The minutes of the antislavery meeting were printed in the North Star and revealed something notable. A list of participants showed that many were women. Women were considered to have no place in politics, but by tradition could speak up for a benevolent cause, as some had on slavery for years. Douglass engaged with such women and was intrigued to learn that some were plotting their own movement against oppression. At least four women at the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society meeting in 1848—Mary Hallowell, Maria E. Wilbur, Mary M’Clintock, and Amy Post—were among those who, a few months later, helped to organize a meeting in Seneca Falls outside Rochester. Douglass attended their “convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition of woman.” They criticized marriage laws and religious conservatism. They demanded the right to vote. They even adopted a Declaration of Sentiments that revised the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal”). Douglass placed his signature on a list of “gentlemen present in favor of the movement,” and then he joined many of the same women for a follow-up meeting at a Unitarian church in Rochester. His newspaper described a poignant moment shortly after Amy Post called the Rochester meeting to order: “Anxiety was manifest” from the people in the more distant pews “concerning the low voices of the women, and when reading or speaking was attempted, cries of louder, louder, nearly drowned them.” Abigail Bush, the president of the meeting, made symbolic use of the disruption, saying women stood before the gathering as “an oppressed class, with trembling frames and faltering tongues,” but they would proceed nevertheless, trusting in “the omnipotency of right.”
So he had allies, who supported his cause as he supported theirs, and he published his newspaper in a way that was calculated to draw in more allies. He began printing proslavery declarations—the fiercest arguments he could find in favor of slavery in California or New Mexico. He knew these arguments from the South would be badly received in the North. He published a statement by Southern members of Congress, who talked of seceding from the Union and said “the faith of each State is pledged to protect her interests in said territories at the point of the bayonet.” A gathering of Virginians said “it is the imperative duty of the Southern States to resist any further interference on the subject of slavery, either in the States or Territories . . . at all hazards and to the last extremity.” On February 9, 1849, John C. Calhoun was quoted at enormous length in Douglass’s paper; his characteristically abrasive words defending slavery and the rights of the white South filled almost five whole columns of the oversize page. Douglass felt sure that such demands and threats would provoke even racist Northern audiences: “Those who cared nothing for the slave, and were willing to tolerate slavery inside the slave States, were nevertheless not quite prepared to find themselves and their children excluded from [the territories,] the common inheritance of the nation.” Where slavery existed, it was presumed that free settlers would not thrive. The Compromise of 1850 was meant to ease the very tensions that Douglass perceived and encouraged, but the legislation “was hardly dry on the page of the statute book before the whole land was rocked with rumoured agitation, and for one, I did my best, by pen and voice, and by ceaseless activity, to keep it alive and vigorous.”
* * *
SOME PARTS OF THE COMPROMISE were still being maneuvered through Congress when, on September 10, 1850, William M. Gwin presented his credentials as a senator from California. So, too, did John Charles Frémont, who, having traded in his military uniform for a Californian jacket, now traded in the jacket for the dark suit favored on the floor of the Senate. Jessie Benton Frémont held the distinction of being both the daughter and the wife of senators. There remained only the question of how long John could serve. Senators served six-year terms, but their elections were staggered—meaning that one of California’s first two senators must accept a much shorter term. They drew lots, and John lost. His term was to end on March 3, 1851, leaving him just a few months to prove himself before reelection.
His fame, at least, seemed secure. A Philadelphia literary magazine that autumn ranked John among the most important men to walk the earth since Jesus: “Since the mission of Him who came into the world to suffer that mankind might find redemption, the three greatest events that have occurred, are connected with the rise and progress of our own happy country;—the discovery of America; the American Revolution, and the establishment of the American empire on the coast of the Pacific ocean.” Each great event was associated with a great man: Columbus, then Washington, then Frémont, who “lifted the veil which, since time first began, had hidden from view the real El Dorado.”
Unlike the other two, John was still on earth and was therefore compelled to face the consequences of his achievements. His Senate term was like a trial in which he was constantly confronted with his past. One day the Senate received a petition from “F. Hultmann, of San Francisco, California,” who said he had loaned “Lieutenant Colonel J.C. Frémont” some $19,500 during the war. This was a small portion of the debts John had built up to supply his troops, which Senator Benton had tried to have Congress assume in 1848. Congress still had not acted, and Hultmann (his name was actually spelled Huttmann) wanted his money back.
