When he met the Sonorans in the desert, he proposed a deal. They had mining skills; he had land. If some wanted to prospect on his property, John would split the proceeds. Twenty-eight accepted. Once enough fresh horses were in hand, John escorted them to Las Mariposas and left them to their work.
Next he went in search of Jessie, reaching San Francisco in mid-June. They spent only a few days together there; she felt the climate was damaging her health, so they tried the air in Monterey. It was a half-empty town, where almost the only men who had not left for the gold region were those such as the consul and businessman Thomas Larkin, who was already rich, or US troops whose enlistments prevented them from seeking their fortune—and even many soldiers deserted. One of the few men who remained for Jessie to meet was “long thin young” William Tecumseh Sherman, the officer who had been among the first to be told of the gold strike. There were also Californian women, among them the wife of General José Castro, the former Mexican official whose troops had once confronted John’s force. General Castro was away but his spouse shared their house, renting the Frémonts one wing of it, with a window overlooking the bay. Jessie sensed that she was not the most welcome visitor; to the Californians “my name represented only invasion and defeat,” but they helped her scrounge milk and food for Lily: “every eatable thing had been eaten off the face of the country, and nothing raised.”
For some days the Frémonts explored the country in their carriage, taking a kind of holiday and sleeping on the cushions. Then, while keeping their rooms in Monterey, they moved to San Jose, just south of San Francisco Bay, where John was setting up the sawmill machinery he’d had shipped from the East. He saw an opportunity. The shrewder characters in California grasped that while it was a gamble to seek one’s fortune by mining, they could make a more certain income selling supplies to miners. That was the plan of Collis P. Huntington, the New York hardware store owner who, along with Jessie, had been on the Crescent City out of New York; arriving on a different ship in late August, he peddled goods in the goldfields and then opened a store in Sacramento, his first step toward becoming one of the richest men in California. A similar possibility was open to John when he started his sawmill and a steam engine to turn it. Timber was wanted everywhere—for every building, for underground mines, even for the creation of wood-plank streets in San Francisco—and John soon had men hacking down enormous redwood trees to feed them into the whining saw.
In the overcrowded town they were able to rent only a single dusty room (“Fleas swarmed there,” Jessie said unfairly, “as they do wherever the Spanish language is spoken”), and she cast about to find a servant. John had intended for Jackson Saunders to work as a cook, but the African American man made a request the Frémonts could not refuse: his wife back east was enslaved, which meant that by law his children were enslaved, and upon reaching California he realized that he could dig for the gold to buy their freedom. John helped him obtain equipment and sent him off to Las Mariposas among the Sonorans. Next Jessie learned of a “cook, washer, and ironer for sale.” A white migrant to California had brought along a black slave and was now willing to part with her. Residents informed Jessie of the opportunity, “as I was thought to be the most helpless woman in town,” but she held to the principles she had learned from her mother and refused to become a slave owner. Another person in San Jose later bought the woman for the extravagant price of four thousand dollars.
* * *
IN AUGUST, JOHN WAS ON A PORCH IN SAN JOSE when he looked up to see his friend Edward F. Beale approaching. Incredibly, the naval officer turned gold promoter had completed the ordeal of returning to California yet again, having become one of the first Americans to lead a bicoastal life. Since spotting Jessie in Panama in May as he traveled to the East, Beale had reached New York and held up his eight-pound lump of gold in front of a crowd of men on Wall Street before turning back toward the Pacific. Now he was moving about California with a journalist, who wanted the opportunity to introduce himself to John. The journalist took a careful look at Colonel Frémont, who was “wearing a sombrero and a Californian jacket, and showing no trace of the terrible hardships he had lately undergone.” John was so reserved and unassuming that the journalist, Bayard Taylor, would not have guessed that he was looking at “the Columbus of our central wildernesses”; perhaps this was another way of saying that John’s celebrity made him so much larger than life that John, when encountered in person, seemed a bit smaller than expected. Still the reporter was impressed that John was “compactly knit—in fact, I have seen in no other man the qualities of lightness, activity, strength and physical endurance in so perfect an equilibrium.” His thin, tanned face featured a “bold aquiline” nose and deep-set eyes that were “keen as a hawk’s.”
