Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  But there was another aspect of her father’s life in the West that Jessie talked about much less: his ownership of slaves. His family had controlled more than twenty African slaves when he was a boy, and by his own account he had “never been without” at least a few as an adult. He owned several when he came to St. Louis, which contributed to a deadly dispute: a fellow lawyer repeatedly insulted Benton, in part by questioning whether he had paid property taxes that were due on the human beings he owned. To settle this quarrel, the two men rowed out to Bloody Island, that dueling ground on the Mississippi, and shot and wounded each other. Later they returned for another round and Benton killed his opponent. Benton never renounced dueling, saying it was “deplorable” but expressed real human passion, and “there is at least consent on both sides.” He also never fully renounced slavery. In the fight for Missouri statehood, he was slavery’s advocate. He spoke in 1819 at a grand public meeting for statehood at the St. Louis courthouse, which was filled to overflowing: “Many remained at the doors and windows” to listen as Benton spoke, according to an article in his paper. Benton spoke against proposals that Missouri should be forced to abolish slavery before joining the Union.

  He seemed to grasp that slavery was wrong (“dishonorable to the United States,” his paper was willing to admit in passing in 1820), yet he rationalized. Without evidence, his paper claimed that slaves had an easier life in Missouri than elsewhere, so why keep them out of Missouri? The same article in Benton’s paper whipped up the racist fears of white readers: if Congress had the power to free slaves in Missouri, it would also have the power to invite “free negroes” to move to Missouri, where they could vote and “intermarry with the whites.” The Missouri debate grew so intense that it ignited the first national crisis over the expansion of slavery into new territories. Congress resolved the impasse with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, drawing a line through the Louisiana Purchase. Slavery could exist south of the line, but nowhere north of it—nowhere except Missouri, which was north of the line but was allowed to establish its own slave laws. Slavery, too, was a global trade, and produced products that were traded globally. Benton didn’t want Missouri missing out.

  * * *

  JESSIE GREW UP MORE SKEPTICAL OF SLAVERY. She credited this view to her mother, Elizabeth, whose family had a history of questioning it. Although the McDowells built their fortune as other prominent Virginians had—importing enslaved workers to farm the land they had taken from Indians—they occasionally pondered whether their way of life made any moral or practical sense. One such occasion came after a slave uprising known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which was savagely suppressed in 1831 but provoked Virginians to consider how badly it could all go wrong. Virginia’s legislature soon debated ending slavery through gradual emancipation. And the legislators who spoke in favor included James McDowell, Elizabeth’s brother and thus Jessie’s uncle. He argued that the state could justly interfere with the property rights of slave owners because of the danger slavery posed to society.

  Uncle James’s side lost: rather than free slaves, the legislature voted to tighten control, blocking antislavery messages by making it a crime to teach any black person to read or write. Uncle James, wanting to run for governor, stopped talking about abolition. “When the South grew stormy,” Jessie said, “he grew silent, and took refuge in fine sentences about [protecting] his native State [against] Northern aggression”—finding grounds to defend slavery indirectly when he knew it was indefensible. Jessie wished afterward that he had shown as much “courage in the cause” as her mother, who was “of a more enduring nature.” Elizabeth’s ideas were born of personal experience. As Jessie learned the story, her mother’s family was Presbyterian, moralistic and judgmental, and Elizabeth grew up to quietly rebel against “the grim Scotch Puritan atmosphere that dominated her own home.” She developed “a generous spirit of broad resistance to any form of intolerance and of active sympathy with the oppressed.” She resolved that when she inherited enslaved people she would free them, and she kept her word. She brought up Jessie “to think it good fortune to be free from owning slaves,” because slavery degraded both the enslaved and their masters. It warped the minds of white children, “making them domineering, passionate, and arbitrary.”

  After Elizabeth married Senator Benton, it was certainly at her urging that their house servants “were all freed, or born free,” even though her husband apparently still used slaves outside the home in business ventures. Census records from 1840 listed a “T. H. Benton” of St. Louis with six slaves, whose spare description made them seem like a family: a man and woman between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-six, and four children, three of whom were under the age of ten.

