uble 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. If he could not rule he was ready
to ruin. That disposition accorded with both his mental and physical
make-up. Bodily he was a bundle of bones and nerves without a particle
of surplus flesh. His hair was red, his complexion was sandy, and his
eyes, when he was excited and angry, had a baleful expression that led
some one in my presence on a certain occasion to speak of them as
"brush-heaps afire."

He was not an eloquent man, although a ready and frequent public
speaker. His voice was not musical. His strong forte was invective. He
was nearly always denouncing somebody. Apparently, he was never so
happy as when making another miserable. Sometimes his personal
allusions were very broad. He was accustomed in his speeches to refer
to one of Missouri's United States Senators as "that lop-eared
vulgarian." That he was not almost all the time in personal
difficulties was due to the fact that he was known to be a man of
exceptional courage. He was a born fighter. Physically I think he was
the bravest man I ever knew. I witnessed several manifestations of his
fearlessness, but one particularly impressed me.

I have spoken of the Camp Jackson affair. Although the people in the
Rebel encampment surrendered without a blow, the incident was
attended with considerable bloodshed. A mob of Rebel sympathizers,
consisting largely of half-grown boys--I was in the midst of the
throng at the time--with their pistols opened fire on a German Union
regiment and killed several of its men. The troops, in return, poured
a volley into the crowd of spectators from which the shots had come,
killing or wounding over forty persons, the most of them, as is usual
in such cases, being inoffensive onlookers. A man standing beside me
and, like myself, a spectator, had the top of one ear clipped off by a
Minie ball as cleanly as if it had been done with a knife. I found
when, soon afterwards, I reached the business center of the city,
where the Rebel element then largely predominated, that the story of