With
Worse Offenses Than These I Have Not Heard Him Charged.
* I ought perhaps to state that General Fremont has published an
answer to the charges preferred against him.
That answer refers
chiefly to matters of military capacity or incapacity, as to which I
have expressed no opinion. General Fremont does allude to the
accusations made against him regarding the building of the forts;
but in doing so he seem to me rather to admit than to deny the acts
as stated by the committee.
At the period of which I am writing, February, 1862, the long list
of military successes which attended the Northern army through the
late winter and early spring had commenced. Fort henry, on the
Tennessee River, had first been taken, and after that, Fort
Donelson, on the Cumberland River, also in the State, Tennessee.
Price had been driven out of Missouri into Arkansas by General
Curtis, acting under General Halleck's orders. The chief body of
the Confederate army in the West had abandoned the fortified
position which they had long held at Bowling Green, in the
southwestern district of Kentucky. Roanoke Island, on the coast of
North Carolina, had been taken by General Burnside's expedition, and
a belief had begun to manifest itself in Washington that the army of
the Potomac was really about to advance. It is impossible to
explain in what way the renewed confidence of the Northern party
showed itself, or how one learned that the hopes of the
secessionists were waxing dim; but it was so; and even a stranger
became aware of the general feeling as clearly as though it were a
defined and established fact.
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