Hello, and welcome to Western SIV. In today's Bonus Author Interview, I sit down with historian John Bicknell, and I talk about his most recent book, The Pathfinder and the President, John C. Fremont, Abraham Lincoln and the Battle for Emancipation. I know a lot of you listening out there are American Civil War fans, because there are still plenty of those out there.
I'm one of them. But John C.
Fremont was one of those figures that I just didn't know very much about going into this interview, and so I was really excited to pick this book up and give it a read and learn a little bit more about these two fascinating individuals, one Lincoln that I and probably you know a lot about, and one Fremont that I and probably you don't know.
As much about.
And I found it fascinating because the way that they interacted with one another and the way that Fremont pushes forward Lincoln's agenda, particularly on emancipation from military standpoints, is a really interesting read and something that I think puts a little bit of a spin on the term that we bandy about a lot for Lincoln, which is the great emancipator. If he's the great emancipator, then John C. Freeman,
it is probably the great emancipator pusher. All right, So if you're listening to this, the book is available right now, you can pick it up. I've got a link in the show notes if you're interested. And so without further ado, after these quick messages, we'll hear the.
Interview and welcome back.
As I mentioned previously, I am sitting down today with historian John Bicknell. We're talking about his most recent book, The Pathfinder and the President, John C. Fremont, Abraham Lincoln and the Battle for Emancipation. Like many of you, I'm a lot more familiar with Abraham Lincoln than I am with John C. Fremont, and that's one of the reasons
that I found reading this book so fascinating. And I kind of want to start here by I've got a section of the book in the very very beginning in the introduction here, just kind of reading for a moment, just quoting your book, it says, quote, history is rarely kind to losers, and the Civil War was especially unkind
to John C. Fremont. From eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five, Fremont lost two military commands, the only major battle in which he fought a presidential campaign, a good chunk of his fortune, his home, and much of the renown he had accumulated over the previous twenty years that made him one of the most famous men.
In the world. End quote.
So this is a really really interesting book. But I wanted to start because you do talk about their personalities, and I want to start by asking you a little bit about the personalities of John Fremont and Abraham Lincoln and how their personalities play such a key role in the events that you explore in the book in general, and then I want to come back to this question of historical losers in a moment.
Okay, sure, thanks for having me on. First, Lincoln and Fremont came from similar backgrounds. They were both born in the South, of course, Lincoln and Kentucky, Fremont in some of Georgia. Fremont also went to college in Charleston. They both came from sort of straightened circumstances. As young men, they were not very well off, and they both moved to the West to become well known, become famous. So
they shared some circumstances in life. They were both married to very assertive, politically minded women, and their wives were both in a way well certainly, certainly Fremont's wife was more politically astute than he was, but they they diverged in their personalities. Lincoln became a lawyer, had a very lawyerly mind, very methodical, devoted to the Constitution and the rule of law. Fremont wasn't like that. Fremont joined the
Army topographical engine years he became a western explorer. That's where he gained his fame, but it's also where he learned to conquer the elements through his own resources and sort of ignore the chain of command and become his own master. He was not wedded to the law the way Lincoln was. He sort of made it up as
he went along. He defied orders, he was court martialed, and his personality was much more attuned to I want to get this done, and I'll figure out a way to do it, and the law be damned.
And I think there's a lot in Freemont, and I might come back to this later on that we questioned like who would fit better into today's political society, And I think in some ways if Fremont might actually might actually be the better fit than the lawyerly and somewhat rules based Abraham Lincoln. And you know that the two men, as we'll talk about in a moment, you know, there's a chance that we could have had John Fremont as
President of the United States. This is not completely talking out of turn, but you write in the introduction, and I want to come back to this issue of losers here for a second. And I'm putting that phrasen Air quotes, by the way, but you're writ in the introduction that quote Fremont did accomplish things during the war that have been forgotten or dismissed, in large part because he ultimately
failed as a commander a soldier and end quote. And I guess, I guess I have two questions that come off of who doesn't and we can debate the fairness of that. Then, also, specifically to this particular book, should Fremont be remembered and taught more than he is today? I suspect to know the answer to the second question, but I'm interested you to your answer to both.