Slavery demanded John’s attention when senators considered a part of the great compromise, Henry Clay’s bill to ban the slave trade in the District of Columbia. It contained a few stirring phrases: “Any slave” brought into Washington “for the purpose of being sold” would “thereupon become liberated and free.” It also contained disturbing clauses revealing that this element of the compromise was itself deeply compromised. It strengthened the shackles on slaves already within the district, mandating prison for anyone who helped a slave “to run away from his, her, or their owner or lawful possessor.” It even allowed local authorities, if they chose, “to prohibit the coming of free negroes to reside” in Washington. The free African Americans who could be banned from Washington were the kind of people whom the Bentons hired, and they included Jacob Dodson, who had traveled twice with John to the Pacific and served alongside him in the war. (When veterans were paid after the war, Dodson was unable to collect for years, because federal law did not provide for “the mustering of colored men into the service of the country.”) To say such a man could be banned from entering the capital was sickening. Yet this bill was part of the compromise that gained California statehood, and few wanted to revisit it. William Seward of New York was almost alone when he proposed to amend the bill by stripping the racist provisions and adding a public referendum to abolish slavery in Washington. Senators North and South voted to block Seward and protect the compromise, and John voted along with them, sacrificing the likes of Dodson for what was seen as the greater good; maybe he assumed that the local government would never really ban free black residents anyway. John then joined the majority who passed the overall legislation, which by the standards of the moment counted as an antislavery measure.
John tripped over more of his past when the senators from California proposed laws for the special problems of the new state. Frémont and Gwin agreed that because John faced reelection first, he would introduce the necessary legislation so that he would have a record to run on. This seemingly collegial move by Gwin handed John a dangerous honor, since anything John proposed would be controversial. Who really owned California, its land, and its mineral wealth? Under what rules would they operate? Who had a place in the new American West—the Indians, the Spanish and Mexicans who had come after them, the American settlers who had come after them, or the prospectors who were flooding in now? John was being asked to resolve the contradictions of manifest destiny, which he had done so much to make reality.
He tried. He introduced a bill offering a system to confirm the land titles of California property owners who had bought their real estate under Mexican law. This would be deeply reassuring to the Mexicans who had remained in California since the conquest, as well as the America
n settlers John knew from Bear Flag days. But critics observed that a major landowner who might benefit was John C. Frémont, the master of Las Mariposas and other properties with shaky titles from Mexican times. He was instantly open to the charge of corruption. Pistol-toting Senator Foote declared on the Senate floor that the bill could bring disgrace to the republic. Afterward, in the stone-walled hallway outside the chamber, John confronted the Mississippian and said he was no gentleman. Foote struck him in the face. It was only through the negotiations of their friends that the senators from California and Mississippi avoided a duel.
Boldly, if perilously, Senator Frémont pushed on. He offered a bill “to preserve peace with the Indian tribes in California by extinguishing their territorial claims in the gold-mine districts.” Senator Frémont’s constituents wanted protection from the natives, which was another way of saying that Indians must be shoved off their own land. John doubtless considered his solution to be pro-Indian—he asserted that natives had legal rights to their property. “In California,” he told his Senate colleagues in a speech, “we are at this moment invading those rights. We lived there by the strong hand alone,” and Indians naturally felt justified in killing invaders when they could. To keep the peace, he said, Indians should be paid for their land and encouraged to move. But he received little credit among white Californians for affirming Indian rights, and his experience should have told him that his plan was unlikely to succeed. In 1837 he had played his small role in the operation to pry Cherokees away from their homeland in the East, and he understood that Indians were forced to give up far more than they gained (as he later said, “there has been no continuous effective policy” toward Indians except their removal “out of the way of the white man”). The only argument for repeating this terrible operation in California in 1850 was that the alternative was worse—white rampages that risked killing the entire native populace.
Senator Frémont also tried to regulate gold mining, introducing a bill that he cast as favoring small prospectors. While underground minerals would belong to the United States, John proposed that anyone could stake a claim and keep the wealth, as long as they turned in gold to the United States Mint in exchange for gold coins. Each prospector simply had to buy a mining permit and could work only one small square of land at a time. A mountainside might become a vast grid split among thousands of small prospectors, and “moneyed capital” would be prevented from “driving out or overpowering the population who have no capital but their courage and industry.” It was a measure against the concentration of wealth and inequality. But a single phrase of the bill provoked intense debate. Who was allowed to prospect? The agents “shall have the authority to grant permits to American citizens.” William Henry Seward of New York read this phrase and objected: Why should immigrants be blocked from the goldfields? The citizenship clause would exclude many of them, ranging from Mexicans to many of Seward’s own New York constituents who had come from Ireland and Germany. He proposed that permits should also be sold to anyone who “declared their intention to become” citizens, saying that immigrants, alongside citizens, would bring up more of the national wealth than citizens alone.
Senator Frémont of California rose to disagree. “All our American population are entirely opposed to the working of the mines by foreigners,” he said. Word of the gold strike had hardly begun to spread in April 1849 when some Californians made the first proposals to ban foreigners from the mines. White Californians attacked Chinese miners, approved a punishing mining tax that applied only to foreigners, and drove away Mexicans by the thousands. But in challenging Seward in the Senate chamber, John did more than pass on his white constituents’ concerns—he endorsed them. He said that California’s gold rush was drawing “civilized Indians and inferior castes” out of the Mexican state of Sonora, where they had gained experience in gold mining. “This brought into California a class of population of very doubtful character, operating in some cases to the exclusion of Americans.”
