Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [253]
Lincoln learned of Frémont’s proclamation by reading it in the newspapers along with the rest of the nation. With this announcement, Frémont had unilaterally recast the struggle to preserve the Union as a war against slavery, a shift that the president believed would lead Kentucky and the border states to join the Confederacy. Lincoln wrote a private letter to Frémont, expressing his “anxiety” on two points: “First, should you shoot a man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation; and so, man for man, indefinitely.” Even more troubling, he saw “great danger” in “liberating slaves of traiterous owners,” a move that would certainly “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 recent Confiscation Act of Congress. Lincoln was anxious that Frémont change the language of his own accord, so that the president would not be officially forced to override him. He understood that if the controversy became public, radical Republicans, whose loyalty was crucial to his governing coalition, might side with Frémont rather than with him.
Moreover, as Lincoln later explained to Orville Browning, “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.” As chief executive, he could not allow a general in the field to determine the “permanent future condition” of slaves. Seward fully supported Lincoln on principle as well as policy. “The trouble with Fremont was, that he acted without authority from the President,” Seward later maintained. “The President could permit no subordinate to assume a responsibility which belonged only to himself.”
Lincoln’s fears about the reaction to Frémont’s proclamation in the border states were justified. Within days, frantic letters reached Washington from Unionists in Kentucky. Joshua Speed wrote to Lincoln that Frémont’s proclamation had left him “unable to eat or sleep—It will crush out every vestage of a union party in the state—I perhaps & a few others will be left alone.” He reminded his old friend that there were “from 180 to 200000 slaves” in Kentucky, of whom only 20,000 belonged to rebels. “So fixed is public sentiment in this state against freeing negroes & allowing negroes to be emancipated & remain among us,” he continued, “that you had as well attack the freedom of worship in the north or the right of a parent to teach his child to read—as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.”
Meanwhile, events in Missouri took a strange turn. On September 1, the same day that Frémont made his proclamation public, Colonel Frank Blair penned a long letter to his brother, Montgomery, that would lead to the colonel’s arrest and imprisonment two weeks later. “I know that you and I are both in some sort responsible for Fremonts appointment,” he admitted, but “my decided opinion is that he should be relieved of his command.” Blair was not reacting to the proclamation, as was assumed by contemporaries and historians alike. On the contrary, he told Monty he agreed with the proclamation, believing that stringent measures, including the liberation of slaves, were necessary to dispel the illusions of impunity the marauding bands of rebel guerrillas seemed to harbor. He wished only that the proclamation had been issued earlier, when Frémont “had the power to enforce it & the enemy no power to retaliate.”
But since Frémont had taken command, Frank told his brother, the situation in Missouri had grown increasingly desperate. Through “gross & inexcusable negligence,” the rebels had accumulated a substantial following. “Oh! for one hour of our dead Lyon,” he lamented, adding that many now ascribed Lyon’s death to Frémont’s failure