Okay, and all into the second one first, because it's easier for me. Of course, I think he should be remembered and top more. I've written two books about him. But I think the way history works is there's elevening a flattening. If you think about just everything going on in the world today, just look at the newspaper, watch the news. There are one hundred things going on, and they all seem important to a group of people, to somebody, and we pay attention into varying levels depending on our
interests and what it means to us. But one hundred years from now, one hundred and fifty years from now, ninety eight of those things will have disappeared, and what will remain are the two things that affect lives into the future. Right, So the same thing is true now of things that happened one hundred and sixty years ago. As I went back and researched this book, what I found was in newspapers, in people's diaries, in their letters, in the coverage of the news. In eighteen sixty, sixty one,
and sixty two. Fremont was much more prevalent than you would think if you only read books about that era today. And I think the reason is he was replaced by other people. Fremont, as I said, was one of the most famous people in the world in eighteen it was world famous. In eighteen sixty he had become the most famous Western explorer, not because he discovered the most new things, but because he and his wife wrote about those explorations
very eloquently. During westward exploration or expansion, Americans used his books as guides to the West that they were entering, and he became quite famous. He was elected a Senator from California, not because he was a great politician, but because he was famous and beloved. So by the time of the Civil War, Fremont was much more famous than Lincoln. Even still in eighteen sixty and really into eighteen sixty one, more people knew who Fremont was than knew well who
Lincoln was. And events, of course elevated Lincoln and depressed Fremont's stock. And because Grant won the battles and Lincoln won the war and Sherman won the West, Stremont sort of faded away. He then lost all his money after the war and faded into oblivion. People rode up, you know, new heroes rose up to replace him. And so the things that he did during the war that really did matter, the appointment of Grant a key moment in the war,
Fremont gave him his first command. The building of the riverboats in Missouri that Grant later used to conquer Vicksburg was really attributable to Fremont. He made other reforms in healthcare and that sort of thing as commander of the West that made a huge difference in terms of saving lives at the time, but they just sort of disappeared into oblivion in the larger picture.
Well, I agree with you with what you say about sort of the flattening of history, and I think that's true a lot of times, particularly if you pick up a textbook, you know, you take up your normal United States history textbook, you probably get a paragraph I'm going to say on John C. Fremont, maybe a page if it's if it's more in depth than that, but it ignores all the things that the people did at the time at the time is really and that that phrase
at the time matters, because that's what tends to get forgotten. We focus on that when we look at history sometimes that that tip of the iceberg that we can see, but we don't think about everything that's underneath the surface, that's actually holding the iceberg up right, And I think that's you make it a stud comment where it's think of all the things in the news today. I mean, we're sitting here, it's April twenty twenty five. A couple
of weeks ago. In the news people couldn't stop talking about there was this use of this signal chat by people in the current administration to plan an attack. No one talks about it anymore. Other things have happened, you know. And but at the time it seemed like the most important thing. And it's been two weeks, you know, think about if it's been years and so on and so forth.
And but you brought up an infant point one that I wanted to press on a little bit, which is John C. Fremont and his role in the exploration of the West. And as you were talking, I thought, gosh,
I really should ask about this. So I wondered if you could maybe talk for a moment, broadly for listeners who don't know what we're talking about, who never heard of John C. Fremont, about what was his general role in the exploration of a vaswath of the country that at the time people knew very very little about.
