This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [37]
It appears that fame went to his head. In the Mexican War he got into California in time to have a hand in detaching that territory from Mexico, and he enjoyed brief glory as an empire-builder; then, when the army sent a full-fledged general out to California to take charge, Frémont refused to obey his orders, and the army cracked down hard. Frémont was recalled to Washington, court-martialed, and dismissed from the service. To rebuild his reputation he led an expedition that was to find a route for a railroad from St. Louis to San Francisco. He elected to march into the worst of the Colorado Rockies in the bitterest winter the West had known in years, lost more than a fourth of his men through cold and starvation, saw the expedition evaporate completely, and went on to California by himself over the well-traveled southern route — and on his arrival found that the new gold rush had made him a multimillionaire, pay dirt having been struck in quantity on a ranch he had bought a year or two earlier.
Then he became a senator, and in 1856 the new Republican party made him its first candidate for President, and the North throbbed to the drumbeat chant: Free soil, free men, Frémont! Clearly, he was a man the Republican administration had to reckon with, and he was one of the very first men to be commissioned as major general after Fort Sumter fell. (The date of the commission was extremely important, as far as rank was concerned, since a major general automatically outranked all other major generals whose commissions bore later dates than his.) When old General Harney was finally pulled out of St. Louis, Frémont seemed the obvious person to put in his place.
His job was fully as big as McClellan’s. He had command of what was called the Western Department — everything between the Mississippi and the Rockies, plus the state of Illinois, with the promise that Kentucky would be added as soon as Kentucky’s gossamer-thin neutrality was torn apart. He had the support of the powerful Blair family, and in a personal conference Lincoln had given him a broad charter of authority — “Use your own judgment and do the best you can” — and in general terms Frémont was responsible for saving the West and winning the Mississippi Valley for the Union.8
He received his assignment on July 3. It took him three weeks to get from Washington to St. Louis, since he went by way of New York and tarried there to attend to various business matters, and when he reached St. Louis late in July he found himself stepping into an uncommonly tough spot. The Confederates were putting on a big push to retake the state. In the south and southwest they had perhaps as many as fifty thousand men under arms, with five thousand more ominously waiting at New Madrid, on the river, and an undetermined number consiscrated somewhere in western Tennessee. It was believed that a Confederate army of ten thousand was about to attack Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio joins the Mississippi. (At that moment there was probably no spot in the United States, outside of Washington itself, whose retention was more vital to the Union than Cairo.) The northeastern counties of Missouri were boiling with guerrilla bands whose night ridings and bridge burnings seemed likely to spill all the way over into Iowa if they were not checked, and St. Louis itself was full of Rebel sympathizers who would seize the city if they had half a chance.
To deal with all of this Frémont had in his command just twenty-three thousand men, more than a third of whom were ninety-day soldiers who were about to go home. He had no arms or equipment for any new troops, the military war chest was about empty, and it developed that the government’s credit in St. Louis was exhausted.9
Altogether, it was a situation in which the Federal commander