Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton Page A

emancipation would keep England and France from recognizing the
Confederacy; and the President, who had devoted agonizing hours to the question
of preventing European intervention in this war, cut her short with the curt
remark: "You are quite a female politician." The next day the elder
Blair
    (who had been Jessie's friend for many
years) scolded her, crying out: "Who would have expected you to do such a
thing as this, to come here and find fault with the President?" All in
all, she had a most unhappy visit. 4
    Overruling Fremont,
Mr. Lincoln was thinking of a principle and of a point of tactics, and the
explanation which he did not bother to give Jessie Fremont he gave to his old
friend and political supporter, Senator Orville Browning of Illinois. Writing
to Browning not long afterward, Mr. Lincoln said that the principle was simple
but basic. As a general Fremont could seize all sorts of property—a Missouri
farm, or even a Missouri slave—for purely military purposes, but the effect of
such seizures was only temporary. "When the need is past it is not for him
to fix their permanent future condition. That must be settled according to the
laws made by law-makers, and not by military proclamations." What Fremont
did was nothing less than an act of dictatorship. The United States no longer
had a constitutional government if a general, or a President, "may make
permanent rules of property by proclamation." Reflecting that the acts of
a general were in the end the acts of the President himself, Mr. Lincoln went
on to write a sentence that would echo powerfully a year later: "What I
object to is that I as President shall expressly or impliedly seize and exercise
the permanent legislative functions of the government."
    So much for principle. There was also
work-a-day practicality, for Fremont had packed both moral error and tactical
blunder into one ill-advised pronunciamento. Tactically, the case rested
largely on Kentucky; on Kentucky's geographical position and on its divided
state of mind, representative of the divided minds of so many millions who
lived elsewhere. Kentucky was still at peace, delicately poised between the
warring sections, and Kentucky's sentiments were fearfully, tragically mixed,
strong devotion to the Union going hand in hand with cheerful acceptance of
slavery and outright horror of anything that smacked of racial equality.
Fighting an abolitionists' war, the Federal government might well lose Kentucky
entirely, and the President wrote soberly: "I think to lose Kentucky is
nearly the same as to lose the whole game ... we would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this
capital." 5
    So far the war was incomplete. It had
two ends and no middle which is to say that although it was being fought at
full strength in Virginia and in Missouri it was not being fought at all in the
400-mile length of Kentucky. Here was where North and South touched one another
most intimately, and perhaps came closest to a mutual understanding; here was
the vital center of the whole border country, which in reality was no border at
all but a broad corridor straight through the heart of America. Once the war
broke into Kentucky it could begin to develop its full potential, which was
likely to be much greater than had been bargained for by either of the two
Kentuckians, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, who headed the opposing
governments.
    Kentucky had tried hard to stay out of
the war, thus reflecting not only the split in popular feeling but also the
fact that Governor Beriah Magoffin leaned toward secession while a majority of
the state legislature opposed it. Immediately after Fort Sumter Governor
Magoffin notified Lincoln that the state would furnish no troops "for the
wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern states," and a group called
the State Union Committee agreed that Kentucky could not send such troops
"without outraging her solemn convictions of duty, and without trampling
upon