Authors: Adam Goodheart
He had always hated slavery, of course, but from his pulpit on Hollis Street he had rarely even uttered the offensive word, let alone tried to preach politics. His denunciations were almost always couched in biblical allegories. (The week that
Anthony Burns was marched down State Street between ranks of soldiers, King had preached a sermon that he was rather proud of, on the trial of Christ before Pilate.) Indeed, he had made quite
clear that he disdained “radical eloquence” and “abstract principles”: Boston already had more than enough Sunday-morning legislators.
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In San Francisco, though, his resolve began to waver. He accompanied Mrs. Frémont and Mr. Harte to the American Theatre on the
night of Senator Baker’s great speech and was overwhelmed with several strong emotions, not least of them envy. “That is the true way to reach men!” he said, pacing around the Frémonts’ private box in his excitement. His own preaching was a paltry thing by comparison, he told Jessie:
it could never have the seismic effect of Baker’s. Later that night, she set out to convince him otherwise. She told him he was destined for politics; she even claimed, King said in wonder, to be “distressed that I have not lived longer in the state, so that she could have me elected
Senator
this winter.” In this pasty-skinned clergyman, she saw not only wit and intellect but also something that less perceptive eyes missed: a kind of soldierly strength.
Indeed, something there had often reminded her of her husband’s old frontier guide, Kit Carson: the gunfighter, the sunburnt trailblazer, the hero of pulp fiction.
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Needless to say, Mrs. Frémont’s protégé did not get a Senate seat that winter. But at a San Francisco theater on the evening of February 22, 1861—at the very hour when, three thousand miles away, President-Elect Lincoln was pulling a shawl over his face and slipping aboard the night train to Baltimore—the Reverend Mr. King stepped up to a lectern draped with an American flag.
It was
Washington’s Birthday, and San Francisco was celebrating the holiday as never before: schools and businesses were closed, people filled the streets, and, as the
Bulletin
reported, “there were as many stars aloft as a cloudless night displays—as many stripes as the traitors who plot to despoil the country of its unity and glory are entitled to.” In the afternoon, more than ten thousand had
gathered for a mass meeting and adopted, by acclamation, a series of resolutions professing their loyalty to the Union—as well as their willingness to “cheerfully acquiesce” in any honorable compromise that might keep the South in the fold. King’s oration, before an overflow crowd at the Music Academy, was to be the climax of the day, the crowning expression of unconditional love for the united country.
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But his message was one his listeners were unprepared for. What would George Washington do today if he were in the White House, he asked? And then with a ferocity such as the audience had never seen, came the surprising answer: “Nothing. He would have acted four months ago. He would have purged his Cabinet of treason. He would have awed out of it conspirators and thieves. He would not have been a lump of shilly-shally incarnate.”
Then he tore into the would-be compromisers—into the very ideas that San Francisco’s Unionists had unanimously embraced earlier that day: “Change the Constitution in order to save it!” This was not politics
but suicide. And King spoke powerfully of the American continent’s geography, how it bound together East and West, North and South:
[Washington] believed that
God created this country to be one. The Creator placed no Mason and Dixon’s line upon it; that was the work of foolish men. He marked no boundaries for rival civilizations in the immense basins of the West.… The Mississippi, like a great national tree, has its root in the hot Gulf, and spreads its top in the far icy North, a glorious tree, with boughs in different latitudes, and
branches binding the Rocky Mountains and the lakes together, its great trunk the central artery of a national unity.
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Afterward, in a letter to a close friend (a black New Yorker named
Randolph Ryer), King exulted like a warrior returning from the field of victory. “I pitched into Secession, Concession, and Calhoun, right and left,” he wrote, “and made [even] Southerners applaud. I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to ‘a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp,’ and the audience
came down with thunder.” When the oration was all over, Mrs. Frémont made her way to King through the pressing throng, and told him, he said, that “she would like to hear it forty nights in succession.… [I] am urged to give it all over the State, and help kill the Pacific-Republic folly. It was
the
occasion, thus far, of my existence.”