Honestly, Fremont was an officer in the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, which was given the task of exploring the mountain west. Essentially. Freemont's great advantage in this was that he was married to the daughter of the chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Thomas hart Benton, Senator from Missouri, great proponent of westward expansion, John with his daughter John
Jesse Benton. Thomas hart Benton wasn't very happy about this at the beginning, but came to appreciate some of Fremonts some of Fremont's attributes, and Fremont was given command of exploring expeditions in eighteen forty two, eighteen forty three, and another one in eighteen forty five. The most famous one
was in eighteen forty three and forty four. He was tasked with going up the Oregon Trail all the way to Oregon, which he did, and then without orders, he turned south, marched his crew down the face of the Sierra Nevada in wintertime, and then crossed the mountains in February of eighteen forty four, extremely hazardous undertaking that almost got some of them killed, although they all managed to make it, and he crossed into California which of course
that time was part of Mexico. Again, this was all against He had no orders to do this at all, and eventually returned to the United States and bent and smooth things over. The next year, he went back to California. This was on This was in the very early stages of the run up to the Mexican War, and he was in California at the time the war started. He
stirred up some trouble. He ate it and abetted some local trouble, got in a lot of trouble with the commanding General, Stephen Watts Carney, and was eventually court martialed and dismissed from the service. The President was willing to give him a pardon or at least a commutation of his sentence, and Fremont refused it, saying that would essentially be an admission of guilt. He didn't believe he had
done anything wrong, and so he left the army. After that, he conducted two more exploring had two more explorations into the West for mostly railroad purposes. These were private endeavors not funded by the government, that Benton helped facilitate, one of which ended in disaster in Colorado. They got cotton, a snowstorm, there was some cannibalism. Again Freemont escaped. So he was this sort of seminal figure of Western exploration.
As I said earlier, he wasn't exploring areas that other people had never gone to, but he was a path popularizer, and he became sort of the image of Western exploration in the popular mind, much as he became the image of military emancipation in the Civil War.
I think that's really interesting, and I think that it's interesting how he becomes the image of it. And I think that everybody we have to remember, of course, you know, we're talking about in the eighteen forties, a period where much of the West it is still being explored and certainly relatively sparsely populated. So it's not what we could imagine nowadays, when we have a tendency to think about
these things. But one of the characters are individuals in the story that I want to come back to is Jesse Benton Fremont, which is John Fremont's wife, And I think because she comes across as so important in the story to him, and I wanted to ask you why
you felt it was so necessary. I think it'll become pretty clear to readers why and listeners why pretty in a moment here, but why it was so important to include hers prominently in the story and why to do it when you know we're still in an era when by and large women aren't considered essential parts of history. But she very much bucks this trend and sort of get to the like, how does she do that?
She was completely essential to Fremont's success. What made him famous was the reports of these There were the government publications, the reports of the exploration, but she was essentially his editor, if not co author, of these reports and would she took what could have been very dry descriptions of him running around out in the West and turned them into these sort of poetical adventure stories that grabbed people's emancipation
or imagination. Pretty much real contribution in terms of Western exploration was to change people's perception of what the West was. Stephen Long, who had explored parts of the West in eighteen eighteen eighteen twenty, called it the Great American Desert, and that was sort of the image people had of the West. There was a big, wide, useless expanse that wasn't green and beautiful like the east, where we lived and Fremont. Fremont and Jesse's descriptions of the West changed
that perception. People still understood it wasn't green, but while Stegner's phrase, they were able to get over the collar of green. They made people. They helped people understand the West on its own terms and appreciate its greatness for what it was instead of what it was. And that's what Jesse contributed to these reports. And then because she had grown up, what you know, working with her father
who was a senator, she knew the political world. She was much more attuned to that world than Fremont ever was, and she was essentially his campaign manager for president in eighteen fifty six. She handled correspondence, She dealt with all of these men who were trying to tell him what to do and how to do it. And you said, he could have been elected president. He could have been
elected president. It was the party was news. They weren't very well organized, but it came within you know, three states really of winning the election that Lincoln won four years later. And when people talked about what Fremont might do as president, they didn't say Fremont would do this. They said the Fremonts would do this. So even then the people who, even the politicians in Washington, understood the role that she played. Well, I want to go back.
