Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  In October the electoral map came into focus. Republicans had known all along they would lose every slave state, while it seemed likely they would carry New England and New York. The election would be decided in James Buchanan’s Pennsylvania and a handful of western states. Pennsylvania held state elections in mid-October, weeks before the presidential contest, and they were seen as an early test of party strength. The Frémonts could do nothing but gather information from party operatives and the New York papers:

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  PHILADELPHIA, OCT. 16–2 ½ P.M.

  The returns are so utterly confused and unreliable that it is impossible to decide how the election has resulted. The city is full of forged returns from different counties [which] are being extensively circulated for gambling purposes.

  It took a few days to grasp that Democrats had won the state elections, though Republicans alleged without evidence that the Democrats had stuffed ballot boxes. It seemed that there was time to recover—three weeks remained before the presidential vote, and Greeley’s New York Tribune refused to give up: “Republican reader! is your township or ward organized? Have you a working Fremont Committee? . . . If untiring and incessant husbandry be expended on the soil of Pennsylvania, and of every other doubtful State, and not otherwise, a harvest of living men may be made to spring up sufficient to save this nation.” But as the presidential election day neared, journalists less attached to the Republican cause were doubtful. The New York Mirror declared, and the Washington Star agreed: “If [Frémont] is defeated in the great contest . . . it will be entirely owing to this ‘damnable iteration’ that he is a Roman Catholic . . . the Protestant American masses . . . have set their faces like flints against the elevation to higher offices of the Government, of a man whose allegiance to the Pope is stronger than his allegiance to the State. And we have no doubt that tens of thousands of the more bigoted Protestants persist in the belief . . . that Col. Fremont is a little fishy on the Catholic question.”

  A Fillmore paper in Ohio posted a mock advertisement for the sailing of the passenger ship “Disunion,” captained by “John C. Fremont,” with a crew that included Sumner and Horace Greeley as the second and third mates, along with “Clerk, Fred Douglas,” and some of the cabins reserved for “Jessie . . . the Jessie Clubs, and the Fremont Clergy. No ticket will be delivered to any clergyman who does not acknowledge an ‘anti-slavery God.’”

  On Friday night, October 31, Republicans planned a mass gathering in New York City for mechanics and workmen. A Republican club rented the performance hall at the Academy of Music; Greeley’s Tribune called it “one of the largest and most enthusiastic gatherings” ever seen there, “and a large number of ladies graced the meeting by their presence.” A group that called itself the Rocky Mountain Glee Club sang a rallying song for Frémont, and when the cheering crowd looked up at one of the private boxes in the theater, they spied their candidate, who, in a deviation from ordinary practice, had chosen to attend the event with his wife. John Charles Frémont—the illegitimate son of an immigrant, inventor of his own name, young man on the make, survivor of snowstorms and hunger, famed beyond measure, wounded by experience and often lost inside his own head—was granted this one evening to take in the applause; and it could have been that on this evening, as the speakers railed against the evils of slavery, he thought of Cecilia, the brown-skinned girl he’d known as a youth, whom he had loved with a passion that “extended its refining influence over my whole life.” Beside John in the theater box sat Jessie Benton Frémont, who had chosen her husband, borne his absences and his children, then exalted him and protected him from that which he could not bear—Jessie, who had wanted nothing more as a girl than to be her father’s son, who had made her mark on the world even when that wish was denied, and who had lost her father when she stood up for what she believed was right.

  One of the speakers at the Academy of Music that evening was Henry B. Stanton, a man with mutton-chop whiskers and deep-set eyes—a writer, reformer, and abolitionist. He was married to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the women’s rights activists who had attended the convention at Seneca Falls. On this night, Mr. Stanton offered his vision of the stakes of the election—whether or not the territories would be ruined by “the curse of human Slavery.” Stanton said he was certain the Republican presidential candidate was Protestant, but he also said that it did not matter: “I had rather be ruled over for the next four years by a liberty-loving Catholic who is true to the Union than by a Slavery loving Protestant, who is false to Freedom, Free Soil and humanity.” The crowd applauded. When election day arrived, Stanton said, “we will touch those cords which will vibrate down the vista of the future, and which will not cease to reverberate until, for good or evil, the Republic shall cease to exist.”

  That weekend—it was Sunday, November 2—Jessie wrote a letter to Lizzie Lee. She remained so certain Democratic postmasters were reading her mail that she facetiously wrote on the inside of the letter, “Post Master please send as soon as read, to Mrs. Lee.” To Lizzie she said, “I don’t dare say anything more than to tell you we may be successful. Telegraphs will do the rest.” In 1845 Congress had passed a law creating a single presidential election day, sweeping away the old practice of staggered elections that unfolded across weeks. It was the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, which in 1856 would be November 4. The telegraph wires would bring results from across the country as quickly as each state’s ballots could be collected and counted.

