dare anything with the hope of accomplishing a great career.  But I have never heard that he has shown any practical knowledge of high military matters.  It may be doubted whether a man of this stamp is well fitted to hold the command of a nation’s army for great national purposes.  May it not even be presumed that a man of this class is of all men the least fitted for such a work?  The officer required should be a man with two specialties—­a specialty for military tactics and a specialty for national duty.  The army in the West was far removed from headquarters in Washington, and it was peculiarly desirable that the general commanding it should be one possessing a strong idea of obedience to the control of his own government.  Those frontier capabilities—­that self-dependent energy for which his friends gave Fremont, and probably justly gave him, such unlimited credit—­are exactly the qualities which are most dangerous in such a position.

I have endeavored to explain the circumstances of the Western command in Missouri as they existed at the time when I was in the Northwestern States, in order that the double action of the North and West may be understood.  I, of course, was not in the secret of any official persons; but I could not but feel sure that the government in Washington would have been glad to have removed Fremont at once from the command, had they not feared that by so doing they would have created a schism, as it were, in their own camp, and have done much to break up the integrity or oneness of Northern loyalty.  The Western people almost to a man desired abolition.  The States there were sending out their tens of thousands of young men into the army with a prodigality as to their only source of wealth which they hardly recognized themselves, because this to them was a fight against slavery.  The Western population has been increased to a wonderful degree by a German infusion—­so much so that the Western towns appear to have been peopled with Germans.  I found regiments of volunteers consisting wholly of Germans.  And the Germans are all abolitionists.  To all the men of the West the name of Fremont is dear.  He is their hero and their Hercules.  He is to cleanse the stables of the Southern king, and turn the waters of emancipation through the foul stalls of slavery.  And therefore, though the Cabinet in Washington would have been glad for many reasons to have removed Fremont in October last, it was at first scared from committing itself to so strong a measure.  At last, however, the charges made against him were too fully substantiated to allow of their being set on one side; and early in November, 1861, he was superseded.  I shall be obliged to allude again to General Fremont’s career as I go on with my narrative.