Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  10¼—A Van Buren cannon in front of the Telegraph office with a fox tail attached to it

  Runners shuttled to the Baltimore telegraph office, bringing bits of color from the crowded convention hall.

  6¼—Senator Walker is speaking in favor of the two-thirds rule—was cheered by many—hissed by some

  The crowd in Washington was cheering and hissing too. The dozens of spectators who’d come to watch Samuel Morse became hundreds. He read each news bulletin aloud. A correspondent for a newspaper called the Whig Standard declared: “Those attending at the Capitol may almost be said to have been in attendance at [the convention in] Baltimore!” At some point the crowd undoubtedly included Senator Benton. A correspondent wrote to the New York Herald that there was no news in Washington; nobody was doing anything important except following the latest burst of information from elsewhere. People sensed that they were witnessing a profound change in the human condition—“the annihilation of space,” as more than one person called it. Who could imagine the possibilities once people could learn about any event anywhere, instantly? “Professor Morse’s telegraph,” the Herald correspondent said,

  has originated in the mind . . . a new species of consciousness. Never before was any one conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city—40, 100, or 500 miles off. For example, it is now precisely 11 o’clock. The telegraph announces as follows—“11 o’clock—Senator Walker is now replying to Mr. Butler upon the adoption of the ‘two-thirds’ rule.” It requires no small intellectual effort to realize that this is a fact that now is, and not one that has been.

  The arcane updates about a “two-thirds rule” contained the key to the presidential nomination. Van Buren needed two-thirds of the delegates and fell short. To avoid an impasse, delegates began coalescing behind another candidate: James K. Polk, a former Speaker of the House and former governor of Tennessee.

  Mr. Saunders declares it is necessary to have a candidate in favor of annexation

  And Polk, unlike other contenders, wanted to annex Texas. Delegates chose him unanimously. When Morse read out the news, cheers went up from the crowd at the Capitol, along with “mutterings” from those opposed. A runner hurried across town to the office of one of the newspapers, which in an unprecedented feat was able to rush the news of Polk’s nomination into print on the same day it happened.

  Polk’s supporters exulted—and not all were from slave states. George Bancroft, a noted historian turned politico, attended the convention from Massachusetts, and turned toward Polk; he wanted both Texas and Oregon, and soon wrote in a public letter that it was “the manifest purpose of Providence that the light of freedom should be borne from our fires to the domain beyond the Rocky Mountains.” But Senator Benton felt his own expansionist goals had been hijacked. If Polk won the election, a second effort to annex Texas would be inevitable. Days after the convention, he rose at his Senate desk and told his colleagues that war with Mexico loomed: “Senators say this is a small war—a little predatory war—a war between weak powers—and, therefore, it is nothing to engage in it. I tell them that is nonsense, and worse. War is war, whether great or small!” But party unity forced Benton to stifle his own doubts as the election neared.

  An empire was available for the taking. Democrats were for Texas; Democrats were for Oregon; and grand as these ambitions were, their presidential nominee held a grander one: Polk wanted California. It was his biggest goal. He did not publicize this; few if any of the delegates who voted for him would have known it. No word of it came down the telegraph line from Baltimore, so it was unknown to the members of the public who crowded around Samuel Morse at the Capitol as he translated the telegraph clicks and read out the news. They listened, rapt, to the clattering sound of the future, but Morse’s translations were not enough to tell them what the sound really meant.

  * * *

  JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT HAD NO WAY of knowing any of this before he at last crossed the frontier that summer, reaching St. Louis on August 6, 1844. It was after dark. His men who lived in St. Louis headed home, and John walked through dim streets to the Benton house, only to find the lights out. Gabriel, the Bentons’ coachman, explained that Jessie was not home, having gone to care for a sick relative. John crossed town to the relative’s house, only to find it also dark. Unwilling to wake anyone, he sat in a public square beneath the stars, then checked into a hotel, sleeping long past daylight. Another man might have pounded down doors to find his wife and child, knowing the household would forgive the intrusion; John’s reserve would not allow it, nor did he seem in a hurry to step back over the threshold into ordinary life.