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He did not offer it for quite forty solid nights. But in the weeks ahead, King gave that speech again and again, to one packed house of Californians after another—not just in San Francisco, but in Marysville, Stockton, Sacramento. He spoke in gold-mining camps, and standing on saloon porches or tree stumps in towns with names like Deadwood, Rough and Ready, and Mad Mule—places where Southerners hissed him, or worse. He had never known the true exhilaration
of public speaking, he told Mrs. Frémont, until he had to encounter a front row bristling with revolvers and bowie knives. Far better to face these, somehow, than the supercilious front pews of the Hollis Street church.
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When not traveling and speaking he was writing, usually in Mrs. Frémont’s garden. He composed a new oration on
Daniel Webster—conveniently glossing over the
Compromise of 1850, he admitted privately, but taking the occasion to remember the senator’s words when California achieved statehood: “At last we have seen our country stretch from sea to sea, and a new highway
opened across the
continent from us to our fellow-citizens on the shore of the Pacific. Far as they have gone, they are yet within the protection of the Union, and ready, I doubt it not, to join us all in its defence and support.” On April 19, he spoke on the anniversary of the
Battle of Lexington—another opportunity to turn American history to the uses of the present.
Even the Eastern press was taking notice now. “The ghost of old
Sam Adams abides with Mr. King,” wrote the
New York Times
’ West Coast correspondent. “While he charms his hearers with eloquence, he charges them with the very spirit that filled the air about
Bunker Hill in 1774 and ’75…. He has brought every element of power that his popularity gives
him to bear in all our cities in favor of liberty and human rights.”
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To be sure, the “Pacific-Republic folly” lingered, but now its would-be founding fathers were in full retreat.
Asbury Harpending’s
Alcatraz plot was foiled when one of his own coconspirators—a failed Senate candidate who had publicly called for Lincoln’s assassination—approached General Johnston to enlist him in the scheme. General Johnston may have been a
Southerner, but he was a man of honor first. His response was to fortify all the federal outposts at risk, especially Alcatraz, and to transfer weapons from the Benicia arsenal to the less vulnerable island fortress. A few months later, the general would resign his commission and cross a thousand miles of the West on foot to take command of a Confederate army—but until then, as he promised the governor of California, he would defend the property of the United States,
“and not a cartridge or a percussion cap belonging to her shall pass to any enemy while I am here as her representative.” The Alcatraz plot was dead, and Harpending and his friends slunk off into other, more promising, pursuits.
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Thomas Starr King, the awakened Christian warrior, relished the sense of combat. “I do not measure enough inches around the chest to go for a soldier,” he told Jessie Frémont, “but I see the way to make this fight.” What a remarkable war, to enlist even him as a hero!
And he considered her a soldier, too—if anything, a more potent force than he. “Have you met Mrs. Frémont?” he would later ask a friend. “Her husband I am very little acquainted with, but she is sublime, and carries guns enough to be formidable to a whole Cabinet—a she-Merrimack, thoroughly sheathed, and carrying fire in the genuine Benton furnaces.”
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Indeed, he had spent precious little time with Colonel Frémont. The Pathfinder was off on an extended trip through Europe in pursuit of capital for his mining ventures—accompanied by his mistress,
a certain
Mrs. Corbett of San Francisco.
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Mrs. King, for her own part, hardly appeared at
Black Point. Irritable and chronically unwell, she missed Boston and despised their new home—“an ardent hater of this city, coast, and slope,” King called her.
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Whether he and Jessie Frémont ever took the opportunity to advance their mutual admiration past friendship is doubtful, however. Both seem to have remained devoutly observant of
Victorian sexual proprieties, despite long hours alone together, including at least one overnight trip spent strolling in the meadows of San Mateo, skipping rocks on a stream, and lodging at a country inn.
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But they were ecstatic comrades-in-arms all the same: they shared in the giddy exhilaration of wartime, and thrilled at the events unfolding around them. “What
a year to live in!” he exulted. “Worth all other times ever known in our history or in any other.”
Mrs. Frémont observed, with somewhat more restraint but greater penetration: “All over our country now we are being called to lay aside self.” To be selfless, perhaps; but perhaps also to shed old selves and create new ones.
