After the charges were read, Frémont opened his own defense by brushing aside all technicalities and announcing that the whole case against him boiled down to three issues. First, that the orders to Stockton and Kearny by their respective military bosses in Washington were imprecise; second, California had already been conquered when Kearny arrived, and thus Kearny’s orders were obsolete; and, third, the prosecution was unable to appreciate the great issues at stake. Frémont argued that at all times he had acted in good faith, that he had been a good governor and military scientist, prevented civil war, and conquered California bloodlessly. In essence Frémont painted himself as a respectful soldier trying to do his duty for his country during a difficult time.
When his turn came, Kearny said that it came as news to him that California was already conquered by Frémont and Stockton, since the day he arrived there he was violently attacked by Mexicans at the Battle of San Pasqual, which killed or wounded most of his men. He painted Frémont as an opportunist and testified that Frémont had basely attempted to “sell himself to the highest bidder” by asking if Kearny would also be willing to appoint him governor, just as Stockton had, thus offering to switch sides.
At length Benton’s great hour came round. With Kearny still on the stand he puffed himself up in the manner of an actor, his face reddened with rage, turned his great head and beetle brows toward the witness chair, and launched into a tirade of disdainful maledictions, as though the general had become some bottom-dwelling misfit. He implied that Kearny was lying about selected events, that his memory was consciously “faulty.” He accused Kearny of coming to California “to steal the laurels and material benefits” that had been so hard won in battle by Frémont and Commodore Stockton.
He charged that Kearny was jealous of Frémont’s youth and fame and was deliberately out to ruin him. He informed the court that the general had “looked insultingly and fiendishly” at Frémont, apparently to intimidate him, and it “was therefore his duty to glare” at Kearny “till his eyes fell—till they fell upon the floor!”
His voice cut the air like a saw. Benton might have thought of himself as an American Cicero, but rarely, if ever, had a general officer of the armed services such as Kearny been so scurvily treated in a court-martial proceeding. Naturally, the court took this into consideration, the newspapers lapped it up, and Frémont’s trial vied for front-page coverage with flashes of the victorious American battles in Mexico.
The court-martial continued for three months while the press “tried the case on a country-wide basis,” eclipsed only by news that Winfield Scott’s army had at last taken Mexico City and that peace was at hand.‖
It had been a remarkable achievement, with Scott fighting his way across the interior of Mexico with an army half the size of what Santa Anna could throw at him, and testimony to the amazing skills and ingenuity of America’s military establishment, which would be put to such terrible use little more than a decade hence.
It didn’t do Frémont’s case much good that he attempted to portray General Kearny as pretentious and overbearing; officers of the regular army understood that lieutenant colonels do not refuse to obey the orders of their superiors on grounds that they may have been pretentious or overbearing.
Nor was it helpful that he had agreed to let Benton be his lawyer. The fiery old politician had argued as he would in the Senate, fulminating with provocative and sometimes insulting rhetoric, especially against Kearny, which caused the court to admonish him on more than one occasion. After all those years of nearly freelance exploring, it appeared that Frémont had fallen out of touch with traditional army customs and standards; how else can one explain such an incendiary defense?
In any case the court found him guilty as charged and sentenced him to be dismissed from the service, which caused not just a national but an international uproar. That was not quite the end of it, however, though it might as well have been.
Half of the court recommended clemency by President Polk, and while the others did not the matter went to the president’s cabinet, half of whom recommended clemency and half did not. Polk split the difference. He dismissed the most serious charge of mutiny but concluded that Frémont was guilty of the lesser offenses. He canceled the punishment and ordered Frémont to “resume his sword.”
However, Frémont’s egocentric personality would not admit to any guilt whatever, and he immediately presented his resignation from the army. He had just turned thirty-five years old.
Benton used the occasion to launch a rancorous vendetta against Polk—as Polk himself had predicted—the U.S. Army in general, and Stephen Watts Kearny in particular. He stopped speaking to the president, tried to pass a law to change courts-martial procedures, and voted against the administration in almost all of its war measures. When Kearny’s bill for brevet major general came up for approval in the Senate, Benton’s was not only the lone vote against it, he also threatened a filibuster.
