Description:

Fremont John



Union General
John Fremont Scarce Signature

 

A fantastic vibrant John Fremont Signature on card stock,  3.5" x 1.75". Signed as  "J.C. Fremont". Card with light toning, with the verso having small adhesive remnants to the corners.

 

Perhaps best known for the elaborate measures taken by President Lincoln to fire him and relieve him from his command more than his career as a General, Fremont was one of the most romantic and colorful characters of the Civil War era. Just slightly earlier, during the 1840's and early 1850's, Fremont led five expeditions surveying and mapping routes through what is now the Midwest and on to Oregon and California, leading to his nickname "The Pathfinder". When the Civil War broke out, President Lincoln appointed the "Pathfinder" a Major General and Commander of the Department of the West, based in St. Louis, Missouri. But however great Fremont may have been as an explorer, it soon became clear that he was in over his head as a general. Under his leadership, the Department of the West was an administrative shambles and a hotbed of corruption, though Fremont himself was never personally implicated. He proved ineffective as a military leader, failing to rid Missouri of Confederate forces. Plus, he implemented public policies in his department that gained him powerful enemies both in Missouri and in Washington.

 

Perhaps worst of all, Fremont seemed stubbornly blind to the political realities with which President Lincoln had to contend. An ardent abolitionist, Fremont issued a proclamation in August of 1861 freeing the slaves of all owners in Missouri who refused to swear allegiance to the Union. With little apparent regard for the national political implications of such an action, he issued his proclamation totally on his own, without even notifying the president of his intention. Fearful that premature emancipation would drive slave-holding border states like Missouri and Kentucky into the embrace of the Confederacy, President Lincoln asked Fremont to quietly rescind his order. Fremont refused, thus requiring Lincoln to publicly overrule him. That, in turn, subjected the president to extensive criticism in the press and from the more radical members of his own party who were demanding immediate abolition. By late October 1861, less than four months after appointing him, the president was ready to relieve Fremont of his command.

 

Fremont, however, had no intention of taking his fate lying down. Although he had been born in the South (in Savannah, Georgia), he was a loyal, and in many ways highly commendable American patriot. To actually defy a presidential order relieving him of command was never an option for him. On the other hand, an order that was not received need not be obeyed. Fremont had accumulated at his headquarters aides and bodyguards numbering literally in the hundreds. In them he saw his opportunity to remain in command. He would simply lock down security at his headquarters so tightly that no officer from Washington would be able to get through to deliver any order replacing him. Needless to say, the delivery of Lincoln's orders became a side-show to which became Freemont's legacy in the Civil War.

 

Quite a fall from grace considering only a few years prior in 1856. he became the first Republican candidate for President.


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