15. K. Marx. The Dismissal of Fremont
Fremont's dismissal from the post of Commander-in-Chief in Missouri forms a turning point in the history of the development of the American Civil War. Fremont has two great sins to expiate. He was the first candidate of the Republican Party for the presidential office (1856), and he is the first general of the North to have threatened the slaveholders with emancipation of slaves (August 30, 1861).(1) He remains, therefore, a rival of candidates for the presidency in the future and an obstacle to the makers of compromises in the present.
During the last two decades the singular practice developed in the United States of not electing to the presidency any man who occupied an authoritative position in his own party. The names of such men, it is true, were utilised for election demonstrations, but as soon as it came to actual business, they were dropped and replaced by unknown mediocrities of merely local influence. In this manner Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, etc., became Presidents. Likewise Abraham Lincoln. General Andrew Jackson was in fact the last President of the United States who owed his office to his personal importance, whilst all his successors owed it, on the contrary, to their personal unimportance.
In the election year 1860, the most distinguished names of the Republican Party were Fremont and Seward. Known for his adventures during the Mexican War,[104] for his intrepid explora-tion of California and his candidacy of 1856, Fremont was too striking a figure even to come under consideration as soon as it was no longer a question of a Republican demonstration, but of a Republican success. He did not, therefore, stand as a candidate. It was otherwise with Seward, a Republican Senator in the Congress of Washington, Governor of the State of New York and, since the rise of the Republican Party, unquestionably its leading orator. It required a series of mortifying defeats to induce Mr. Seward to renounce his own candidacy and to give his oratorical patronage to the then more or less unknown Abraham Lincoln. As soon, however, as he saw his attempt to stand as a candidate fail, he imposed himself as a Republican Richelieu on a man whom he considered a Republican Louis XIII. He contributed towards making Lincoln President, on condition that Lincoln made him Secretary of State, an office which is in some measure comparable with that of a British Prime Minister. As a matter of fact, Lincoln was hardly President-elect, when Seward secured the Secretaryship of State. Immediately a singular change took place in the attitude of the Demosthenes of the Republican Party, whom the prophesy-ing of the "irrepressible conflict"(2) between the system of free labour and the system of slavery had made famous.(3) Although elected on November 6, 1860, Lincoln took up office as President only on March 4, 1861. In the interval, during the winter session of Congress, Seward made himself the central figure of all attempts at compromise; the Northern organs of the South, such as the New-York Herald, for example, whose bête noire Seward had been till then, suddenly extolled him as the statesman of reconciliation and, indeed, it was not his fault that peace at any price was not achieved. Seward manifestly regarded the post of Secretary of State as a mere preliminary step, and busied himself less with the "irrepressible conflict" of the present than with the presidency of the future. He has provided fresh proof that virtuosos of the tongue are dangerously inadequate statesmen. Read his state dispatches! What a repulsive mixture of magnilo-quence and petty-mindedness, of simulated strength and real weakness!
For Seward, therefore, Fremont was the dangerous rival who had to be ruined; an undertaking that appeared so much the easier since Lincoln, in accordance with his legal tradition, has an aversion for all genius, anxiously clings to the letter of the Constitution and fights shy of every step that could mislead the "loyal" slaveholders of the border states. Fremont's character offered another hold. He is manifestly a man of pathos, somewhat pompous and haughty, and not without a touch of the melodramatic. First the government attempted to drive him to voluntary retirement by a succession of petty chicaneries. When this did not succeed, it deprived him of his command at the very moment when the army he himself had organised came face to face with the enemy in southwest Missouri and a decisive battle was imminent.
Fremont is the idol of the states of the Northwest, which sing his praises as the "pathfinder".(4) They regard his dismissal as a personal insult. Should the Union government meet with a few more mishaps like those of Bull Run and Ball's Bluff,[105] it has itself given the opposition, which will then rise up against it and smash the hitherto prevailing diplomatic system of waging war, its leader in John Fremont. We shall return later to the indictment of the dismissed general(5) published by the War Department in Washington.
Written about November 19, 1861 First published in Die Presse, No. 325, November 26, 1861
Endnotes
[104] T h i s refers to t h e United States' 1846-48 war against Mexico. It was provoked by the slaveholding planters a n d big bourgeoisie for expansionist ends. As a result of the war, the US appropriated almost half of Mexico's territory, including Texas, Upper California a n d New Mexico. Fremont, who had been exploring California from the early 1840s, joined in the fighting with his team.
[1 0 5] On the battle of Bull Run see Note 44. The battle of Ball's Bluff (northwest of Washington) was fought on October 21, 1861. The Southern forces defeated several regiments commanded by General Stone ""which had crossed to the right bank of the Potomac and were left without reinforcements. The two battles revealed serious shortcomings in the organisation and tactics of the Northern army.