This was a betrayal. He knew Sonorans; he had encountered them on his way to California in 1849. Rather than operating “to the exclusion of Americans,” they had accepted the leadership of the American they had just met and even agreed to work on his land, where he welcomed their labor. With little effort on his part they had made him rich beyond his dreams. Jessie described them not as people “of very doubtful character” but as people who acted honorably when dividing the gold (“not taking an ounce more than their stipulated portion”). Having profited from the labor of immigrants in a way that changed his life, Senator Frémont opposed granting opportunities to others exactly like them. What changed? As a private individual in 1849, he saw his interests clearly, acted sensibly, and employed people with the skills he needed. As a legislator in 1850, he was part of a system, joining a group of men who were thinking in the abstract about categories of people who were not like them.
Several lawmakers joined the debate over the citizenship clause on the floor of the Senate, each man rising in turn at his desk. One said it would be unfair for foreigners to benefit because Americans had fought and died to conquer California. Seward of New York replied that he was happy to focus on the more than seventeen hundred American lives lost in the war, because it was customary for immigrants to join the army with its hazards and low pay: “More than half of those lives were the lives of men born aliens,” outside the United States. Henry Foote of Mississippi, the next to speak, replied with a personal attack: Seward was a “presidential aspirant” who was cynically appealing to voters “of foreign birth,” but secretly thought his German and Irish constituents were worse than black people.
Senators from the recently formed states of Iowa and Wisconsin rose to defend the foreign born; many of the settlers now filling the prairies had come from Europe and were not yet citizens. Isaac Walker of Wisconsin said “they were voters in Wisconsin,” which was true; numerous states in the nineteenth century allowed noncitizen residents to vote. Walker added that “they worked on our roads; they paid taxes; they performed all the duties of citizens.” He could not “blast all their hopes” by blocking those who were moving to California intent on prospecting. Augustus Dodge of Iowa hit on a compromise: perhaps the bill should be amended to allow European immigrants to mine for California’s gold. Those were the kinds of immigrants who voted in Iowa. Dodge cared less about Mexicans: “I think Mexicans are a miserable people, who should be excluded from the mines.”
John’s fellow Californian William M. Gwin rose to agree about “miserable” Mexicans: the crowds of them who came out of Mexico were “peons,” who would take over multiple mining claims and work them in the service of a single aristocratic master. “We know nothing of their institutions,” he confessed, “but we know that one man gets all the gold.” It sounded very much like slavery, and Gwin, the slave owner from Mississippi, found it unacceptable.
Walker of Wisconsin replied, “Make them all free when they get there.”
“But we do not want them at all,” Gwin exclaimed, confessing that the true defect of Mexicans as he saw them was that they were Mexican. The bill was amended to allow mining by United States citizens and “persons from Europe who produce testimonials of good character.”
* * *
SENATOR FRÉMONT’S TERM WAS SO BRIEF that he ran out of time to guide his proposals into law. Late in September he left the work to Senator Gwin while he returned to California to campaign for reelection. He knew the state legislature would meet sometime before March 3 to pick a senator for a full six-year term. Jessie did not relish the trip; she was pregnant. But she would not remain in Washington without him, and in October 1850 the family caught a steamer to Panama and crossed over to a ship on the Pacific side. On November 21 they were gliding through the Golden Gate and glimpsing San Francisco growing up its hillsides beside the bay. The city looked different than it had the year before. A long wharf extended into the water now, constantly under construction and stretching into deep w
ater to reach oceangoing ships, like the Pacific Mail steamer that deposited Jessie and John. It took “over seven hundred paces” from the end of the wharf to the shoreline, according to a journalist who walked it, “good, long paces at that.” Jessie, with John beside her, would have taken the walk slowly. She was avoiding exertion as expectant mothers were urged to do, while he had grown ill on the voyage and still felt weak. Gradually they approached the city that spread out before them.
A census taker and his assistants had been moving about San Francisco that fall, introducing themselves to people and scrawling information on paper forms. They identified at least 12,625 residents in San Francisco County, which three years before had been a handful of residents in a village. The census takers marked down where all residents were born, creating a sample of California migration. Of the 12,625, about five thousand were born in eastern states, mainly Massachusetts and New York. More than thirty were babies born during the arduous ocean journey from the East, including one born “on the Equator” and two born “off Cape Horn.” A few were born in wagon trains while crossing the Great Plains or Rocky Mountains. A solid majority of San Franciscans—7,423 people—were listed as “born in foreign countries,” a sweeping category that included European immigrants, Australians, Chinese who had ventured across the Pacific, and Hawaiians who had come to California as laborers. The “foreign” majority apparently also included native Californians, those born in California when it was part of Mexico, who were now regarded as immigrants in their own land. The only people the census takers listed as California-born were one hundred babies born during the previous year of United States rule.
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