Review - "The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation" by John Bicknell

[The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation by John Bicknell (Stackpole Books, 2025). Hardcover, 2 maps, photo gallery, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:v,290/372. ISBN:978-0-8117-7665-3. $32.95]

When it came to what was to be expected from those individuals who were the most politically motivated appointments to the Union Army's high command, public confidence in John Charles Fremont's ability to produce battlefield victories ranked at or near the top. Though his Mexican War career was controversial and he was recognized much more for frontier exploration than organized fighting capacity, the famous "Pathfinder of the West" entered the American Civil War with a reputation that paid off with a lofty appointment as one of the Union Army's highest ranking major generals. As author John Bicknell argues in The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation, while battlefield glory in the Civil War entirely escaped Fremont, his legacy as an early and leading proponent of military emancipation was unparalleled. In Bicknell's estimation, Fremont, much more so than David Hunter, Benjamin Butler, or any other of the slate of prominent Union generals who targeted slavery early on, deserves to be remembered by history as the "military embodiment" of emancipation.

As Bicknell explains, Fremont did not plan to immediately go into military service. At the beginning of the conflict he was in Europe, where he facilitated significant arms purchases for Union forces. Amid the general rush and confusion among competing buyers, along with no little amount of trans-Atlantic miscommunication, Fremont's financial dealings were often, perhaps unavoidably, conducted in irregular fashion. Similarly haphazard procurement procedures led to accusations of waste and fraud throughout Fremont's subsequent tenure in Missouri as commander of the Department of the West. Much of the opprobrium was directed toward Justus McKinstry, Fremont's chief quartermaster, whose actions were given wide latitude by his superior. The author's own assessment of the accusations of official malfeasance in Missouri, and how much blame Fremont himself earned, is judicious in its approach. Taking the measure of administrative disorder on Fremont's end along with the likelihood that unofficial shortcuts, sketchy or not, were necessary to address crisis in the face of broad neglect from distant Washington, Bicknell's 'plenty of blame to go around' handling of the matter has merit.

It was during his abbreviated tenure at the head of the Department of the West that Fremont experienced the political meatgrinder that would plague every top commander in Missouri. As was the case with Nathaniel Lyon and William Harney before him, practically everything in Missouri ran through the very powerful Blair family. Like Lyon, but unlike Harney, Fremont, at least initially, had the support of the politically conservative but uncompromisingly pro-Union Blairs, who were basically the long arm of Lincoln in state and departmental affairs. Bicknell traces how the relationship mutually soured, a situation exacerbated by Fremont arresting serving officer Frank Blair. As the author keenly observes, it also didn't help Fremont's standing that key emissaries from Washington who were sent to Missouri to report on conditions there were far from impartial in their investigations and submitted slanted reports hostile to Fremont. Of course, any discussion of the home, military, and political life of John C. Fremont has to include his close partner in all of it, wife Jessie Benton Fremont. Their package-deal relationship has been explored at length in many publications, and this study ably traces the many ways in which Jessie's unflagging support and personal interventions aided, and at times hindered, her husband's Civil War-period military and political activities.

Among the growing list of ways in which the general aggravated his civilian masters, it was Fremont's penchant for striking out on his own path, even to the point of insubordination, that got him into the most amount of hot water with the Lincoln administration. Fremont is perhaps most remembered by Civil War students for his 1861 declaration of martial law in Missouri that included a revolutionary order forever freeing all slaves held by those in rebellion. While the order was immediately and fulsomely praised by many in the North, Lincoln, caught off guard and deeming such a weighty political decision the exclusive domain of the chief executive, immediately rescinded the emancipation measure. Fremont's refusal to revise his proclamation, forcing Lincoln to do it himself, was the strongest signal that his tenure in Missouri would likely be short. That impolitic reaction, combined with his failure to offer much relief to the besieged defenders of Lexington in September, placed Fremont's remaining military freedom of action in Missouri on a very short leash. His ponderous fall campaign into southwest Missouri achieved nothing of great note (partially due to persistent logistical limitations), and Fremont was finally relieved altogether on November 2, 1861, ending a tumultuous 100 days in command.

