For Gwin, at the moment, all was working as planned. In mid-October 1849, the delegates signed the new constitution and sent it to Washington in hopes that Congress would approve it. In November, Californians elected a state legislature, and in December the lawmakers met in San Jose—in an adobe building that local leaders had purchased as an improvised state capital—to choose two prospective United States senators. Both would hurry to Washington, lobby for statehood, and then take their seats in the Senate if successful. One of the chosen was William M. Gwin. The New Yorker Elisha Crosby thought his presence might help the case for statehood, offering Southerners in Congress a reliable proslavery vote: “I was induced to vote for him as a U.S. Senator because he was known as an extreme Southern man.” Failure to send such a man to the Senate would have been “so palpable a cut or insult to the South that the State never would have had a chance of admission.”
For the other seat one name loomed above all others: John Charles Frémont. The conqueror of California had made it known that his brief hiatus from public life was over. In Jessie’s view, his ambition grew out of their antislavery activism—which was to say her activism. “What we had done in Monterey when the State Constitution was being framed there had enrolled us on the antislavery side,” she said. “It would have been deserting not to continue the work.” He might have sought California’s governorship instead, but a post in the Senate would allow them to return to Washington and “our old home life to be restored.”
When asked to state his positions just before the vote, John spoke of slavery much more cautiously than Jessie did. Jacob R. Snyder, a California settler and frontiersman, wrote him a letter asking several questions, and John replied with a letter that was published in the Alta California on the day the legislature began its session. He declared his adherence to the Democratic Party (“By association, feeling, principle and education, I am thoroughly a democrat”) and then ducked any discussion of slavery, saying he was not “entering into any discussion of the question at issue between the two great parties.” He favored “a central, national railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.” Its “stupendous magnitude,” he said, working up to a Thomas Hart Benton level of enthusiasm about global trade, made the railroad “the greatest enterprise of the age,” which would bring changes “throughout the Pacific Ocean and eastern Asia—commingling together the European, American, and Asiatic races.” It probably was not politically shrewd to speak of “commingling” the races before the all-white legislature, but he was too excited to contain himself. Even the catastrophe of his recent expedition became a success. “The result was entirely satisfactory,” he wrote. “It convinced me that neither the snow of winter nor the mountain ranges were obstacles in the way of the road.” He acknowledged that he had not actually located the necessary pass, but believed it existed. He fielded a few pointed questions about his ownership of Las Mariposas, but nothing prevented his easy election.
When John learned the news, he promptly departed San Jose. It was a rainy day, but that did not stop him from riding seventy miles southwest to Monterey, where Jessie had gone in another effort to improve her health. She was spending her days in their wing of the Castro house, which featured a bearskin rug and a fire. “The rains set in furiously,” she said, “and I was completely house-bound; but I could see the bay, and even through the closed windows I could hear the delightful boom of the long rollers falling regularly and heavily on the beach.” She sewed new clothes. She read old magazines to Lily. She spent time with an Australian woman who had signed on as a cook. Jessie and Lily were sitting with the cook during an evening of “tremendous rain” when “Mr. Frémont came in upon us, dripping wet, as well he might be, for he had come through from San Jose. . . . He was so wet that we could hardly make him cross the pretty room,” but she urged him not to worry about the floor. He informed her that he had been elected senator, and added that he wanted to start for Washington within a few days.
Jessie was overjoyed. She wanted back her father and mother and siblings. She was lonely—she had only her husband, who was living with her yet not truly beside her, because he could not stop moving around California. When he was done delivering the news about the Senate, he spent but a single night in Monterey and then departed, riding the same horse seventy miles back again through the rain to San Jose. To judge by the time spent, he was happier in motion than with her. Was there something off about him? Something she truly didn’t know? He was, as ever, so respectful and reserved, so reluctant to drip water on the bear rug on his own floor. Yet that very reserve made him seem distant, even to her.
Jessie’s final evening in California was the final evening of the year. “When we heard the steamer’s gun, New-year’s night, the rain was pouring in torrents, and every street crossing was a living brook. Mr. Frémont carried me down, warmly wrapped up, to the wharf, where we got into a little boat and rowed out. I have found that it changes the climate and removes illness to have the ship’s head turned the way you wish to go.” Surely John Charles Frémont had his own emotions as the ship raised anchor and the year 1850 arrived. One year ago he had been reading Blackstone’s commentaries on the English law while sitting in a snowbound tent, his men near death all around him as he dreamed of building a career in California as a lawyer and a landowner. He had been thinking it might take seven years to establish himself. The gold rush had accelerated everything.
