California was Whig now, Jessie said. The elections within a few months would produce not only a Whig senator but also a Whig governor. But the Frémonts didn’t mind—the likely Whig governor was, like the Frémonts, a big landowner with property on the edge of Indian country, which meant that he would do something to remove the threat of Indians. “You will see how fortunate it is for our interests that he should be in power.” This was a striking political forecast, both because of its calculated self-interest and because it was wrong. Democrats were not about to lose power. Within a few months they captured both the governorship and the Senate seat, and neither went to John, who had withdrawn from the arena. He continued riding across the state in pursuit of business schemes, and by late 1851, not even California’s vastness gave him room enough to move. He presented steamer tickets to Jessie, who was delighted to be told it was time for their first real vacation: an extended visit to Paris, taking time away at last from duty and ambition.
On closer examination, there was more to the journey than a vacation. John was still seeking British investors to expand his operations on Las Mariposas. He decided to visit London on the way to Paris, because the competing stories told by his agents were beginning to undermine his credibility there. His relations remained strained with the agent Hoffman, such an obsessive letter-writer that neither of the Frémonts had the patience to read all that he wrote them. (Hoffman himself was running out of patience while waiting for John’s tardy responses, and finished one note with the line, “The mail has this moment arrived—not a line from you—the world here is astounded.”) Then came a further complication, which involved Thomas Hart Benton. John’s father-in-law had never seen Las Mariposas, but believed the land grant was becoming a danger and distraction to his son-in-law. Benton arranged for the Mariposas to be sold for one million dollars, conditional on John’s approval. The move revealed the arrogance, and the foresight, for which the former senator was famous: in a letter to Hoffman, the London agent, Benton explained that John was “not adapted to such business and it interferes with his attention to other business to which he is adapted.” John wavered, first seeming to accept the sale, then revoking it. This angered Benton, opening a breach with his sponsor. Worse, Benton had been right. John was not “adapted” to business, didn’t know what he was doing, and would have better served himself to sell. Allegations of scandal were beginning to surround the land grant: a newspaper in the new settlement of Stockton, California, alleged that “extensive frauds were about to be perpetrated in Europe” by John’s agents. John filed a libel suit against the paper, but the claim still reached newspapers in New York within weeks, which guaranteed that it would also be read in London.
On February 1, 1852, the Frémonts boarded a steamer for Panama. The railroad across the isthmus was not finished, so it remained a rough passage; nine-month-old Charlie was wrapped in a tablecloth and slung onto the back of a porter. A second ship took them to New York; then, for the first time in their lives, they started across the Atlantic, on a ship called the Africa, with the family taking over the whole ladies’ salon since Jessie was the only woman traveling. The transatlantic crossing that had taken their ancestors months to complete now took ten days or less, and in late March they arrived in the capital of the British empire, 2.5 million people spread along the Thames, the closest thing to a capital of the world. As always, the papers took note of the Frémonts; a correspondent in London, writing for a newly established American sheet called the New York Times, said John had arrived just in time to rescue his prospects. It was “a great relief” to London investors that “the Colonel was coming in person to clear up all doubts, and remove the ugly suspicions.” The couple checked into a suite at the Clarendon Hotel, with “chintz and flowers and wood fire,” an address that “becomes a millionaire fresh from California.”
It was uncertain how rich John really was, but he surely had fame—even in London, where he recently had been the star of a smash-hit documentary. From April 1850 to late 1851, a lecturer in London had shown an art display on the explorations of John Charles Frémont. His lecture featured eighty scenes of John’s adventures that were painted on a single enormous canvas, scrolled with hand cranks as awestruck audiences sat for two hours watching the procession of pictures. During nineteen months of performances in a packed lecture hall, some 350,000 people saw the story of the dashing explorer, which was advertised both in general newspapers and in women’s publications. John’s agent in London was bothered to discover that the lecturer had obtained his information from Senator Benton and from John himself; the self-promotion seemed gauche. But fame could be like gold. “The leaders of fashion are ever on the watch for every fresh celebrity,” said the Times correspondent. Mrs. Frémont was welcomed at the regular reception of the Duchess of Derby, the wife of the prime minister, and shook the hand of the aged Duke of Wellington. Both Frémonts were taken to dinner with the leader of the Barings banking house, and welcomed at the home of the head of the Royal Geographical Society. Jessie, dressed in a gown of pink satin with blond lace, attended a reception where she kissed the hand of Queen Victoria.
Fame also attracted less flattering forms of attention. On April 7, the Frémonts were stepping out of the Clarendon on their way to another elegant dinner when four policemen appeared. As Jessie watched, the policemen arrested John and led him into custody. He had been seized, the policemen said, for nonpayment of a debt. It was the $19,500 he had borrowed from a California merchant during the war, now alleged to have grown to $50,000 with interest—the money that the merchant had demanded from the Senate the year before. When Congress did not act, the merchant sold the debt to British investors, who saw their chance to collect when the newspapers announced John’s presence in London.
