Authors: H.W. Brands
Had the rest of the country known what William Sherman knew about life in California in 1856, John Frémont might not have won the first Republican nomination for president. But the struggle for order in San Francisco loomed far larger locally than in the affairs of the nation, which had problems aplenty of its own, and Frémont’s run of good fortune continued.
That it kept Frémont in politics was rather surprising. By the bad luck of the draw (the other senator selected by California’s first legislature, William Gwin, got the longer straw, and hence the longer term) and the slowness of Congress to accept California as a state, Frémont served only a few weeks in the Senate before having to return to California to defend his seat. Although he hadn’t been away long, the debate over the Compromise of 1850 so polarized California politics—as it was polarizing politics throughout the country—that an outspoken free-soiler like Frémont could no longer pass muster with the predominantly Democratic and South- leaning California legislature. His candidacy failed (although it took the legislature almost another year to agree on his successor).
The San Francisco fire of 1851 shortly added injury to insult by destroying his and Jessie’s home; he responded by taking the family to Europe for an extended holiday. His reputation preceded him and his wealth accompanied him; the family lived and were treated like royalty. In England,
John was most intrigued to meet the Duke of Wellington, now past eighty but still impressive. Jessie preferred her audience with Queen Victoria. In Paris they were entertained by the recovering nobility, who recovered enough before the Frémonts left to put the imperial crown back on the head of a Bonaparte, Napoleon III.
On their return to America, Frémont deposited Jessie and the children in Washington, where she tended to her ailing mother; and he headed west on his fifth exploratory expedition. The plans for a California railroad had by now become thoroughly entangled in the sectional struggle. The secretary of war, Mississippi Democrat Jefferson Davis, aggravated the struggle—in the guise of attempting to resolve it—by commissioning five separate surveys of possible routes. Frémont’s previous exploratory work was ignored, as was the explorer himself. Frémont took the snub personally, and politically. The regular army—Davis was a West Pointer—obviously still bore a grudge against the man who had crossed General Kearny; moreover, the Democrats and the South were determined to stall construction of a line that would strengthen the North by linking free California to the other free states. While others besides Frémont complained at the politics of the superfluous surveys, he took matters into his own hands, and his own pocket, by funding a survey of his own.
This final expedition of Frémont’s career lacked the grisly drama of some of the previous four. No one ate anyone else, although at one point of low rations Frémont swore everyone to abstinence from human flesh and vowed to shoot the first man who eyed his fellow hungrily. As always, Jessie worried about her husband; she later convinced herself that she knew telepathically the precise moment of the expedition’s greatest peril, and, just subsequently, of its deliverance.
The expedition contributed little to public understanding of the West, but it did serve to put Frémont once more in the public eye—which almost certainly was one reason he undertook it. By the time he emerged from the mountains, the sectional controversy had a new twist, in the form of the new party. The Republicans held organizing conventions in 1854; shortly thereafter they began planning for the presidential election of 1856.
They had a cause—antislavery—but they needed a candidate. As a
new party, the Republicans had no party stalwarts to call upon, no party regulars to reward, no party debts to repay. The most likely choices from the professional political world carried some heavy baggage. William Seward of New York had stirred antislavery hearts in the debate over California by referring to a “higher law” that transcended federal statutes and even the Constitution. Although few Americans doubted that such a higher law existed, to cite it on the floor of an already divided Congress seemed to many to be dangerously incendiary. (“Wild, reckless and abominable,” was Henry Clay’s judgment.) Seward, in other words, scared people. A second possibility, Salmon Chase of Ohio, had won his antislavery spurs by defending fugitive slaves (“the attorney general for runaway Negroes,” he was often called) and denouncing both the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But Chase seemed more comfortable in a courtroom than on the stump. Besides, both Seward and Chase were career politicians with offices and reputations to consider. The chances of a Republican nominee in 1856 weren’t so bright as to convince them to jeopardize what they worked for years to gain. Indeed, smart money guessed that the role of the Republican nominee in 1856 would be merely to break trail for the party’s candidate four years later.