  Not until later in the day did Jessie see her husband, when he came to the relative’s house “in his uniform and thin as a shadow.” They did not have much time alone. As soon as word of John’s arrival spread, the house “was thronged with welcoming friends.” The throng apparently included a reporter, to whom John described his exploits. And then they were packing. Within days the Frémonts were moving toward Washington, the shoreline passing them as they stood on the deck of a steamboat, wheels churning the water and Jessie doubtless trying to restrain the curiosity of twenty-one-month-old Lily as she once had seen her mother restrain little Randolph. John had an entourage: Jacob Dodson was still with him, as was William, the Indian from Oregon who wanted to see the white man’s world. There was also a Mexican youth, one Pablo Hernandez; the expedition had rescued him when he was separated from a Mexican trade caravan that was attacked by Indians. At first John intended to arrange for Hernandez to return home, but having been borne eastward by fate, the young man wanted to get an education, and was on his way to become part of the crowded Benton household.

  By August 21 the party was in Washington, D.C., and John and Jessie were fending off visitors. John’s knowledge of the West made him a source for anyone with questions about Oregon or, as Jessie noticed, about California. So many people called at the Benton house that the Frémonts had trouble beginning their report—and there needed to be a report, for as with John’s previous expedition the purpose was not only to explore but to publicize. “We were forced,” Jessie said, “into leaving home every day. There was a good small house within a square from us,” a square being the way she referred to a city block, “and this Mr. Frémont rented.” They developed a routine. Each evening John organized his notes for the next day’s writing. In the morning, John said, Jacob Dodson “kept up the camp habit and very early brought me coffee,” and then John and Jessie went to work upstairs in the rented house, which they used as an office. “Nine o’clock always found me at my post, pen in hand,” Jessie said, “and I put down Mr. Frémont’s dictation.” John would talk, “pausing only for a more fitting word, for the whole of the four hours—walking about. The freedom of movement was essential to his freedom of expression—it was my great reward to be told that but for me the work could not be done.”

  “The narrative,” John said, “will be strictly confined to what was seen.” They decided “to present nothing, either in the narrative or in the maps, which was not the result of positive observation.” Maps would show only the expedition’s lines of travel across the countryside, with white spaces to either side. In this way they avoided information from unreliable sources and ensured that the narrator John C. Frémont would always be at the center of the story. He was present in every scene, like the first-person narrator of a novel. He described his actions straightforwardly. His plunge into the unknown on November 25 was simply a decision he made, and he did not reflect on the wisdom of it. He admitted to abandoning the howitzer as his commander had predicted, although he still said it was good to have brought it. And just as his first report described him vomiting at a crucial time, the second report confessed to unheroic moments. On February 23 in the Sierra Nevada, he was walking with Kit Carson and came to an icy creek: “Carson sprang over, clear across a place where the stream was compressed among rocks.
” John tried to copy him and fell in. He was a democratic everyman waging civilization’s fight against nature—often in peril, at times overmatched, but never giving up.

  Their writing ended each day at one o’clock, and they had lunch with toddler Lily before “going off for a long brisk walk,” as Jessie said. “A slight rain, we did not mind—only a rain storm.” At last she was alone with him. Walking south, they crossed a bridge over a canal and reached the National Mall, an expanse of green space that stretched westward from the green-domed Capitol. They made a handsome couple. Tested by motherhood, her mother’s illness, and John’s absences, the “girlish beauty” John had first met at sixteen was now a poised and experienced woman of twenty. John was lean and formal in his uniform. Their walks would have been a chance to get to know each other, because for all they had been through, they had not been through much together. When they reached their third anniversary in October 1844, she might have counted the thirty-six months and noted that he had been absent for twenty. Her desire to be near him made her especially grateful to help him write about the experiences that occupied more of his time than she did.

