This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [42]
It was beginning to be pretty clear by now that in a military sense nothing much was apt to be accomplished in Missouri under Frémont. The Confederates themselves were the first to catch on; a bit later their Secretary of War was to write contemptuously of Frémont, “whose incompetency, well known to us, was a guarantee against immediate peril.”14 From the War Department in Washington came a top-level mission to look into the charges of graft and corruption that were piling up around the St. Louis headquarters. (The mission found much real waste and mismanagement, much probable graft, but no dishonesty involving Frémont personally; the man was a romantic made dizzy by his own altitude and dazzled by his own reputation, but he was never a grafter.) Meanwhile the break between Frémont and the Blair family became complete. Ever since Frank Blair and Schofield had paid their visit Blair had considered Frémont a dithering incompetent. In return, Frémont looked on Blair as an unscrupulous alcoholic, and he presently put him under arrest for insubordination. Rookie soldiers of the 16th Ohio Artillery, marking time disconsolately because Frémont was unable to provide them with any cannon, were assigned to stand guard over Blair’s tent. They found him a pleasant sort of prisoner; one rainy night he even invited the soldier who was guarding him to come into the tent and have a drink, and he appears to have been mildly shocked when the soldier virtuously refused.15
Only one thing could keep Frémont in command: a speedy and decisive victory over a Confederate army in the field. This Frémont set out to achieve. He had plenty of troops by mid-September, and if all sorts of equipment were still lacking there was enough to get moving. (After all, in Hungary the revolutionists had campaigned without tents; and, as Jessie recorded, it was considered that the army could seize cattle and corn along the way and so could move without an extensive supply train.) So by the early part of October an army of forty thousand men set off for southwest Missouri, where the Rebel forces were somewhat loosely concentrated under Sterling Price. Frémont was still thinking in terms of the capture of New Orleans, and he wrote to Jessie (who was in effective charge of army headquarters at St. Louis) that this “would precipitate the war forward and end it soon and victoriously.”16
This it might possibly do. But the simple lack of know-how at the top was a fearful drag on the army’s movements and a depressant for army morale as well. The green soldiers could not help seeing that Frémont and his staff seemed much more concerned with military pomp and display than with the more prosaic business of keeping the army fed and moving. Full of enthusiasm though it was, the army began to feel that it was almost helpless — poor weapons, inadequate training, and bad leadership — and an Iowa soldier remarked that they were being led straight into the heart of the enemy’s country with “an inferior quality of unserviceable foreign-made guns, a lamentable lack of military method in the plans for the campaign, a want of confidence and harmony among the commanders who were to lead the army, and in many regiments discipline little better than that of an armed mob.” Illinois soldiers grumpily declared that the best they could say about this campaign in Missouri was that it was better than being in hell, and one volunteer wrote angrily about the failure of supplies and concluded: “If there ever was an empty, spread-eagle, show-off, horn-tooting general, it was Frémont.”17
With infinite effort the loose-jointed army plowed on down toward the southwest. Substantially outnumbered, the Confederates drew back from before them, and by the end of October Frémont had his troops in and around Springfield. A couple of incidental skirmishes, dignified in Frémont’s later reminiscences as “admirably conducted engagements” and “a glorious victory,” had been fought, but although Frémont believed he was on the verge of bringing the main Confederate force to battle the chance