Let's talk a little bit more about that election, because I think we're talking about the election. Well at first, I want to talk about eighteen fifty six. You know, the Republican Party is incredibly new and Fremont decides to run for the Republican nomination in that year. And I'm curious as to why he made that choice, Like where was he in his life that made him want to do that, and you know why was the campaign ultimately unsuccessful for him.
He had been elected to the Senate in eighteen fifty As soon as California became a state, he was he was this great heroic figure in the state and he was one of the first two senators to be elected. He unfortunately for him, drew the short straw, so he had to run again in two years and wasn't re elected. And then they discovered gold on this plot of land that he had bought for you know, next to nothing
in California, and he became incredibly wealthy. So between eighteen fifty and eighteen fifty five he was developing this gold mining operation in California. And in eighteen fifty four, of course, to Kansas Nebraska Act was passed. It destroyed the Whig Party. The Republican Party formed an eighteen fifty four and both parties really came to Fremont in eighteen fifty five interested in him being their candidate for president in eighteen fifty six. That's how that's the kind of figure he was at
that time. Both parties thought almost like an Eisenhower. Both parties wanted him to be their candidate, or at least some elements of parties, but he couldn't be a Democratic candidate because he could not accept the Kansas Nebraska Act. He was anti slavery, and so sort of naturally turned to the Republican Party. The great advantage he had as a candidate was he had the sponsorship of Francis Preston Blair.
Blair had been a Jacksonian. He was the newspaper editor for the Democratic organ under Jackson, but he had drifted away from the Democratic Party as it became increasingly pro slavery and pro Southern And Blair was this great mover and shaker in Washington, and he was a leading organizer of the Republican Party, and he was a longtime friend of Thomas Hart Benton, so he thought he had really hoped Benton would be the first presidential candidate for the
Republican but Benton wanted nothing to do with this project, so he turned to Fremont, and Fremont essentially got a free ride to the nomination because the other leading candidates mostly William Seward from New York Salm and Chase from Ohio, who were both longtime anti slavery activists. Seward was quite reluctant,
Chase was a little reluctant. He would have taken the nomination if they'd given it to him, but they were both a little worried that the party wasn't very well organized, it was brand new and probably had very little chance to win, so they were sort of happy to see Fremont be the guinea pig for this operation, and so Freemont won the nomination. Lincoln actually was considered as the
vice presidential candidate in eighteen fifty six. He got the second most votes at the Republican convention for vice president. Why did he lose the election? I write in my book about the campaign in the Lincoln's Pathfinder of the previous book that American voters were still more afraid of disunion than they hated slavery. In eighteen fifty six, the Democrats really ran a good campaign, saying essentially, if you elect Fremont, it means the session it probably would have.
In the intervening four years. Of course, you had the dread Scott decision, you had the great controversy over Kansas, and then you had John Brown's attack at Harper's Ferry sort of changed the circumstances and made the North hate slavery, or at least parts of North the hate slavery more than they secession, which, of course, and the Democratic Party splintered also, which made it possible for Lincoln to be elected where Fremont could not be.
Yeah, I want to pause there for a second and come back to this question of Fremont and slavery, because I think it's worth talking about for a moment.
Two things.
One which is, you know, had Fremont always opposed slavery and what was to what extent we can know and obviously you can't look into the hearts of individuals from hundreds of years ago. To what extent do we know why he opposed slavery. I mean, different people opposed slavery for different reasons and to different extents. And how did Fremont And then sort of a second follow up question would be, like, how did Fremont's views on slavery differ
from Lincoln's? You know, because Lincoln's position in the election of eighteen sixty is very intentional about the opposing the expansion of slavery, not necessarily contradicting slavery where it already exists. That's that's different, right than saying that we're going to abolish slavery. And I wonder if I could ask you where did Fremont fall on this spectrum of anti slavery stances?
