Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Although Senator Benton had formally supported the winner, everyone knew his feelings. He grimly gathered evidence that the incoming administration planned to punish him. On January 12, 1845—it was a Sunday, but no day of rest for him—he wrote his friend and ally Francis Preston Blair, editor of the Washington Globe, and in his carefully indented handwriting began listing evidence of conspiracies against them, seventeen numbered points in all, including:

  3. The design to send you on a foreign mission, [and thus remove you as editor of the Globe] . . .

  5. The design to destroy Benton through newspaper denunciations . . .

  11. Prostitution of the Post Office to all the schemes . . .

  . . . These, and other points of inquiry, will confirm, & extend your knowledge of the plots against us.

  Yours truly, Thomas H. Benton

  Benton was not wrong. Blair was removed as editor of the main Democratic Party paper, neutralizing one of Benton’s channels of influence. Benton himself was harder to dislodge, since Missouri’s legislature, which chose its senators, elected him to a fifth six-year term; but his home-state opposition was growing.

  * * *

  LAWMAKERS READ POLK’S VICTORY as a popular mandate for Texas, and even before the inauguration considered an annexation measure, which Senator Benton could no longer stop. He even helped the process in hopes of uniting the party. President Tyler approved the measure hours before completing his term at the start of March, leaving Polk with only a few more steps to complete the transaction. The evening before Polk’s inauguration a crowd held a “Texas Torch-Light Procession” down Pennsylvania Avenue, their cheers surely audible a block away at the Benton house. A pro-Polk newspaper reprinted an article on Texas under the headline LAND! LAND!

  The next day guards blocked the streets near the Capitol, keeping the crowd away until the hour of the inauguration. When the guards stepped aside, a newspaper reported a “fearful” rush: “No limbs, happily, were broken, though injuries both to clothes and persons certainly were sustained.” Thousands filled the lawn in the rain. The Frémonts doubtless had walked the few blocks to attend, while dignitaries including Senator Benton joined the incoming and outgoing presidents on a platform erected over the eastern Capitol steps. Although it was still raining as Polk took the oath (John Quincy Adams quipped that the ceremony was witnessed by “a large assemblage of umbrellas”), a reporter said Polk delivered his inaugural address “in a firm tone of voice, with the air of a man profoundly impressed by it himself.” He celebrated the annexation of Texas, and acted as if Oregon was already won (“our domain extends from ocean to ocean”). Stiff and formal, his gray hair combed back straight from his forehead, he also called for the preservation of the Union, which he said was endangered: “It is a source of deep regret that, in some sections of our country, misguided persons have occasionally indulged in schemes and agitations, whose object is the destruction of domestic institutions existing in other sections.” Listeners understood that “domestic institutions” meant slavery, and that the “misguided persons” in “some sections” were Northern abolitionists. Their “schemes and agitations” were the problem, not slavery—and Polk went to some lengths not to say “slavery” or “slaves.” His euphemisms invited his audience to consider the situation in the abstract, without thinking of the human beings affected. He ended the speech by asking for the aid of God, and then he was done, and out of the rain, and governing.

  He agreed to meet Senator Benton after the inauguration. If he ever had supported his allies’ “design to destroy Benton,” the president set it aside; he needed his fellow Democrat’s power in the Senate. They shared broad goals: Polk wanted Oregon along with California and Texas, and Benton didn’t object to these goals so much as the manner in which they were being sought. Benton, too, grasped the need for accommodation, and brought an offering to the presidential mansion: his famous son-in-law, who had seen as much of California as anyone in Washington. Polk had not articulated his California ambitions in his inaugural address, but Benton, having gathered intelligence from men around Polk, could perceive what those ambitions were.

  John told the new president that official Washington did not yet know much about the land west of the Rockies. “I mentioned that I had, shortly before, at the Library of Congress, drawn out from the map-stand one giving the United States and Territories, and found on it the Great Salt Lake represented as connected with the Pacific Ocean by three great rivers.” John said the map was wrong, that no rivers flowed from the Great Basin to California, but the president gave the impression that he believed the maps. It didn’t matter. Whatever California was, Polk wanted it while there was still a chance. He was thinking of geopolitics, not geography: Mexico’s hold on that distant territory was tenuous, and he worried that Britain, already in competition with the United States for Oregon, might seize California first. Benton believed that Americans could take California the way he wanted to secure Oregon, by encouraging emigrants to settle there in such numbers that the result became inevitable. Polk favored more direct measures: he wanted to buy California from Mexico.

  The president’s interest did not come from nowhere. California was a part of the national conversation. The New York Herald published a steady flow of articles that mentioned it—fifty-nine stories during 1843 and fifty-three in 1844; in other words, more than one article per week. Although the Herald naturally paid far more attention to Oregon and Texas, its interest in California was consistent. Some of the articles were letters from an anonymous correspondent in Monterey, California’s capital, who went by various aliases—“Americano,” “Paisano,” or no name at all—and promoted the appeal of California. Other papers printed their own California stories, including some from the same anonymous correspondent, and this subject of interest to news editors became of interest to public men. Daniel Webster, the great senator and former secretary of state, invited Captain Frémont to dinner to discuss California, and wrote in a letter in March 1845 that he regarded the excellent harbor at San Francisco Bay to be “twenty times as valuable to us as all Texas.” Webster opposed territorial acquisitions—he meant his remark to disparage Texas as much as praise California—but it was all the same to Polk, who wanted both.

