Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Young Fremont’s Unionist associations allowed him to perceive an opportunity when it sailed into the harbor. In January 1833, a US Navy warship glided past the unfinished bulk of Fort Sumter and dropped anchor, sent by President Jackson to signal his determination to enforce federal law. While many Charlestonians saw the USS Natchez as a threat, Fremont saw a chance to get away. He learned of a job on board, and Poinsett agreed to recommend him, even though he thought the job—as a shipboard mathematician—was a waste of Fremont’s talent. He would spend long, dull days at sea, tutoring poorly schooled seamen to calculate the figures necessary to take navigational readings by the sun and stars. His abbreviated education and his study of the pictures in the Dutch book he couldn’t read apparently gave him enough knowledge to persuade the ship’s captain that he was qualified.

  When the nullification crisis eased (President Jackson’s threat of force was followed by a compromise in Congress over the tariff) and the Natchez moved on, twenty-year-old C.J. Fremont bid good-bye to his mother and went out into the world beyond the harbor. Never having been at sea, he joined a crew who made their lives on it: one was Lieutenant David G. Farragut, who had served in the War of 1812 at age eleven. Within a few months the ship was patrolling the coast of South America, which was a magnificent adventure, although Poinsett was right that the work did not test the young mathematician. When the Natchez returned, John wavered over what to do next. He rejected a permanent position as “Professor of Mathematics in the Navy,” but then wrote Poinsett asking for a mathematician’s berth on a ship bound for the Mediterranean.

  Your kindness to me on a former occasion . . . induced me to hope for it also on this—an excuse which you will think rather worse than none at all, but which was true, and all I had to offer . . . Should it suit your convenience to aid me with your influence, I need not say how great would be my obligation to you . . .

  I have the honor to be

  With much respect

  Your Ob’t Servt

  J. Charles Fremont

  Poinsett didn’t get him the job. He had a different journey in mind for his protégé: moving inland instead of out to sea. He was about to give the young man his first experiences in westward expansion.

  In the 1830s the major cities on the Eastern Seaboard were competing to become portals to the developing interior. New Yorkers had already opened the Erie Canal, which connected to the Great Lakes. The tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad were under construction over the Appalachians, and a similar venture was called the Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad. Joel Poinsett of Charleston was among the investors. “The Rail Road will be built,” declared a letter published in the Charleston Courier in 1836. “Real estate in Charleston will appreciate 100 percent; and our own particular Rail Road Stock will rise in two years 100 per cent. . . . Every dollar judiciously laid out in Charleston in real estate, will double itself in five years.” That was just the rosy scenario necessary to persuade men to invest in a plan to lay more than six hundred miles of iron rails over some of the roughest parts of the Appalachians to reach the Ohio River Valley. To find a route, the investors assembled a survey party under the direction of an army engineer, and Fremont was hired to go along. They rode northwestward through South Carolina and into Tennessee, spending long days in the woods and stopping at night at the homes of farmers along the way.

  The project was a fateful failure; the railroad was never built. Although Charleston eventually was connected by more roundabout routes to the Mississippi River Valley, it remained a provincial city on its coast, where regional resentments and dreams of independence festered. But for Fremont the railroad survey was a priceless experience, and the army officer who led it later hired him for a second assignment that launched his career as a soldier of the American empire. He was to map Indian country—the Cherokee Nation. President Jackson had imposed a treaty requiring the Cherokees to surrender their land in North Georgia and surrounding states. They were to move west of the Mississippi by the spring of 1838, but because it was an illegitimate treaty, signed by a breakaway faction of elite Cherokees and not the Cherokee government, no one knew if the fifteen thousand Cherokees would go. The army prepared to clear them off the land by force if necessary, and Fremont was assigned to a surveying party ordered to map Cherokee territory in case it became a battlefield.

  The men rode into Cherokee country in early 1837, splitting into small groups and moving “hurriedly,” as Fremont recalled, through rough mountains. Told to sketch the Hiwassee River, he walked twenty miles along its winding course in a day, climbing huge stones and fallen trees. He woke “so stiff next morning I moved like a foundered horse,” and could no longer lift his feet. He had to sit on obstacles and yank his legs over one at a time. But he recovered in the evenings at Cherokee farms. These were his first meaningful encounters with Indians, who had adapted their culture to life among white people: “many of their farms were much the same as those that are to be met with elsewhere on our remote frontier.” Cherokees welcomed him into their homes and let him sit by their fires. Nobody threatened him, even though he was working for the government that threatened them. Cherokees were conducting a sustained act of nonviolent protest, simply declining to move west. Their protest would not end until some were rounded up at gunpoint and their leaders at last consented to start along the Trail of Tears in 1838.