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  WHEN THE NEWS SPREAD that Buchanan had won New Jersey, college students at Princeton celebrated in the streets. The school was favored by elite families from the South, which may have affected the tone of the demonstrations. Students “marched around the town in procession” while “bearing a black coffin,” which was said to hold the body of John C. Frémont. One of the students, presumably a man, donned “black bonnets and dress, riding on a little Canadian stallion, representing Fremont’s widow, the now disconsolate Jessie. After a general round of the town, a funeral oration was delivered, and the coffin burned.”

  When the Democrats won Pennsylvania, the election was all but decided. Word came that Buchanan also carried Indiana and Illinois. It took a few weeks to hear from the Pacific coast, which was still beyond the telegraph lines, but eventually it became clear that John had lost his own state of California. Every other free state had gone to the Republicans—New York and all the states of New England, along with Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin—but it was not enough to overcome the Democratic dominance of the South. Fillmore carried a single state, Maryland, with eight electoral votes. Buchanan won the electoral vote, 174 to John’s 114. The count was near enough that a flip of Pennsylvania and just one other free state would have changed the outcome. Still it was a Democratic victory. Democrats, and the South, declared that the Constitution and the Union had prevailed. The threat of Southern secession receded. Lily Frémont said afterward that when the results were known, old Francis P. Blair wept openly over breakfast at the Frémont house, though John and Jessie, at least in front of others, took the news in silence.

  Horace Greeley, in the pages of the Tribune, portrayed the result as one lost battle in a war; under the headline HOW LIBERTY BEARS DEFEAT, he reprinted editorials from Republican newspapers across the country that called for John to run again in 1860. It was true that Republicans, in their first national election, had made a strong showing. Far more Americans had voted in 1856 than in any other election in history—roughly four million in all, a million more than in 1852. Democrats had carried the popular vote with a plurality of 1.8 million; Republicans tallied 1.3 million, despite failing to make the ballot in Southern states. The Know-Nothings finished a distant third with some 800,000, a sign that their power was waning and that Republicans had become the main opposition party. There was no telling what Republicans might do as
they grew more organized. Clearly the South did not consider the crisis to be over: when Northern papers began speculating about a new Republican campaign in 1860, an ominous reaction bounced back from the South. A Charleston newspaper said that Buchanan’s election was merely an armistice between the sections, and the next election could ignite greater conflict. A Richmond paper warned that merely talking about 1860 was already igniting it.

  Weeks after the election, a Woman’s Rights Convention came to order at the Tabernacle on Broadway in New York City. The Herald gave it sneering coverage: “The audience included more outre specimens of the human race than could be found in any other place . . . all shades and grades of insanity, [including] a lady who thought that she ought to be President in place of Mr. Buchanan . . . persons supposed to be women, with all the surroundings of masculinity, [and] their husbands, mild, broken in spirit, and with all the effeminacy generally supposed to be the most effective panoply of the opposite sex.” Inside the hall, however, the participants were buoyant. Lucy Stone, the convention president, declared that it could not be much longer before women received the right to vote, now that “women were urged to attend political meetings, and a woman’s name was made one of the rallying cries of the party of progress.”

  The house on Ninth Street was quiet. On November 18, Jessie wrote a letter to Lizzie Lee: “We are subsiding into former habits, not without some of the giddy feeling one has after having been a long while on ship board. Things hardly have their natural value and attraction after the engrossing excitement of the one idea we have had in our heads for so many months.” She asked Lizzie to have some of her papers and a rug sent up from Washington. “I am gathering up my household belongings from California and elsewhere. Mr. Frémont says I may live where I like & I like here.” She could not bear to return to Washington after the bitterness of the campaign; her father was there, but so were other relations who had turned against her. She focused on domestic matters as the New York winter set in. One day tiny Francis Preston tumbled down a flight of stairs. He managed to roll sideways on the steps and landed in the dining room unhurt. Another day, inside the warm house, Jessie had time to look out the window and study “a fierce sleeting rain that makes man and beast go on their way with bowed heads.”

  On the day of the sleeting rain, a Saturday, her husband bowed his head and went outdoors by himself, saying he had business downtown. Their relations had changed; John had grown more distant. After the election the Frémonts’ friend and political ally John Bigelow stopped communicating with them, although Jessie did not seem to know the reason. Bigelow told others that he could no longer be around the couple because he suspected that John had “debauched” one of the family’s French maids. If Jessie had the slightest suspicion she left no sign of it. But her interests and those of her husband were diverging. Jessie was ready to settle down and focus on her children. John was growing restless again. He made plans to return to California, where he could try again to expand the gold-mining operations at Las Mariposas. Jessie, given a choice to travel with him, decided that for now she would renounce the Pacific coast and remain in New York. She said she would only be in the way.

  In the spring of 1857 John bought a ticket on a steamer for Panama. The railroad was finished across the isthmus now, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific and bringing California ever closer, though the journey to San Francisco would still take weeks. It was hard to say how long he would be gone—several months at least, maybe half a year. He packed his bags at the house on Ninth Street and said farewell to his children, aged fourteen, six, and two. And then John and Jessie bid each other good-bye, having agreed that they would endure, for a time, a separation.