Okay, Jesse was always very strongly anti slavery. We don't really know much about Freemond. He never wrote or talked much about it until eighteen fifty he entered the Senate. He cast some anti slavery votes, but was not He was not an abolitionist. He did not support, for example,
abolition in the District of Columbia. He supported the abolition of the slave trade, which was part of the Compromise of eighteen fifty, but he was sort of mildly anti slavery in the way a lot of northern at that point. He was a northern person Northern politicians were, but not adamantly when and of course was had a wife a long history of being anti slavery, but again not an abolitionist.
The Republican platform of eighteen fifty six reflected that position against the expansion of slavery into New territory, but leaving slavery alone or it existed, and it continued that that was also part of the campaign of eighteen sixty And when the war started, Fremont gave a speech in May of eighteen sixty one, he was still in Europe, calling for the North to rise up and defeat the rebels to preserve the union. And he gave a fairly long speech and did not mention slavery in May of eighteen
sixty one. But by August of eighteen sixty one he had been in Missouri for a month, and he had seen how the war there was progressing, and I think he and Lincoln reached the same conclusion. Fremont just got there first by the end of August eighteen sixty one. What Fremont believed was that it would absolutely necessary to get rid of slavery to win this war. That slavery was the underpinning of the Confederacy's power, and it had to be done away with to win, to win the
warrant preserve the Union. For him, at that point, there was no dichotomy between those two things. You can't say I'm for preserving the Union, not for getting rid of slavery. Lincoln had not quite yet gotten to that point. He would pretty soon, but Freemont got there first.
Well, it's really interesting, and I wanted to ask you as through a follow up question on that, which is, you know, prior to the election. I'm just going to skip forward to the election of eighteen sixty election of Abraham Lincoln. But prior to then, did these two did they know each other?
Did they have any communication?
I think we're so used to, you know, the powerful people and parties and powerful politicians having a personal knowledge of one another to some extent, was Lincoln? Had Lincoln met Fremont? Were they aware of one another? Had they corresponded? Do we have any sense of what the communications between those two, if any, were, going up to that election in eighteen sixty As.
Far as I can make out they had never met Lincoln. Of course knew of Fremont. He was quite famous, and I Lincoln or Fremont would have known about Lincoln. Certainly by eighteen fifty six he was a prominent Illinois politician, had been a candidate at the convention for vice president, and Lincoln did campaign for Fremont in eighteen fifty six. He gave a number of speeches in Illinois, he traveled to Michigan to give a speech in favor of the campaign.
But they had not met, and I don't think they met until they met in early in the middle of eighteen sixty one or early eighteen sixty one, when Fremont met Lincoln in New York. Lincoln was traveling to from Springfield to Washington, and the two met in February of eighteen sixty one.
Yeah, and so there's you know, Lincoln wins the election of eighteen sixty And you're right to point this out. This is it's always worth pointing out that, you know, this is this is a split ticket situation. You know, we have multiple we have more than two major candidates running, and so what ends up happening is the electoral college
vote or the popular vote gets divided. Lincoln doesn't win over fifty percent, you know, I think somewhere around forty two points something percent of the popular vote, but he wins a majority because you know, within a variety, especially of the border states, you know, the vote get split between a variety of different candidates, and he wins. It's not that he comes in with this massive mandate or
anything the way we talk about it today. But he has to put together a cabinet, and there are people who definitely want John C. Fremont to have a role in that cabinet. You quote on this book, Horace Greeley, you know, the influential newspaper man. I'm sure most people who are aware of the American Civil War and its
lead up to of that name who wrote quote. I believe that John C. Fremont ought to be Minister to France, not so much for his own sake as because the Republicans of fifty six will feel that they are slighted if he is not recognized by the new administration. Right, So there's people pushing for Fremont to have a role in this, you know, But ultimately he doesn't seem to have gotten a formal role. So what happens here, and why doesn't he end up with a stronger position maybe than he should have?