  Although the young mapmaker accepted the common view that it was “wise and humane” to move Indians out of the way of encroaching white settlers who preyed on them, he grasped that Cherokees were losing more than they gained. “There has been no continuous effective policy by the Government except in the removal of Indians from East to West, and out of the way of the white man,” he later said; promises to compensate and support Indians were never fully kept. His ambivalence about his mission did not prevent him from feeling exhilarated by the work. During “this accident of employment,” he wrote, “I found the path which I was ‘destined to walk.’ Through many of the years to come the occupation of my prime of life was to be among Indians and in waste places. . . . There were to be no more years wasted in tentative efforts to find a way for myself.” His sponsor was now in a position to help him find more work: Joel Poinsett became secretary of war in 1837, appointed by a new Democratic president, Martin Van Buren. Poinsett helped Frémont obtain a job in the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, a special unit devoted to surveying and mapping the American landscape. Accepting the appointment, John left Charleston for good. Only his mother remained for him there; his sister, Elizabeth, had died in her teens, while his brother, Frank, had left Charleston for a career in the theater. John moved to Washington and in 1838, at age twenty-five, was one of a group of ten men formally appointed second lieutenant, the newest and lowest-ranking officers in the army.

  His qualifications came from life experience rather than formal training. This distinguished him from army officers who had graduated from the military academy at West Point, where cadets were forced to apply themselves in class, master the science of war, and generally grow up. West Pointers were early participants in the national trend of professionalization, which lawyers, physicians, engineers, scientists, educators, and others would eventually follow: raising formal standards, demanding specific credentials, and excluding those who did not measure up. John Frémont represented a different tradition: that of the intrepid amateur who found out how much he could get away with.

  * * *

  THE CORPS OF TOPOGRAPHICAL ENGINEERS was filling an enormous gap in the nation’s knowledge. The Louisiana Purchase, more than eight hundred thousand square miles west of the Mississippi, was much traveled but little understood; while native people and fur traders knew it intimately, only scraps of their experience had filtered eastward to be recorded. Lewis and Clark’s expedition beginning in 1803 had traced the Missouri River more than two thousand miles to its source and continued beyond it to the Pacific, but only a few formal exploration
s had followed. From the perspective of Washington, the Rocky Mountains were hardly known; the trails to Oregon and California were scarcely mapped; and great mountains and rivers that appeared on maps were merely rumors. The corps was organizing a mapmaking expedition to fill some of the blanks, and ordered John from Washington to the starting point, St. Louis. He reached the city in the spring of 1838 and mingled with army officers posted to a barracks there, among them Captain Robert E. Lee, who had recently finished making a detailed map of the St. Louis waterfront.

  Lieutenant Frémont was the sole commissioned officer assigned to the expedition, which would mostly consist of hired civilians. The War Department engaged a uniquely qualified expert to command: Joseph Nicollet, a distinguished French geographer who had previously mapped the source of the Mississippi River. John was to become, in effect, the explorer’s apprentice as Nicollet further mapped the northern plains. He was a slight man with an intense focus on his craft; in a letter to his mentor Poinsett, Lieutenant Frémont described the geographer as “delightful” because of the “almost extravagant enthusiasm in the object of his present enterprise wh[ich] he seems to think the sole object of his existence.” He was an immigrant who had fled to the United States for a new start after going bankrupt while speculating in the Paris financial markets. His French background and language made him welcome in St. Louis, where many families had remained since French colonial times. The powerful Chouteau fur-trading family, whose ancestors were founders of the city, supplied Nicollet with provisions as well as with men—voyageurs, as they were called—who had learned the rivers and plains while transporting furs.

  It was a stroke of fortune that John was able to learn from Nicollet, who had devoted his life to a great mystery of the age: how to study the surface of the earth when so little could be seen at any one time. It required a blend of science, stamina, and systems. Nicollet had brought notebooks, five by seven inches or smaller, in which his tiny handwriting recorded every observation. (“Departed Traverse des Sioux at 11:07 a.m. . . . appearance of rain . . . the heat is overwhelming.”) Enchanted by the prairie, he made a note in his journal about “the beautiful lawns we are crossing,” and as the expedition followed winding rivers, he sketched the shape of each bend until the river resembled a little snake on his page. From time to time he would halt the expedition and produce a triangular device called a sextant; peering through a lens, he measured the angle of the sun above the horizon at a certain moment of the day. He then stayed up long past dark to measure the angle of Polaris, the North Star. From these and other readings it was possible to determine latitude and longitude. A barometer measured air pressure, which varied with altitude. Once these readings were compared with readings that had been meticulously recorded at other times and places, Nicollet could determine exactly where he stood on the surface of the earth, how far he was from other points, and how far above sea level. He was a master at this craft, a disciple of the great European geographer Alexander von Humboldt; had Nicollet never emigrated to America, it would have been hard for Lieutenant Frémont to find anyone who had so much to teach him.

