably. “I am thoroughly persuaded,” he wrote a friend, “that in all he has done [concerning] Gen. F. the Prest. has been guided by a true sense of publ[ic] duty.”
O
NE WEEK AFTER
the resignation of General Scott and the dismissal of General Frémont, the administration faced a pressing new dilemma. Seward had received word that the Confederacy had dispatched two prominent Southerners, James Mason and John Slidell, to England to argue its case for formal recognition. Seward hoped to intercept the Confederate ship carrying the two former senators, but they had escaped the Union blockade in Charleston and reached Cuba, where they boarded the
Trent,
a British mail ship. On November 8, Union captain Charles Wilkes, in command of an armed sloop, encountered the
Trent.
Acting without official orders, he fired a shot across the bow and then proceeded to search the vessel. When Mason and Slidell were found, they were courteously escorted back to the Union sloop
San Jacinto
and taken to prison at Fort Warren in Boston. The British ship was allowed to continue its journey.
Captain Wilkes became a national hero to a North desperate for good news. “We do not believe the American heart ever thrilled with more genuine delight than it did yesterday, at the intelligence of the capture of Messrs. Slidell and Mason,” the
New York Times
reported. “If we were to search the whole of Rebeldom, no persons so justly obnoxious to the North, could have been found.” Wilkes was fêted at Faneuil Hall in Boston, and a great banquet was given in his honor. Cameron appeared before a throng of happy Washingtonians and led “three cheers for Captain Wilkes.” Bates recorded “great and general satisfaction” in his diary, while Chase reportedly said he regretted only that the captain had not gone one step further and seized the British ship.
Lincoln, too, seemed pleased at first. In a letter to Edward Everett, he spoke happily of “the items of news coming in last week,” first the Union victory at Port Royal, and “then the capture of Mason & Slidell!” His gratification was soon mingled with anxiety, however, when Britain’s furious reaction to the incident became known. It took nearly three weeks for news of Mason and Slidell’s capture to reach London, but, as
The Times
reported, the “intelligence spread with wonderful rapidity.” The complex situation was promptly reduced to a slogan: “Outrage on the British flag—the Southern Commissioners Forcibly Removed From a British Mail Steamer.” The London press fulminated against the incident as an explicit violation of the law of nations, demanding “reparation and apology.” Fabricated details of the capture depicted a brutal removal of the Southern commissioners.
Looking to give the supposed transgression a face, the British press focused upon Seward. Though the secretary of state told British officials confidentially that Wilkes had “acted without any instructions from the Government,” thereby sparing the government “the embarrassment which might have resulted if the act had been specially directed by us,” he decided not to speak publicly on the matter. The first public response should come from the British government, Seward maintained. Seward’s silence troubled Thurlow Weed, whom Seward had sent to Europe as an unofficial representative. In one of his daily letters to Washington, Weed warned his oldest friend that “if the taking of the rebels from under the protection of the British flag was intended, and is avowed, and maintained,
it means war.”
Newspapers reported that steamers in every dockyard were being equipped with troops and supplies, ready to leave at the government’s order. The press continued “fanning the popular flame by promising to clear the sea of the American navy in a month; acknowledge the Southern Confederacy; and, by breaking the blockade, letting out cotton, and letting in British manufactures.” Secessionists in Europe, Weed reported, were “certainly jubilant.”
Moreover, Weed anxiously wrote, word circulated in “high places” that Seward hoped “to provoke a war with England for the purpose of getting Canada.” Animosity toward Seward was widespread, he continued, “how created or why, I know not. It has been skillfully worked. I was told yesterday, repeatedly, that I ought to write the President demanding your dismissal.”
Agitated by the vituperative attacks by the British press, Seward burst into Lincoln’s office on Sunday afternoon, December 15. Orville Browning, who was taking tea with the president at the time, dismissed Seward’s worries, insisting that England would not do “so foolish a thing” as to declare war. Lincoln was not so sure. He recalled a ferocious bulldog in his hometown. While neighbors convinced themselves that they had nothing to fear, one wise man observed: “I know the bulldog will not bite. You know he will not bite, but does the bulldog know he will not bite?”
The American press hounded Seward with questions about the affair, but both he and Lord Lyons, the British minister to Washington, remained silent as they awaited the official British response. On December 19, nearly six weeks after the initial incident, “Her Majesty’s Government” finally declared the seizure of the envoys from the British ship “an affront to the national honor,” which could be restored only if the prisoners were freed and returned to “British protection.” In addition, Britain demanded “a suitable apology for the aggression.” If the United States did not agree within a few days, Lyons and the entire British delegation were to pack up and return to Britain. Lyons carried the document to the secretary of state’s office, where he discussed the inflamed situation with Seward. Before presenting the document formally, he agreed to leave a copy so that the secretary and the president might have more time to consider their response. “You will perhaps be surprised to find Mr. Seward on the side of peace,” Lord Lyons wrote to the British foreign minister.