  * * *

  JESSIE WAS NEARLY FOURTEEN when she had to separate a bit from her father. During one of their winters in Washington, D.C., her parents sent Jessie and Elizabeth to a boarding school in Georgetown. She considered her enrollment “a great misfortune,” though it should have been a joy. The school, where about a hundred girls lived and others came during the day, had a Danish woman as principal and a cosmopolitan flavor. Her classmates were the daughters of lawmakers and military officers, Jessie’s social peers—but she could not stand them. There was “no end to the conceit, the assumption, the class distinction.” She felt “miserably lost.” She felt that nobody measured up to her father, who had been cured of snobbery by his experiences in the West.

  One event brought her feelings about Washington society to a boil. It was a wedding scheduled for April 9, 1840, shortly before Jessie’s sixteenth birthday. One of her classmates had caught the eye of the much older Russian ambassador, and their union became a major occasion, even attended by President Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson’s close adviser and successor. Jessie was a bridesmaid, and though she liked the dress chosen for her (“very long; of white figured satin, with blonde lace about the neck and sleeves”), the event began to feel oppressive. The bridesmaids and groomsmen differed in age as much as the teenage bride and fortysomething groom, which became apparent when they were paired off. Jessie walked into the ceremony on the arm of Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a bachelor in his late forties. He was the Bentons’ neighbor and family friend, which should have eased the oddness; but Jessie was revolted by the scene. The more she looked at the Russian groom, Baron Alexander de Bodisco, the less she liked him. She saw him talking with Senator Benton: “Contrasted by my father’s superb physique—his clean, fair, noble presence, his steady blue eye and firm mouth—the curious ugliness of Bodisco came out painfully. He was a short and stout man . . . with rather projecting teeth. . . . and restless little eyes,” which made Jessie wonder how happy her classmate would be once the newlyweds were alone.

  After the wedding, Jessie cut off her hair. She thought a boy’s haircut would make it easier to keep following her father around as she had for years. She meant to stay with him and turn her back on conventional society. But Senator Benton was “horrified” when she showed him the haircut, and even more so when she informed him that “I meant to study and be his friend and companion. . . . I really meant it. He was really displeased. Then I learned that men like their womankind to be pretty, and not of the short-haired variety.”

  It was a few months later, as her hair was growing back, that she decided to attend a concert at her school. She saw her older sister, Elizabeth, in the crowd—and Elizabeth was not alone. She was accompanied by an officer in the army. He was handsome and clean-shaven, though he let his dark hair grow long in a fashionable style. He looked dignified and reserved. Jessie came across the room to talk, and Elizabeth introduced him. He gave his name as John Charles Frémont.

  He didn’t talk much about himself. He did not, for example, mention his age. In the months that followed, when they encountered each other again at the Benton house, he still did not get around to saying how old he was. He surely could not be nearly as old as the Russian ambassador, but probably was olde
r than some of the teachers in Jessie’s school. His reticence drew her in. He was intriguing. At this school where so many students seemed to be the daughters of somebody important—the very feature that Jessie disliked even if she was the ultimate example of it—this man didn’t seem to have a name that anybody in Washington knew.

  Washington before the Civil War. Pennsylvania Avenue angles to the right.

  Chapter Three

  THE CURRENT OF IMPORTANT EVENTS

  Jessie and John, 1841–1842

  Washington

  John and Jessie’s courtship peaked in Washington’s most crowded season, the time of a new presidential administration. Martin Van Buren had been defeated for reelection, and Democrats gave way to an opposition party called the Whigs, whose nominee, William Henry Harrison, was sworn in March 4, 1841. He mounted a white charger for his inaugural procession, riding down Pennsylvania Avenue near the Benton house. Without doubt Jessie and John were in the crowd as the sixty-eight-year-old delivered his address in front of the green-domed Capitol, speaking in a “clear, strong and harmonious” voice, according to a Whig newspaper, displaying an “erect and manly form.” One month later he was dead. His doctor blamed pneumonia, giving rise to a myth that he had caught it in the cold of his inauguration, but researchers later identified more likely causes, such as an infection from sewage dumped in marshland near the White House.

