“Yours truly,
“A. Lincoln.”
So the general was to begin his duties with a clean slate. But no sooner had he taken firmly hold of his work than the extreme Charcoals began to oppose him and Governor Gamble. Happily he and the Governor agreed in policy and were united in action.
An act of the Governor first elicited the wrath of the extremists. The policy of assessing well-to-do disunionists, begun in St. Louis, had spread itself over the whole State. The dragons’ teeth sown by Halleck were producing an abundant harvest. Just at this time the Provost-marshal general was engaged in gathering assessments in different parts of our commonwealth. Opposed as the Governor was to this arbitrary method of dealing with supposed disloyalty, he commanded the enrolled militia, that was under his immediate control, not to aid the Marshal in collecting the assessments that he had made. For this, the Charcoals poured the vials of their wrath upon his head.
But the Federal commander did not long escape their vituperation. That border ruffian, Quantrell, and his lawless gang, made a raid into Kansas, looted Lawrence and murdered many of its inhabitants. For this dastardly outrage the extreme radicals unreasonably blamed General Schofield. And when General Lane of Kansas and the men following his lead wished to invade Missouri in order to make reprisals, Schofield, in the interest of peace and good order, would not permit it. For this the extreme Charcoals bitterly denounced him, and even called in question his loyalty. They determined to down him. In their newspapers they sharply criticized him and his methods. In return he fulminated an order against the immoderate and lawless press, threatening to throttle it. This was an unwise act on his part. It encouraged them in their opposition. They had not toiled in vain. At least they had made the lion roar. They went to reprehensible extremes. The general believed that they tampered with some of the enrolled militia, that had been put by the Governor under his command. He sent a regiment of militia to New Madrid to relieve the 25th Missouri, and while on board the steamboat, going down the Mississippi, they mutinied, landed, and went to their homes. So if the general’s information was not at fault, faction began to blossom into treason.
As late as October (1863) the radicals sent a communication to the War Department complaining that General Schofield had enrolled rebels in the militia of northwest Missouri, and disarmed Unionists. The general, replying to this charge, declared that he had enrolled “twice as many former rebels” as were named by his accusers, “amounting to from five to ten per cent. of the whole” militia organization of that part of the State, and that he was glad to make a repentant rebel of “more service to the government than a man who never had any political sins to repent of.” He also felt great satisfaction in putting men of that class to “guard the property of their more loyal neighbors.”[[91]] So that the act of which his enemies complained was evidently both wise and patriotic.
At last the extremists sent a large delegation to Washington to lay the situation in Missouri, as they apprehended it, before the President, and to urge him to remove General Schofield and appoint in his place General Butler. Mr. Lincoln heard them patiently, and on the following day replied to them in a strong, lucid paper. With marvellous insight he analyzed the parties in our State, and pointed out their attitude towards each other, and towards both the State and national government. He also heartily sustained General Schofield. The members of the delegation were of course disappointed, but returned wiser than when they went. They had surveyed at a distance the factional strife of their State. The perspective gave them a juster notion of its relative importance. They had listened to the luminous analysis of it all by the clear-headed President. They saw new light. From that day factional strife began to subside. It lingered, but it was less virulent. Little by little reason resumed its sway, and a larger charity found place in the minds of those holding divergent views.
But the view of these radicals which General Schofield presents in Chapter V of his “Forty-Six Years in the Army,” seems to me to be somewhat misleading. Admitting, as he claims, that some of them plotted to overthrow the provisional State government, and to change the policy of the national administration, and instigated to open mutiny a regiment of enrolled militia, his declaration that “they are loyal only to their radical theories, and so radical that they cannot possibly be loyal to the government,” certainly was not true of the great mass of them. While some of them, in their zeal for the extinction of slavery and secession, were led into the advocacy of condemnable policies, the loyalty of most of them was spotless. Many who clamored for the general’s removal did so patriotically, believing that the highest interests of Missouri demanded it. I believed then, as I do now, that they were in error, but they were true as steel both to their honest convictions and, as they saw it, to their country. And with the unswerving conviction that in the conflict then raging slavery would perish, they fought right on. Never were men more intensely in earnest. They won at last, as we shall see. Not the Claybank, but the Charcoal triumphed, and in that triumph both were equally blessed. And both contributed to the victory; the intensity of the Charcoal made it possible; the conservatism of the Claybank made it reasonable and most largely beneficent. But General Schofield came near to achieving the position between the factions that the President craved for him. While on the whole he was more satisfactory to the Claybanks than to the Charcoals, he was not wholly satisfactory to either. Some of the Claybanks were bitterly opposed to his policy of enlisting negro troops. And when some loyal slaveholders found their chattels wearing the uniform of United States soldiers, and claimed their property, they were both amazed and wrathful when informed by the general that, notwithstanding their loyalty, their slaves by their act of enlistment had been made free. So it came to pass that some Claybanks and some Charcoals approved him, some Claybanks and some Charcoals, for totally different reasons, sharply condemned him. In a most delicate and difficult position, he tactfully did what he believed to be right, and won the approval of the best elements in both of the warring factions.
CHAPTER XXI
HOMES AND HOSPITALS[[92]]
When, in 1861, the war broke out in Missouri, and the battles of Boonville, Carthage, Dug Spring and Wilson’s Creek were fought, and collisions and skirmishes multiplied throughout the State, the demand for greater hospital accommodations at St. Louis became imperative. The New House of Refuge Hospital, two miles south of the city, proved to be altogether inadequate; and when all the wards of the St. Louis Hospital, kept by the Sisters of Charity, and of the City Hospital had been filled, still more room was at once required.