An 1850s political stump speech, by St. Louis artist George Caleb Bingham.
Chapter Fifteen
DECIDEDLY, THIS OUGHT TO BE STRUCK OUT
Presidential Aspirants, 1854–1856
Washington, Nantucket, and New York
Jessie spent those months in Washington, preoccupied with her absent spouse. “In midwinter, without any reason, I became possessed by the conviction that he was starving,” she said. The feeling “made a physical effect on me. Sleep and appetite were broken up, and in spite of my father’s and my own efforts to dissipate it by reasoning . . . nothing dulled my sense of increasing suffering from hunger to Mr. Frémont and his party.” She became convinced that she shared a telepathic link with her husband that caused her to feel his suffering. No telepathy was necessary; it was reasonable to assume that her husband was starving, knowing what she did of his previous expedition. “When I have no more anxious thoughts pressing on my heart it will not ache,” she wrote Lizzie Lee. In the same letter she spoke of parenting twelve-year-old Lily, which, needless to say, she was doing alone.
She faced the added stress of a political controversy, which she could not help but take personally; it involved the land John had been crossing and the railroad he was risking his life to advance. At the Capitol a few blocks from the Frémont house, Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas sponsored a bill to organize a government for the Nebraska lands, which his Committee on Territories reported to the Senate on January 4, 1854. Douglas was a frontier lawmaker from Illinois, equally adept at roaring speeches to rural audiences and maneuvering legislation through Congress. He had managed the Compromise of 1850 to completion and brought California into the Union. Now he believed proper government for Nebraska would improve the prospects of building the Pacific railroad across it. But as in 1850, proslavery lawmakers did not want another free state without compensation. Douglas obliged. His bill divided the land into two territories, to be known as Kansas and Nebraska, and although both lay north of the Missouri Compromise line dividing slave territory from free, Douglas agreed to have that compromise repealed. He would leave all questions of slavery to the people who settled there. It was not hard to imagine Kansas, which was farther south, becoming a slave state while Nebraska became a free one.
The Washington Union, the leading organ of the Democratic Party, described it as a “measure of peace and compromise,” but the reaction was anything but peaceful. Horace Greeley’s antislavery New York Tribune assailed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its Northern author, saying Douglas was not “manly, noble or independent,” and behaved as if “subjection to the slaveholding interest is now the only sure path to political honors and distinction.” Frederick Douglass had been right: many Northerners who were “willing to tolerate slavery inside the slave States” were not willing to be “excluded” by slavery from any new land, not even the remote plains of Kansas. Kansas was known to the public through the travel writing of John C. Frémont, and it sounded attractive: In his first report he described looking down from a bluff at the Kansas River, 230 yards wide. The river was lined by “a broad belt of heavy timber,” and beyond the river valley stretched prairies of “the richest verdure.”
Although the Kansas-Nebraska Act became an official Democratic Party measure that was backed by the president and was soon on its way to passage, it began to crack the party. Frustrated Democrats joined equally frustrated Whigs to discuss forming a new antislavery political party, who would call themselves Republicans. Congressman Thomas Hart Benton was unwilling to go that far, but delivered a speech in the House, thundering far past the hour he had been allotted that the bill would destroy “the peace of the country.” The old lawmaker was so estranged from President Pierce that when the president appointed a new postmaster in St. Louis, Benton stopped using the post office, hiring a private express company instead. He drew closer to antislavery lawmakers, and one evening invited Senator Seward of New York to walk home with him. “I am heart-sick being here,” Seward said. “I look around me in the Senate and find all demoralized,” with many Northern states represented by men who upheld Southern interests. Seward was cheered by his conversation with Benton, the first of a number they would have as they strategized against the Nebraska bill. In a letter to his wife, Seward said he was further cheered when he left Benton’s house and went “over to Mrs. Frémont’s,” which required a separate call, since the Frémonts at last had their own home in Washington, close to the Benton house on C Street. “She is a noble-spirited woman. Has much character. I am sure you would like her. She is very outspoken.” It was notable that Seward had gone to hear the views of Mrs. Frémont, not her husband, who he knew was away in the West.
In April a visitor brought news of John. Almon Babbitt, the Utah territorial secretary who had rescued John’s finances in Parowan, arrived in Washington. He carried a letter from John to Benton, and also visited Jessie, who marveled at Babbitt’s story. Because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had relocated its people to Utah after careful study of John’s maps and reports, it was partly because of John that the Mormons founded a town in the place where he eventually needed to find one. “Safety had come to him,” she said, “and to those who had entrusted him with their lives, through the results of his previous work.” John had saved himself.
