eral was known outside the State, and news of Belmont did not excite the East. The country's gloomy face was turned toward the Potomac and the James, waiting for victories to wipe out Bull Run, while McClellan at the head of his great army was wearing out its patience marching up and down. Belmont with its loss of life was criticized for years as an unnecessary fight. It was not intended for a battle, but a demonstration. If Belmont had not been fought, said Grant years later, "Colonel Oglesby would probably have been captured or destroyed with his three thousand men. Then I should have been culpable indeed." Besides, we should have missed an episode unique and picturesque, illustrating the peculiar temper of the time. CHAPTER IX DONELSON THIRTEEN more weeks of waiting, not altogether wasted because the time was used in drilling troops at Cairo and teaching officers the ways of war. There were few regulars in Grant's command. The South had scattered its West Point graduates throughout its service, so that the volunteers had the advantage of instruction by trained officers. The educated soldiers of the North had kept their old commands and rank until the war had lasted many months, and while there was one whole "regular brigade" in the Army of the Potomac, in which every officer, from general to second lieutenant, had been educated in his profession, there were elsewhere entire divisions serving under commanders who had had no military training. Grant, face to face with such conditions, suggested while at Cairo that, except for the staff corps, the regular army should be disbanded and the officers detailed to lead and drill the volunteers, a condition brought about through natural process as the war progressed. Grant was not alone in trouble with Frémont. Lincoln was having difficulty too. The more Fré mont displayed his pompous incapacity, the harder for his chief to handle him, and he was bright enough to play spectacularly upon the anti-slavery sentiment, which looked upon him as the champion of the negro's cause, while those above him would subordinate it if thereby the Union might be saved. On August 30 came the final test of patience. In that morning's paper Lincoln was amazed to read a proclamation issued by Frémont confiscating the property of all persons in Missouri who had taken active part with the enemies of the United States, and declaring free their slaves, a proclamation hailed with joy throughout the North, but with dismay by the Administration, which knew that Kentucky and the other border States would not hold to the Union if they thought their slaves were to be free. To Lincoln Frémont's proclamation meant defiance and a usurpation of legislative power, but patiently he asked Frémont to modify it; at Frémont's request issued himself the modifying order, and brought down on his head the North's denunciation with threatenings of impeachment. Some would have made Frémont dictator. "How many times," wrote James Russell Lowell, "are we to save Kentucky and lose our self-respect?" Such was the spirit Lincoln faced in the first months of war. In view of the part politics so largely played in the conduct of the war, only incorrigible ineptitude could have elicited the order issued two days after Belmont, putting Halleck in Frémont's place. To Grant the substitution was of little benefit. Halleck, an educated West Point soldier, of great learning, a master of the technique of war, - "Old Brains" they called him, had been for years a San Francisco lawyer, having seen service in Mexico. He had just been made a major-general of volunteers, and great things were expected of him. He was a pundit, not a fighter; his big head stuffed with strategy, but not alive with wit. He had no aptitude for such emergencies as now confronted him in an unusual kind of war. He never learned what Gibbon had in mind when he declared a century before that "the great battles won by the lessons of tactics may be enumerated by the epic poems composed from the inspirations of rhetoric." To Halleck, Grant, with his plain, practical ideas, was a specimen unclassified, and besides, there was a lurking memory of the way Grant quit the service on the coast. Grant, left to vegetate at Cairo, weary of inaction, at last sought Halleck out. He had a scheme for opening a roadway through the South and pushing back the first line of defense, which Smith, his old West Point preceptor, had approved, to his great satisfaction, and he thought it merited consideration |