A newspaper reported that on his way out of California, Colonel Frémont had made “a timely and excellent donation for this state.” He had given away books to help in creating a new state library, one hundred volumes in all, according to the journal of the state senate. The volumes revealed something about his life and interests, as did his decision to part with them. He gave away books associated with his former life as a soldier and explorer: one on astronomy, one on drawing with shades and shadows, and a “treatise on field fortification.” He gave away books with which he had been preparing for a future as a lawyer: volumes on evidence and writing wills, and commentaries by the Supreme Court justice Joseph Story. He gave away the volumes of Blackstone that he had lifted from Senator Benton’s library and carried over the plains, the Rockies, and the southwestern deserts, holding on to them even when he was walking for help in the snow and starving. Now he didn’t need them anymore. He also let go a single work of fiction. It was a Spanish copy of Don Quixote, Cervantes’s novel about the travels of an overly romantic man who had lost touch with the world.
Part Four
BLACK REPUBLICANS
Antebellum political heroes: Henry Clay sits beside John C. Calhoun, who holds a feather pen. Thomas Hart Benton is the fourth figure from the left, behind General Winfield Scott. Gray-haired James Buchanan is tucked behind the Romanesque statue. Bearded John Charles Frémont stands in the upper right.
San Francisco in 1850.
Chapter Thirteen
WE THOUGHT MONEY MIGHT COME IN HANDY
Senator and Mrs. Frémont, 1850–1851
Washington and San Francisco
If a single moment could illustrate the congressional debate over California statehood, it came on April 17, 1850, when Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi prepared to walk into the Senate chamber by tucking a pistol into his suit. It was a Colt revolver, available to him thanks to a revolution that was subtly changing American society. Samuel Colt, a Connecticut man, had begun making his patented revolvers in the 1830s, although they were slow to catch on; the revolver that John Frémont fired at a Klamath man in Oregon in 1846 would have been one of the relatively few in existence. But in the late 1840s Colt perfected his assembly-line production, first selling revolvers to the Texas Rangers and then mass-producing a small, five-shot weapon for civilian use, the 1849 Colt Pocket. With a barrel as short as three inches, it could be dropped into a man’s coat. Colt eventually sold more than 325,000 copies of the pistol as the United States, already an armed society, took a
giant leap forward in the power and convenience of its concealed weapons. Foote carried his five-shooter into the Senate because he was debating California statehood and feared a confrontation with an opponent, Senator Thomas Hart Benton.
Foote took his seat on the outermost semicircle of desks, from which he had a view of his Senate colleagues. The bitterness was palpable. Ever since news of California’s constitution had reached Washington in late 1849, a faction of Southern men had labeled it a conspiracy to deprive them of their national power. Their leader was Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the man who had quietly orchestrated the nullification movement in the 1830s and advocated taking Texas in the 1840s. In March 1850 Calhoun requested time for a speech against California statehood. Emaciated and ill, the white-haired, stern-faced senator did not have the strength to deliver what he had written, so he huddled in his cloak at his Senate desk while a colleague from Virginia stood behind him reading it aloud. His speech said the “great and primary cause” of the South’s discontent was that “the equilibrium between the two sections . . . has been destroyed.” The North had become more populous and more powerful, and now that new territory had been won from Mexico, “the North is making the most strenuous efforts to appropriate the whole to herself.” It would soon be impossible for the South to protect itself from an unrestrained federal government. “Seceding from the Union” would be justified if the Union was “oppressing instead of protecting us.”
Benton considered Calhoun a traitor, trying to “pick a quarrel for a wicked purpose” of encouraging the South to secede. He forgave Calhoun nothing when the South Carolinian died a few weeks after his speech, and this helped to provoke his quarrel with Henry Foote of Mississippi, who was publicly defending Calhoun’s memory. A balding, prickly man in his midforties, Foote recently had compared Benton to “a degenerate Roman senator.” Now, on April 17, he rose to speak again. He declared that Benton, “the oldest member of the Senate,” was one of the “calumniators” who spoke malicious falsehoods against the fallen hero Calhoun. Calling Benton a liar crossed a line. The Mississippi senator was mid-sentence when the massive sixty-eight-year-old Benton rose from his desk and began walking toward him. Foote retreated down the aisle and drew his five-shot Colt revolver. “In a moment,” said a reporter afterward, “almost every Senator was on his feet.” Some shouted for order. Some shouted for the sergeant at arms. Colleagues of Benton restrained him, while senators near Foote tried to take away his gun. Benton shook off his colleagues and advanced a second time, shouting, “I have no pistols! Let him fire! Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” Instead another senator took charge of Foote’s gun and “locked it in his desk.” As the presiding officer tried to quiet the spectators in the gallery overhead, Benton declared that Foote wanted to “assassinate” him and demanded an investigation. The next day he wrote the United States attorney for Washington, requesting that Foote be charged with a crime.
The bitter feelings masked a reality: the gun remained unfired. The Union was not yet torn in two. Benton and Foote had different visions of the country, but on the immediate issue disagreed less than it seemed. Both knew California statehood had enough votes to pass, and differed only on how it should be done; Foote wanted the South to be compensated for its loss. There was a compromise available, which Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky already had proposed in an emotional speech, interrupted by shouts from spectators who crowded the gallery and the hall outside. Clay said Congress should organize California and New Mexico without regard to whether they were slave or free. The same would be done for Utah, a new territory surrounding the Great Salt Lake, settled by Mormons in 1846 after John Frémont’s explorations promoted the area. White Southerners could be assured that they were not banned from introducing slavery somewhere in the conquered land; Northerners that slavery was unlikely to spread anyway, since the climate in the new lands was not thought to favor slave-grown crops. Clay offered further benefits for each side. For the North, Congress would ban the slave trade in the District of Columbia, though not slavery itself. For the South, Congress would pass a fugitive-slave law compelling Northern states to return escaped human property to the South.