Jessie invited Babbitt to return for dinner, and invited Francis Preston Blair to join them. (She dryly asked Blair to “forget he has lots of wives,” which was assuming too much; the Mormon appeared to have one wife.) She instructed Blair to bring Lizzie and her husband. It was a perfect Washington dinner, so gracefully arranged that Jessie’s various purposes might not be noticed. The Saturday meal would reward Babbitt, a Democrat, with an introduction to Blair, who was a living link to Jackson, the party founder. Blair would make a political connection in Utah. And Jessie could gratify her friends with firsthand news of her husband.
* * *
JOHN REACHED HOME IN LATE SPRING, which allowed him to support Jessie in her mother’s final months. Elizabeth Benton, who had taught Jessie to despise slavery and likely influenced her husband’s growing opposition to it, died on September 10, 1854. Because of her long illness, the family had been “deprived of her companionship” for years, as Jessie put it; the end may have come as a relief, although that was not something Jessie wanted to express. “How great a loss this was . . . can only be known to those who knew her.”
Her father understandably remained in Washington during Elizabeth’s final months, though he faced reelection in Missouri. Benton’s organization handled the campaign for him and added a special new feature. He had long wanted political party nominees to be chosen by voters, not by party conventions or caucuses, and that year St. Louis Democrats held what was called a “primary election,” arguably the first of its kind in the nation. Benton was nominated without opposition. But the general election was different. As the political parties fractured, a new political movement had been gaining strength, formed of groups opposed to immigration. Benton’s challenger, a former mayor of St. Louis, collected both Whig and anti-immigrant support. In the election on August 7, Benton was defeated. The telegraph sped the news to Washington, adding that as the votes were counted, “a riot was then taking place.” The riot had started on election day, when an election judge slowed down voting by scrutinizing the naturalization papers of voters in an Irish neighborhood. Conflict between Irishmen and natives escalated into full-scale gunfights, in which ten people were killed.
Benton pressed on, changing nothing that he stood for, still a national figure and the leader of many Democrats in Missouri. He served out his House term, which was to last until March 3, 1855. On one of his final days, February 27, he woke in his home on C Street and prepared himself for work. It was a bitterly cold day of the sort he had always found to be good for his lungs, and though the streets were icy, he no doubt had slept with his windows open as he always did. This would explain why he d
id not detect the faint smell of smoke in the house; when one of his daughters mentioned it, he dismissed it. He left the house at eleven o’clock in the morning, making the short walk he had taken thousands of times up the hill to the Capitol.
In the afternoon he was at work beneath the arched ceiling of the House of Representatives when a messenger told him his house was on fire. The news so startled lawmakers that the House halted most of its business, and many of them followed the seventy-two-year-old as he hurried back along frozen Pennsylvania Avenue toward C Street. They could do nothing when they arrived. A reporter watched Benton “standing in the crowd, looking, with others, on the blazing roof of his dwelling.” Jessie stood with him. Thinking back to the smoky smell his daughter had noticed, he decided that the woodwork near a defective chimney must have smoldered for days before spreading. The fire centered on his third-floor study, the location of all his books and the half-finished manuscript of a book he was writing. A fire company arrived, but water ran short and later froze in a hose. Nothing of value was saved from the house except, by chance, a portrait of Thomas Hart Benton as a young man. Once firefighters were able to enter, they went from room to room tossing furniture out the windows to reduce the fuel for the fire; a looking glass sailed out of a third-floor window and shattered on the street.
After a night of watching his house burn, Benton came with Jessie to her nearby house. “Neither of us had slept,” Jessie said, “but he made me lie down.” She was about six months pregnant, and he was more solicitous of her welfare than his own. Father and daughter “talked together as only those who love one another can talk after a calamity.” Of his lost possessions he said, “It is well, there is less to leave now—this has made death more easy.” After Congress adjourned a few days later, he returned to St. Louis, where the remains of his late wife had been sent for burial, and watched the gravediggers cover her coffin in Bellefontaine Cemetery. But in no other way did he act like he was ready for death. He began rewriting his lost manuscript and making plans to run again for elective office.
His son-in-law was considering his own future. John received promising news in early 1855. After years of litigation, the Supreme Court upheld his title to the Mariposa grant. Roger Taney, the chief justice, wrote the majority opinion in Frémont v. United States, which was considered a landmark case affirming the titles of many California landholders; it was said to cause “considerable rejoicing among the land claimants.” The news seemed to vindicate John’s refusal to sell the property, and brightened his prospects for enlarging his fortune. But he was being lured in another direction, toward what seemed like an even bigger opportunity, which soon became so appealing that John put off a planned trip to California.