  The explorer’s apprentice learned equally important lessons in wilderness survival from the French-speaking voyageurs. One night, when detached from the rest of the expedition, Frémont and two other men camped on the prairie, and woke in the night to a crackling noise. A prairie fire was sweeping in their direction, swift and unstoppable. The voyageurs understood that the only safe place was on ground that was already burned. They lit a prairie fire of their own, let the wind blow it away from them, and with moments to spare stepped into the blackened area. On another day John persuaded the expedition’s hunters to allow him to join the pursuit of a buffalo herd. “This,” he said, “was an event on which my imagination had been dwelling.” The men approached the herd on horseback, working toward it from downwind so the buffalo would not catch their scent. Topping a low ridge, the men looked down on a “compact mass” of brown creatures making “the loud incessant grunting noise peculiar to them.” And then the chase began as the buffalo thundered away in clouds of dust, which was so thick that as the hunters charged after the herd they couldn’t see the ground. Frémont learned how green he was: “I made repeated ineffectual attempts to steady myself for a shot at a cow after a hard struggle to get up with her, and each time barely escaped a fall. In such work a man must be able to forget his horse, but my horsemanship was not yet equal to such a proof.”

  John accompanied Nicollet on a second expedition in 1839, and afterward returned with him to the East. They had grown close, the mentor and protégé. Nicollet, who was Catholic, was living on the grounds of St. Mary’s, a Catholic college in Baltimore, and John sometimes visited him there, meeting Nicollet’s friends among the Catholic clergy who ran the school. Returning to Washington, the two men set up a workroom near the Capitol and began to produce a map. The periodic celestial readings became dots on paper, the expedition’s precise location on certain dates. The men would then use the journal entries and sketches to reconstruct the routes they had taken between these points and the landscape they had seen. It was slow and painstaking work, as Lieutenant Frémont was awkwardly reminded one day when a man appeared in the doorway. He was a man in black, in his late fifties, with a massive body that filled the doorframe, a full head of hair, and piercing blue eyes. He introduced himself as Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He said he wanted to see Joseph Nicollet’s map of the northern plains. Frémont gestured with regret to the map projection, which was blank; they were still organizing the raw material.

  Senator Benton was disappointed, but the two men made a connection: Benton wanted to absorb Frémont’s firsthand knowledge, as he did with every western traveler he met. Though he had never gone west of Missouri, he soaked up so many details from those who had that it could seem he must have walked the ground himself. Frémont began visiting the senator’s home a few blocks from the Capitol, where they sat in Benton’s upstairs library. Soon John had a new mentor. Sometimes John stayed for dinner at the Benton house, and got to know members of the family. He took an interest in the senator’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, when she came home from her boarding school in Georgetown, the little river port at the edge of Washington.

  Elizabeth agreed to attend a school concert with him in Georgetown—and it was at the concert that he noticed Elizabeth’s sister Jessie, who was attending the same school. Afterward, John C. Frémont recorded the moment of their first encounter. “She was just then in the bloom of her girlish beauty,” he said. “There was no experience of life to brush away the bloom.” The “pleasure of seeing her sister” drew her out in “bright talk,” he said. “Naturally, I was attracted.” He came away thinking of Jessie rather than her older sister.

  St. Louis, 1832: the gateway to empire.

  Chapter Two

  THE EQUAL MERITS OF DIFFERING PEOPLES

  Jessie Ann Benton, 1824–1840

  Cherry Grove, St. Louis, and Washington

  Jessie Benton Frémont could not have been more different from John in her family ties. While he lost touch with everyone but his mother and could hardly describe his background without risking shame, she came from an intact family. She had multiple siblings and many illustrious relatives. Her mother’s family, the McDowells, were a mass of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, deeply embedded in Virginia since colonial times, with connections by marriage to other leading families and generations of ancestral lore.

  Jessie was born at her mother’s childhood home, on the McDowell land some two hundred miles southwest of Washington in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was in Rockbridge County, named for its natural bridge, a stone formation that spanned a river and so charmed Thomas Jefferson that in the 1700s he bought the land on which it stood. If the McDowells were not so famed as the Jeffersons, they did own an expansive estate. A long private avenue led to the house, lined on b
oth sides with cherry trees that had been cut to form a canopy overhead. The estate was called Cherry Grove, and there Elizabeth Benton bore her second child on May 31, 1824.

  It is not certain that Jessie’s father arrived in time for the delivery. Senator Thomas Hart Benton likely remained at work in Washington until May 27, when Congress adjourned, and then he faced a ride of a few days to reach the home of his in-laws. It was not from any lack of interest in his wife and child that Benton cut it so close; he had been thinking about the baby, perhaps too much. His first child had been a daughter, and he was hoping this time for a son. Although he was disappointed, he never gave up easily on an idea, and he chose for the girl what sounded like a boy’s name, a variation on the name of his late father, Jesse Benton.