  Polk’s new secretary of state was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania—the Bentons’ neighbor and friend, the recent presidential aspirant, and the groomsman who’d had Jessie on his arm at the wedding of the Russian ambassador. In the spring of 1845, Buchanan began bringing documents to the Benton house relating to Mexico. He was a distinctive character in Washington, regarded with a mixture of respect and derision. Some found him fastidious and almost effeminate; Andrew Jackson called him Aunt Fancy. He was cautious and noncommittal, avoiding strong stands that might harm his later prospects. Yet this weakness was a kind of strength: he was a survivor who arrived in Washington in 1821, the same year as Benton, and had spent all the years since moving in and out of Congress and prime administration posts. Buchanan, a bachelor, had dropped by the Benton home for dinner for years, and it was politically savvy now for Buchanan to seek Benton’s counsel as a way of showing the administration’s respect. The two climbed the stairs to Benton’s third-floor library, sometimes joined by another senator who lived in the neighborhood, as well as by John and Jessie. Some of the papers Buchanan placed on the table were in Spanish, and at her father’s request Jessie wrote out translations as the men tried to guess the mood in the distant Mexican capital they’d never visited.

  The plans for John’s next expedition began to change. He was already under orders to arrange another trip, and before the inauguration those orders ruled out California: his commander, Colonel Abert, told him to scout the upper reaches of the Arkansas and Red rivers, which were east of the Rockies. He was to work near Bent’s Fort, twelve hundred miles or so short of San Francisco Bay. Even if he was to contemplate a detour to California, his instructions allowed no time: he was to return within th
e current year, and hire no more than forty men. It would be his least ambitious expedition. John’s letters to Abert suggested that he was planning an ordinary scientific survey; he requested permission to hire a “Botanical Colourist” to make drawings of the plants they encountered. Then the Polk administration took charge. On April 10, John was told he could increase his party by ten or more if desired, and he should also note “the military peculiarity of the Country which you shall examine.” He was given extra months to explore before he returned, but should still come back as soon as possible so that “if any operations should be required in that Country, the information obtained may be at command.” He was, in other words, gathering information of military use in the event of war, in an area near the US border with the Mexican province of New Mexico.

  There was still no mention of California. There was nothing in the orders—at least nothing in the written orders—to justify the description published in Niles’ National Register, an influential newspaper, on May 3:

  EXPLORING EXPEDITION. Lieutenant Fremont is now . . . organizing an exploring company of young men to form an expedition to the waters of the Pacific. He desires none but young men of intelligence and good character. The expedition will last for three years, and its operations will probably extend from the Black Hills to the Western ocean, and from California to the northern limits of Oregon. Those who have a taste for danger and bold daring adventure, may now have a chance.

  It was hard to imagine the Register printing the story unless John or someone close to him was the source. He was by now comfortable describing his mission in different terms than his chain of command, and this was different enough to attract attention: “What we do not understand,” a Boston paper said, “is how, or for what purposes, an expedition is sent from the Government into Mexican territory, nor why our engineers are employed in surveying rivers and harbors not belonging to us. We have no objection to the survey; we only want to know by what right it is ordered.”

  When asked directly, John said he was seeking a better and shorter route to Oregon, and thought the route might lead through California. Because his objective was incompatible with his orders to hurry back with information from the border with New Mexico, he planned to divide his force at Bent’s Fort. Some of his men would survey the eastern slope of the Rockies and head home as ordered, while most would journey with John into Mexican territory.

  Did President Polk, his commander in chief, really mean for John to go to California? At least Polk did not mind, since Frémont’s destination was publicized before he departed and the president did not object. Polk also did not object when, after John’s departure, his destination was discussed in the presidential mansion. Senator Benton had a long talk with the president, and Polk made a vague entry in his diary: “Some conversation occurred concerning Capt. Frémont’s expedition, and his intention to visit California before his return.” The phrase “his intention to visit” framed it as Captain Frémont’s choice, which Polk could disavow later if necessary.

  * * *

  JOHN SAID GOOD-BYE TO JESSIE IN MAY 1845. They had been together nine months this time, their longest period yet without a separation. If he’d told the newspapers that he planned to be gone three years, he surely had to face his wife and tell her something; Lily was two and a half, having had her first real chance to know her father, and if he really did stay away three years, he would by the end have missed more than half her life. Like many a spouse with bad news, John may not have spoken with perfect clarity; Jessie came away with an impression that he would use the summer of 1845 traveling to California and the summer of 1846 returning, reaching her after an absence of fifteen months or so. They would not have to be entirely out of touch, because letters could be sent to and from California by sea.

