Terrible Swift Sword Read Free Page B

in the dusk, neighbor ambushing neighbor,
hayrick and barn blazing up at midnight with a drum of hoofbeats on a lonely
lane to tell the story, or a firing squad killing a bridge-burner for a warning
to the lawless. The separate scenes were monstrous, confusing, ever-changing;
put together, they might make something planned neither in Washington nor in
Richmond.
    2.
A Mean-Fowt Fight
    John Charles Fremont brought to Missouri
a great reputation, a brand-new commission as major general, and a formidable
set of abilities which did not quite meet the demands that Missouri was about
to make. He entered the Civil War at the precise place where it wore its most
baffling aspect, and although he presently saw with tolerable clarity what
needed to be done he knew hardly anything about the way to go about doing it.
He was famous as The Pathfinder, the man who had charted trails across the
untracked West; he had been the first presidential candidate of the new
Republican party in 1856, helping to make another sort of trail into an even
more trackless wilderness; and now he was in Missouri, a bewildering jungle
where a trail could be blazed only by a man gifted with a profound
understanding of the American character, the talents of a canny politician, and
enormous skill as an administrator. Of these gifts General Fremont had hardly
a trace.
    Perhaps nobody really understood what
was going on in Missouri, and the fault was partly Nathaniel Lyon's. Lyon was
like a sword—hard, narrow, and sharp—and he had gone slashing through the
complex loyalties of this border state so vigorously that almost everyone was
adrift. A captain in the Regular Army, exercising a highly irregular authority
and leading troops which were almost equally irregular, he had in May
surrounded, captured, and disarmed a contingent of Missouri state militia
legally camped in a St. Louis suburb, with subsequent gunfire and the killing
of sundry civilians. Then, elevated abruptly to the position of brigadier
general, Lyon had in effect declared war on the governor of the state, secessionist-minded
Claiborne Jackson, driving that functionary off toward the Ozarks and occupying
Jefferson City, the state capital. Missouri had not seceded—could not really
secede, now, because all of the machinery of state government was gripped by
the Federal power—and a majority of its people almost certainly had been
Unionists, at least to a degree, from the start. The state probably would have
stayed in the Union in any case, but Lyon took no chances. He kept thinking, no
doubt, of a fact which greatly worried hard-drinking Frank Blair, the brother
of Lincoln's Postmaster General and son of that tough activist, Old Man Blair
of Maryland: Francis P. Blair,
Jr., Republican leader in Missouri and Lyon's principal sponsor. Blair
complained that one big problem was the presence of a great many good men
"who liked the Union very much but did not see the necessity of fighting
for it"; men who thought that "the best way to put down the rebellion
was to make a show of force but not to use it at all." Lyon believed in
using if, did use it, with the result that Missouri was divided into factions
and sub-factions, with almost everybody in the state apparently either making
war or preparing to make war —on his next-door neighbor, as often as not. 1
    This was what Fremont stepped into when
he reached St. Louis on July 25, and he can hardly be blamed if he found it
confusing. His responsibilities were broad, his means were limited, and the
crisis seemed immeasurable. He was supposed to safeguard Missouri and all the
Northwest, and he was also expected to organize, equip, and lead an army down
the Mississippi to New Orleans, reclaiming the great valley and reopening it to
commerce and breaking off the whole western part of the Confederacy. He had
about 23,000 troops, more than a third of which were three-months volunteers
whose terms were about to expire. Governors of the Western states were