Frémont had much of what Seward and Chase lacked, and lacked what they had. He was an arresting figure: still young (he turned 43 in 1856), still handsome (a lithograph circulated during the campaign might have made him an idol in the theater), demonstrably brave (in wilderness and war), and wonderfully wealthy (which, besides impressing people, helped with campaign costs). His wife had a reputation of her own as being fearless in the face of physical hardship and unyielding to her husband’s political foes. Jessie’s Benton heritage added just the right touch of establishment respectability to her husband’s outsider appeal. The connection of both John and Jessie to California, whose political troubles paled, in the national mind, beside its still-golden promise, lent an additional aura to a Frémont candidacy. As important as anything else, Frémont possessed no political record, and therefore almost no political enemies.
Frémont’s appeal wasn’t lost on the Democrats, who were having problems of their own finding an acceptable candidate. By his and others’ accounts,
he was approached by prominent Democrats and offered the Democratic nomination in exchange for a pledge to accept the Fugitive Slave and Kansas-Nebraska Acts. He was sufficiently interested to present the offer to Jessie, then vacationing on Nantucket.
Jessie’s political instincts where sharper than his, and her opposition to slavery more reflexive. She immediately vetoed the offer. Pointing to a lighthouse on the island, she said, “It is the choice between a wreck of dishonor, or a kindly light that will go on its mission of doing good.” (This was what she recollected for publication. Almost certainly she was more straightforward in person.) Frémont told the Democrats to keep their nomination.
The Republican nomination came with no conditions. During the spring of 1856 an overwhelming enthusiasm for Frémont arose in the Midwest; one observer likened the surge to a “prairie fire,” while the Chicago correspondent of the
New York Tribune
observed, “A sort of intrusive feeling pervades the people that he will be nominated and elected. The same sentiment is extending over Iowa and spreading into Wisconsin. He seems to combine more elements of strength than any man who has yet been named.” Frémont’s strength continued to increase as the Republican delegates gathered in Philadelphia for their inaugural nominating convention, and it carried him to victory on the first ballot. The platform on which the party placed him opposed the expansion of slavery and endorsed the California railroad.
H
ER HUSBAND’S NOMINATION
thrust Jessie Frémont into the national spotlight as never before. She doubtless knew it would, and by all evidence she relished the experience.
She first emerged as a distinct figure in the campaign during the week after the Republican convention, when a boisterous crowd of well-wishers rallied at New York’s Tabernacle in support of the Frémont ticket. One of the speakers recited the candidate’s qualifications: explorer of the West, pathfinder through the Rocky Mountains, conqueror of California. The speaker added, “He also won the heart and hand of Thomas H. Benton’s
daughter!” At this, the crowd erupted into three cheers and many more loud hurrahs, for Jessie Benton Frémont.
The crowd then poured from the Tabernacle up Broadway to Ninth Street, where the Frémonts had purchased a large house. They clambered over the stonework outside the door, shouting to see the candidate and his wife. In the crush, a stone balustrade collapsed, sending scores of bodies sprawling across the pavement. Miraculously, no one was hurt—which seemed to the pious and superstitious among them a sign of God’s or some other agency’s blessing. Frémont spoke briefly, prompting applause followed by demands that Mrs. Frémont come out. “Jessie! Jessie! Jessie!” the crowd shouted.
In an era when the candidates themselves often held aloof, considering it unseemly to solicit votes on their own behalf, calls upon a candidate’s wife to appear in public were essentially unheard-of. Frémont tried to turn the calls aside, but the crowd made plain it would keep shouting for Jessie till she appeared. Finally she did, prompting an explosion of enthusiasm—“as though all their previous cheering were a mere practice to train their voices for this occasion,” remembered one participant whose ears were still ringing decades later.
At thirty-two years of age, Jessie had matured into one of the great beauties of American politics. With their wealth, connections, and personal history, she and John made the most glamorous pair in American life. Yet there was more than personal appeal that brought out the crowds for Jessie. The Democratic nominee, Buchanan, was a bachelor, with all the questions bachelorhood raised regarding his masculinity and private life. While Republican posters and cartoons showed him in a dress, Republican orators made the character question a test of Buchanan’s capacity for leadership. “I hold that no man who has not had the courage to marry a wife ought to be put up for the president,” asserted a typical speaker. More- discreet members of the party simply let the existence of Jessie, and their enthusiasm for her, underscore the point.