A visitor was making regular appearances at the Frémont house in those days. Jessie identified him as Edward Carrington, a man related to the Bentons and to Jessie’s extended family—probably Edward Codrington Carrington Jr., from an old Virginia family in Botetourt County, just south of Jessie’s ancestral home. The elder Edward Codrington Carrington had served in the War of 1812, while Mrs. Edward Carrington of Botetourt County was raising funds to maintain George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon. The younger Mr. Carrington was a onetime student at Virginia Military Institute who volunteered for the war against Mexico, then in 1853 moved to Washington to practice law. He was twenty-nine, one of a number of men drawn into the Frémont orbit who were much closer in age to Jessie than to John; yet the visitor seemed to influence the older man. Do you not think, Carrington asked, that the time has come to restrict immigration? John agreed. Not that immigrants should be banned—but “indiscriminate immigration” would bring the problems of the crowded old world, because newcomers arrived “without a comprehension of American history and of their duties.” John endorsed the old nativist idea of limiting immigrants’ ability to vote, believing the foreign-born should be denied the franchise until they had been in the country twenty-one years. Young Carrington was delighted because, Jessie said, “he was a member of the Native American party.”
The view John had picked up was impossible to reconcile with his experience. His writings were streaked with tributes to men of different nationalities and cultures who not only knew the history of the country but had made history with him. (“It was a serious enterprise . . . to undertake a traverse of such a region, and with a party . . . of many nations—American, French, German, Canadian, Indian, and colored—and most of them young, several being under twenty-one years of age.”) It was, however, possible to reconcile skepticism of immigration with the moment in history and with his ambition. As the defeat of Benton suggested, anti-immigrant sentiment was the next big thing. Carrington was connected with other men in the nativist movement, who were thinking of “making an offer” to John, “looking towards his nomination as a Democratic candidate for the Presidency.”
* * *
THE POLITICAL POWER OF NATIVISM had grown since the Catholic church burnings in Philadelphia in 1844. The resistance to immigrants in the California goldfields, which Senator Frémont had tried to exploit in 1850 only to be damaged by it, was representative of the era. Some nativists founded secret societies with names such as the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. They had secret handshakes and passwords. Entry-level members of the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner were not even told the name of the organization at first. (Newspapers nicknamed them the Order of Know-Nothings, because they claimed to know nothing when questioned about the order; junior members apparently were telling the truth.) More senior members of the order took an oath to use all legal means to “remove all foreigners, aliens or Roman Catholics from office.” The old nativist talking point that John repeated—that adult immigrants should wait twenty-one years to vote because newborn native children did—was a more polished form of such thinking, processed for mass consumption. By comparing immigrants to native children rather than other adults, the idea offered a memorable combination of illogic and grievance, making an arbitrary rule sound like it was based on reason, and positioning the equal treatment of immigrants as unfair to natives.
New waves of Irish Catholic immigration since the late 1840s had triggered fresh nativist grievances and energized the secret societies to reach for power. Professional politicians were unsure how to contain them, and quickly found that ignoring them didn’t work. When supporting Winfield Scott in 1852, the Whigs tried to compete with Democrats for the immigrant vote, but seemed to push away nativist Whig voters, losing more than they gained. Soon the nativists, temporarily abandoned by both parties, rose as a power all their own. The leader of a Know-Nothing order began giving public speeches in New York, while a nativist youth movement called themselves the Wide-Awakes and walked the streets wearing their own distinctive white felt hats. The Know-Nothings generated drama by engineering protests that seemed designed to provoke violence: five thousand of them escorted an anti-Catholic preacher through Brooklyn until they were battling with crowds of Irishmen—and a week later they repeated the process. A church was blown up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, while another was burned in Maine. In Washington, men broke into the construction site for the Washington Monument and stole a block of marble that had been donated by the pope for incorporation in the structure. They threw it in the Potomac River.
Thomas Hart Benton’s defeat in August 1854 by a Whig who was also a nativist set the pattern for other elections that fall. Some candidates ran openly under a Native American banner, while in other races nativists used their influence to nominate friendly candidates on both Whig and Democratic tickets. In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothings elected their candidate for governor—one of several governorships they eventually would control—and virtually the entire state legislature, as well as much of the congressional delegation. The order attracted ambitious political professionals, such as Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who survived the political hurricane and won reelection to his congressional seat in 1854 by welcoming nativist support.
Lawmakers who would not bend to the nativists were left politically homeless. One of them was Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig representative. In the summer of 1855 the Illinois lawyer received a letter from a friend asking where he stood. “That is a disputed point,” Lincoln replied.
I think I am a whig, but others say there are no whigs . . . I am not a Know-Nothing. This is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they made no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Lincoln knew what he stood for—he spent much of 1855 organizing opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Illinois—but did not know where his efforts would lead.
Some Southern Democrats saw nativism as an issue that could bring them new Northern allies. Of course Democrats themselves were courting immigrants, but consistency was not the point. By raising the illusory dangers of immigrants, they could unite native-born voters from the North and South, distracting from the divisive question of what to do about black people.
Imperfect Union Page 30