Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [256]
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