The credit for the manoeuvres of the day was
given to Captain--afterwards General--Nathaniel Lyon, who was in
immediate command of the Unionists, but everybody understood that the
real leader, as well as instigator, of the movement was Blair.
Blair had been the admitted leader of the Missouri Abolitionists. He
was as radical as any man among them. One day he stopped me on the
street for the purpose of thanking me for a paper I had contributed to
the _Missouri Democrat_, in which I had favored what was practically
immediate emancipation in Missouri. He said that was the right kind of
talk, and what we had to come to. I felt greatly flattered, because
there was nothing in the article that disclosed its authorship, and
Mr. Blair had taken the trouble to inquire about it.
Blair turned against the Missouri Abolitionists when a decided
majority of them turned against him in his quarrel with Fremont. They
indorsed Fremont's emancipation proclamation, which the President, at
Blair's instigation, it was charged at the time, revoked.
Blair was a man not only of strong ambition but of arbitrary
temperament. He could not tolerate the idea of a newcomer pre-empting
what he had considered his premises.
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