Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  He had also come to doubt John’s ability. Jessie traced the break between them to the winter of 1851 to 1852, when Senator Benton had attempted to sell Las Mariposas (saying John was “not adapted to such business”) and John had revoked the sale. Benton also seemed unimpressed with John’s expedition in 1853 to 1854, even after John flattered him by saying it had borne out Benton’s vision for where the rail route should be found. By April 1856, relations were so strained that Jessie could not bear to see her father. Writing a letter from New York to her best friend, Lizzie Lee, she said, “I do not think I can go to Washington,” because her father would be there. “I have made one thing a fixed resolve—not to be hurt at heart any oftener than it is forced upon me—to go deliberately into agitation and pain is almost suicide.”

  I know both my people too well ever to look for concession from either side. And with Father this is only the expression of years distrust of Mr. Frémont’s judgment. . . . I think Mr. Frémont could not have done otherwise than revoke [the Mariposas] sale. I know more facts than father did. Indeed Mr. Frémont would have had small respect for himself to allow of such an administration of his estate during his life. . . . I have written constantly to Father. I always tell him whatever I think may interest him—never saying politics—but for four months I have not had a line from him.

  If Jessie thought her father had at last had found “a fair occasion” to express his old resentments, there was another possible explanation: Benton had worked with the most consequential presidents of his time, and did not see John among them. Benton, the old newspaperman, knew how much of his son-in-law’s reputation had been manufactured.

  Jessie finally received a warm letter from her father, inviting her to Washington with the grandchildren. John and Blair encouraged her to go, still hoping she could recruit him. But she dreaded the meeting and allowed herself to be delayed several weeks before traveling. When at last she reached Washington she found her father was absent, having just caught a train toward Missouri.

  * * *

  BEFORE THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION, violent events gave new force to the party and to John’s efforts to lead it. First, the Kansas-Nebraska Act intensified the conflict between proslavery and antislavery forces. Missourians swept across the state border, seizing land and brushing aside Indians who had made their homes in Kansas. Some Missourians wanted profit from real estate, while others, led by the proslavery senator David Atchison, meant to make Kansas a slave state. Northern settlers arrived, some assisted by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. It had been founded by Eli Thayer, a Massachusetts politician and educator, who dreamed of colonizing Kansas as a free state. Pro- and antislavery settlers established separate towns along the Kansas River and traded gunshots. Proslavery territorial governors appointed by President Pierce failed to keep order, and Charles Robinson, an agent of the Emigrant Aid Company, claimed that he was governor.

  John knew Robinson. He had been in California during the gold rush, becoming a leader in sometimes-violent battles over land ownership and supporting John’s failed Senate reelection in 1851. John’s managers sensed an opportunity to make John a part of the Kansas story by writing a supportive letter to his friend, designed to fall into the hands of news editors. The letter to Robinson in April recounted John’s Senate defeat in a way that artfully suggested, without evidence, that he had lost because of his antislavery beliefs.

  We were defeated then, but that contest was only an incident in the great struggle—the victory was deferred, not lost. You have carried to another field [Kansas] the same principle, with courage and ability. . . . I can only say that I sympathize cordially with you, and that as you stood by me firmly and generously when we were defeated by the nullifiers in California, I have every disposition to stand by you in your battle with them in Kansas.

  In a few sentences John recast himself as an antislavery fighter and connected himself to a radical voice in Kansas. Newspapers across the country reprinted the letter. The Washington Star, critical of the Republicans, added a sneering commentary: the letter would have been more “complete if it had given the world the Colonel’s opinion upon ‘the equality of the races.’” Democrats claimed “black Republicans” favored social equality for African Americans. But Republicans praised the letter, which fixed attention on Robinson just before his story took a dark turn. Weeks later, federal authorities arrested the would-be governor and accused him of treason, a charge that made national headlines and marked him as an antislavery martyr.