To redeem his slightly tarnished reputation, Frémont went back to exploring but his good luck seemed to have run out. This time he was without the backing and subsidy of the U.S. military and had to finance his own expedition, which he did by enlisting wealthy St. Louis men who were interested in an exploration of the south-central Rockies for purposes of establishing their city as the eastern terminus of a transcontinental railroad line. In the meanwhile Jessie had a baby, a boy, but he was sickly and soon died, which crushed her. She blamed it on the court-martial, and on General Kearny.
Frémont nevertheless set out, taking a party of thirty-three—including many of his old regulars—though not Carson this time. They went from Independence down the Santa Fe Trail to Bent’s Fort where it was already winter, and everyone was talking about the extraordinary snows for that time of year. Against the advice of the fur traders there, Frémont decided to push on anyway, perhaps overanxious to redeem himself, and got trapped on Boot Mountain in the San Juan Range. In winter this was some of the most savage terrain on earth. A big storm hit; mules began to die, then men. They sent out for help but they were starving. By the time it was over a dozen men were dead and there had been a pragmatic cannibalism of the Donner variety. The expedition had been a disaster and one reason undoubtedly was Kit Carson’s absence.
Just as Frémont began his ordeal in the mountains, Polk sent Kearny to Mexico, first as governor of Veracruz, then as governor of Mexico City. But a few months after he arrived the general came down with yellow fever and was returned to St. Louis in fragile health, to the home of his brother-in-law Meriwether Lewis Clark, who had commanded Doniphan’s artillery so well. There the fever killed him on the last day of October 1848, with his wife and children by his side. Because of the sensational press reports emanating from Frémont’s trial, many dead cats had been thrown Kearny’s way by a public that disliked being told its hero may have feet of clay. Nevertheless, a few weeks before he died, Kearny had sent for Jessie Benton Frémont, whom he’d known and befriended in St. Louis since she was a girl. But she refused to come, blaming him for the strain she thought had caused the death of her child. “I could not forgive him,” Jessie told Kearny’s doctor. “There was a little grave between us I could not cross.”
Benton’s vicious attacks on Kearny during the court-martial were of course spread throughout the land and hurt Kearny personally, because before the rift Benton had been a longtime friend, and also professionally since he never responded to the slander. De Voto mounts his high horse on the subject nearly a hundred years later, but his proofs are good and fair. He wrote in 1942: “Benton could be a gigantic hater [and] turned demagogue on a cosmic scale. His attack on Kearny was dishonest, it was absurd, and it was puerile.
“Few of those in high places were capable of putting the republic before themselves. Kearny served it without trying to serve himself. He was a man, a gentleman, and a soldier. The enmity of an adventurer’s father-in-law should not be permitted to obscure his achievement any longer.”
After his catastrophic four
th expedition, Frémont went to California where he had acquired a huge piece of property below the Sierras and intended to start a ranch. In 1850 he was elected senator from the new state, where gold had been discovered three years earlier and emigrants were pouring in at an astonishing rate.a There was even gold on Frémont’s place but he was somehow cheated out of it through his employees’ misfeasance or malfeasance while he was away in Washington. In 1856 he was an unsuccessful presidential candidate for the fledgling antislavery Republican Party, and financial troubles plagued him until the Civil War, when he was taken out of mothballs and commissioned a major general.
Benton had died in 1858 at the age of seventy-six, having been defeated for office in Missouri seven years earlier after he came out against slavery. He had subsequently been censured for misbehavior on the Senate floor. His autobiography, Thirty Years’ View, a lengthy screed fulminating against everything and everyone, from paper money to President Polk, was published in 1854.
