Authors: Adam Goodheart
Such was the atmosphere in which the statewide convention assembled
in St. Louis to determine Missouri’s fate.
O
NE DAY TOWARD THE END OF 1860,
Jessie Frémont tripped over a board that had come loose on one of San Francisco’s rickety plank sidewalks, hurting her leg so badly that for the next six months she was largely confined to the cottage at Black Point. But Mrs. Frémont hardly needed to go down into the city anyhow: San Francisco, as usual, came up to see Mrs. Frémont.
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In her aerie above the Bay, she presided over a salon—almost all male—of the quickest wits and keenest minds on the Pacific Coast. The lure of a golden land had already drawn to California a remarkable array of thinkers, dreamers, talkers, and schemers, all of whom rejoiced to discover a distant shore where the social proprieties and cultural pieties of Boston and Philadelphia did not apply. At Jessie Frémont’s gatherings, silver-haired
politicians chatted with youthful poets; famous novelists collected sea yarns from the captains of China-trade clippers. The house itself suggested a kind of newfangled cultural mélange unlike anything seen in the East: silk hangings and damask-shrouded furniture in the latest Paris taste intermingled with American Indian baskets and photographs of Western landscapes, along with a splendid
Albert Bierstadt
painting of the Golden Gate. On the walls of her young sons’ room Mrs. Frémont pasted cutout pictures of ships and horses.
Guests lingered for hours over luncheon on the veranda, or strolled together through the gardens, enjoying the perfume of flowers mixing with the smell of the sea. They relished, too, the charisma of their famous hostess, who enthralled them with her tales of a girlhood spent dandled on the knees of presidents. She had never been a conventional beauty, and was growing stout and matronly as middle age approached, but she still retained all the charm that had won her, at
the age of seventeen, the handsomest man in Washington as husband.
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When
Herman Melville, in the gloomy eclipse of his literary fame, passed through San Francisco, he naturally called at Black Point, where a lively afternoon of conversation cheered him considerably. A much more frequent visitor was a shy, intense young writer named
Bret Harte, whom Jessie Frémont had discovered while he was working as a typesetter and living in a tiny apartment above a
restaurant. Harte’s comic poems and tales of life in the mining camps enchanted her, as did his newspaper columns, signed The Bohemian, which evoked a particularly Californian kind of cultural life in which writers and artists lived as rugged free spirits. Each Sunday afternoon, he would come
to dinner and read aloud from his latest manuscript for her to critique. “Sometimes her comments cut like a lash, but her praise is sincere and freely
given,” Harte told a friend. “To know her is a liberal education.” Mrs. Frémont soon shared her “pet,” as she called him, with the Eastern literary establishment, helping him land a short story in
The
Atlantic Monthly—
and thus introduced a new, distinctively Western voice into American letters.
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As for the famous Pathfinder, when he was there at all he was usually just a taciturn presence hovering at the margins of his wife’s sparkling soirees. More often, Colonel Frémont was away from San Francisco attending to his troubled gold-mining enterprises and other personal affairs.
Even when the former presidential candidate was absent, though, politics was very much in the air at Black Point. Senator
Edward D. Baker, the West Coast’s most prominent Republican—indeed, one of the national party’s rising stars—was a habitué. A handsome, hot-tempered, powerfully built Midwesterner, the Gray Eagle probably reminded Mrs. Frémont of her father. Like old Tom Benton, Baker was
one of the most captivating orators in Congress. His skills had been honed back in
Illinois, where he had joined the Disciple sect to become, like James Garfield, a youthful sensation on the preaching circuit.
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Only after migrating to the West Coast, however, did he develop his own distinctive brand of Republicanism.
In October 1860, shortly before she injured her leg, Jessie Frémont brought several friends along to the American Theatre on Sansome Street to see Baker give a campaign speech for Lincoln. The senator had arrived in town by steamer the week before, met at the wharf by a phalanx of Wide Awakes, his ever-present “bodyguard” for the duration of his stay. Thousands of San Franciscans turned out to hear his address at the theater; Baker’s
friendship with Lincoln went back more than twenty years, to a time when they had both been young lawyers in Springfield, and no doubt many of his listeners hoped to hear personal anecdotes of the Rail-Splitter. It turned out, however, that Baker had very little to say about his party’s nominee. He addressed larger themes, in words that spoke directly to an audience of Western pioneers:
The normal condition of the Territories is freedom. Stand on the edge of the Sierra Nevadas, or upon the brow of any eminence looking down upon the Territories beyond, and what do you behold? You find there the savage, the wild beast, and the
wilderness; but you do not find slavery.… The Western man goes into the Territory with his family, his horses, his oxen, his ax and other implements of labor. The Southern man goes with his
slave.
