Another Massachusetts antislavery champion, Lydia Maria Child, condemned Lincoln for being “narrow-minded, short-sighted, and obstinate,” and exclaimed: “O Lord! O Lord! How we do need a Cromwell!” She urged all opponents of slavery to sustain Frémont: “We ought never to forget that he was the first man to utter the word, which millions long to hear.” George Bancroft told his wife: “We suffer from the want of an organizing mind at the head of the government. We have a president without brains.” From Chicago, Joseph Medill wrote that Lincoln’s “frightfully retrograde” order to Frémont “comes upon us like a killing June frost—which destroys the comming harvest” and “has cast a funeral gloom” not only over the Windy City but also over “the state and the intire west.” Nothing that Buchanan ever did “received so universal censure.” Alluding to the ninety-first Psalm, Medill lamented that the “loss [of] a battle can be repaired: but this letter acts as a pestilence that walketh at noon day.” Medill’s newspaper alleged that “[n]o Sunday in our recollection has been so broken by general indignation and rage.” In Wisconsin, people were so angry that one resident told his congressman that it “is utterly impossible for you to conceive what a whirlwind of grief & indignation” Lincoln’s letter “has aroused throughout the North West.” There the president “today could not carry the vote of [a] single town.” Not even Buchanan was so roundly execrated as Lincoln now was. In Minnesota, the feminist-abolitionist Jane Grey Swisshelm condemned the president’s “imbecility, or treachery.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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