Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  This book contends that the Frémonts advanced the antislavery cause—and also helped to bring about the Civil War that came in 1861. Their role must be properly defined. It would be wrong to claim, as Confederates did, that antislavery zealots such as the Frémonts were to blame for the war. In truth slavery was to blame, and its defenders fired the first shot. But events in which the Frémonts took part—westward expansion and the election of 1856—disrupted the old political order that had protected slavery, and forced a national reckoning with it.

  The disruption came during an era that can feel eerily familiar, in that its social and technological change prefigured our own. Then as now, new industries were transforming daily life. Americans had never before seen places like Lowell, Massachusetts, a district of textile mills where eight thousand workers, mostly women, turned spindles and looms that produced fifty-eight million yards of cloth per year. The economy was globalized. Beaver pelts trapped in the West were shipped to Europe to become top hats; ginseng from the Appalachians and lead from Missouri were shipped to China in exchange for porcelain and tea. There was a revolution in communications; never in human history had people been so well connected. New roads, then steamboats, then railroads, and finally the telegraph shrank the world until information that had taken months to spread could travel in days, hours, or even seconds. Upon seeing the first practical telegraph line in 1844, a newspaper writer proclaimed “a new species of consciousness,” the unprecedented ability to know “what events were at that moment passing in a distant city.” Weekly newspapers became daily papers. They reprinted articles from papers elsewhere, creating a national conversation that the telegraph accelerated. Democratic politics were also transformed: voter participation rose year by year, partly driven by political coverage in the ever more vibrant media. But the increase in voting was, in one respect, ominous. Many Americans went to polling stations out of fear, concerned that the wrong election outcome would cause calamity. The telegraph spread news of political violence, which partisan newspapers interpreted in radically divergent ways. None of the advances in technology seemed to be making the country more stable, more equal, or more just.

  Slavery was the great dividing issue. It touched the whole country, even states that seemed free of it; the 1.95 million pounds of cotton fed annually into the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills was picked almost entirely by Southern slaves. But Northern states had gradually abolished slavery on their own soil, while Southern states increasingly defined themselves by it. As rivalry sharpened between the sections, some began questioning the political system that held them together. Americans today can relate, for we still question the relative power of politically different states: Why, for example, should California and Oklahoma each have two senators when California has ten times the population? Why should noncitizens be counted in the census, giving extra House seats to states with more immigrants? The answer is that the nation’s founders made the rules when they drafted the Constitution, but in divisive times it is easy to perceive the rules as dangerously unfair. In the 1800s, Northerners resented that the Constitution allowed white Southerners an advantage when apportioning House seats according to population—white Southerners were allowed to count three-fifths of their slaves. Southern leaders resented that the North’s population grew larger than the South’s. Then westward expansion created the need to organize new states, which must be either slave or free, adding power to one side or the other. For years some parity was maintained, but that changed after John C. Frémont helped to bring the free state of California into the Union. Free states soon seemed powerful enough to elect a president without a single vote from any slave state. This was what John Frémont first attempted as a presidential candidate in 1856, and what Abraham Lincoln tried again in 1860. Southerners, fearing a government that no longer depended on them, prepared to secede from the Union.

  Imperfect Union is a story of the American union, as seen through the Frémonts’ union. They were early players in America’s constant struggles over equality, race, and identity. It goes without saying that the story is set in a time of open bigotry and state-sponsored racism: even outside the South, only five states permitted full voting rights for black men, and none allowed the vote to women. Yet it needs to be said, and is a major theme of this book, that these were also years of American diversity. America as we know it would never have come into being without the work of people who supposedly were not part of it. John, who seemed to define the new race of Americans, was the illegitimate son of a French immigrant. He would not have accomplished as much as he did without his partnership with a woman. When the Frémonts eloped, the only cleric who was willing to officiate was a Catholic priest. The volunteers for John’s perilous expeditions included men of numerous religions and backgrounds—a German immigrant mapmaker, French Catholic mountain men, free black men like Jacob Dodson, a Portuguese Jewish photographer, and Indians of several native nations. Numerous languages could be spoken around their campfires. All of these people were creating the nation we have inherited, which is the legacy of all of them.