During the Civil War Frémont did not distinguish himself; in fact, quite the opposite. His first duty in 1861 was as commander of the Union Army of the West, headquartered in St. Louis. It was an enormous responsibility, but for some reason Frémont surrounded himself with a bunch of cronies and a company of brass-helmeted troops dressed like French chasseurs, and he became ensconced in an expensive mansion where he refused to see anyone. Dispatches came to the house, and dispatches left the house, but nothing of consequence occurred until Frémont issued an edict under his own authority freeing all the slaves of anyone suspected of having Confederate sympathies. This happened to be the very last thing that President Lincoln wanted at the moment, since he was trying frantically to hold the slaveholding border states Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland to the Union politically rather than by force. The president tactfully ordered Frémont to modify his order but the Pathfinder refused, even after another urgent appeal by Jessie, who again marched on the White House with her indignant swishing of skirts. On November 2, 1861, Lincoln relieved Frémont of command.
Four months later he was given charge of the Mountain Department of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and in this capacity in June of 1862 he engaged, or endeavored to engage, the redoubtable Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who made a fool of him all over the Shenandoah Valley. Again relieved, after refusing to serve under General John Pope in the Army of Virginia, Frémont went to New York but never received another command. In the election of 1864 hard-line abolitionists once more pushed Frémont into the Republican primary, but he quit in the middle of it. As a regular soldier, it seems Frémont was a wash, no matter how brilliantly he had performed in the mountain wilds as explorer par excellence. Benton had doubtless been accurate when he accused such West Point officers as Emory and Cooke of being disdainful of Frémont because he had no formal military training. In retrospect their assessment seems to have been quite correct.
After the war Frémont became involved in railroad building but lost everything in that dicey business. In 1878 he secured an appointment as governor of the Arizona Territory, but when that ended he had to rely on Jessie’s literary career for their living. They remained in New York, where he died in 1890, at the age of seventy-seven. Afterward, Jessie moved to Los Angeles, where she died in 1902 at the age of seventy-eight.
Frémont has turned out to be a controversial and contradictory personality in American history. Headstrong, and at times imprudent, he inspired the utmost loyalty from his subordinates—those fabled mountain men—no mean feat in itself. He was curious, fearless, and had a decisive presence of command, even when he was wrong. During the Civil War his status as national hero was diminished, and he became lampooned in the press for his Civil War blunders and his radical politics.
He nevertheless will be remembered by more than a score of western plants that are named after him (as well as by him), and numerous counties, cities, mountains, rivers, high schools, streets, hospitals, libraries, parks, and bridges, mostly in the West, bear his name. In addition, innumerable children were named after him during his most famous exploration years in the 1840s, including, I suspect, as noted, my great-grandfather Fremont Sterling Thrower.
Of the other characters in the drama, Kit Carson became a national folk hero through Frémont’s expedition reports, and his stature was further expanded by the publication of dozens of pulp fiction Westerns—then called dime novels—purporting to recount his fabulous exploits. After the Frémont years, he became a rancher in New Mexico and later served the U.S. government as an Indian agent and fighter during numerous uprisings. During the Civil War he was recalled to service, commanding a 500-man battalion of mounted infantry against a Confederate invasion of New Mexico and fought at the Battle of Valverde.
Following that he was once more preoccupied with “Indian troubles,” the Indians having used the Civil War as an occasion to run amok. In the spring of 1864 he forced the surrender of 8,000 Navajos who were marched three hundred miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, a trek known then, as today, in Navajo lore as the “Long Walk.”
By the end of the war Carson was breveted a brigadier general with headquarters in Ute territory in Colorado. Afterward he continued to ranch until the death of his wife, Josefa, in childbirth in 1868. He followed her a month later, on May 23 of that year, from a rupture of his abdominal aorta. His last words were “adios compadres!” Their eight orphaned children were parceled out to relatives and Carson soon passed into legend. His reputation remained solid as an honest, decent, fearless, sympathetic frontiersman, as well as a cold-blooded killer of Indians that he felt threatened by. He was a man of his time.
Interviewers of Carson have stated that, like Andrew Jackson, he believed the Indians needed to be separated from white men for their own good, that for the most part the trouble started when whites confronted Indians in what the Indians considered to be their territory.