  Kansas received even more attention when a proslavery sheriff linked with David Atchison led a party of gunmen into the settlement of Lawrence, which had been founded by free-soil settlers. The gunmen sacked the offices of an antislavery newspaper called the Herald of Freedom and threw its printing press in the Kansas River. They burned a building called the Free State Hotel and torched the houses of residents. It took a few days for fleeing residents to carry the story to the nearest telegraph office, from which it almost instantly reached Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, more than a thousand miles away. Greeley spared no ink: Lawrence had been “devastated and burned to ashes by the Border Ruffians,” the label given to proslavery gunmen from Missouri. “A few bare and tottering chimneys, a charred and blackened waste, now mark the site [attacked by the] myrmidons of Border-Ruffianism, intent on the transformation of Kansas into a breeding ground and fortress of Human Slavery.” Antislavery activists in Kansas struck back. John Brown, a New Englander whose messianic opposition to slavery had led him to join a free-state militia in Kansas, slipped away from the militia to conduct a retaliatory raid on his own authority. Moving at night, at the head of a small group of loyalists that included four of his sons, they rounded up five proslavery settlers and executed them.

  By then the dispute over Kansas had triggered political violence in Washington itself. Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a lengthy talk in May on what he called the crime of Kansas. In an especially withering passage, he mocked a South Carolina senator named Andrew Butler for his “incoherent phrases” and “the loose expectoration of his speech” while opposing Kansas as a free state. “There was,” Sumner said, no “possible deviation from truth which he did not make.” Senator Butler was not present for this tirade, but Butler’s nephew learned of the speech afterward and considered it an insult to his family. The nephew, Preston Brooks, was a member of the House of Representatives. He walked across the Capitol to the Senate chamber, found Sumner writing at his desk, and beat him again and again with a heavy cane until he was unconscious. Brooks kept thrashing him even after the cane broke into pieces over Sumner’s head.

  Now that the conflict had reached one of the principal media centers, the country learned of every detail. The telegraph and daily newspapers allowed people across vast distances to read about the caning almost simultaneously, and to read daily updates as further facts became known. Nothing like this would have been possible a decade earlier. Of course the news was filtered through Northern and Southern editors, which meant Northerners and Southerners were simultaneously reading different versions of the same event. A witness quoted in a Chicago newspaper said Sumner was ambushed, “hemmed in” at his desk and beaten mercilessly until he “had by a great effort torn [his] desk from its fastenings, and then he pitched forward insensible on the floor.” A correspondent for South Carolina’s Charleston Courier all but rolled his eyes. “The telegraph has already spread a thousand and one stories about this transaction,” he wrote, many of them “incorrect.” Sumner “was beaten, it is true, but not so badly . . . he is not seriously hurt. His whole speech was of a character very irritating to Southern men.”

  The partisan reporting played to, and likely reinforced, partisan attitudes. A paper in Columbia, South Carolina, declared that Brooks had “the hearty congratulations of the people of South Carolina for his summary chastisement of the Abolitionist Sumner.” South Carolinians held public meetings to vote Brooks resol
utions of thanks and a “handsome gold headed cane,” while a woman from his congressional district promised to send “hickory sticks, with which to chastise Abolitionists.” It was even alleged that “the slaves of Columbia” had taken up a “subscription” to buy Brooks a gift for his “protection in their rights and enjoyments as the happiest laborers on the face of the globe.”

  As quickly as the telegraph had spread the news of the caning everywhere, it spread the Southern reaction across the North. Readers of the New York Herald unfolded their papers to discover extended excerpts of the Southern press praising “chivalrous” Brooks for beating “the poltroon Senator of Massachusetts.” And this was a new phenomenon in itself. Masses of Americans learned not only of a disturbing event more rapidly than ever before but also that other Americans celebrated the very event that horrified them. While editors had always reprinted opposing views to demonstrate how wrong they were, the telegraph allowed them to do so with unprecedented speed and force. Northern Democrats immediately began reporting declines in support for their party, while more Northern voters began turning to Republicans. Even those who did not feel strongly about the freedom of slaves cared about the freedom of speech, and Sumner’s caning in response to his words was seen as the latest evidence that the South would never tolerate that freedom. “Has it come to this,” asked John Bigelow’s Evening Post, “that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? . . . Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?” The Constitution and the country seemed in danger. As the Republican convention neared, the party’s 1856 campaign began to take on the character of a righteous cause.