Beyond this, the 1856 Republican campaign was the first national campaign that gave substantial voice to women. The American feminist movement grew up with—or rather grew out of—the antislavery movement,
most conspicuously after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and other women delegates to an 1839 antislavery convention in London were forced to sit in a curtained gallery, sequestered from the rest of the convention. Stanton and Mott subsequently organized the first American women’s rights conference, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, where they demanded equal rights for women. In the 1850s neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were about to accord women equal rights, but the Republicans, as the more progressive party, seemed far more congenial to the women activists than the Democrats—besides being correct on the crucial issue of slavery. Women’s hopes rested with Frémont, wrote Lydia Child. “I would almost lay down my life to have him elected.” Few of the feminists, even in demanding a larger role for women, aimed to overturn traditional patterns of family life. Equal partnership between husbands and wives would have been quite satisfactory. In this regard, the partnership between John and Jessie Frémont seemed a model, which made the Frémonts—together—that much worthier of women’s support.
Had they known how large a role Jessie actually played in John’s campaign, the activists would have been even more impressed. No less a judge of political astuteness than Abraham Lincoln remarked, to her face, that she was “quite a female politician.” And so she proved in fighting to get her husband elected. She took control of his correspondence, determining which letters he should see and which not. She covertly coauthored a campaign biography of Frémont that obfuscated his illegitimate birth behind a veil of prevarication. (Democratic reviewers criticized the book—fairly— as reading like a novel, and supplied their own version of the story of Frémont’s father. One reviewer remarked, “These incidents in the life of the progenitor of the free-soil candidate for the Presidency show that he was at least a disciple of Free-love, if not of Free-soil.”) She wrote numerous letters rebutting allegations that he was a closet Catholic, allegations resting on his French ancestry and the fact that he and Jessie had been married by a priest. (Henry Ward Beecher turned this latter evidence into an opportunity to compliment Jessie. “Had we been in Col. Frémont’s place,” the famous Congregational minister declared, “we would have been married if
it had required us to walk through a row of priests and bishops as long as from Washington to Rome, winding up with the Pope himself.”)
Although most of her activities on her husband’s behalf remained secret, Jessie became a lightning rod in the campaign. Her supporters recited how at eighteen she had defied the War Department to launch her husband’s most famous expedition, and asserted that the same defiant spirit still burned within her. Rallies sprouted signs reading “John and Jessie,” “Jessie Bent-on Being Free,” and even “Jessie for the White House.” Frémont’s opponents predictably seized on such outpourings as suggesting that she was the real candidate, the one who wore the pants in the family, the one who would run the country in case of her husband’s election.
The Democrats made much of a split in the Benton household. Thomas Benton, having been retired from the Senate for opposing slavery’s extension, nonetheless had no use for Republicans, whom, he judged, were harbingers of disunion. Some of the old anger at Frémont for eloping with his daughter seems to have resurfaced, and perhaps resentment at Frémont’s having carried her off to California. Whatever the mix of motives, Benton refused to make an exception for his son-in-law in condemning Republicans. “I am above family, and above self when the good of the Union is concerned,” he declared. A Republican victory—that is, a Frémont victory—would be lethal to the Union. “We are treading upon a volcano that is liable at any moment to burst forth and overwhelm the nation.”
This became the theme of the opposition’s campaign. Frémont and the Republicans would wreck the Union, the Democrats said. “The election of Frémont would be the end of the Union, and ought to be,” declared Robert Toombs of Georgia. James Mason of Virginia insisted that the only answer to a Frémont victory must be “immediate, absolute, eternal separation.” Adding personal invective to the party posturing, Henry Wise of Virginia asked rhetorically, “Tell me, if the hoisting of the Black Republican flag in the hands of an adventurer, born illegitimately in a neighboring state, if not ill-begotten in this very city [Richmond]—tell me, if the hoisting of the black flag over you by a Frenchman’s bastard, while the arms of civil
war are already clashing, is not to be deemed an overt act and declaration of war?”