  It was said that all of Washington was thrown into mourning, but this was an overstatement. Lieutenant Frémont did not lose sight of his priorities, and asked to be relieved of his duty to march with hundreds of other men in uniform in Harrison’s funeral procession April 7. The workroom where he was mapmaking, on 4½ Street near the Capitol, had an excellent view of the procession, which he wanted to watch with invited guests: the family of Senator Benton. From the windows they saw the presidential coffin pass on a horse-drawn wagon, draped in black velvet and decorated with two crossed swords and a scroll of the Constitution. John wrote later that the event “was something to see and remember,” but did not write down anything about the procession that he saw or remembered. He was paying attention to Senator Benton’s second-oldest daughter, his true reason for wriggling out of his marching duty: “The funeral occasion proved, as I had hoped, my red-letter day,” a day to cherish.

  These were the lengths to which they had to go to see each other, since Mr. and Mrs. Benton did not fully approve of the penniless lieutenant as a suitor. The young couple’s path grew even narrower in early June: John’s commanding officer, Colonel J. J. Abert, ordered him to spend the summer conducting a survey of the Des Moines River, one thousand miles west of Washington, beginning “without delay.” Jessie, too, left Washington, attending a wedding in Virginia, near her grandparents’ house in Rockbridge County. It was a last moment of childhood for her: in a house that was jammed with relatives for days, she climbed with cousins to an upper floor, rummaging through closets and changing into “old uniforms and gowns.” One cousin was a young man on leave from West Point, whose features resembled Jessie’s, and she persuaded him to trade clothes to see if anyone noticed—the second time that something about attending a wedding prompted Jessie to try looking like a man. “Go to your room and dress properly,” one of the uncles barked when they emerged.

  John and Jessie both returned to Washington at the end of the summer, each unchanged in their feelings. “The survey was a health-giving excursion,” John said, “but it did not cure” his “special complaint.” Jessie, too, was in love—and overcome with the fear that her father would marry her off to someone else. As closely as she had clung to him, she rebelled; the grand wedding to which her family’s status entitled her was not anything she wanted. She decided to elope with John in October. Seeking a pastor who would agree to marry them without telling Senator Benton, John approached his mentor Joseph Nicollet, and the Frenchman referred him to a Catholic priest. The cleric agreed to marry them even though neither bride nor groom was Catholic. The simple ceremony “was in a drawing room,” Jessie said afterward, with “no altar lights or any such thing.”

  For weeks afterward they continued their lives as before. If they consummated their union, it could only have been done desperately and in secret, since Jessie was still living at home. Only a few people knew the truth, including a friend of John’s named F. H. Gerdes, who warned him on November 7, “Any delay of an open declaration, which some time or another must follow, makes your excuse less well, as this declaration itself, more difficult.” A few days later the young couple finally told Senator Benton, who was enraged. According to the family story, he ordered John to leave the house. Jessie held her ground, or rather held her spouse: she took John’s arm and quoted from the book of Ruth, “Where you go I will go also.” Her threat to leave with John melted her father’s heart.

  There is another, less romantic account of this confrontation. In this story, Benton was enraged not only at John but also at Jessie. According to a relative, the senator was so angry that he “would not let her remain in his house,” and ordered them both to go away. Mrs. Benton tried to make peace, proposing a second, Protestant ceremony to make the union seem more proper; the senator refused, fearing it would amplify the scandal. But within a few weeks he surrendered, acknowledging his daughter’s free will and placing a brief notice of the marriage in a newspaper. Because John could not afford the lifestyle to which Jessie was accustomed, he moved out of his boardinghouse and into Jessie’s room in the Benton house. John adopted the whole family much as he had once folded himself into his girlfriend Cecilia’s family in Charleston.