  Campaign art contrasting married John Frémont with his bachelor opponent.

  Chapter Sixteen

  HE THROWS AWAY HIS HEART

  The Frémonts, 1856

  New York

  On December 11, 1854, Jacob Dodson filed a petition in Congress. Eight years after serving in the California Battalion during the war against Mexico, he was still unpaid. Because John had violated the law by allowing his black former servant to enlist, the government had never recognized his service. Now Dodson wanted compensation. John B. Weller, one of the senators from California, took up the cause and introduced a bill to allow “Jacob Dodson, a colored man,” to receive “all the pay and allowances to which he would be entitled . . . if he had been legally enlisted.” It took more than a year for the measure to pass both houses of Congress; Dodson himself may have been able to lobby for its passage, since he worked as a Senate messenger and also was “in charge of the retiring rooms” of the Senate for many years, making him known and useful to many lawmakers. President Pierce signed the bill into law in April 1856, acknowledging Dodson’s place among the African Americans who had served, despite the law, in every war. It was an act of justice to pay the thirty-year-old the same as any white man, although it underlined the inequity of the system. Congress compensated Dodson without making the slightest move toward repealing the law that barred Negroes from military service.

  Dodson’s story reflected the wider political landscape Republican managers surveyed in 1856. It was true that the new party gave voice to the widening Northern unrest against the slave power—but also true that white society still broadly accepted racism and prejudice. There were only so many white men who opposed slavery strongly enough to let it determine their votes, and Republicans needed virtually all of them. This included a group of Northern voters whom Republican leaders found distasteful: Northern nativists. Some anti-immigrant voters were also antislavery—immigrants, like slaves, could be seen as competition against native white labor—and they could not be discarded. James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, in a shockingly worded column that John or Jessie would surely have seen at home, described the emerging Republican coalition as a combination of “anti-slavery Know Nothings and nigger worshipers.” It was a measure of the times that Bennett published this racist language in an article approving the coalition, which he considered better than the “corrupt, imbecile and most wretched” Democrats.

  Before the Republican convention, the problem of seeking the Know-Nothing vote became a crisis. The nativist American Party divided over slavery, as every institution in the country was doing: hostility toward Catholics and immigrants, the force that was supposed to transcend slavery, was not strong enough to bind the anti-immigrant party. Northern delegates, objecting to their party’s position on slavery in the territories, bolted the American Party convention that nominated Millard Fillmore and planned their own convention in New York. These antislavery Know-Nothings, casting about for a celebrity candidate, talked of drafting John Charles Frémont—and presented him with a perilous choice. If the Know-Nothings nominated John they would brand him with their tainted label and drive away many voters. But if they did not nominate him, they would pick some other antislavery candidate, who would divide the antislavery vote. The Tribune’s Greeley saw the entire operation as a cynical plot inspired by proslavery Democrats, who by highlighting nativist issues on the antislavery side would “frighten Adopted Citizens into their net.” John privately drafted a letter refusing the nativists’ nomination, ready to send if needed.