  John and Jessie, late in life, with daughter, Lily, before a California redwood tree.

  Epilogue

  On March 4, 1857, a parade of floats and soldiers marched through Washington to the sounds of a military band. The marchers were militia units from many states. They halted in front of the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, waiting until white-haired James Buchanan emerged to join the march toward the Capitol for his inauguration. Near him rolled a wooden sailing ship, fully rigged, which had been built for the occasion, placed on wheels, and pulled down the street by horses as “an emblem of national unity and power.” On the steps of the Capitol the new president declared, “I owe my election to the inherent love for the Constitution and the Union which still animates the hearts of the American people.” He said the nation’s differences over slavery were not as great as they seemed, and he predicted the question would be “speedily and finally settled” by the Supreme Court.

  The chief justice of the court was on hand for the inauguration, where seventy-nine-year-old Roger Taney administered Buchanan’s oath of office. Two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, Taney released his opinion in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Writing for the majority, Taney delivered a ruling that Buchanan, as president-elect, had been privately lobbying for. It found that Dred Scott, an enslaved man who had been taken into free states, had no standing to sue for his freedom because black people were not and never had been citizens of the United States: “History shows they have, for more than a century, been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and unfit associates for the white race, either socially or politically.” Slavery was justified because it had existed in the past. The chief justice acknowledged that the Declaration of Independence said “all men are created equal,” words that “would seem to embrace the whole human family; and if used in a similar instrument at this day, would be so understood.” But it was “too clear for dispute” that the founders could not have meant what they said in 1776, because they practiced slavery, which would put them “flagrantly against the principles which they asserted.” So began the administration of James Buchanan, the man who had defeated the Frémonts; having engineered one of the worst rulings in Supreme Court history, he launched his term as one of the worst presidents in history. The ruling failed to quiet abolitionist fervor, as the enraged Northern reaction intensified it. Southerners renewed threats of secession as the president drifted helplessly.

  Republicans began framing change as inevitable. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” the Republican lawyer Abraham Lincoln said as he campaigned for Senate against Democrat Stephen Douglas in 1858. The Union could not endure “permanently half slave and half free”; slavery would either become lawful everywhere, or else “the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.” It was the new party, not beholden to slave interests, that made “ultimate extinction” possible.

  Stephen Douglas saw something destabilizing in the new party. “Why can we not have peace?” he roared to an Illinois crowd during the last of his seven debates against Lincoln. “Why should we allow a sectional party to agitate this country?” Northerners once had opposed sectionalism, “but the moment the North obtained the majority in the House and Senate by the admission of California, and could elect a President without the aid of Southern votes, that moment ambitious Northern men formed a scheme to . . . make the people be governed in their votes by geographical lines.” Douglas was not entirely wrong. The work of John Charles Frémont and others had disrupted both society and the power structure. They set in motion events that must end with the fall of slavery.

  Horace Greeley wanted John to seek the Republican nomination again, and in 1858 visited him in California to discuss it. John wasn’t interested. It was a missed opportunity: when 1860 arrived, the Democrats divided over slavery, splitting their votes between Northern and Southern candidates and dramatically increasing the Republican chance of victory. Nominating Abraham Lincoln at their convention in Chicago, Republicans swept all the Northern states along with California and the new state of Oregon, which was participating in its first presidential election. Lincoln won the electoral vote “without the aid of Southern votes,” precisely as Stephen Douglas had predicted; he defeated three
rivals, including Stephen Douglas. Lincoln named William H. Seward secretary of state, and Salmon P. Chase secretary of the treasury. Francis P. Blair became an adviser to the president—still a connection to the Unionist Jackson, whose portrait hung on Lincoln’s wall.

  Modern-day Americans are not entirely unfamiliar with the emotions that underlay the Southern reaction. In the twenty-first century, the increasing diversity of the country has triggered fear among some white voters that they will be permanently outnumbered. Nineteenth-century white Southerners found proof in Lincoln’s election that they were outnumbered, and resolved to leave the Union rather than risk the threat to slavery. Seven Southern states seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration. John Frémont’s South Carolina led the way on December 20, 1860. Soldiers of the newly declared Confederacy placed gun batteries on the Charleston Harbor islands where John had once played with Cecilia and her brothers, and opened fire on the still-incomplete Fort Sumter in April 1861. Lincoln’s call for troops to suppress the rebellion prompted four more states to secede, including Jessie Frémont’s Virginia. Virginians were forced to choose sides, and Robert E. Lee, the officer who mapped St. Louis around the time John first arrived there, chose his native state. So did John B. Floyd, the former Virginia governor who had once talked with John of a pro-Southern presidential campaign. In the last days of the Buchanan administration Floyd was secretary of war, covertly trying to ship weapons to the South. Then he became a Confederate general. In 1862, surrounded at Fort Donelson in Tennessee by Union forces, Floyd slipped away and escaped in the night, leaving a more junior officer to surrender most of his troops.