Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  An older article in Larkin’s bundle told of Jessie. One of her cousins had married the governor of Maryland and then became involved in a messy divorce; “Mrs. Frémont and two sisters attended the court as witnesses.” Then there was an article about Indians visiting Senator Benton—a group of Potawatomi, who had once lived near the Great Lakes but had been pushed across the Mississippi. In Washington they paid their respects to the West’s leading senator, who welcomed them into his home. They called him a friend, and he solemnly said that he would “always endeavor to do them justice.” Refreshments were served, and the conversation widened to include “the members of Col. Benton’s family—among whom, we are tempted to remark, was the accomplished lady of a gallant young officer, who has already, by his distinguished service to the government in the wilds between the Missouri and Pacific, achieved for himself a reputation that will be as lasting as it is enviable.” According to the version of the article that Larkin had obtained, the natives also tried to meet three-year-old Lily, but “the little one declined an introduction.” All these things John read about while recovering from his recent Indian wars.

  * * *

  AS JOHN READ THESE PAPERS in the late spring of 1846, Jessie was twenty-eight hundred miles away in Washington, D.C. She was living with Lily amid the polished English furniture in the Benton house on C Street. Larkin’s newspapers had given accurate, if outdated, information about her life. The messy divorce had actually taken place in 1844: Jessie’s teenage cousin was married to the much older governor, who publicly accused her of infidelity, a charge so destructive to a woman’s reputation that her family and friends, including the Bentons, helped her sue for libel and staged a public event testifying to her virtue. The meeting with Indians had taken place more recently, in late 1845. They were part of a stream of visitors who paid homage to her father, who remained an oversize figure after a quarter century in the Senate, his movements followed in the papers, his counsel sought at times by the president. In the spring of 1846 his decades-old dream of taking possession of Oregon was becoming reality. President Polk had held for a time to the expansionist demand for all of Oregon (“Fifty-four forty or fight!”), but renewed diplomatic efforts with Britain produced a treaty that split the territory, mostly along the 49th parallel that served elsewhere as the dividing line between the United States and Canada. The Oregon settlers had strengthened the US claim to the southern areas centering on the Columbia River; the British took the Fraser River to the north. In June 1846, Thomas Hart Benton was one of the senators who went into executive session, clearing the galleries so they could privately debate and approve the treaty.

  Washington was about to become the capital of a transcontinental nation with a confirmed Pacific coast. The growing capital was rapidly approaching fifty thousand residents, though it still did not impress visitors, for it was designed to be larger and grander than it yet was. Its broad angled avenues allowed magnificent vistas of the city, but in comparison with European capitals there was not much of a city to see. Still, its leading citizens were members of a globalized community with connections to the wider world. The Bentons had purchased their house from an early member of the global elite, who traveled between Washington, Boston, and London. A short walk east of the house was the railway station, where trains led to cities in the northeast; a short walk west, at the National Hotel, was the new office of the Morse telegraph company, which had now strung its wires all the way to Philadelphia and New York. At least half a dozen newspapers offered stories from home and abroad, and advertised a “magnificent collection of valuable European oil paintings” that was offered at auction in June 1846. Sophisticated buyers could also bid on “a very handsome variety of Chinese articles,” recently imported and “beautifully ornamented,” including “handsome writing desks,” tea caddies, and “bamboo book-cases and couches.”

  Jessie had little time for shopping; she was absorbed in family difficulties. Her mother’s health had grown worse, and often Mrs. Benton seemed disoriented. Once, when Senator Benton was entertaining guests at home, his wife appeared before them less than fully dressed. The family had been told by doctors that it would help Mrs. Benton if they appeared cheerful around her, and they strained to keep up the facade. By the spring, Jessie thought, “the disease seems to have expended itself, and she is quite well again.” But Jessie could be forgiven for feeling alone. On her fourth wedding anniversary in October 1845, she could only guess where her spouse was. Lily turned three in November. Then Jessie turned twenty-two on May 31, 1846. Visitors to the Benton home naturally inquired after her famous husband, and newspapers asked for information about him; she could give biographical details, as she may have for that laudatory profile, but she struggled as much as anyone for up-to-date news.

  In the spring of 1846 she began receiving the first word since St. Louis. Newspapers were given a report via Mazatlán, Mexico, that Captain Frémont had appeared in California, having “discovered a good wagon road to Oregon, which is much shorter than any heretofore travelled.” So intently did the country follow his progress that this brief item was reprinted in at least a dozen papers. A few days later came an update reprinted in more than forty newspapers: “Fremont at Monterey.” Now she was living the story of his California exploits, in the order that they happened and several months behind. In May she received a letter from her husband—the one he had written by the vice-consul’s fire at San Francisco Bay in January (“I am going now on business to see some gentlemen on the coast”). She arranged for its publication, confidently contacting newspaper offices with a scoop. The letter was reprinted in two Washington papers on May 15 and spread across the country. On May 26 a Washington paper published further news: General Castro’s demand in early March that John leave California. “We have not the least apprehension for Captain Frémont,” the writer cheerfully concluded. His wife could be forgiven if she did not feel the same. But the very next day a letter arrived from Thomas Larkin, reporting her husband’s apparently safe retreat.