A savvy politician, the senator reassured everyone that a vote for the Republicans was simply a vote for free white labor, not a vote for black emancipation: the party was committed not to interfere with slavery wherever it was already legal. Yet, at the climax of his speech, Colonel Baker, as he was often called, seemed to advocate nothing less than an American revolution:
Everywhere abroad, the great ideas of personal liberty spread, increase, fructify. Here—ours is the exception! In this home of the exile, in this land of constitutional liberty, it is left for us to teach the world that slavery marches in solemn procession! that under the American stars slavery has protection, and the name of freedom must be faintly breathed—the songs of freedom be faintly sung! Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, hosts of good men are
praying, fighting, dying on scaffolds, in dungeons, oftener yet on battle fields for freedom: and yet while this great procession marches under the arches of liberty, we alone shrink back trembling and afraid when freedom is but mentioned!
At this, one newspaper reported, the entire hall broke out into “terrific cheers.” And that was not all: “While the people were cheering, Mr. Harte, who sat on the platform, apparently carried away with enthusiasm, rushed to the footlights, and with extended arms, excessive vehemence and loud voice, declared: ‘It is true! it is true, gentlemen! We are slaves, compared with the rest of the world. The colonel is right!’—then,
pale as a ghost, staggered back to his seat, the people cheering vociferously.”
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It was, to say the least, out of character for the shy young poet. People said afterward that his patroness must have put him up to it. More than a few said that but for being a lady, and a famous man’s wife, Mrs. Frémont would have liked to be shouting from the footlights herself.
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But the voice that would carry farthest and loudest across California in the months to come was neither the distinguished senator’s nor the mercurial poet’s. It was another of Jessie Frémont’s protégés who accompanied her to the American Theatre that evening. He was perhaps the most unlikely-looking hero in the entire hall. But in years to
come, people would call him “the man who saved California for
the Union.”
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Mrs. Frémont had become acquainted with the young Reverend Thomas Starr King one evening in the spring of 1860, when he and his wife had come to dinner at Black Point—an obligation of all interesting newcomers to San Francisco. The hostess, possessing as she did a keen eye for masculine beauty, cannot have been particularly impressed as she clasped King’s frail white hand in welcome. The clergyman stood barely over five feet tall, with greasy hair
that hung lankly over the collar of his ill-fitting coat. His eyes, large and luminous, bulged slightly from their sockets like a sickly child’s; indeed, he seemed somehow not fully adult, a sexless boy-man in the garb of a preacher.
Yet behind those strange eyes flashed a wit as keen as Mrs. Frémont’s own. Almost as soon as they began conversing, both felt a marriage of true minds: a sense of communication as free, electric, and unimpeded as a telegraphic transmission. “An enchanted evening,” she would call it. The Gray Eagle was at the dinner table that night, too, as was the Great Pathfinder, but these political giants could only sit and watch as the bons mots flew
back and forth between the mistress of Black Point and this odd little creature. Mr. King’s conversation was extraordinary: an incessant running commentary on life’s perplexities, spiced with literary references, antic puns, self-deprecating jokes, mimicry, and even some slightly risqué allusions. Only Jessie Frémont, perhaps, could have kept up with him. King was no less charmed by his new friend—not least because of her responsiveness to his
performance. “She
is
a superb woman,” he wrote. “She is my one admirer in the universe.” Before long he was a regular at the cottage, coming and going almost as if it were his own home and talking with Mrs. Frémont for hours on the veranda.
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They were the same age, thirty-five, but in most respects their lives could hardly have been more different. Unlike the pampered senator’s daughter, the little clergyman had grown up in a modest house in Charlestown, Massachusetts, beside Boston Harbor—“under the shadow of
Bunker Hill,” he liked to say—and, being unable to afford the tuition at Harvard, had scrounged an education in lecture halls and
free libraries, where he picked up French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and a bit of German by the time he was nineteen.