Okay, three months the eighteen fifty six campaign was really seen by many as a kind of crusade, and so in addition to already having this fame that he'd won, Freemont became this symbol of political anti slavery. So he engendered an incredible amount of goodwill among anti slavery Northerners and even among abolitionists with whom he was not quite
entirely in league. And so by eighteen sixty he was a leading figure in the Republican Party, even though it wasn't really active in politics at that point, and so people believe that he should have a role to play in this new administration. Now, people were constantly overestimating Freemont's abilities because of his fame. I mean, we see this
all the time, right, because of his fame. He had a he definitely had a certain crewise, very handsome, had a very certain charisma, beautiful young wife, you know, lovely children, that sort of thing. But how much ability he had to carry out any of these jobs to sort of open a question and among the political class in Washington Fremont's. Their opinion of Fremont was not very high. He did not think or act like a politician. He was not a backslapper. He didn't make the sort of usual compromises
that politicians make. I'll give you one example. He was accused of being a Catholic in the eighteen fifty six campaign. He and Jesse Delope had gotten married by a priest, and of course his father was French, so they He carried this sort of stigma around with him and it was costing him votes in some places Pennsylvania, Indiana, and the politicians came to Fremont and said, you need to issue a statement about this and to reassure people that
you're not a Catholic. Goes, well, I'm not a Catholic, but there's really nothing wrong with being a Catholic. So I'm not going to engage in this sort of nonsense. And he didn't. He absolutely refused to do it. That's sort of and he had other problems as well with politicians. But Lincoln saw him as a potential Secretary of War as potential Minister to France. Seward opposed his appointment as Minister to France. I think in part because Seward didn't
want the competition. He saw Fremont as a viable political figure still and wanted people loyal to Seward who he could he had more control over. Lincoln didn't think like that, but he did. His operatives had promised Simon Cameron, a senator from a very powerful senator from Pennsylvania, a position in the cabinet, probably secretary of War or and Cameron came to collect he wanted to be a secretary of War.
That put Lincoln in bind. He didn't really want to have promised anybody things, but he knew that these people who around him.
Had done that.
So he was sort of juggling the candidates, and Fremont was in, he was out, he was in, he was out. In the end, he was out largely, I think because he didn't want to be in. He didn't really want to be in the cabinet. He wouldn't have minded, i think, being Minister to France. But really what he wanted was to be a general and lead armies in combat, and so that's eventually the job that he got.
That's really interesting, and I mean, we think of like cabinet posts as being very important today, but as he sees the war unfolding. That's where he sees his path, and I don't think that's unreasonable. Frankly, given his background then his connecttions to Missouri and to the West, my question then is going to be okay, So he doesn't get on position on the cabinet. So what happens to him in early eighteen sixty one as it becomes abundantly clear that conflict is inevitable.
