Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  The Frémonts came ashore, walking streets paved with wooden planks. Several streets were named after men John had known during the war, such as Vallejo Street for the Mexican general John had imprisoned at Sutter’s Fort. Kearny Street was named for the general who had arrested John and put him on trial. It was understandable that when finding a place to live, the Frémonts crossed Kearny and continued uphill, through an immigrant neighborhood soon to be known as Chinatown, to take a house on Stockton Street, named after the commodore who briefly made John governor. Jessie and Lilly took up residence in this house while John slowly recovered from his illness—and then, as soon as he was able, he left town.

  Maybe it was his restlessness that had prompted him to leave Washington so soon. He would spend the year of 1851 in near-constant motion from place to place. To be sure, he had obligations. He had business at Las Mariposas, where associates had organized a corporation, to be capitalized at one million dollars, to exploit a mining site there called Agua Fria. He also had to face reelection. By mid-January, a newspaper said, “Col. Frémont is now sojourning at San Jose,” still the state capital, and was “mingling freely with the members” of the legislature who would decide his fate. He was shocked to discover that he was the target of fierce criticism. California, which did not have a single newspaper a few years earlier—the only way to get the news was the way Thomas O. Larkin got it, collecting months-old papers from passing ships—now had multiple papers in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and elsewhere. They carried on a ferocious public debate, and much of it was critical of his work in the Senate. About half a dozen California politicos, sensing his vulnerability, were maneuvering for his job.

  In later years the Frémonts would suggest that his opposition to slavery had caused his political trouble in California. There was little evidence to support this. It was true that proslavery forces in California would have been happy to see him replaced with someone like his fellow senator Gwin, vocally in favor of slavery and tied to Southern interests. But this was a subterranean factor. John’s more immediate problem was his record: the bills he had proposed to address the great questions of manifest destiny were met with resentment and scorn. The land bill, critics shouted, allotted more acreage on better terms to the old settlers of California than to new ones. “If this bill passes,” declared a Whig newspaper that identified with the newcomers, the lawmakers who wrote it should “keep out of the country—California will be no pleasant residence for them.” The old settlers who stood to benefit were “runaways from justice, negroes, Indians, Kanakas [Hawaiians], and the scum of Christendom.” California’s lawmakers were “senseless. And yet some persons are talking of re-electing Fremont to the Senate.”

  Worse was the reception for his mining bill; even a newspaper that supported him said that “we are not at all sorry” that it had not yet become law. The citizenship provision was profoundly divisive, yet it somehow united the state against its author—everyone hated it. California’s foreign-born residents and the old Californians understood that they were targeted. John felt forced to write a public defense of his record, acknowledging that the mining bill “has been condemned in general terms for excluding foreigners.” He tried to save himself by ducking responsibility, saying that “your delegation” in Washington had “every reason to believe” that they were simply following California public opinion, and now “your returning representative finds himself unexpectedly censured for a proposed measure which he did not originate, and for which he is only accidentally in a situation to be held responsible.” Racists didn’t like the bill either. The modification to allow Europeans was far too liberal for some: Why were “sallow emigrants” from Spain or Italy any better than Mexicans? Other critics creatively misread the citizenship provision. They noted that prospectors had to pay a modest fee for permits, and that because of the citizenship restriction, the fees would be paid mainly by United States citizens. It was therefore, declared a Sacramento newspaper, “a tax upon American citizens to work in the mines”—bias against citizens! “Our people are already taxed enough,” the paper declared, blaming the scheme on lawmakers in faraway Washington. Having given in to the impulse to cynically play for the nativist American vote, John discovered he was not cynical enough; nativists outdid him and recast him as an out-of-touch elitist.

