“You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government.  On the contrary, it is itself the surrender of the government.  Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the United States—­any government of constitution and laws—­wherein a general or a president may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?  I do not say Congress might not, with propriety, pass a law on the point, just such as General Fremont proclaimed.  I do not say I might not, as a member of Congress, vote for it.  What I object to is, that I, as President, shall expressly or impliedly seize and exercize the permanent legislative functions of the government.

“So much as to principle.  Now as to policy.  No doubt the thing was popular in some quarters, and would have been more so if it had been a general declaration of emancipation.  The Kentucky legislature would not budge till that proclamation was modified; and General Anderson telegraphed me that on the news of General Fremont having actually issued deeds of manumission, a whole company of our volunteers threw down their arms and disbanded.  I was so assured as to think it probable that the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us.  I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.  Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland.  These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.  We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capital.”

If it be objected that the President himself decreed military emancipation a year later, then it must be remembered that Fremont’s proclamation differed in many essential particulars from the President’s edict of January 1, 1863.  By that time, also, the entirely changed conditions justified a complete change of policy; but, above all, the supreme reason of military necessity, upon which alone Mr. Lincoln based the constitutionality of his edict of freedom, was entirely wanting in the case of Fremont.

The harvest of popularity which Fremont evidently hoped to secure by his proclamation was soon blighted by a new military disaster.  The Confederate forces which had been united in the battle of Wilson’s Creek quickly became disorganized through the disagreement of their leaders and the want of provisions and other military supplies, and mainly returned to Arkansas and the Indian Territory, whence they had come.  But General Price, with his Missouri contingent, gradually increased his followers, and as the Union retreat from Springfield to Rolla left the way open, began a northward march through the western part of the State to attack Colonel Mulligan, who, with about twenty-eight hundred Federal troops, intrenched himself at Lexington on the Missouri River.  Secession sympathy was strong along the line of his march, and Price gained adherents so rapidly that on September 18 he was able to invest Mulligan’s position with a somewhat irregular army numbering about twenty thousand.  After a two days’ siege, the garrison was compelled to surrender, through the exhaustion of the supply of water in their cisterns.  The victory won, Price again immediately retreated southward, losing his army almost as fast as he had collected it, made up, as it was, more in the spirit and quality of a sudden border foray than an organized campaign.