  In mid-June she thought she found a way to communicate with him. A man appeared at the Benton house: James Wiley Magoffin, a Kentuckian who did business in New Mexico. While visiting Washington he met Senator Benton, and Jessie saw an opportunity. When he next went west toward New Mexico, would he take a letter to John, leaving it at Bent’s Fort along the way? Magoffin said he would. If John rode home that summer as expected, he would stop at Bent’s Fort and discover the letter.

  Washington City June 18 1846.

  A Mr. Magoffin says he will be at Bent’s Fort a month from tomorrow, and that he will leave [this] letter for you. . . . I hope that as I write, you are rapidly nearing home, and that in early September there will be an end to our anxieties. In your dear letter you tell me that le bon temps viendra [the good time will come], and my faith in you is such that I believe it will come: and it will come to all you love, for during your long absence God has been good to us and kept in health your mother & all you love best.

  She offered him the love of a spouse and the shrewdness of a public relations counsel. “I had to publish almost all your letter,” she reported, “and like everything you write it has been reprinted all over the country.” She did not comment on a peculiar feature of his letter—that so much was suitable for publication, with little private sentiment directed to her alone. It was less a love letter than a report to a trusted partner. To be sure, she was proud to be his trusted partner, and proud of him. She had heard that President Polk was about to approve another promotion for the famous explorer—he had been a second lieutenant, then a first lieutenant, then a captain, and now would skip past the next rank, major, to become a lieutenant colonel. “I am sorry,” she said, “that I could not be the first to call you Colonel.” She said he was “the most talked of and admired Lieut. Col. in the army,” and that “almost all the old officers came to congratulate me on it.” She insisted that nepotism had nothing to do with the promotion: “It was certainly a free
will offering of the President’s, neither father nor I nor anyone for us having asked or said we would like it.”

  There was in this line a hint that Mrs. Frémont was beginning to see a role for herself as a political operative. By denying that she had lobbied for him, she indicated that she could lobby for him. Although she was young and a woman, whose assigned sphere did not include politics, she was an “accomplished lady” with an emerging public profile, who knew the top players throughout Congress, the administration, and the army. Some, like James Buchanan, were family friends who had known her all her life. Others, like Senator John Adams Dix of New York, had arrived in the city in recent years to discover a self-possessed, well-informed, and well-connected young woman who sat in on her father’s meetings with them and seemed to be as much a part of Washington’s landscape as the green copper Capitol dome.

  She told her husband how the public was responding to the combined report of his past two expeditions, the masterpiece they had written together. “Its popularity has astonished even me, your most confirmed & oldest worshiper.” People compared it to Robinson Crusoe: just as Daniel Defoe’s tale of a man shipwrecked on a Caribbean island was “the most natural and interesting fiction of travel, so Frémont’s report is the most romantically truthful.” A British lord from the Royal Geographical Society wrote to say that he was preparing a paper on the report. It was even providing John with his only connection to his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter:

  Lily has it read to her . . . as a reward for good behavior. She asked [the mapmaker Charles] Preuss the other day if it was true that he caught ants on his hands and eat them—he was so much amazed that he could not answer her, & she said, “I read it in papa’s lepote [report]; it was when you were lost in California.”

  Editors were writing Jessie for his “biography and likeness.” In spite of the evidence that she may have given them information, she claimed she had not yet done so; “I had no orders from you.”

  You know it would look odd to leave out your age, & you never told me how old you were yet. How old are you? You might tell me now that I am a Col.’s wife—won’t you, old papa? Poor papa, it made tears come to find you had begun to turn gray. You must have suffered much and been very anxious.

  She was thinking that when he returned, she would help him rest by taking a larger role in his next report: “I am not going to let you write anything but your name when you get home.”

  Jessie said John’s mother had sent a daguerreotype of her son. Jessie hung it over her bed, where it served as her “guardian angel.” Even when she was not gazing upon his likeness, he flashed into her head, as when she started reading a history of the Spanish colonization of North America. “I was by myself, Lily asleep, and reading by our lamp, when I came to De Soto’s search for the fountain of youth. I stopped, for it seemed as if pleasant old days had returned; and then I remembered so well what you once wrote to me that I could not help bursting into tears.”

  Do you remember, darling? It was soon after we were married, & you wrote me, “Fear not for our happiness; if the hope for it be not something wilder than the Spaniards’ search for the fountain in Florida, we will find it yet.” I remembered it word for word, although it was so long since I read it. Dear, dear husband, you do not know how proud & grateful I am that you love me. We have found the fountain of eternal youth for love, & I believe there are few others who can say so. I try very hard to be worthy of your love.

  She kept writing until she could write no more.

