This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [43]
Frémont’s objectives were two: to catch and destroy the Confederate army, and then to capture Memphis as a step toward New Orleans. Remote as Washington was, it was obvious even in the White House that he was never going to do either of these things, the way he was going. So to one of his subordinate officers in St. Louis, late in October, there came from Washington a sealed packet with instructions to get it into Frémont’s hands as quickly as possible.
But Lincoln had made this delivery subject to one condition — an extremely interesting one for the light it sheds on Lincoln’s attitude, even at that stage of the war, toward an erring strategist. If, when the messenger reached Frémont, “he shall then have, in personal command, fought and won a battle, or shall then be actually in a battle, or shall then be in the immediate presence of the enemy in expectation of a battle,” the envelope was not to be delivered; instead, the messenger was to keep it and check back for further instructions.18 Lincoln had had enough, in other words, but if Frémont would actually get into a full-dress fight all would be forgiven.… Then and throughout the war, inability to get in close and fight was the one trait in a general that Lincoln could not forgive. One good battle could always cover a multitude of military sins.
The messenger took off. Because it was commonly understood in St. Louis that Frémont had made arrangements to keep any order of recall from reaching him, the messenger was disguised as a Missouri farmer and was under orders to follow a little stratagem. He presented himself at Frémont’s camp and told the sentries that he was a messenger with information for the general from within the Rebel lines. He got at last to some of Frémont’s staff officers, who told him he could not see the general but could give them any information he had. He refused to do this — what he had to tell the general was for the general’s own ears — and after a whole day of this the staff finally decided that he was harmless and took him to Frémont’s tent. There the man produced the envelope and handed it over. Frémont opened it, asked wrathfully how this person had ever got through his lines, and read the bad news: over the signature of Winfield Scott, he was ordered to turn over his command to his ranking officer — a surly regular named David Hunter, who had long been convinced of Frémont’s total ineffectiveness — after which he was to report to Washington, by letter, to see if anybody had any further orders for him.19
For the time being, at least, the Pathfinder had come to the end of the trail.
3. He Must Be Willing to Fight
There had been the romantic General Frémont, and there still was the romantic General McClellan. In addition there was General U. S. Grant, who was not romantic at all — a stooped, rather scrubby little man whom nobody in particular had ever heard of — and the war was giving him a chance to make a modest new start in life.
In a way, Frémont was responsible for him. Grant had gone off to war that spring as colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry, which put in a month or two in the summer guarding railroads in eastern Missouri, and he had been promoted chiefly because the inscrutable ways of Republican party politics entitled an Illinois congressman named Elihu B. Washburne to name one brigadier general. Washburne knew Grant and liked him and sent in his name; and somewhat to his surprise — for he had had a hard time getting into the war at all, that spring — Grant became a general. And what Frémont had done for him was to lift him out of a railroad-guarding billet in Missouri and give him command of the military District of southeastern Missouri, whose headquarters were in Cairo.
Like Grant himself, Cairo was more