Several days after King’s speech on Washington, Jessie Frémont dared step into the public limelight as she had never done before: she published an article in a newspaper. The Frémonts’ former coachman,
Albert Lea, a Negro, had been sentenced to death for murder, and although he was clearly guilty, she felt the sentence was unjust, motivated by the judge’s
racism and
pro-Southern leanings. Her open letter of protest in the daily
Alta California,
signed J.B.F., shocked the city: a lady of national prominence airing a political grievance in the press, and defending a Negro murderer to boot!
Lea would go to the gallows in the end, but in Mrs. Frémont’s life it was a turning point. Never again was she content merely to be one famous man’s daughter and another’s wife.
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Did Mr.
King and Mrs. Frémont’s rhetorical campaign—in which she was the chief strategist, he the field marshal—actually save California for the Union? She would never stop believing that it had. Many others thought likewise; Ralph Waldo Emerson would write King the following year to say that “the salvation and future of California are mainly in your hands.”
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This was almost certainly an exaggeration. The shock of actual
secession, and of the news from
Fort Sumter, were surely more influential in making most Californians realize that no middle ground, no neutrality, was possible. Their state could not stand outside American history, any more than any other part of the country. California—and each of its citizens—would have to stand with the
new Union, with
the warlike Union, or be classed among its enemies. This realization awoke in many people an idealism they had not known they possessed. “The noble and beautiful side of the nation is now apparent,” Mrs. Frémont wrote to a friend back East.
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Yet there is no denying that King’s words, reaching millions in person and in print, articulated a rationale for linking California’s destiny to that of the beleaguered East. Speaking as if he were the voice of history itself, he reconnected what seemed the land of the past to the land of the future. In his Lexington speech—first delivered while news of Sumter’s surrender was crossing the plains in a
Pony
Express pouch—he asked the audience to imagine the sun rising on that first morning of the Revolution: shining first on the Maine coast and his beloved New England mountains, then sweeping over the Alleghenies and turning the Hudson into a thread of gold, crossing the Mississippi, flooding the prairies with light, climbing the far slope of the Rockies, then gleaming upon the highest peaks of the Sierras before dawn rolled at last over the western ocean—this heavenly
path confirming the rightness of the continent’s unity.
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The men, women, and children in the room listened in silence. It was the kind of journey that almost every one of them had also taken. And it was a time when gorgeous words could move spirits in a way that they rarely can today.
King brought Eastern culture with him to the West, even into the mining camps. Curious people came just to see this expatriate Bostonian, this friend of Beecher and Emerson: names that all literate Americans knew. Another message that King carried with him wherever he spoke:
This is yours, too.
In June 1861,
Frank Buck—the man who had told his sister that he didn’t “give a straw” if the Union perished—went to hear King’s speech on Washington in the raw wooden meetinghouse up in Weaverville. As soon as he came home, still electrified by the experience, he sat down to write her another letter:
Who do you think we had to preach? ‘T. Starr King.’ … It was beautiful beyond description. Language just flows from his mouth so easily. Everybody was in ecstasies. He held the audience spell bound for two hours. It was a great treat for us I assure you. Even the men from Virginia and Texas admired him although he lashed the Secessionists without mercy.
I had intended to write you at some length on politics but there are no longer any political parties. We are all either for this Government
or against it.… You may set us down as loyal to the Union. No matter whether this rebellion was caused by Northern Abolitionists or Southern Fire Eaters we won’t discuss the matter but put it down at any sacrifice.
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Back in San Francisco three weeks later, King accompanied Mrs. Frémont and her children to the wharf where the Vanderbilt Line steamship
North Star
awaited them. The
Pony Express had brought a letter from Colonel Frémont in
London: he was returning at once to the United States, and wanted them to close up the cottage at Black Point and meet him in New York. King escorted his
friend to the door of her stateroom. Their parting was difficult; both were overcome not just with emotion but with the exhaustion of the past few months. At last he pressed into her hands a bouquet of long-stemmed violets and a volume of Emerson’s essays. “Smell, read, and rest,” he said.
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