  Mr. Magoffin has come for the letter & I must stop. I have not had so much pleasure in a very great while as today. . . . Farewell, dear, dear husband. In a few months we shall not know what sorrow means. At least, I humbly hope & pray so. Your own affectionate and devoted wife,

  Jessie B. Frémont

  She gave the letter, this piece of her heart, to the traveler Magoffin, who packed it away for the long journey to Bent’s Fort. Jessie had no way of knowing that by the time she sent the letter her husband had changed his plans, and would not be traveling to Bent’s Fort that summer after all.

  * * *

  JOHN’S INACTION IN CALIFORNIA could not last. Though still without a strategy, he had already set events in motion. Because he had drifted down to the coast in February with a hazy notion to find real estate, he had prompted General Castro to order his expulsion. Although the Americans slipped away, their temporary defiance made it hard for Castro and other officials to let the matter drop. They had to take additional measures for California’s security. On April 11, officials met in Monterey to counter “the imminent risk of invasion founded on the extravagant design of an American Captain of the United States Army, Mr. N. [sic] Frémont.” Those in attendance included the prefect of Monterey, as well as General Castro and General Vallejo, the commander of the northern frontier. They agreed that Castro would command a military response, and moved to cut off John’s most obvious potential source of support. On April 30 they issued a declaration targeting American settlers, proclaiming that “a multitude of foreigners” had come to California, “abusing our local circumstances,” and had become “owners of real property, this being a right belonging only to citizens.” If foreign landowners were “not naturalized” as citizens, their ownership should be declared “null and void,” and they were subject to expulsion from the country “whenever the Government may find it convenient.”

  The threat to expel foreigners was not enforced. The authorities were not likely to “find it convenient,” for expulsion was politically hard and the government was weak and divided. Even if the government had been strong, Generals Vallejo and Castro were well disposed toward the Americans. The wording of their proclamation suggested its true purpose was not expelling Americans, merely pressing them to pledge allegiance to the government—but the American settlers missed the nuances. One, a New Englander named William B. Ide, later recalled the proclamation as a death threat, which supposedly said that “all foreigners” who had arrived within the last year must “leave the country, and their property and beasts of burden, without taking arms, on pain of death.” Ide seemed baffled that the “naturally humane and generous” General Castro would have issued such a cruel edict—which, of course, he had not.

  Ide was a pivotal actor in what happened next. He was a Massachusetts-born carpenter and teacher, a somber man of fifty with a line of whiskers on his chin, and a Mormon. He had arrived in California just two months earlier than John had, crossing the Sierra Nevada with a party of settlers in October 1845. He worked for a few months on the same northern California rancho where John stopped on his way to and from Oregon in early 1846. That was the full extent of his connection to California; he had no claim to it except his long journey to get there. But just as Captain Frémont reached California and instantly began naming landmarks, complaining to the authorities, and shopping for beachfront property, Ide already viewed California as his own. This was not surprising, given the ideas afoot in his country (“This country appears to have been created on a magnificent plan,” “Westward the star of empire takes its way,” “the manifest purpose of Providence”). When he heard rumors of a Mexican crackdown, he did not think of complying with the authorities’ demands and looked for protection to the US Army captain who was camping in the region.

  Ide was encouraged to do so: Captain Frémont, also fearing a Mexican attack, had authorized his former employee Neal and other settlers to spread the word that Americans should band together for “their common safety” and that “my camp, wherever it might be, was appointed the place of meeting.” These settlers were likely the authors of a letter that a messenger carried through the Sacramento Valley. Ide saw it on June 8, 1846. It falsely claimed that “a large body of Spaniards on horseback” were on their way up the Sacramento, burning crops and houses as they went, and that “Capt. Fremont invites every freeman in the valley to come to his camp” to develop a plan of action.

  When Ide visited
Captain Frémont at his tent, however, he was disappointed. The army officer still did not think he could hold out against the California authorities and intended to avoid involving himself directly in conflict so that the United States would not be implicated. According to Ide, John proposed a harebrained scheme in which the settlers would rise up to strike some blow against the Mexicans and then flee California, with John escorting them back to the United States. John never recorded making any such proposal, and Ide’s memory was not reliable, but the notion fit John’s written statements that he intended to retreat to the United States, and it contributed to a mystery: What was the army officer up to? What was his intent? If he believed, as he said later, that he was “required” to do what he could “to promote the object of the President” to “take California,” why was he planning to leave? If he believed that he should not involve himself in a war with local authorities, why was he encouraging settlers to join him for their common defense? Was he covertly leading the settlers to rise up or merely stirring the pot? Was he lying about his plans to leave in order to fool Mexican authorities, who might intercept his letters? Or was he lying long afterward, when he forgot that he had ever planned to leave and talked instead of his duty to remain? The simplest explanation is the most likely: the historical record is confusing because John Charles Frémont was confused. He was exhausted after thousands of miles in the saddle. He lacked clear instructions from home. He lacked the information he most needed, whether war had started between Mexico and the United States. He also lacked reliable information about what the Mexicans were doing. He had long ago absorbed Senator Benton’s understanding of the strategic power of American settlers to take control of a desired piece of land, but he was not a great strategic thinker. Thus he sent mixed signals, not knowing what to do.