  Part One

  NATION BUILDING

  Prairie Meadows Burning by George Catlin, 1832.

  Charleston, South Carolina, fronted by the Battery.

  Chapter One

  AID ME WITH YOUR INFLUENCE

  C.J. Fremont, 1813–1840

  Charleston and the West

  Long before he was famous for wandering the West, John Charles Frémont grew up in a family that wandered the South. They moved restlessly from city to city, beset by scandal, then tragedy, then poverty. The scandal was John’s illegitimate birth.

  John’s mother, Anne Pryor, was the offspring of an elite Virginia family. She was married when she fell in love with Charles Fremon, a French immigrant and French teacher. Confronted by her husband in 1811, Anne left him and moved with Charles to Savannah, Georgia, where John was born to them on January 21, 1813. Their life in modest rented rooms was a change for Anne from the plantation houses where she had grown up; Charles Fremon made a bare living by opening a “French and Dancing Academy” for elite young ladies and gentlemen, and taking in boarders who wanted to study his native language. But they were not entirely without help. Anne had come from Virginia with a living token of her aristocratic past: a maid named Hannah, a family slave in her midthirties described as having a “redish complexion.” She had an independent spirit. Having accompanied Anne when she followed her heart to Savannah, the maid tried to follow her own heart, and escaped in 1812 with a free black boatman. But all the rules were different for Hannah; she either returned or was captured, and was on hand to help when baby John arrived.

  The family faced trouble from the start. The state of Virginia refused to grant a divorce, meaning Anne could not marry the father of her child. Beyond that, something didn’t work for them in Savannah. The baby was only nine months old when they relocated with him to Nashville, where Charles started another French and dancing school. Tennessee also did not hold them long, and they rambled back eastward to Norfolk, Virginia, while two more children, Elizabeth and Francis, were born to them along the way. They no doubt grew poorer with the demands of each new child. Then Charles Fremon died around 1818, leaving Anne with next to nothing, and five-year-old John without any clear memory of his father.

  John never said what he felt about the collapse of his family, except indirectly by what he edited out of his life. He did not speak of his father, and was still a youth when he began effacing his father’s name. First, he changed Fremon to Fremont. Then his given name went through an evolution. His earliest known signature, from age fifteen, was written J. Charles Fremont—he was going by Charles, like his father. As late as his eighteenth year, some documents called him Charles Fremont or even reversed his initials to make him C.J. Fremont. But he later put the initials back in order, giving John as his first name. Not until his twenties did he add an accent mark,
completing his identity as John C. Frémont.

  Before his teenage years, when people still called him Charles or C.J., his mother moved the family to Charleston, South Carolina. C.J. sometimes walked to its harbor, lingering at the Battery, a waterfront promenade, where he could “go and feel the freedom of both eye and thought.” He felt that “the breast expands” when “the eye ranges over a broad expanse of country, or in the face of the ocean.” He could watch white sails on the horizon as ships approached from Liverpool or Boston, along with black smoke from the regular steamer coming up the coast from Savannah. Approaching ships angled past Fort Sumter, a brick pile that was just getting under construction on a shoal in midwater.

  He couldn’t spend much time looking, because his family needed him to work. At thirteen he interrupted his education to work for a lawyer, serving subpoenas. But the youth’s intelligence prompted the lawyer to pay for him to go back to school, the first of many times that Charles would attract an older male sponsor. A schoolteacher became the next sponsor, and recorded a description of his student: “middle size, graceful in manners, rather slender . . . handsome; of a keen piercing eye and noble forehead.” The teacher took extra time to instruct him in Greek, passing on a love of Greek plays, and at sixteen Charles was admitted to the College of Charleston, starting as a member of the junior class.