  What remained to support him was his immense reputation (one paper called him “the talented, urbane, and unsullied Fremont”), his connections (“I hope you will be at San Jose in time for the election,” he wrote a prominent landowner whose influence he could rely on), and his money. Just before the voting began on February 20, he threw open rooms in San Jose to entertain state lawmakers, offering what one observer called “the good things, which nourish and make glad the physical nature of man”—certainly food and drink, if not other things of a “physical nature.” Across the street, lawmakers and voters attended a banquet thrown by one of John’s Senate rivals—T. Butler King, the Georgia congressman who had arrived in 1849 on the boat with Jessie, and had remained to seek his fortune.

  Lavish spending did neither of the contenders any good. When the state legislators met in convention starting on February 20, they were hopelessly deadlocked between multiple candidates. Lawmakers cast ballots twenty times without anyone nearing a majority. Ordinarily deals would be struck and some candidates would withdraw in favor of others, but neither John nor anyone else seemed to have the political strength to end the fight. One lawmaker wryly “suggested as a mode of getting along faster that the next ballot should be regarded as the 31st ballot instead of the 21st ballot.” The suggestion was not taken, but soon they were on the thirty-first ballot anyway, and then beyond it. After voting 142 times over the course of two weeks, the legislators gave up on electing any senator at all. California would have to do with just one, Gwin, until January 1852, when the legislators agreed they would meet and try again.

  * * *

  JESSIE, NOW HEAVILY PREGNANT IN SAN FRANCISCO, was able to follow the Senate fight through the newspapers. In truth she had two races to follow; her father was facing reelection before the Missouri legislature that winter. In late February, even as the Californians were balloting, the Missouri news began to reach the Pacific. The California papers reported that Benton Democrats in his state’s legislature gathered to plot strategy. They declared that Benton was their candidate, and in dramatic Bentonian fashion resolved “to sustain the nominee until the present Legislature ceases to exist.” They would never surrender. But another faction of Democrats joined the Whigs in supporting a Whig who was willing to be more flexible than Benton on slavery. On March 6, just one day after the papers carried news of John’s defeat, a Sacramento newspaper carried a single sentence from afar: “In Missouri, Mr. Geyer has been elected in place of Mr. Benton.” Jessie had been the daughter and the wife of a senator; now she was neither. She had never not been a senator’s daughter—she was nearing her twenty-seventh birthday, and Benton had been in office thirty years.

  Her two senators responded differently to defeat. Benton’s instinct was to fight. His beloved Democratic Party was fatally split over slavery’s expansion; Missouri’s other Democratic senator, David Atchison, was a radical supporter of slavery whose allies led the way in defeating Senator Benton. But Benton still enjoyed the support of his faction, and though he was about to turn sixty-nine he began considering which office he could seek next. John Charles Frémont, too, still had supporters, but took his defeat as a cue to step away from politics. He left the capital at San Jose, riding home to San Francisco to spend a day or two with his wife. Then he rode away again, 160 miles out to Las Mariposas in the company of the Frémonts’ friend Edward F. Beale. Although he would have known from a glance at his wife that she was due within weeks, business and the mountains called him. Besides the Mariposa gold mines, he was making an offer to buy an immense rancho outside Los Angeles. The Frémonts envisioned large-scale farming—“olives figs & grapes, as well as peaches
& apricots,” Jessie said. She wrote her father’s friend Francis P. Blair in Washington, asking him to ship them seeds.

  Yet it was not quite accurate to say that John was focused on business. He kept undertaking projects and losing his way. He kept undermining himself. What compelled him was the mountains, the land, the adventure, the separation from other people. He saw the possibilities of the West and dreamed up schemes for his place within it, yet lacked the sustained focus on details that were essential to success. He did not manage to buy the Los Angeles ranch. His San Jose sawmill vanished from the record, apparently abandoned or sold. While he was military governor he had purchased several plots of real estate in San Francisco, including an orchard in what would become the city’s Mission District, but as with so much real estate in California his title was cloudy. He had assigned seventeen leases to various companies and prospectors authorizing them to prospect on his Mariposa land, but not all struck gold, and his title remained uncertain enough that other prospectors continued to work his land without permission. “Mr. Frémont has had heavy losses in his gold experiments,” Jessie reported in a letter. He had an agent in London, David Hoffman, working to organize British capitalists into companies that would invest in large-scale mining—but John stopped answering Hoffman’s increasingly urgent letters seeking decisions and information. (Jessie finally intervened, asking a mutual friend, “Will you please write to Mr. Hoffman who will I fear think Mr. Frémont a myth.”) Because John engaged multiple agents who sold leases for various Mariposa claims, the agents made competing bids for capital and cast suspicion on one another.