  Jessie would not accompany him to St. Louis this time; her mother was ill in Washington. Charles Preuss would not be coming either; the German mapmaker decided to skip this expedition to spend more time with his wife. Other familiar faces would be coming: Jacob Dodson, the son of the Benton family servants, was ready to go west again. So, too, was William Chinook, the young native man who had come east with John in 1844 and was now desperate to return to Oregon. John and Senator Benton had arranged for him to spend the previous nine months with a family in Philadelphia, but nine months was too long. William was so depressed that his hosts summoned a physician, who reported that “he seems drooping & anxious about his return,” and “eager to join his old friend Captain Frémont to whom he seems much attached.” Informed that it was time to go, he came down the coast to Washington bearing a Bible he’d been given by his hosts, and said that he had “been a Quaker all winter.” Doubtless he was also wearing white men’s clothes, although his “old friend” Captain Frémont was unimpressed, later writing a patronizing description of William speaking pidgin English and unchanged in his Indian ways. William would travel with John as far as St. Louis, where an Indian agent would help connect him with travelers bound toward his home along the Oregon Trail.

  A steamboat glided up to the St. Louis waterfront and deposited John with his companions on May 30, 1845. The publicity of the expedition had preceded them, and when John organized a meeting for potential recruits, he was mobbed. The crowd overflowed the warehouse where he had planned to speak, forcing him to adjourn to a nearby park, where men were so frantic to catch his attention that he could not get a word in. He escaped the meeting, only to have men follow him back to his lodgings. In the days afterward he managed to interview men who wanted to work for him even though he offered miserable wages. Thomas S. Martin of Tennessee nearly turned down the job when he learned the pay was just fifteen dollars per month, but the captain proposed a compromise: he would “name no wages at present,” but if Martin went along he would “make everything satisfactory.” So alluring was the work that Martin agreed. More than ninety men enrolled, and in June they started west on a Missouri River steamboat, aiming to pick up animals at the Missouri border as John had done before.

  Enthusiasm for American empire was peaking that spring and summer of 1845. This was the season when a thousand emigrants to Oregon departed from Independence, Missouri, with many embarking from other points. In Washington, President Polk was preparing his first diplomatic proposal to divide Oregon with Britain, with the southern part attaching to the United States and the northern part to British Canada. He faced public pressure to take it all (“Fifty-four forty or fight!” was the slogan, referring to the Oregon country’s northern border, surely one of the few slogans in American political history that turned on a popular interest in latitudes). When the British rejected his proposal due to an apparent miscommunication, Polk withdrew his plan, demanded all of Oregon, and began making preparations for war; perhaps the new ship Princeton, with its powerful gun Oregon, really would prove itself on the Oregon coast. It was possible that the United States could be fighting two wars, because the annexation of Texas was proceeding. The Post Office was establishing service from New Orleans to the Texas port of Galveston. Captain Robert F. Stockton, creator of the Princeton, sailed into the Gulf of Mexico for an ostensibly friendly visit at the Mexican port of Veracruz. He then steamed up to the Texas coast and plotted, unsuccessfully, to raise a private army of Texans to march against Mexico.

  In his essay that summer declaring “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent,” journalist John L. O’Sullivan began picturing the United States after that destiny was realized. The Pacific coast would be connected to the East by a transcontinental railroad. Alongside the tracks would march a long row of wooden poles bearing copper wire. “The day cannot be distant,” he wrote, when congressmen would travel to Washington from the Pacific coast in less time than it once took from Ohio. Just as soon, “the magnetic telegraph will enable the editors of the ‘San Francisco Union,’ the ‘Astoria Evening Post,’ or the ‘Nootka Morning News,’ to set up in type the first half of the President’s Inaugural before the echoes of the latt
er half shall have died away beneath the lofty porch of the Capitol.” Once they had a fully connected continent, Americans’ “yearly multiplying millions” would dominate the world; Europe would never be able to compete against “the simple solid weight of two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!”

  The new secretary of the navy was the historian George Bancroft, the man who, after Polk’s nomination, had written that territorial expansion was “the manifest purpose of Providence.” He was a New England minister’s son who became a teacher and then the author of a multivolume history of the United States, which began with an epigraph: “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” He’d gone into politics in 1837, when Martin Van Buren appointed him the federal collector of customs in Boston. His power of patronage (the men he hired included fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, appointed a “measurer of coal and salt”) and his power of the pen had given him influence when he swung his support to Polk at the Democratic convention. Polk brought him to Washington, where he could nudge the star of empire on its way. Around the time of the inauguration, according to Bancroft, Polk sat with him and, slapping a hand on his thigh for emphasis, named four main goals. Two were standard Democratic priorities: low tariffs and an independent treasury system, a predecessor of the Federal Reserve. The third was settling possession of Oregon. The fourth was California. Bancroft ordered extra navy ships to the California coast, and made plans to assign a new, aggressive commander to the Pacific squadron: Robert F. Stockton of the USS Princeton.