  It was a priceless opportunity. The college’s brick building was new, its cornerstone having been laid just three years earlier, and though its roof leaked in the rainy climate it was a vibrant institution. Aware that the top colleges were in the North—Princeton, Harvard, Yale—Charlestonians wanted a good school of their own, and leading citizens became trustees. There were three thousand books in the library, and the size of the student body had recently reached a record high of sixty-two. The college president, Jasper Adams, had been recruited from Brown University in New England, and his curriculum blended readings from ancient Athens and Rome with the ideology of the new American republic. That ideology went on display when students performed at a college exhibition: Charles Fremont recited an “Extract from Mr. Crafts’ Oration, 4th July 1812.” William Crafts was a Charleston politician who in that speech declared, “This country appears to have been created on a magnificent plan, destined for the production of great events, and the display of extraordinary powers.” Americans would develop “mental and moral greatness” as they met the challenge of spreading across the continent and conquering the West. “Our rivers,” C.J. repeated to the audience, “flowing with boundless velocity—our mountains, rising in awful grandeur—our rocks, braving the fury of the elements, are marked with the characters of independence, and proclaim the residence of freemen.”

  The faculty member who took attendance recorded the way C.J.’s academic career gradually drifted off course. In the fall of 1830, he missed the first few weeks of class. The faculty understood; attendance records noted that “C.J. Fremont” was “teaching in the country by permission.” Probably he was helping to support his family by giving private lessons to affluent families, as his father once had. C.J. returned to college a few weeks later, and his high grades suggested that he caught up with his classmates. But he began missing more classes, sometimes vanishing for a week. His behavior stood out, even in a school with generally spotty attendance (“The whole course of . . . Philosophy,” one campus record complained, “will be badly understood by the Senior Class on acc. of the frequent absences!”). His professors gave him “frequent reprimands.” His friends were mystified. At last, on February 5, 1831, Charles was summoned to meet the faculty. The confrontation (on a Saturday, after Charles had been absent the previous Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) could not have been easy for President Adams, for he knew his students well and sometimes visited their parents. He understood that Charles came from a struggling family. Yet the young man gave no explanation for his absences. Adams informed him that he was expelled, and his academic record ended with the sentence: “C.J. Fremont was dismissed from the college for incorrigible negligence.”

  The young man shrugged. “I knew that I was a transgressor,” he said. The punishment “came like the summer wind,” for the “edict only gave me complete freedom . . . I smiled to myself while I listened to words about the disappointment of friends—and the broken career.”

  * * *

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED? Charles eventually confessed a secret. He was “passionately in love,” cutting class to visit a fourteen-year-old girl. Her name was Cecilia, and she lived with her family in a house on a Charleston street corner. She was one of five brothers and sisters overseen by their mother and grandmother. They had become his surrogate family; he was part of a “little circle of sworn friends” with the brothers and sisters, and together they explored the woods and islands around the harbor. Sometimes they went shooting or picnicking. Once, in a rowboat, they were nearly swamped by the waves around Drunken Dick, a hazardous shoal on which ships sometimes foundered. Returning to her home, John sat with Cecilia in a side room that had a door opening onto the street, allowing them to flee when the grandmother approached. There is no record of what the grandmother thought of this eighteen-year-old college dropout lounging in her house with an adolescent girl. When Charles revealed this relationship in his memoir, he did not declare whether he’d had his first sexual encounter with her, but he did write: “This is an autobiography and it would not be true to itself if I left out the bit of sunshine that made the glory of my youth. . . . I lived in the glow of a passion that now I know extended its refining influence over my whole life.”

  Who was the young woman who so affected him? He never gave her family name, and said little of her personality, but described her appearance: she had a “clear brunette complexion” with “large dark eyes and abundant blue-black hair.” She also had a compelling family history: her people came from Haiti, in the West Indies, and were Creoles, meaning they descended from French colonists who had once ruled Haiti. The French were expelled by a revolt among Haiti’s black slave population, which culminated in 1804 with the massacre of many white residents and the creation of an independent black-led republic. Cecilia’s family were refugees.