  Not long after they married, John wrote her a letter. “Fear not for our happiness,” he said. “If the hope for it be not something wilder than the Spaniards’ search for the fountain in Florida, we will find it yet.” It was a curious choice to compare their quest for happiness to Ponce de León’s fabled search for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in the 1500s. In the apocryphal story, the explorer never found what he was looking for, plunging into the American wilderness in search of a goal that did not exist. But the metaphor suggested the way John and Jessie’s marriage was intertwined with both ambition and exploration. John’s work mapping the West served Senator Benton’s goal of establishing a trade route to Asia; the two could be of great use to each other. Jessie’s choice of John had its own logic: while she refused to let her father dictate her life, she wanted to be close to him. The gender roles of the time would not allow her to become Senator Benton’s assistant—so she married a man who was certain to assist him.

  * * *

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1842, a newspaper announced a civic ritual. “The President of the United States,” a brief note read, “will receive the visits of his fellow-citizens this day, between the hours of 12 and 3 o’clock.” It was customary for the president to begin each year by throwing open his home to shake hands with all comers. Top officials and diplomats attended—someone spotted the Russian ambassador Baron de Bodisco and his teenage bride—and so did many others, “the dashing dweller of the city, in fashionable array, and the hardy farmer, proud of his homespun costume,” as a newspaper described the crowd that filled the ceremonial rooms of the presidential mansion. Mr. and Mrs. Frémont took their place in the receiving line for what amounted to their public coming-out as a couple. Jessie wore a blue velvet gown with a blue cape and lemon-colored gloves, topped with a hat adorned with ostrich feathers. John’s Army Corps of Topographical Engineers uniform was at least as eye-catching—his hat decorated with the image of an eagle, topped by a plume, and twice as large as his head. He would have to make sure he had space around him before removing the hat in the crowd.

  The president at the front of the receiving line was John Tyler, who had assumed office after Harrison’s death. If his conversation with the Frémonts resembled holiday encounters with presidents in later eras, then John and Jessie each said something brief and awkward, which the sore-handed president received as grace
fully as possible before moving on to the next guest. The point of the encounter was not the words but the face time: the president of a republic must expose himself to the people, who were his employers. Perhaps John was nervous to meet him, but seventeen-year-old Jessie would have been less so—Tyler was a Virginia aristocrat who’d turned to politics, the sort of man she had known since she was born.

  After the republican ritual the Frémonts returned home, where Senator Benton asked to have a word with his son-in-law about the year to come. He reminded John that there was money available for the Corps of Topographical Engineers to mount another expedition in the West. Now that Joseph Nicollet, with John’s aid, had mapped much of the region east of the Missouri River, the next expedition would range west of it. The Frenchman was in declining health and could not command this time, so Benton suggested that John should succeed him—and the senator had confidence that he could persuade the army to give him command. Even if his Democratic Party was out of power, he remained on the military affairs committee and had ties to key military officers. Whatever lingering anger he may have felt about the elopement, he set it aside—for practical politics demanded the channeling of passion, the suppression of anger. If Benton could reconcile with Andrew Jackson, who had tried to kill him, he could reconcile with the young man who had stolen his daughter’s heart.

  “I felt I was being drawn into the current of important political events,” John said. For the senator was not simply planning a mapping expedition. He had larger ambitions. He wanted to use John’s mission to advance his long-standing plans to capture the Oregon country—or rather recapture, since he felt the United States had given up its rights to that territory by sharing it with Britain. As long ago as 1825, he had introduced a bill titled “An Act to Authorize the Occupation of the Oregon River.” By this he meant the Columbia River, which emptied into the Pacific: he wanted his American seaport to be established there, ready to trade with China. Senators rejected the idea, unwilling to risk war with Britain. In 1842, President Tyler was no more inclined to take up Benton’s notion than the Senate had been in 1825; his administration was negotiating away conflicts with Britain, not creating new ones. But Benton was about to develop his own foreign policy.