The appointment of General Fremont to the command of . . .

. . . a Military District is alluded to in the following language by the Frankfort, Ky., Commonwealth:

We do not know how far West the division of the Potomac extends – probably to the Blue Ridge, and includes a greater part of Virginia, the Carolinas and Florida and Georgia.  If so, Fremont’s command is rather a small mountainous district – too hilly for him to show much of his tom-foolery, in the shape of splendid carriages, bands of music, and a menagerie of puffers, painters, reporters, &c., &c.  The North and South Knoxville line will cross very near to Maysville, and will throw into Fremont’s command the Cumberland Gap, the Sandy Valley, and Eastern [sic] Virginia.  Among these mountain men, the Major General, if he has any tact at all, must adapt himself to mountain manners, as well as mountain passes, and if he only had Kit Carson with him he might get along pretty well.

We suppose his appointment was something like Cameron’s appointment to Russia – a sort of politico-State necessity which the President could not entirely disregard; and deemed it better to have the discontented officer off in the woods than to keep in stirring up murmurs and making party combinations at Washington.  We wish, however, he could have found some other place for him – Arizonia [sic], for instance, but we can’t have all things as we wish.  We take comfort in another thought, and that is; that if the rebel main army does not try to force its way through Kentucky by the Cumberland Gap or Prestonsburg, but leaves those points to be defended by Humphrey Marshal and John S. Williams, Fremont can hold his own against them, and is as good a man as either of them, either in patriotism or soldiership.

Now when our seceshers are throwing up their camps over Fremont’s appointment, pretending all the time to be horrified that Lincoln should have done this thing, we beg them to stay their grief, “for this is our funeral,” and none of their business.  We’ll do the best we can with it, and the army will see to it that the war is carried on solely for the union, the Constitution and the Enforcemnt of the Laws.  And it may turn out after all, that all the bad that was in Fremont has been evacuated by the President’s order to him in Missouri to attend to his own duties and let the niggers alone, and hereafter he may turn out better than many expect.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 22, 1862, p. 3