The policemen took John to a “sponging house,” a holding facility for debtors, which he described as the “ante-room to the jail.” He spent the night there. Jessie spent the night racing through London in search of bail money, no doubt still wearing the clothes in which she had planned to go out that evening. One of her visits was to David Hoffman, John’s long-suffering agent, with whom John had grown so disappointed that he had suspended their business. She found his home and demanded to see him after nine o’clock at night. Hoffman—an American from Maryland, a onetime law professor turned land promoter—was in his late sixties and suffering from a cold. Summoned from his bed by a servant, he stumbled out of his bedroom to meet Jessie in the parlor of his home. She was accompanied by one of John’s business associates, but she did all the talking.
“My husband is arrested,” Jessie said.
“I am grieved to hear it,” Hoffman replied.
She held up one of Hoffman’s letters. “You say [here that] you are still loyal to Colonel Frémont.”
“I certainly am,” Hoffman said, and then asked if Jessie had read the remainder of the letter, which warned John that his contradictory acts were endangering his hold on the Mariposas.
“Oh no!” Jessie said. “It’s too long.”
Moving on, Hoffman gestured toward a chair. “Do be seated.”
“No. I want no words. I have no time for that. I want four thousand pounds and I must have it.”
Hoffman said he didn’t keep that kind of money at his house. “I have but six hundred pounds.”
“Oh don’t tell me that,” Jessie said. “I know all about it. I know you have money there. I was told so. I must have it.”
Jessie believed that Hoffman had collected funds from Mariposa investors. Hoffman answered that it would be improper to turn over investors’ money if he had any, and John owed him money for expenses. “Colonel Fremont is my debtor—not my creditor.”
“Do you know who I am?” Jessie took out a pen and wrote her name at full length, so that Hoffman would see both Benton and Frémont. The agent replied that he did not doubt who she was, but that he did not have bail money.
“You are a great rascal,�
�� Jessie said as she left. “My father says so.”
Hoffman, the obsessive letter-writer, afterward set down all the dialogue he could remember, preserving a picture of Mrs. Frémont in furious defense of her husband. He sent the dialogue in a letter to Mr. Frémont, apparently to show his own innocence as well as to inform John of Jessie’s imperious behavior. It was a long letter, and it was not clear if John ever read it.
Jessie reached out to other associates of her husband, and John spent only one night in custody before an American merchant in London arranged his bail. The great explorer finished his business meetings as though nothing was wrong, and when news reached the United States the press took his side. “The arrest, from all accounts, was outrageous,” a New York paper said.
The Frémonts moved on to Paris as planned. But from Paris, John wrote Thomas Hart Benton to say, “I have reason to believe that many others of these liabilities will be urged upon me.” He thought the various notes he had signed during the war could total more than one million dollars with interest, and none had been reimbursed by Congress. “If I was [as] great a patriot as you,” John said, “I would go to jail and stay there until Congress paid these demands . . . but my patriotism has been oozing out for the last five years.” He asked if Benton could help find him a job with an American embassy while in Europe, so that he would be protected from arrest by diplomatic immunity. The job would also “help pay expenses.” He was apparently spending enough of his fortune to worry about the cost of travel.
* * *
WHILE THE FRÉMONTS WERE AWAY, first on the Pacific coast and then in Europe, a literary sensation was sweeping the country. It began on June 5, 1851, when a story took up more than half the front page of a Washington, D.C., newspaper called the National Era. It was the beginning of a novel. The opening chapter featured a slave trader, “a short, thick-set man,” with “a gaudy vest of many colors” and a “swaggering air of pretension,” bargaining with a Kentucky plantation owner to purchase a four-year-old slave. The headline of the story read:
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN:
OR,
LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.
By Mrs. H.B. Stowe.
The story was serialized in the paper throughout the remainder of the year. Readers followed, week after week, as the slave child escaped with her mother, while the title character, Uncle Tom, was sold down the river to New Orleans, sold again to a sadistic master in the Red River Valley, and beaten to death.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a member of a prominent New England family. Her father, Lyman Beecher, had been a Calvinist minister who in the 1830s moved from Boston to Cincinnati hoping to win the West for Christ. Harriet’s older sister Catharine Beecher was a girls’ educator who once had secretly coordinated a women’s campaign in defense of Cherokee Indians. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was an enormously popular Brooklyn preacher who had grown fiercely critical of slavery. Now Harriet made her own contribution to public affairs. Her newspaper serial was not unique; so many slave narratives, both factual and fictional, had been published over the previous two decades that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story seemed to have been loosely based on earlier works. But coming as it did after the Compromise of 1850, her novel reached a public that was ready for the subject. The serialized “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in book form on March 20, 1852. The first edition sold out in four days, and the publisher had such trouble keeping up with demand that the reviewer for Frederick Douglass’s newspaper in Rochester was compelled to write an article based on the earlier newspaper version. “The [book] has not yet reached us,” the reviewer confessed, but given its power, “we are not surprised at the delay.” The reviewer predicted that Uncle Tom’s Cabin would “rise up a host of enemies against the fearful system of slavery.” It was the first of many articles Douglass would publish about the book.
