584 Question of emancipating and arming slaves. j_ 1861 establishing martial law throughout the State of Missouri, and con- taining the radical provision that the property, real and personal, of Missouri rebels was "confiscated to the public use... and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free men." He also organised a military commission to hear evidence and issue personal deeds of manu- mission to such slaves. The language of the proclamation and the generaFs subsequent explanations assigned rather confused reasons for the step, and gave it the character of merely a local police regulation. Indeed the circumstances and manner of its promulgation indicated very clearly that it was a political manoeuvre on the part of the general to regain the prestige lost by the weakness of his military administration. The President decided at once that the measure was not only dan- gerous on the score of policy, but that no emergency existed in Missouri to justify it as a military necessity. He instantly wrote Fremont a private letter, asking him to modify the order so as to make it conform to the Confiscation Act which Congress had passed. Fremont, however, refused to make the retractation as of his own accord, and asked the President to order it publicly, which he accordingly did. As Fremont had doubtless expected and hoped, the question of emancipation by military decree quickly grew into a political issue, in which many radical anti-slavery newspapers and politicians took sides with the general. He became leader of a Republican faction which loudly criticised the President, though on account of Fremont's conspicuous failure as a soldier it did not attain any numerical importance. Yet, in regard to the final results of the great national drama, the incident proved a double benefit. Lincoln's revocation of Fremont's proclamation finally decided the hesitating Kentucky conservatives to range themselves on the side of the Union, and heartily to lend the substantial military power of their State to the suppression of the rebellion; while the adherents of Fremont, weak in numbers but active in propagandism, aided materially in the creation of public opinion which demanded that slavery should be utterly destroyed. The inevitable processes of war soon moved the slavery question forward another step. If the army undertook to employ negroes in military work at exposed points, must it not protect them ? and, as a necessary consequence, must it not permit them to protect themselves, and furnish them with weapons for defence? When an instruction of the War Department affirming this duty was submitted to the President, he saw that it was liable to misconstruction by unfriendly critics, and interlined with his own hand the explanation, "this however not to mean a general arming of them for military service." When also, at the beginning of December, 1861, the President found that Secretary of War Cameron had, without his knowledge, printed in his annual report an unqualified recommendation to arm slaves, the President instructed