Edward F. Beale had come carrying a letter for John from the East, which John opened and read. It said President Zachary Taylor had appointed him to a commission assigned to draw the new boundary between the United States and Mexico. John sent an immediate letter of acceptance, thanking the president for “the mark of confidence bestowed upon me”; he viewed the appointment as vindication, presuming the government’s call to service implied an acknowledgment that the judgment of his court-martial had been wrong after all.
The Frémonts were still in San Jose when they received even more uplifting news. A convoy of animals arrived, driven by some of the Sonorans who had been digging for gold at Las Mariposas. One animal bore a buckskin bag holding the first diggings, which Jessie believed to be one hundred pounds of gold, or at least of quartz shot through with gold. Either way it was a fortune, and more bags soon arrived. Jessie said they “were put for safety under the straw mattress. There were no banks nor places of deposit of any kind. You had to trust some man that you knew, or keep guard yourself.” Whenever possible, the Frémonts shipped the bags to Monterey, “and it accumulated in trunks in our rooms there.” They were rich—so absurdly rich they hardly knew what to do, so rich they stopped trying even to keep track of their wealth. When, after a few months, the Sonorans reported to John that they were ready to take their share of the gold and go home, John did not take the time to travel with them to open the trunks of gold in Monterey. He simply gave them the keys to the trunks, trusting them to divide the fortune and leave the proper share behind. The lure of gold had driven much of the settlement of the New World, had enticed men to the greatest heights of bravery, ingenuity, cruelty, and madness—yet Jessie said afterward that the Sonorans divided the gold “with scrupulous honor, not taking an ounce more than their stipulated portion.”
Other prospectors were more troublesome. Many raced to Las Mariposas without making any arrangements with John. He declared in a letter that “hundreds—soon becoming thousands—crowded to the same place.” He could do little except hope that some would give him a share of their bounty in tribute for access to his property: his title had not included mineral rights, and his claim to the land itself was uncertain, since he had bought it from a man who had committed not to sell it and its boundaries were undefined. Even if his title was unquestioned, the lure of gold would have overwhelmed his defenses—John Sutter’s far better-established empire to the north was being trampled. John faced years of litigation over his ownership, and in the meantime watched as a town called Mariposa grew up to become the seat of a new county. By 1850, when California participated in its first United States census, Mariposa County had gone from a non-Indian population of virtually no one to 1,512, including a scattering of merchants, hotelkeepers, carpenters, stonecutters, and a justice of the peace; 43 women, who mostly seemed to be the wives and daughters of miners or other recent emigrants; and 1,105 miners, no more than a few of whom worked for John Frémont.
* * *
THE DELEGATES TO CALIFORNIA’S constitutional convention gathered in Monterey at the start of September. They had come from all over the territory; delegates from San Francisco had taken passage down the coast in the ship called Colonel Fremont. The
y met in Monterey’s new town hall, two stories high with a sloping roof and walls of solid yellow stone. It was called Colton Hall, after Walter Colton, a Monterey resident who had overseen its construction as the city’s alcalde, or mayor. He had paid for the building by collecting fines from criminals, which was why he called it “the culprit hall,” and said his name would “go down to posterity with the odor of gamblers, convicts, and tipplers.”