  Worse, John’s finances were growing confused, as men who had lent him money over the years continued demanding payment. The habits he had developed over the years were catching up with him. From his earliest days as an expedition leader, when he purchased instruments in New York by writing vouchers against the government that had not been authorized in advance, he had shown his talent for living on credit. He had traveled back and forth across the continent, sometimes with cash on hand but just as often without, buying horses and food and supplies, offering nothing in return but little pieces of paper—bank drafts and promises of payment that a remote seller in the West could only hope to cash at some later place and time. This kind of paper juggling was an essential skill on the cash-poor frontier. He could never have completed his great expeditions without it. But it was a dangerous game when enlarged to the scale on which he now operated.

  His critics saw in his chaotic business dealings signs of dishonesty and greed, but John was likely also revealing his mental state. In the previous decade he had led four great expeditions that in terms of exertion, isolation, danger, and death were much like going to war. One had ended in an actual war. Many of his men had been killed, and others had come apart under stress. Surely their commander was also affected, despite his own insistence to the contrary (“I have not been injured in body or mind”). He was unsettled, racing from place to place, seeking some venture that was enthralling enough to hold his attention. He was exceptionally lucky that the Sonoran immigrants had made him a fortune almost without his participation in 1849; the trunks of gold from those times left him room for many mistakes.

  * * *

  IN THE MONTHS THAT JESSIE LIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO, the city was developing many classes of people. There were elites like the Frémonts and their friends, who rapidly filled their houses with all the comforts of the East. There were powerful merchants like Sam Brannan, a Mormon businessman who had come from New York before the gold rush. There were Mexican elites, marginalized but still present, while many Chinese, commonly pushed away from gold mining, were forming a laboring underclass. European immigrants were better off than the Chinese, but not fully accepted: Jessie learned that anyone with a British accent was suspected of being a convict from a British penal colony in Australia. The Australians were blamed for a crime wave and dealt with ruthlessly. One day, a newspaper reported, a person “said to be a Sydney man” was caught stealing a safe. Local men gave him a “pretty severe drubbing” and dragged him to the police station. Members of a private “Committee of Vigilance,” unwilling to wait for punishment through the justice system, then seized the foreigner, conducted their own trial, and marched him to Portsmouth Square, where “a dozen willing hands” put a rope around his neck. Ignoring his protests of innocence, as well as his appeal to be shot instead, they “immediately ran him up” on a beam that extended from a building. They left the body up for hours, “swinging in the night air.” At a coroner’s inquest afterward, leading citizens were called to the stand but gave unhelpful testimony. “I was present when a man was hung,” said the merchant Sam Brannan. “I don’t know who had hold of the rope.”

  For the sake of her baby and herself, Jessie cloistered herself from such scenes. Keeping to the house on Stockton, she wrote letters to the East—to Lizzie Lee and to her father; and to Francis P. Blair, the ex-editor, who wrote back to her with political news. On March 14 Jessie wrote to console a Delaware woman on the death of her young daughter: “I know that the sympathy of friends can do very little in such an affliction but I cannot refrain from expressing mine.” She mentioned her own loss of little Benton in 1848. “Before this reaches you I shall have another, and my health has been so good that I have all reason to believe it will not have the fate of my dear little boy.” On April 19 her baby was born, another boy. He was named John Charles Frémont, and she called him Charlie. He was healthy. For a few weeks the elder John Charles came home, and Jessie was surrounded by friends and family.