  It was only human that she would wonder what her place really was in his work and life. The report they produced included a timeline of dates, locations, and miles traveled each day, so it was easy for her to compare chronologies: What was she doing on this or that day? At the start of December 1843 she had received his message that he expected to be home in January, news she passed on to Mrs. Talbot in a reassuring tone. Now she knew her reassurance was out of date before she had given it. Her husband had changed his plans, delayed his return, and condemned her to extra months of agony. If she said a word to him about how she’d felt, no trace made it into the report.

  She at least could think of her suffering as the price of fame. When he had given his story to the reporter in St. Louis, it had been picked up by other papers so rapidly that the news had reached Washington before the Frémonts did; many people in the capital had read of his exploits battling snow that was “from five to twenty feet deep” on peaks that rose “seventeen thousand feet above the sea.” (The highest peaks in all the Sierra Nevada were closer to fourteen thousand.) One day a Washington paper contained a remarkable phrase: “Fremont’s Peak beyond the South Pass.” His name was being given to “the highest point in the Rocky Mountains,” the summit he had taken such risks to ascend in 1842. His name was also attached to more modest items: He’d returned with hundreds of plant specimens slipped into envelopes or pressed into books, and while most had broken apart during the journey home, they included a shrub that John’s botanist called Fremontia vermicularis. Its leaves, John informed the botanist, “have a very salty taste which perhaps you do not know.” James Hall, a paleontologist, wrote an appendix to the report describing “fossil ferns” that the expedition had brought back; he named one Sphenopteris Fremonti. In the spring of 1845 the Convention of American Geologists and Naturalists, meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, held an extended discussion of the meaning of fossils John had found in eastern Oregon, which some scientists viewed as evidence that the region must have contained some vast lake in the distant past.

  Before the report was even complete, the secretary of war sent a message to Congress, declaring that John’s mission had been “peculiarly arduous and dangerous.” The description of John “and his bold adventurous party in situations and perils the most critical, and requiring the utmost fortitude to encounter and overcome” was enough to make any truly modest officer blush. It was reprinted in the Daily Madisonian in Washington, and then on the front page of the New York Herald. The army was promoting him by brevet—rewarding him for meritorious service—not once but twice: from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, and then from first lieutenant to captain. A brief Senate debate emphasized John’s growing celebrity. The Senate ordered ten thousand copies of the still-unfinished report, and then considered a proposal to meet demand for it by printing “five thousand extra copies,” bound up with the report of John’s 1842 expedition to make a single volume. The Bentons’ friend and neighbor, Senator James Buchanan, disagreed with this proposal and successfully shepherded through a change: Why five thousand extra copies? Make it ten thousand extra copies.

  People across the country were waiting for their copies—not least the people of Nauvoo, Illinois, a Mormon settlement on the Mississippi River. The Mormons were considering migration farther west and had been eager for John’s report ever since news accounts of his expedition had appeared in the Nauvoo paper in January 1845. In September, after the full report arrived, the Nauvoo newspaper reprinted three long excerpts describing John’s explorations. That December, church officials gathered in the attic of Nauvoo’s Mormon temple while one of them staged a reading of sections of John’s report. Brigham Young climbed the stairs to the reading and sat quietly, listening to the descriptions of the Great Salt Lake.

  The young explorer.

  Chapter Seven

  A TASTE FOR DANGER AND BOLD DARING ADVENTURE

  The Frémonts, 1844–1845

  Washington, St. Louis, and Alta California

  When the presidential nominating conventions were over, the 1844 general election pitted James K. Polk, the advocate of territorial expansion, against Henry Clay, a skeptic of it. Clay was a gray-haired former senator from Kentucky, the Whig party founder, and a brilliant orator who had walked the national stage even longer than Thomas Hart Benton. Much like Benton, Clay had spent his early career promoting visions of empire, but had lately grown to fear the consequences. New territories would provoke conflicts over slavery, he said, so it was “better to harmonize what we have than to introduce a new element of discord.” Clay’s difference with Polk presented the country with a fateful choice, which would also have great influence over the future of the Frémonts.