  Notably, John said Cecilia’s siblings had the same “brunette complexions,” dark eyes, and blue-black hair. Although these words could describe French people who identified as white, they easily suggest people of color. Charles did not state their race, yet the implication of his description was clear enough. One of his early biographers was apparently uncomfortable about this description, and solved the problem by effectively putting the young man’s lover in whiteface—rewriting her description to give her “clear ruddy skin” instead of brown. Perhaps the biographer concluded that Fremont misspoke.

  A more straightforward explanation is that Charles described her accurately and knew what his description would imply. Haiti had many people of mixed race—and people of all racial identities had to flee Haiti when suspected of aiding the colonizers. And so it’s plausible that C.J. Fremont’s first love was a person of mixed race, as were all her siblings, his close friends. This would help explain why his classmates at Charleston College were baffled about where he went instead of studying: he could not tell them. An interracial relationship was a greater transgression than missing class. Such relations were common, as was obvious from the city’s population of several thousand people of mixed race, known as mulattoes (many of them descended from white slave owners, who did as they liked with enslaved women they controlled). But like Charles’s birth out of wedlock, this could not be discussed.

  Charles’s affair with Cecilia did not last. His mother still needed financial help, and before long his time was taken up with minor teaching jobs, including one in which he and a partner taught French. But he had begun dreaming of the wider world—the world he saw from the Battery, or while roaming with Cecilia by the harbor—and his dreams were fueled by a pair of books he had read. One was a book on astronomy, which awakened his interest
in celestial navigation. The book was in Dutch, which Charles could not understand, but he could study the “beautifully clear maps of the stars,” and he had the math skills to follow the “many examples of astronomical calculations.” The other book collected stories of “men who had made themselves famous by brave and noble deeds, or infamous by cruel and base acts.” This book reflected the aspirations and the anxieties that churned within C.J. himself.

  * * *

  HE FOUND HIS WAY OUT of Charleston with the help of his next mentor: Joel R. Poinsett, a politician, diplomat, and amateur botanist. Appointed the United States minister to Mexico in the 1820s, Poinsett earned two distinctions: he was the first US ambassador to the newly independent country, and while there he sent home a red flower that became known in the United States as the poinsettia. Returning to Charleston in 1829, Poinsett attended the same church as C.J. Fremont’s family and served as a trustee of Charleston College. He was the same age as John’s mother, and took notice of her wayward son.

  The first and most important thing that Poinsett did was give C.J. a political orientation. Poinsett was a Unionist, meaning he favored preserving the country as it showed early signs of coming apart. In 1831, the year of Fremont’s affair with Cecilia, Charleston residents held a “states-rights ball,” while other South Carolina towns held “disunion dinners” to promote the South breaking away from the North, and citizens of Beaufort performed a “Disunion Drama.” The issue was not slavery, at least not directly. Some South Carolina leaders proclaimed their right to nullify what they called the Tariff of Abominations, federal taxes on imported goods that protected American industries but raised the price of products bought by Southern planters. If Fremont’s mentor in these years had been one of South Carolina’s radical thinkers—such as John C. Calhoun, who was serving as vice president of the United States yet secretly aiding the nullifiers—his life might have taken a different course. But Unionists such as Poinsett supported President Andrew Jackson and his administration (one South Carolina paper said the idea that the federal government could not enforce its laws was “beyond patient endurance from a people not absolutely confined in their own mad-houses”). Poinsett also held a nuanced view of slavery. In 1832 he told a visiting French writer named Alexis de Tocqueville that slavery was a disadvantage to the South—that Northern and western states were gaining far more rapidly in population, which meant the South was steadily losing power. It would be a mistake to call him antislavery: he said nothing could be done about slavery, a position that allowed him to accept the status quo while deflecting the questions of disapproving outsiders. But as Charles later said, Poinsett “saw the dark spot on the sun,” understanding that the divide over slavery endangered the country.