  Their house was on the high side of Stockton Street. Its windows offered a view downhill, past Chinatown to the open plaza at Portsmouth Square, which gave them a perfect vantage on the night of May 3, 1851, when San Francisco caught fire. Flames shot out of the windows of Baker and Messerve, a business facing the plaza. It did not take much to destroy a wooden city lit by fire. The flames spread from building to building. “Who could see the end?” Jessie asked. “The planked streets were conductors of fire, the sea winds carried it overhead, and on and on through the long night it raged and roared.” Flames approached the US Custom House, where the authorities saved one million dollars’ worth of gold by throwing it down a well. A journalist on the street watched the Union Hotel, which “burned like a furnace until the woodwork was nearly destroyed, when the huge walls, five stories high, pitched headlong into the street.” Eighteen city blocks, and parts of others, were destroyed. John and Edward Beale, who was staying with them, prepared to carry off Jessie and the two-week-old infant, but their house was spared.

  In June, fire struck again, approaching the house from a new direction. This time John and Beale were out at Las Mariposas, so it was Jessie who made the decision to abandon the house. She ordered a servant to carry boxes of papers up the hill to a friend’s house and out of danger, telling Lily to go along with him (“I could not trust the man, but I did trust the child”). Jessie followed with the six-week-old baby. In their friend’s house, crowded with refugees, one woman sat at the window and watched her own house burn down. When it was gone she yielded the chair to Jessie, and “I in my turn watched from that window the burning of my home.”

  Only later did she learn that her belongings had been saved. The credit belonged to a group of English immigrants, who knew the Frémonts as landlords; John had leased property to them, allowing them to build houses and a brewery on it. Early in the fire some of these immigrants perceived that the flames were approaching the Frémont house and went to see if Mrs. Frémont needed help. Discovering that she had already evacuated, they rescued objects instead. They picked up “mirrors, china and glass, several hundred books, furniture, even kitchen utensils, and all our clothing.” Working with “cool method,” the immigrants carried it all away from the approaching flames. Afterward, one of the women laundered the Frémont family’s clothes and brought them to Jessie in her refuge. A man came along with her and placed a parcel in fr
ont of Jessie, tied in a red silk handkerchief. “We thought money might come in handy,” he said, “so we brought a quarter’s rent in advance.” He untied the bundle to show “silver and some gold” within. Jessie cried. “It was all so kind, so unexpected, and from people who were kept chilled by public ill-will.”

  When John returned to San Francisco days later, he walked through blocks of ashes and found nothing remaining of the house on Stockton except a chimney. He had to search up and down the streets before he found his family. When Jessie informed him what the English immigrants had done, he sent for them, and as a gesture of gratitude he said he would sell them the land on which they had built their homes. The tenants, said Jessie, were deeply moved. Land was the best possible gift he could have offered as they built their new lives in America, although of course the continued questions about land titles meant there was no telling if John had any right to sell it to them.

  Jessie Benton Frémont in California in the 1860s.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ALL THE STUPID LAURELS THAT EVER GREW

  Celebrities, 1851–1854

  San Francisco, London, Paris, New York, and Washington

  In the summer of 1851 Jessie recorded that rarest of events: both Frémonts together, at home and at rest. They were in their new lodgings in San Francisco, and she was composing one of her letters to Francis P. Blair in Washington. She was sitting with her husband by the fireside, she told Blair, “even in this month of August, for as our season of fogs is not over we need bright fires morning & night.” John, just returned from a journey to Los Angeles, “sits nearest the fire being the thinnest & most cold blooded of the two.” They were drinking “some real China tea.” They were watching “little Charley in his basket.” Jessie called across to John: Did he have anything he would like to say to Francis P. Blair? John answered and she wrote: “I have asked Mr. Frémont for a message and he says I must tell you to prepare yourself for a Whig Senator in his place, politics being too costly an amusement in this country just now.”