He had changed his paper’s name from the North Star to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, a shift that reflected his increasing prominence. He saw in Uncle Tom’s Cabin another opportunity to engage Northern public opinion, and when he received a letter from the author saying she would like to meet him, he traveled from Rochester to Andover, Massachusetts, for the conversation. Stowe asked his advice “as to what can be done for the free colored people of the country,” and he suggested a focus on education (“I am for no fancied or artificial elevation, but only ask fair play”). Nothing concrete came of their meeting, but it reflected Douglass’s strategic goal: engaging white Northern allies in the fight against slavery. Not every antislavery activist felt the same way; in 1852, one of Douglass’s former colleagues on his newspaper, the black activist Martin Delany, published his own book that called on African Americans to rely on themselves and ultimately to leave the United States—an emigration like the “Exodus of the Jews from Egypt,” to colonize some corner of the Americas. But Douglass saw the answer within the United States, as he wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe: “The truth is, dear madam, we are here, and we are likely to remain.” This meant they must gain relief through the democratic process.
When the Democrats and Whigs nominated their presidential candidates in the election year of 1852, Douglass was unimpressed. He viewed the Democrat, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, as a hopeless captive of Southern interests. The Whig, General Winfield Scott, a hero of the recent war, kept some distance from the party’s Southern wing, which was “an encouraging sign of the times.” But Scott was still no abolitionist. Douglass believed the Whig Party’s “destruction is necessary to the abolition of slavery.” If the Whigs fell apart, it would free more genuine antislavery Whigs such as William Henry Seward to form the “new and powerful Northern party” that Douglass had spoken of for some time.
That summer Douglass attended the national convention of an antislavery party. They were known as the Free Democracy, and their three hundred delegates met in the Pittsburgh Masonic Hall, where Douglass, among other speakers, held the floor while a committee offstage drafted a platform. Their slogan was “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men!” They supported the free distribution of public lands to “landless settlers.” They promised immigrants a “cordial welcome” and an easy path to citizenship. They demanded the abolition of slavery, “a sin against God, and a crime against man, which no human enactment or usage can make right.” They nominated a presidential candidate, John P. Hale, who had been elected to the Senate from New Hampshire by the very sort of Northern coalition that Douglass was hoping for—a coalition of antislavery Whigs and Democrats combined with hard-core abolitionists. Nobody thought Hale could win the presidency, but it was possible for Douglass to look out over the Pittsburgh convention and imagine what could someday be.
* * *
IN THIS POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL FERMENT, the Frémonts played no part. Despite their antislavery views, neither was deeply engaged in the antislavery movement. Both seemed unready to return to politics. (Shortly before leaving for Europe, Jessie had written her friend Lizzie Lee, “I should dissolve the Union sooner than let Mr. Frémont go away a year to Congress.”) By the time of the 1852 conventions, they were settled in Paris at number 61 Champs-Élysées, the grandest boulevard in the city. The Arc de Triomphe was visible a few blocks down the boulevard in one direction; in the other lay the Tuileries Garden. They were renting one of the homes of an English nobleman, Thomas Cochrane, the Earl of Dundonald. Now their journey became more like the promised vacation; French-speaking Jessie was introduced to high society and observed the changing urban landscape. The local prefect, Baron Haussmann, was cutting new boulevards through crowded ancient quarters, and she disapproved of the “frenzy for building and speculating in city property.” The closest the Frémonts came to trouble was when Lord Dundonald wrote to ask that they be better about keeping the gate closed against burglars. (“Give instructions to the porter and his wife to attend to the only duty they have to perform.”)
In Paris they received news of the 1852 elections, which were largel
y good for them. Pierce, the Democrat, won in a landslide, and Thomas Hart Benton won too. After losing his Senate seat in 1851, Jessie’s father had run for the House from St. Louis, and the voters returned him to Washington, back to his home on C Street and the green-domed Capitol, where he remained a man to reckon with, still with unmatched knowledge of the government and the leader of a faction of Missouri Democrats called “the Benton Democracy.” News also arrived that Congress would pay the creditors who’d had John arrested in London, thanks to the intervention of his former Senate colleague William M. Gwin. John wrote Gwin a letter of thanks, and added a complaint: a federal land commission had not confirmed his title to Las Mariposas, which still frustrated his drive for European investment. His anxiety was evident: “My counsel promised me the ratification by several mails back, but we have been disappointed & have not heard a word by the last several mails.” European money was increasingly drawn away from chaotic California and toward a gold strike in Australia. At the end of 1852 the land commission confirmed John’s title, but he still faced an appeal of the decision as well as European investors’ well-earned distrust of the whole project.
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