Freemont is in Europe from February to May of eighteen sixty one looking for investors for the Golden mining operation. That's what he went for. When the attack on for Sumter comes, he essentially throws that away. He can't find anybody anyway because people are worried about what's going on in America, and he begins buying weapons from the French, from the Austrians, from the English to supply American armies, which are not very well supplied. But the American arms
manufacturers are not fully up and running yet. So Freemont's going around Europe buying buying guns to ship back America. At the same time, back in the United States, Lincoln appoints Fremont as a major General of volunteers in the Army. So he returns to the United States and is appointed commander of the Department of the West, which is headquartered in Saint Louis. It covers all the territory to the Mississippi River of the Rocky Mountains. It's a huge swath
of territory. Its territory Fremont knows very well, but it's a little bit of a misnomber because really the actions of this department are concentrated in Missouri. Now, this is a department that has about, after they get some volunteers sent there, about thirty thousand soldiers. Freemont's never commanded more than a few hundred soldiers in California during before and in the Mexican War. I mean literally three or four hundred people, and not very well, I might add. He
has absolutely no executive ability experience at all. He's commanded men groups of a few dozen men in the field in the wilderness. But these are mountain men who pretty much knew what they were doing and did what they wanted to do. Anyway, he owns a golden mind, but he doesn't actually run it. He has people doing that for him. So he's put in charge of this large department. He's not a west Pointer. He has no formal military training and strategy or tactics, and the west Point officer
class despises him. He's gotten special treatment his entire life. He rejected the chain, he rejects the chain of command. He's just he's not very military like person. So he's in this awkward position where he's put in over his head. He has a job, he's been given a job he's not qualified to do. Now you could say he's responsible for this, but in fact the man who put him in charge is responsible for this, and that was a Lincoln. Lincoln had a hard time finding the right generals for
the jobs for a few years in that war. So he's in charge of Missouri and he doesn't really have a clear idea of how to accomplish the task he's been handed, which are to secure Missouri to the Union and make it a base for a movement down the Mississippi River into the heart of the South. He largely fails both of these things, partly because he's incompetent, but also partly because the people running the show in Washington
don't give him any help. They don't he doesn't even get the arms that he bought was some with his own money in Europe. Most of those are distributed to soldiers in the East. They don't send him enough weapons, they don't send him enough wagons. They make it very difficult for him to procure these things. And so he's sort of running this fly by the sea of your pants operation out there, which gets him into further trouble because he's making up his own rules about how to
buy things. He's intrusting this to contractors, not all of whom are the most honest of them, let's say, And so he gets in he's failing militarily, he's getting in trouble for bad contracting. But most importantly, he's offended a man named Frank Blair, who's the son of the man
I mentioned earlier, Francis Preston Blair. Frank Blair Junior is a congressman from Saint Louis, sort of Republican of convenience, who's an ally of Lincoln, who very quick who had been an ally of Freemont Fremont, but very quickly, within a month or so, realizes Freemant suned up to the job and begins to undermine him.
So it's the usual confluence of fact that we see so often in any sort of historical analysis. Well, we've gotten in the time that we've had a chance to talk about twenty some pages or so this into this book that's a lot longer and better. I always end with this question, which is just, you know, obviously there's
a huge amount that we haven't talked about. But is there anything that you really think that the listeners should know about the book, any any sort of specific anecdote or story or something that you think is just so unique that's not covered elsewhere that people who pick up this book, And I think they should by the way, I think, especially if you're a Civil War buff, I think this is something that you should go and get right away.
But is there anything that I, you know.
I don't think of because I don't know this as well as you do.
And I think that the interesting part of the book, and the point of the book really is the relationship between Fremont and Lincoln and how it changes and how it all as policy. It's again, it's one of those things where history sort of has flattened out, so we don't look at we see Lincoln as the great emancipator. He was the great emancipator, but he was not the first emancipator. There were a number of steps that led up to the Emancipation Proclamation, and Fremont was a large
part of many of those steps. I think that's probably been lost for the most part. Many people know about free emancipation Proclamation in Missouri in August of eighteen sixty one, but what they know is that Lincoln overruled it and
was justified in doing so. It's a much more complicated story than that, which I tell a great detail, including many friends of Lincoln who tried to persuade him that Fremont was right and he was wrong, without success, except that within a years than a year, Win can reach the same conclusion that Fremont had that emancipation was a military necessity, and thus we got the Emancipation Proclamation.
Yeah, and I think that that's that's worth remembering in a kind of a great place to end it for today, because if you want that story and that back and forth, well then you can have to pick up the book. And that's my recommendation for everybody always. We always try to give them enough in these interviews to want it, but not enough so that they don't have to get and so there's there's plenty more out there, and it's
it's an excellent read. It's very clearly, meticulously researched, and I think that particularly anybody who's interested in American history and the American Civil War is gonna love this book. So I can't recommend it enough. And if you're listening to this today, it's available, so head out and buy it. And I just I want to thank you again for coming on the show. It was a great conversation.
Thank you very much.