  It was not, however, an absolutely clear choice, since the election touched on many issues at once. In the key electoral state of Pennsylvania that year, the big news was neither Texas nor slavery but a dispute involving immigrants. They were Irish Catholics, who were seen as a threat because of their religion. Philadelphia’s Catholics called attention to their faith when they asserted an equal right to practice it. Pennsylvania mandated the use of the Bible—typically the Protestant, King James Version—for students to practice reading in the public schools. Catholics used a longer version of the Bible and said using the King James Version violated the separation of church and state. Shocked Protestants formed a new nativist party known as the Native Americans or American Republicans, and in May 1844 organized a rally provocatively located in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Irishmen violently broke up the rally. Nativists then burned two Catholic churches, saying they were upholding the right of free speech.

  Weeks later, crowds of nativists came from out of town to march in Philadelphia’s Independence Day parade. Some reserved their own railroad cars to travel down from New York. A nativist mob formed outside a Philadelphia Catholic church, alleging that weapons were hidden inside and saying they feared a terror attack. When the sheriff and the state militia arrived to protect the church, the mob wheeled a cannon up from the waterfront and opened fire. A local resident, George S. Roberts, reported “watching the flashes of artillery against the sky.” It took four days to end the battle, in which a number of people were killed, and the New York Herald declared that Philadelphia was “the scene of riot and bloodshed—of civil war.” When news of Philadelphia’s violence reached the telegraph office in Baltimore, it was wired to Washington, where Samuel Morse was still demonstrating his invention. He found the information so important that he rushed the latest updates to Secretary of State John C. Calhoun.

  Philadelphia’s “civil war” fed into nationwide resentment of immigrants. The Democratic Party actively courted immigrant and Catholic votes in hotly contested New York and Pennsylvania. The Whigs had brooded for years on what they perceived as an unfair Democratic advantage,
and in 1844 some talked of suppressing the immigrant vote. Joseph T. Buckingham, the Whig editor of the Boston Courier, published a signed editorial (addressed to “Native Americans!”) at the end of October, saying that he was willing to grant newcomers every privilege except political power: “domestic demagogues” must be stopped from winning office with the votes of “factious foreigners.” Immigrants should be treated with “generosity and justice” and paid “liberally” for their labor—but adult immigrants should be required to wait twenty-one years before becoming eligible to vote, the same period that newborn native children had to wait. It was the sort of rhetoric that might bring out the nativist vote—or drive immigrant voters to the polls to resist. Because the presidential election was close, the Frémonts’ fate, and the nation’s fate, could depend on which side of the immigration debate prevailed.

  It took many days through October and November for the election results to become clear. Not all states voted on the same day, so instead of an election night there was an election season, from late October to mid-November, during which the Frémonts followed each day’s vote tallies in the Washington papers. On November 3, the compositor of the Whig Standard in Washington was typesetting county-by-county results from Pennsylvania when fresh information came in. Rather than start the story again, he interrupted himself for a late-breaking news bulletin:

  Half past 2, p.m.—We have received, by Professor Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, the following additional returns. . . .

  Henry Clay was on his way to losing Pennsylvania, the second most populous state. The most populous state, New York, went for Polk by a mere five thousand votes. The Democratic coalition, with its important immigrant vote in those two states, narrowly prevailed; had New York instead gone to Clay, so would the election. The Democratic-leaning Daily Madisonian crowed on November 6 that Clay would be “shamefully defeated,” and when Polk won Michigan a week later a headline proclaimed, THE DEMOCRACY GLORIOUSLY TRIUMPHANT. By November 16 the Whig Standard surrendered, announcing not only that the election was lost but that the newspaper was closing: “We have no regrets, personally or otherwise, except that our cause has not been triumphant.” The paper acknowledged that some Whigs had additional regrets—especially a fear that the coming conflict over Texas would split the Union.