But the view of these radicals which General Schofield presents in Chapter V of his “Forty-Six Years in the Army,” seems to me to be somewhat misleading. Admitting, as he claims, that some of them plotted to overthrow the provisional State government, and to change the policy of the national administration, and instigated to open mutiny a regiment of enrolled militia, his declaration that “they are loyal only to their radical theories, and so radical that they cannot possibly be loyal to the government,” certainly was not true of the great mass of them. While some of them, in their zeal for the extinction of slavery and secession, were led into the advocacy of condemnable policies, the loyalty of most of them was spotless. Many who clamored for the general’s removal did so patriotically, believing that the highest interests of Missouri demanded it. I believed then, as I do now, that they were in error, but they were true as steel both to their honest convictions and, as they saw it, to their country. And with the unswerving conviction that in the conflict then raging slavery would perish, they fought right on. Never were men more intensely in earnest. They won at last, as we shall see. Not the Claybank, but the Charcoal triumphed, and in that triumph both were equally blessed. And both contributed to the victory; the intensity of the Charcoal made it possible; the conservatism of the Claybank made it reasonable and most largely beneficent. But General Schofield came near to achieving the position between the factions that the President craved for him. While on the whole he was more satisfactory to the Claybanks than to the Charcoals, he was not wholly satisfactory to either. Some of the Claybanks were bitterly opposed to his policy of enlisting negro troops. And when some loyal slaveholders found their chattels wearing the uniform of United States soldiers, and claimed their property, they were both amazed and wrathful when informed by the general that, notwithstanding their loyalty, their slaves by their act of enlistment had been made free. So it came to pass that some Claybanks and some Charcoals approved him, some Claybanks and some Charcoals, for totally different reasons, sharply condemned him. In a most delicate and difficult position, he tactfully did what he believed to be right, and won the approval of the best elements in both of the warring factions. CHAPTER XXI HOMES AND HOSPITALS[92]