this document, say that the President made the first notes of this "policy" while men were bringing him news of the disaster.

1. Let the plan for making the blockade effective be pushed forward with all possible dispatch.

2. Let the volunteer forces at Fort Monroe and vicinity under General Butler be constantly drilled, disciplined, and instructed without more for the present.

3. Let Baltimore be held as now, with a gentle but firm and certain hand.

4. Let the force now under Patterson or Banks be strengthened and made secure in its position.

5. Let the forces in Western Virginia act till further orders according to instructions or orders from General McClellan.

6. Let General Frémont push forward his organization and operations in the West as rapidly as possible, giving rather special attention to Missouri.

7. Let the forces late before Manassas, except the three months' men, be reorganized as rapidly as possible in their camps here and about Arlington.

8. Let the three months' forces who decline to enter the longer service be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will permit.

9. Let the new volunteer forces be brought forward as fast as possible; and especially into the camps on the two sides of the river here.

July 27, 1861.

When the foregoing shall be substantially attended to: 1. Let Manassas Junction (or some point on one or other of the railroads near it) and Strasburg be seized, and permanently held, with an open line from Washington to Manassas, and an open line from Harper's Ferry to Strasburg— the military men to find the way of doing these.

2. This done, a joint movement from Cairo on Memphis; and from Cincinnati on East Tennessee.

It was to points 7, 8 and 9 of the above memorandum that the President gave his first attention.

Congress, prostrated as it was by the unexpected defeat, stood by Lincoln bravely, voting him men and money. Resources he was not going to lack. The confidence of the country was what he needed. To stimulate this confidence, Mr. Lincoln and his advisers summoned to Washington, on July 22, George B. McClellan, the only man who had thus far accomplished anything in the war on which the North looked with pride, and asked him to take the command of the demoralized army. A more effective move could not have been made.

McClellan was a West Point graduate who had seen serv ice in the Mexican War, but who, in the spring of 1861 held a position as a railroad president. His home was in Cincinnati. After the fall of Sumter the fear of invasion spread rapidly westward from Washington. On April 21 the Governor of Ohio wired the Secretary of War that he desired a suitable United States officer to be detailed at once to take command of the volunteers of Cincinnati and to provide for the defense of that city, and the next day several leading men wired that the "People of Cincinnati" wished Captain McClellan to be appointed to the position.

A month later, when West Virginia had decided to stay with the Union and Eastern Virginia had decided to coerce her to remain with the South, McClellan, who had been put in charge of the Ohio troops as his friends requested, was ordered to protect the Unionists of the section against the Southern army. Early in July he undertook an offensive campaign against the enemy, completely driving him from the country in less than three weeks. McClellan announced his victories in a series of addresses which thrilled the North. They saw in him a great general, a second Napoleon and were satisfied when he was put in charge of the army that the disgrace of Bull Run would be speedily wiped out.

While occupied in reorganizing and increasing the army,

Mr. Lincoln did his best to improve the morale of officers and men. One of the first things he did, in fact, after the battle was to "run over and see the boys," as he expressed it. General Sherman, who was with Mr. Lincoln as he drove about the camps on this visit, says that he made one of the "neatest, best, and most feeling addresses " he ever listened to, and that its effect on the troops was "excellent.'" As often as he could after this, Mr. Lincoln went to the Arlington camps. Frequently in these visits he left his carriage and walked up and down the lines shaking hands with the men, repeating heartily as he did so, "God bless you, God bless you." Before a month had passed, he saw that under McClellan's training the Army of the Potomac, as it had come to be called, had recovered almost completely from the panic of Bull Run, and that it was growing every day in efficiency. But scarcely had his anxiety over the condition of things around Washington been allayed, before a grave problem was raised in the West. The severest criticisms began to come to him on the conduct of a man whom he had made a major-general and whom he had put in command of the important Western division, John C. Frémont. The force of these criticisms was intensified by serious disasters to the Union troops in Missouri.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE FAILURE OF FREMONT LINCOLN'S FIRST DIFFICULTIES WITH MCCLELLAN-THE DEATH OF WILLIE LINCOLN

THE most popular military appointment Lincoln made be fore McClellan was that of John C. Frémont to the command of the Department of the West. Republicans appreciated it, for had not Frémont been the first candidate of their party for the Presidency? The West was jubilant : Frémont's explorations had years before made him the hero of the land along the Mississippi. The cabinet was satisfied, particularly Postmaster-General Blair, whose "pet and protégé" Frémont was. Lincoln himself "thought well of Frémont," believed he could do the work to be done; and he had already had experience enough to discern that his great trouble was to be, not finding major-generals—he had more pegs than holes to put them in, he said one day—but finding major-generals who could do the thing they were ordered to do.

Frémont had gone to his headquarters at St. Louis, Mis- \ souri, late in July. Before a month had passed, the gravest charges of incompetency and neglect of duty were being made against him. It was even intimated to the President that the General was using his position to work up a Northwestern Confederacy.* Mr. Lincoln had listened to all these

* Dr. Emil Preetorius, editor of the "Westliche Post" of St. Louis, Mo., said of this charge, in an interview for this work: “I know that Frémont gave no countenance to any scheme which others may have conceived for the establishment of a Northwestern Confederacy. I had abundant proof, through the years that I knew him, that he was a patriot and a most unselfish man. The defect in Frémont was that he was a dreamer. Impractical, visionary things went a long way with him. He was a poor judge of men and formed strange associations. He surrounded himself with foreigners, especially Hungarians, most of whom

charges, but taken no action, when, on the morning of August 30, he was amazed to read it in his newspaper that Frémont had issued a proclamation declaring, among other things, that the property, real and personal, of all the persons in the State of Missouri who should take up arms against the United States, or who should be directly proved to have taken an active part with its enemies in the field, would be confiscated to public use and their slaves, if they had any, declared freemen.

Frémont's proclamation astonished the country as much as it did the President. In the North it elicited almost universal satisfaction. This was striking at the root of the trouble-slavery. But in the Border States, particularly in Kentucky, the Union party was dismayed. The only possible method of keeping those sections in the Union was not to interfere with slavery. Mr. Lincoln saw this as clearly as his Border State supporters. It was well known that this was his policy. He felt that Frémont had not only defied the policy of the administration, he had usurped power which belonged only to the legislative part of the government. He had a good excuse for reprimanding the general, even for removing him. Instead, he wrote him, on September 2, a most kindly letter:

I think there is great danger that the closing paragraph [of the proclamation], in relation to the confiscation of property and the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will

were adventurers and some of whom were swindlers. I struggled hard to persuade him not to let these men have so much to do with his administration. Mrs. Frémont, unlike the General, was most practical. She was fond of success. She and the General were alike, however, in their notions of the loyalty due between friends. Once, when I protested against the character of the men who surrounded Frémont, she replied: Do you know these very men went out with us on horseback when we took possession of the Mariposa? They risked their lives for us. Now we can't go back on them.' It was the woman's feeling. She forgot that brave men may sometimes be downright thieves and robbers"