The book is clearly not intended to be a detailed examination of Fremont's generalship, providing only big-picture narratives of his operations and no tactical-level discussion of his battles. Sympathetic to Fremont's 1861-62 department commands occupying logistical backwaters, the author largely defends the general's operational conduct as reasonable when faced with the supply, transportation, and environmental challenges presented to him at the time. Bicknell agrees with Jeffrey Patrick, one of the most astute students of the 1861 campaigns in Missouri, that Fremont did not 'abandon' Lyon in the Missouri interior as much as he judged (correctly, in their estimation) securing the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to be the department's overriding strategic priority. As Mountain Department commander, Fremont's chief generalship woes, according to Bicknell, were his lack of enterprise and willingness to countenance calculated risks necessary to reap greater rewards. Fremont was, unlike Grant, not one of those commanders who could accept the limits he was presented with and simply do the very best with what he had in terms of men, equipment, and supplies. While outlining where he deems Fremont ill-used by the Lincoln administration and by history, the author nevertheless concludes that there's no evidence to support belief that Fremont was competent to lead a major army in the field.

There are a few niggles to bring up in the Missouri coverage, mainly in the area of the author's terminology choices. For example, Bicknell improperly calls the Missouri State Guard the Missouri "Home Guard," and he applies the "conditional" unionist brush to a large group of steadfast loyalists (Lincoln cabinet secretary Edward Bates being the most prominent among them) who would be more appropriately represented with the term "conservative" unionists.

Upon Fremont's departure from active service in mid-1862 after refusing a subordinate position in John Pope's Army of Virginia, he quickly fades from view in most general histories of the war, only to briefly reemerge during the nomination process of the 1864 presidential election season. However, Bicknell's more focused study offers a great deal of insight into Fremont's remaining military and political aspirations during this lesser-known gap period. His research reveals that Fremont maintained a wide base of support in the North, and not just among radicals, for both further command opportunities and high political office. On the military legacy side of things, Bicknell feels that Fremont made a major error in declining to pursue a leading role in organizing and commanding black troops. His reasonable supposition is that Fremont's wide popularity combined with his earnest regard for black freedom and advancement made returning to the war at the head of black troops his best remaining opportunity for producing a major military contribution to the Union war effort.

In his earlier study of the 1856 presidential election, Bicknell argued that Fremont's political campaign, though unsuccessful, paved the way for Lincoln's victory in 1860. That "pathfinder" theme connecting Fremont and Lincoln continues in this study. Fremont's next great trailblazing role, this time in military emancipation and application of hard war (with the conciliatory Lincoln trailing behind Fremont in follower status), is a principal part of Bicknell's narrative and analysis. Though the strength and implications of that line of thinking, as presented in the book, certainly possesses numerous elements of truth, it is also the case that that viewpoint benefits very heavily from the advantages of assessing history through the lens of hindsight. It is easy to see now that Lincoln's confidence in southern unionism and concerns over Kentucky's continued loyalty were overblown. However, given what was known and what was unknown at the time, one can argue that Lincoln's calculated caution was well justified, or at the very least not worthy of moral disdain to the degree exhibited by the abolitionists of the time. In comparison to those contemporary critics, the author is more nuanced in his criticisms of Lincoln's reticence.

In 1864, Fremont made it abundantly clear that his third-party presidential candidacy was primarily aimed at defeating Lincoln's chances at a second term. He told all who would listen that he would gladly drop out of the race once someone with better radical credentials than Lincoln received the Republican nomination. However, once he saw the writing on the wall that Lincoln was staying firmly in the race and retained broad-based support, Fremont, to his credit, stepped down rather than risk being the cause behind losing the White House to the Democrats in a three-way contest. He also wanted it made known that his withdrawal was unconditional, which caused some anxiety among the backroom deal makers but did not end up derailing anti-radical Montgomery Blair's exit from Lincoln's cabinet.

As revealed in John Bicknell's The Pathfinder and the President, the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and John C. Fremont was never a close one and quickly dissolved into mutual antipathy. Close reading of Bicknell's study essentially erases any thought that the pair's partnership could have been more productive had just a few things gone differently. The two men were just too far apart in personality and political disposition, and Fremont lacked the military ability to make better use of the high command opportunities that came his way. The modern Civil War literature has produced numerous fine studies of the many complications involved in managing a coalition war effort of pro-Union radicals and conservatives, and Bicknell's study of the Fremont-Lincoln relationship also offers readers another set of keen insights into the inseparability of political considerations from military affairs amid such a conflict. While Fremont was in many ways his own worst enemy when it came to antagonizing the president, he was also the target of powerful forces arrayed against his radical political alignment. The degree to which Fremont deserves credit for leading a cautious President Lincoln along the path toward military emancipation remains open to further debate, and, as the author maintains, the matter also raises intriguing questions in regard to how much the war might have been shortened (if at all) had Lincoln sustained Fremont's emancipation edict in Missouri, but Bicknell's arguments on both counts are a force to be reckoned with among the doubters. Highly recommended.