The upper floor of Colton Hall formed a single room for public meetings. A railing separated the forty-eight delegates from spectators including William T. Sherman, the red-haired army officer, who had been sent as an observer by the military governor. It was a gathering of many big names in California’s recent history: delegates included John Sutter, though he was said to be “a sort of ornamental appendage,” rapidly losing influence; businessman Thomas O. Larkin, who was no longer consul, since California was no longer Mexican soil, but remained influential, daily hosting other delegates for dinner at his New England–style home; and Lansford Hastings, an ambitious self-promoter whose place in history had been established with the Hastings Cutoff, his problematic shortcut on the trail to California that was tried, to their sorrow, by the Donner Party on the way to their doom in 1846. Leaders of the Bear Flag Rebellion were in the room with former enemies among the old Californians. “The Spaniards,” said one delegate, “served in the convention because they saw the necessity. . . . American occupation was inevitable, and they submitted with what grace they could.” Mariano G. Vallejo, the Mexican general who had been imprisoned by John Frémont, was also a delegate. A journalist who met Vallejo at the convention described him as “tall and of commanding presence,” his “eyes dark with a grave, dignified expression.” He maintained his dignity amid the very sorts of foreign interlopers who had once invaded his house: one delegate was a Florida man who, it was said, “carried an enormous bowie knife & was half drunk most of the time.”
William Gwin had been elected. The former Mississippi congressman who had arrived on Jessie’s boat was well prepared, carrying copies of the state constitutions of Iowa and Ohio, which he believed could be used as templates for the California constitution to save time. Delegates with a longer history in California pushed back against Gwin’s efforts to dominate the proceeding, but eventually did crib from the constitutions he had brought, and leaned on his experience as a legislator. Gwin’s influence was significant because he had a definite position on an especially sensitive issue: slavery. The proposed state constitution must declare California to be a free state or a slave state. Of Gwin’s personal view there could be no doubt: he was the owner of a Mississippi plantation worked by slaves, and called slavery “the foundation of civilization.” He was in a position to urge that view—yet did not. He knew that if he and other delegates from the South demanded the right to bring slaves to California, they might create a deadlock with delegates from the North, reproducing the chaos then prevailing in Washington. Congress had failed to organize a territorial or state government in California because lawmakers could not agree on whether to allow slavery there. If California also failed to act, Gwin would lose: he wanted to be a senator, which required California to become a state. “Gwin, with good grace adopted the clause prohibiting slavery,” said his follow delegate and friend, Elisha Crosby of New York. Section 18 of the state constitution read: “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State.”
“The admission of California to the Union was paramount to every other consideration,” said delegate Crosby. Thus the clause was adopted almost unanimously, thanks in part to the ambition of a man who so strongly favored slavery that in future years he would side with the Confederacy. Thomas Butler King, the presidential emissary, was also a Southerner but favored the clause too; he had been told that President Taylor preferred a free state as part of his larger strategy for resolving the dispute over slavery in the conquered territory. The constitution certainly was not driven by an overwhelming desire for social equality: having approved the antislavery clause, the convention nearly approved a clause that prohibited the entry of any black people at all. That was eventually removed, but what remained was a clause similar to that in Iowa’s constitution, explicitly granting the vote only to “every white male citizen of the United States.” Free white Mexicans could also vote if they assumed American citizenship. People of African descent, Indians, Chinese, and others were defined out of the electorate.
The constitution was made less unfair through the intervention of the Californian delegates, who on issue after issue offered a different perspective than the newcomers from the United States. The Americans may have come from the land of liberty, but the Mexicans had a broader conception of it. Mexico had always outlawed slavery, which made it easy for the Californian delegates to endorse the antislavery clause. When it became clear that Indians would be denied the vote, the Californians objected: some of the delegates themselves had Indian ancestry, and a nephew of General Vallejo informed the assembly that landowning Indians had previously enjoyed the franchise. The American delegates grudgingly added a clause that the legislature could, by a two-thirds vote, allow voting to select Indians. The Californians scored a clearer victory in upholding the rights of women. A delegate from Virginia urged that wives should be denied the right to own property because their husbands could better provide for them; a committee that included General Vallejo and other Californians rejected this. They prevailed on the delegates to agree that “all property” that a woman brought into marriage, including real estate, “shall be her separate property.”