Unlike for Frémont, there are no botanical specimens named after Carson, but in the West one might justifiably conclude that almost everything else under the sun has been: the state capital of Nevada is Carson City, and there is Fort Carson, Colorado, as well as Carson Park, Peak, Pass, National Forest, River, Valley, Trail, and untold Carson streets, roads, expressways, and schools; there is even a Kit Carson Parking Lot in Kentucky, his home state.
The mountain men who accompanied Frémont and Carson also found themselves the subjects of dime novels and likely the made-up tales weren’t even the half of it. Trapping beaver had gone out of style and most of them turned to such occupations as wagon train guides, border traders, outpost operators, and buffalo hide and meat hunters. Their day had lasted only about a quarter century, but in that time they made an indelible impression on the American landscape.
The English adventurer Lieutenant George Frederick Augustus Ruxton, who gave so much literary grief to the Missouri Volunteers, went on to become a respectable mountain man himself, and after a year or so he went to St. Louis and began writing articles for a British magazine as well as a fine book, Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. But he was terribly unwell from dysentery he had contracted somewhere along the way, a disease for which, often, there was no cure. Weak and resigned to his fate at the (comparatively) fashionable Planter’s Hotel in St. Louis, he wrote home.
“My dear Mother,” he began. “I always think it better not to say goodbye, and therefore only tell you to keep a lookout for me one of these days.”
He died there shortly afterward, at the age of twenty-eight. His works on the American West are still well worth reading.
Commodore Robert F. Stockton resigned from the navy in 1850 and the following year was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from New Jersey. He served three years, and then resigned to become president of a canal-building company. In 1863, when the Confederate army invaded Pennsylvania, Stockton took charge of the New Jersey militia. He died in 1866, at the age of seventy-one, and his name has been honored on no fewer than four U.S. Navy vessels, as well as the cities of Stockto
n in California, Missouri, and New Jersey, and Fort Stockton, Texas.
Captain Archibald Gillespie of the U.S. Marines returned to Washington and testified for Frémont at his court-martial. There, he married into a wealthy family—a cousin, in fact, of the socially prominent Captain William Emory. For the next several years Gillespie held various posts but was ill much of the time; then, in 1854, he became embroiled in a disgraceful scandal. Officers of the USS Independence, flagship of the U.S. Pacific Squadron, accused Gillespie of “swindling his messmates and brother officers out of the money paid him by them for the mess stores.” Sobered by this shameful incident, Gillespie abruptly resigned his commission, and around the same time he separated from his wife. He found his way to California where his brother practiced law and lived an obscure and shadowy life there until August 1873, when he died at the age of sixty-three. There are no public monuments to his name.
Alexander William Doniphan and his regiment returned to Missouri via New Orleans, where they were feted and fawned over until they resumed their boorish behavior and were nearly asked to leave town. By then, their clothing and appearance were deplorable. A description of one of these men by General Wool seems typical: “He was almost naked, dirty and bearded like a pirate, hair unkempt and falling over his shoulders.” Doniphan arranged on his personal credit to buy civilian clothing for the entire bunch, to the tune of $60,000 (about $60 per man), after which, on June 28, 1847, they were assembled in formation for a final time and mustered out with honorable discharges. Most, but not all, returned to Missouri, by steamboat, up the Mississippi, greeted enthusiastically along the way by the flag-waving occupants of its fabulous plantation homes, which lined both banks of the river for hundreds of miles. In St. Louis, especially, they were received with parades, dinners, and fireworks.
Doniphan was much celebrated and even asked to address the Corps of Cadets at the United States Military Academy. He was so popular it has been said by his biographers that “he could have sought national office in the Congress or perhaps even the presidency.” But despite the efforts of political insiders and pundits he resisted running for office and quietly resumed the practice of law. As the Civil War approached he counseled loyalty to the Union, and later, as things grew heated, at least neutrality for Missouri.
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