The Mississippian Henry Foote supported Clay’s compromise. Benton did not. He thought California statehood should simply be accepted on its own, not attached to proslavery measures as a “surrender” to a hostile minority; the compromise was a “monster.” Lawmakers were at an impasse until a leading Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, orchestrated a compromise of the compromise. Clay’s legislation had so many provisions that were noxious to so many senators that it could never pass, but Douglas calculated that each could pass separately. All were approved in a series of votes over the summer, and each bill was carried up Pennsylvania Avenue by messenger and laid upon the desk of the president—a new president, Millard Fillmore. Zachary Taylor had died of an acute intestinal disease, apparently poisoned by a contaminated supply of milk or water, the second president within a decade to be killed by Washington, D.C.
Some lawmakers decried the whole process. One was a newly elected Whig lawmaker from the state of New York, who took the occasion to deliver his first-ever speech in the Senate. William Henry Seward rose to tell his colleagues that he would not compromise, would not risk leaving the new land even slightly open to the South’s institution. Thin and red-haired, with bushy eyebrows and a confident expression, the Whig said he must follow “a higher law than the Constitution,” for God frowned on slavery even if the Constitution allowed it. Whigs and Democrats alike criticized Seward for what they construed as opposition to the founding document, and the Senate otherwise dismissed him.
* * *
OUTSIDE THE SENATE CHAMBER was a different matter. Seward’s speech was reprinted and shared in antislavery circles, where it inspired a prophecy from Frederick Douglass. The former slave wrote that Seward’s “higher law” concept would resonate in a God-fearing nation. Although most Americans, even in free states, were “dark and depraved on this subject” of slavery, they would finally choose the justice that was demanded by their faith. If both Whigs and Democrats continued resisting this truth, “they will have, for their pains, a new and powerful Northern party,” which would righteously rise to crush them both.
Douglass had been busy since the National Convention of Colored Citizens in 1843, when he pressed for nonviolent change only to be attacked by a mob weeks later. Funded by antislavery groups, he traveled to Britain to lecture. He published a popular autobiography detailing his enslavement and escape. Then he moved with his wife, Anna, and their children to a brick house in Rochester, New York, where he established a newspaper called the North Star. Naturally it was an abolitionist sheet, although its content was broader than that phrase would imply. Articles about slavery shared space with whatever else awakened the editor’s curiosity; it was a view of the world through the eyes of Frederick Douglass. The paper on April 20, 1849, included an item about Louis-Napoléon, the leader of France, who “rambles much about the Parisian streets, unattended,” and also an update on the progress of the famed explorer John Charles Frémont. It was a story of the disastrous expedition in which men “were compelled to eat the dead bodies of their comrades, before they became cold.” Later that year the paper noted the gold on John’s land (“Col. Fremont is said to have fallen upon untold riches”) and then his election to the Senate.
The two-story brick house where Douglass lived with his family was selected for its location between the homes of white abolitionists, minimizing friction with the neighbors. It was about a one-mile walk to his newspaper office, leading through the busy mill town and across the Genesee River on the Main Street Bridge, which had mills and a market built along its sides, propped directly over the river so that businesses could use it to turn waterwheels and dump waste. Reaching the west bank, Douglass entered a four-story stone office building, where a single room contained an iron printing press, a desk in the corner, a
nd wooden type cases along the walls. Aided by an assistant and sometimes by his young daughter and son, he set articles into type. He expressed himself without apology as a black man. “Colored newspapers,” he wrote, “are sometimes objected to on the ground that they serve to keep up an odious and wicked distinction between white and colored persons, and are a barrier to that very equality which we are wont to advocate. We have, sometimes, heard persons regret the very mention of color. . . . We confess to no such feelings.” Black people would achieve equality by doing all that white people could do, working as “doctors, lawyers, merchants, teachers, professors and editors.” He was the change he wanted to see.
Douglass felt free to say things that mainstream white leaders would not dare. Few in power would have spoken as he did about the Christian church, when he said American churches had “volunteered in aid of the inhuman man-stealer.” The Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, whose meetings Douglass attended, endorsed a view held by the most uncompromising abolitionists: “the doctrine of NO UNION WITH SLAVE-HOLDERS,” which meant they wanted to seek, “by all rightful means, the rejection of the Constitution of the United States, on account of its slaveholding character.” This was heresy to those who revered both the Constitution and the Union, but the meeting ended as “three cheers for liberty were proposed and heartily given. . . . We trust each member resolved to do what in him lay for the downfall of tyranny in this otherwise happy republic.”
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