In a further gesture, General Vallejo tried to have a Mexican vaquero added to the various images that crowded the new state seal. The seal featured grapes, mountains, ships in harbor, the Roman goddess Minerva, and a bear. Vallejo thought the vaquero should be lassoing the bear, but by a single vote he was defeated.
* * *
WHERE WERE THE FRÉMONTS during the convention? John, at least, made no impression. He had not chosen to stand for election to the convention and was taking a short break from public service. Having accepted his appointment to the boundary commission, he resigned; he wanted the vindication that the appointment represented to him but had no time for the work. Moving about in his sombrero and Californian jacket, he focused on business and his sudden fortune. He did appear in Monterey, where William T. Sherman saw him; he also appeared in San Francisco, lingering at the United States Hotel and showing off samples of gold from Las Mariposas. He encountered the newspaperman Bayard Taylor there, and told him that the Mariposa land had a vein of gold that seemed to be a mile long; he was trying to drum up investments that would allow him to more fully exploit it.
Jessie, by her own account, had more time for the convention. She said she was staying in Monterey, in the rooms the Frémonts had been granted within Madam Castro’s house, and she began to play a political role. Convention delegates visited. Men in an overcrowded town, which apparently had just one restaurant, welcomed refreshments, a comfortable chair, and an opportunity to talk with that rarity in California, a lady from the States. Having drawn them in, Jessie took the opportunity to assure them “that I really did not want slaves”—in other words, that upscale women could make homes in California without them. (She had hired two Indian men as domestic help.) “Our decision,” she said of herself and her husband, “was made on the side of free labor. It was not only the question of injustice to the blacks, but justice to the white men crowding into the country.” Prospectors should be allowed to seek their fortune without facing unfair competition from other prospectors who had gangs of enslaved men at their command. This was, she suggested later, the beginning of her life as an antislavery activist.
One delegate cast doubt on Jessie’s story—Elisha Crosby, the New Yorker, a critic of John Frémont. (“Frémont was a very nice little gentleman,” Crosby said, “but I thought as many others did, that Jessie Benton Frémont w
as the better man of the two, far more intelligent and comprehensive.”) Years later, Crosby denied that Jessie had influenced the convention and even that she was in Monterey at the time. To be fair to Jessie, she may have been in Monterey, even if Crosby did not remember her. She may have hosted delegates in her home, and it would have been natural, given her confidence in speaking to men about politics, that she would express her long-standing antislavery views. But in a larger sense, Crosby was right: Jessie could not have significantly influenced the convention. The antislavery provision passed for pragmatic reasons, with the votes even of proslavery men like Gwin, and for some delegates Jessie’s reasoned arguments against slavery were irrelevant.
Gwin, the Mississippi plantation owner, was like a sailor who placed his hand on the tiller to steer away from breakers and mistakenly thought it was a momentary change in course. The ship would never sail exactly the same heading again. For thirty years the nation’s leaders had consciously maintained a balance between free and slave states. When Thomas Hart Benton’s Missouri agitated for admission as a slave state in 1820, the free state of Maine had to be admitted in compensation. In the 1830s, the slave state of Arkansas was soon followed by the free state of Michigan. In the 1840s, the admission of both Texas and Florida made it urgent to follow with the free states of Iowa and Wisconsin. Now the free and slave states numbered fifteen against fifteen, which made them evenly balanced in the Senate. The admission of California as a free state would make it sixteen against fifteen, with other free states coming soon and no clear prospect of another slave state in view. Some Southerners talked of dividing California in two, forming a northern free and a southern slave state, with a border along the same Missouri Compromise line that had divided the Louisiana Purchase; but the Californians were preempting this talk by drawing their own borders and presenting their constitution as a fait accompli. If their act was upheld, Southerners would begin to lose their grip on the Senate. The North’s growing population had already given it a majority of the House, and with California’s rise, more and more of the electoral votes used to choose the president would be coming from free states. The balance of power was permanently shifting. Someday it might be possible to imagine the election of a president based on northern votes alone.
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