  The antislavery nativist convention’s 250 delegates met on June 12 at the Apollo Rooms, a music hall better known as the birthplace of the New York Philharmonic. The meeting was public, as a reporter noted: “The dark lanterns, sentinels, pass-words, grips, winks, and locks and keys upon which the Order was founded, having been abolished, this Convention is held with open doors—wide open to Broadway.” The same correspondent noticed “a large proportion of sharp, hungry, and calculating politicians” among the delegates, adding that “Thurlow Weed and his set have a pretty long finger in the pie.” Seward’s political manager had undertaken to solve John’s problem. Weed’s team of political “wire workers” strategized beforehand in the ornate rooms of the Astor House, then walked the few blocks up Broadway to the Apollo Rooms and swept through its open doors. Using persuasion and an alleged thirty thousand dollars in cash payments, they convinced the delegates to support Nathanial Banks for president. The delegates also agreed to delay the final choice of their convention for a few days, until after the Republican convention; once the Republicans had safely nominated John, Banks would refuse the Know-Nothings, who would then give their endorsement to John. By then their label would carry less stigma, because John would be established in the public mind as the Republican nominee—and the nativists would be subsumed in the Republican Party. This, the Herald correspondent said, was Weed’s “amiable” plan for “snuffing out this independent Northern Know Nothing movement like a farthing candle.” It worked as intended. The Know-Nothings were persuaded that they were driving the train when they were being driven.

  Next the Republicans gathered June 17 in Philadelphia. In keeping with custom, John and Jessie stayed away. Messages snapped back and forth on Morse’s lines between the Frémonts in New York, Banks in Washington, and managers such as Francis Blair in Philadelphia. The delegates gathered behind the brick-and-stone facade of Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Hall; Jenny Lind had once sung from its stage, Charles Dickens had spoken from it, and now Republicans swarmed it. “Long before the hour for the assembling of the Convention,” said the Herald, “the passages leading to the hall were crowded with people, and it was with a good deal of trouble that the delegates were able to gain admission.” Blair moved through the crowds, where an observer said “the old fellow’s big head glistens with intelligence” and “mention of his name is invariably followed by uproarious applause.” In the packed music hall the righteous cause reasserted itself. Robert Emmett, a former Democrat, was elected chairman of the convention and addressed the crowd:

  The delegates to this Convention occupy a higher position than any body on earth (Applause.) They may call us what they please—black republicans, nigger worshippers, or anything else—an
d they may say that we intend to drag in all the isms of the day. So we do. We invite them to come with us, and we will unite them in the one great ism—patriotism. (Loud cheers.) . . . Honest abolitionism looks forward to the day when there shall be no such thing as human bondage on the face of the earth. (Loud applause.)

  The Republicans had decided to welcome a delegation from Kansas Territory, and its members were “received with loud cheering, and all the Eastern patriots jumped on the seats to have a good look at the frontier heroes.”

  Delegates were also circulating copies of a letter John had written weeks earlier. He had declined an invitation to give a speech before a mass meeting of Republicans, but had written the organizers a letter stating his views: “Gentlemen . . . I am opposed to Slavery in the abstract and upon principle, sustained and made habitual by long settled convictions. While I feel inflexible in the belief that it ought not to be interfered with where it exists under the shield of State Sovereignty, I am as inflexibly opposed to its extension on this Continent beyond its present limits.” This expressed the essence of the platform that Republicans soon approved: slavery could not be touched where it was, but must never be allowed to spread where it was not. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, who had given his name to the Wilmot Proviso demanding a ban on slavery in new territories, read the platform aloud: the party vowed to uphold the Constitution, which made room for slavery, but also vowed to uphold “the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence,” which declared all men created equal. They supported the Missouri Compromise and insisted that Kansas become a free state. They said that under President Pierce and his administration, Kansans “have been deprived of life, liberty and property without due process of law,” and that for this “high crime against the Constitution . . . it is our fixed purpose to bring the actual perpetrators of these atrocious outrages and their accomplices to a sure and condign punishment.” The Republicans favored a transcontinental railroad. They addressed the problem of nativism—or to be precise, they addressed the political problem of nativism, not the moral problem. Needing to attract nativists without being nativist themselves, Republicans endorsed a vaguely worded plank favoring “liberty of conscience and equality of rights among citizens.” Depending on the needs of the moment, this could be read as supporting Catholics (“liberty of conscience”), supporting immigrants (“equality of rights”), or supporting nativists (“among citizens”).