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While Mrs. Frémont was, naturally, forbidden from speaking before an audience or appearing in print under her own name, Mr. King had built a public career entirely out of words. He wrote, but—much more surprising—he
also
spoke,
in a “manly, sonorous” voice, by turns passionate
and playful, that was all the more impressive because it emanated from such a tadpole-like body. Called to the ministry, he had his own pulpit by the age of twenty-four, at a Unitarian church in Hollis Street, Boston. By his early thirties, King was hobnobbing with Emerson, Phillips, Beecher, and the Adamses; he was earning fifty dollars each time he lectured at a college or
lyceum; and, inspired by Thoreau, he had just published a little book (half ode and half travel guide) about his rambles in the
White Mountains. It was he who would bring Melville to see Mrs. Frémont.
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And then, in April 1860, he suddenly gave it all up—Hollis Street, Bunker Hill, tea with the Adamses—and went to California.
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He did not come to convert the Golden State, Sodom though it may have seemed. Rather, King came to
be
healed and converted himself. As he wrote to a friend not long before departure: “I do think we are unfaithful in huddling so closely around the cosy stove of civilization in this blessed Boston, and I, for one, am ready to go out into the cold and see if I am good for anything.” In fact, Boston was “cosy” for him only to a point.
Emerson might compliment his work; Mr. and Mrs. Adams might enjoy his tea-table chitchat; but their Brahmin circle could never accept the man from Charlestown as its moral and intellectual preceptor.
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Now, just a few weeks later, here he was, taking his tea not in some stuffy Beacon Street parlor but on an airy hilltop above the Pacific, as this brilliant and world-renowned woman spoke with him as few people in Boston ever had: with neither condescension nor deference but frankly, directly, as between equals.
There was so much for them to talk about! He loved California, and hated it. San Francisco appalled him, at first: its swaybacked wooden shanties, its fleas and bedbugs, its streets “bilious with Chinamen.” But the Golden Gate, carpeted with spring flowers in colors more vibrant than any he had seen in a New Hampshire autumn, delighted him.
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Even the occasional earthquakes, he said, made him want to stand up and shout “Encore!” King made a midsummer jaunt to the
Sierra Nevada—no doubt at the Frémonts’ urging—and sent an ebullient series of articles about it to the
Boston Evening Transcript,
the paper of record for the Beacon Hill set. One dispatch included, amid the scenic sublimities, an equally extravagant appraisal of the
colonel’s real estate holdings, currently on the market for investment: “perhaps the most valuable mining property in the world,” King called it. (Clearly, the author was already getting the hang of California, a place where high art and hucksterism bunked contentedly together.)
But it was the garden at Black Point that truly opened King’s eyes to the wonderful possibilities of the West. Life and landscape were integrated there. Nature was not something you traveled to on the
Boston & Maine Railroad. The wild heart of the American continent lay just beyond the edge of the luncheon table. “Yesterday I dined with Mrs. Frémont,” King told an old friend back
East, “& walked bareheaded among roses, geraniums, vines & fuchsias in profuse bloom.” Here was a place where even a Boston Unitarian could take his hat off outdoors!
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Another afternoon, King came unannounced, asking simply whether he could sit alone in the garden, on a small rug that he spread beneath a laurel tree: the view of sea and mountains, he told Mrs. Frémont afterward, helped him to “regain” himself. After this she set up a study in a secluded corner of the grounds where he could come each morning to work undisturbed on his articles and sermons. At noon, she would send over a servant with lunch, and at
teatime he would emerge to share with her what he had written.
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The West was transforming him. In his Boston sermons, King had trod somewhat cautiously down the pathways of
transcendentalism, offering palatable versions of Emersonian abstractions. In his
White Mountains book, he had rhapsodized over the scenery but had also taken care to advise readers on local hotels. Here in California, however, he made the very crags and valleys resound with divine reproach,
with glory and terror: “So many of us there are who have no majestic landscapes for the
heart—
no grandeurs of the inner life! We live on the flats. We live in a moral country, which is dry, droughty, barren. We have no great hopes. We have no sense of Infinite guard and care. We have no sacred and cleansing fears. We have no consciousness of Divine, All-enfolding Love. We may make an outward visit to the Sierras, but there are
no Yosemites in the
soul.
”
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