This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [38]
2. Trail of the Pathfinder
Frémont tried to meet the immediate threats first, and here he did perhaps as well as anyone could have done under the difficult circumstances.
The big thing, of course, was to hold the river. Frémont began by going up to take a look at all-important Cairo. He learned to his horror that although the Federal garrison there consisted of eight regiments, six of them were ninety-day detachments that were due to go home. Of the balance, nearly everyone was sick, nobody had ever drawn any pay, morale had almost entirely vanished, and all in all there were but six hundred men on duty under arms.
In one way or another he scraped together thirty-eight hundred troops and got them up to Cairo. He saw to it that enough men were sent to the northeastern counties of Missouri to suppress secessionist outbreaks there, and with the help of the German irregulars (with whom his name had powerful magic) he held onto St. Louis. All of this was good, but it did mean that no reinforcements could be sent to Nathaniel Lyon in Springfield, so the blazing little man with the red whiskers took the path that led him down to the smoky bottom lands along Wilson’s Creek. Flushed with their triumph, the Rebels who had killed him went surging up the western part of the state, pinching off and capturing a Union force of thirty-five hundred men at Lexington. But at least St. Louis and the river were secure.1
Now it was up to Frémont to collect his forces and squelch all of this secessionist activity; but first he had to get organized, and the assignment might easily have dismayed a much abler man. Frémont had been calling frantically for reinforcements, and midwestern governors were sending regiments to St. Louis as fast as they could be mustered in — men without tents or blankets, many of them without uniforms or weapons, nearly all of them completely untrained. With these necessitous thousands arriving week after week the army’s purchase and supply arrangements in St. Louis were swamped. The War Department was too busy outfitting McClellan’s army to be very helpful, and anyway, Washington was a long way off. Frémont needed everything from tugboats and mules to hardtack and artillery, and he had been told to look out for himself.
If it was a prosaic job, he at least gave it the romantic touch. The commanding general’s headquarters were soon famous as a place of unrestrained pomp and spectacle. It seemed to Frémont that he needed officers, and he began to hand out commissions generously, overlooking the rule that officers’ commissions could legally come only from the President. Foreign adventurers of high and low degree began to blossom out in blue uniforms with gold braid and sashes, and the problems of Missouri were analyzed and argued in all the tongues of middle Europe. An émigré Hungarian officer named Zagonyi showed up as organizer of a crack cavalry guard, explaining in high pidgin English: “Was the intention now to form a body of picked men, each to be an officer. As was raised regiments, could be taken from this corps well-trained officers.” Another émigré Hungarian, General Asboth, scoffed at the call for tents: “Is no need of tents. In Hungary we make a winter campaign and we sleep without tents, our feet to the fire — and sometimes our ears did freeze.” Needing a bandmaster, Frémont took a musician from a local theater, commissioned him as captain of engineers, and put him in charge of headquarters music. There were guards and sentries everywhere, and a surgeon sent from the East to join Frémont’s staff learned that he could not get near the commanding general. He found Frémont making a speech to admiring Germans from the balcony of the building, and when the speech ended saw Frémont “surrounded