Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Floyd’s superior officer in the Confederate army was Albert Sidney Johnston, Jessie’s kindly relative who reassured her when she was terrified by Indians as a girl. General Johnston, commanding Confederate troops at the Battle of Shiloh, sent away his personal physician to care for wounded soldiers on one of the bloodiest days of the war. Then Johnston himself was shot, and bled to death surrounded by men who did not know how to help him.

  Jacob Dodson, John’s former servant and a veteran of the war against Mexico, wanted to fight against the rebellion. Now thirty-five years old, he was still working as a Senate messenger and keeper of the Senate “retiring rooms.” Early in the conflict, when the Union Army was still forming and the capital was defended by only a few hundred soldiers, Dodson wrote Lincoln’s secretary of war proposing that “three hundred reliable colored free citizens” should be allowed to “enter the service for the defence of the City.” He reminded Simon Cameron that he had already served his country, but Cameron wrote back that the administration had no plans to use black soldiers.

  Frederick Douglass pressed for that policy to change, insisting that black troops should be welcomed in the Union Army. Congress and Lincoln gradually altered course; advancing Union armies were desperate for manpower and were flocked by escaping slaves. A law passed in 1862 allowed black men to work as laborers for the military, and then to enlist in the newly formed United States Colored Troops. Douglass and his fellow black activist Martin Delany became prominent recruiters, and 179,000 black men served. So many died for their country that Douglass asserted, and Lincoln agreed, that no one could deny their right to citizenship after the war.

  William M. Gwin, John’s Senate colleague from California who was instrumental in making it a free state, attempted to avoid war in 1861. He assisted last-minute efforts by Seward to negotiate with Southern leaders, but later chose his former home in a slave state over the free state he had represented, personally seceding from the Union and returning to Mississippi. Late in the war he tried to lay the groundwork for slave owners to resettle with their slaves in northern Mexico. After the war, when all was lost, the man who had called slavery “the foundation of civilization” wrote a memoir claiming he had privately opposed slavery all along.

  David Farragut of Tennessee, the naval officer John met while serving as a mathematician on the navy ship Natchez, remained loyal to the Union and commanded US forces as they captured Mobile Bay and New Orleans. William T. Sherman, who bit the gold found at John Sutter’s mill, eventually commanded a destructive march across Georgia, ending at John’s birthplace of Savannah. John Ericsson, the immigrant from Sweden who designed the innovative if ill-fated warship Princeton, in 1862 designed the Union’s first ironclad warship, known as the Monitor, which fought the first Confederate ironclad to a standstill and became a model for generations of warships to follow. Mathew Brady, who developed the daguerreotypes John brought from the West, became the Civil War’s most famous photographer. He organized teams who crossed the country to capture images of soldiers on the march, beside their cannons, wounded in hospitals, and dead in their trenches.

  Kit Carson, famed from John’s expeditions, joined the Union Army and led a unit that helped to drive Confederates out of New Mexico. He went on to lead army forces in Indian wars, ruthlessly defeating Apaches and Navajos. William Chinook, the young Indian from the Columbia River who traveled east with John in 1844 and grew homesick in Philadelphia, returned to his people in 1845 and later joined the Union Army. In the 1860s, he fought in the Snake War, against rebellious Indians in the Snake River valley, an especially bloody conflict overshadowed by the Civil War and little noticed by the country at large, though the Pacific Northwest remembered it. A reservoir, Lake Billy Chinook, was later named for him.

  Thomas Hart Benton did not live to see the Union fractured and restored. He died in 1858, at age seventy-six, confident that his own legacy was secure. In an autobiographical sketch written late in life, he said there was no need to list his important legislation, for it was “known throughout the length and breadth of the land,” and was even recited by schoolchildren. In truth his name largely faded from public notice; to later generations, his great-nephew Thomas Hart Benton, the painter, was probably more famous. But the larger themes of Senator Benton’s career captured the interest of future leaders. Young Theodore Roosevelt, fascinated by the West, felt a connection to Benton, and wrote a biography of him between roundups on the ranch where he lived in Dakota Territory in 1886. (Roosevelt confessed to a friend that in such a remote location he was short of research material on Benton, and was “mainly evolving him from my inner consciousness.”) In 1955, Senator John F. Kennedy was taken by Benton’s stubborn defense of the Union, and devoted a chapter to him in his book Profiles in Courage.

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  JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT WAS WITH JESSIE in Europe during the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. Volunteering to serve the Union, he raced home in time for President Lincoln to appoint him as the general in command of the West, with headquarters at St. Louis. (He was one of several prominent Republicans appointed to senior commands; his friend Nathaniel Banks was another.) Although Missouri remained in the Union, it was boiling with proslavery sentiment and was soon attacked from the south by Confederate forces. John, who never had commanded a military unit larger than a few hundred men, struggled to turn thousands of raw recruits into a coherent force. Rather than command his army in the field, General Frémont set up headquarters in a St. Louis mansion and quickly became isolated: a soldier with saber drawn guarded the door, and it was rumored that officers on urgent business might wait for hours to see him. Jessie kept up his political connections, writing to members of Congress and even to President Lincoln. In mid-1861, John startled the country by declaring martial law and issuing a decree freeing the slaves of Missouri rebels. Lincoln had not yet freed any slave; John’s act was the first demonstration that the ruthless logic of the war would lead to freedom. But his move came too soon. The president, unwilling to alienate slave states that were still loyal to the Union, instructed General Frémont to reverse his order—and John declined, creating one of the early political crises of the war. Just as he once had ignored the orders of Colonel Abert and then defied the orders of General Kearny, he could not bring himself to obey the president. Lincoln did not immediately fire him, but was also hearing disturbing rumors of disorganization and corruption.

  In September 1861 John allowed Jessie to do what she had been urging for months: she traveled to Washington to set Lincoln straight. Riding the trains—it now took only two nights to travel the eight hundred miles—she arrived in the capital and sent a note by messenger asking the president when would be a convenient time to meet. He wrote a single word in reply: “Now.” When she entered his office, the president did not speak. He bowed slightly. She handed him a letter from General Frémont, which he read silently. At last he said, “I have written to the General and he knows what I want done.” Jessie tried to argue that John’s emancipation order was helpful in Missouri and would play well in Europe, too. “You are quite a female politician,” Lincoln replied. Jessie said afterward, “I felt the sneering tone and saw there was a foregone decision against all listening.”

  The president soon relieved John of his command, and the Frémonts returned to Washington. They were living there in early 1862 when Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the capital and called upon Mrs. Frémont. She was “excellent company,” he said, showing “good sense and good humour,” but also expressing “musical indignation” as she was “incessantly accusing the Government of the vast wrong that had been done to the General.” Though John was soon assigned to command an army in western Virginia, he was outmaneuvered in battle and relieved again. He played no role in the later part of the war, although he made news by mounting a short-lived challenge to Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. General Frémont’s principal contribution to the war effort had come at the beginning, when he was organizing
his army and gave several assignments to a formerly washed-up army officer named Ulysses S. Grant, who rose to command all Union forces by the end of the war and accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

  After the war’s end in 1865, John tried again to enlarge his fortune, this time by investing in railroads. In his mind, of course, these were more than mere investments. He sought a role in transcontinental railroads, of the sort he had advocated since the conquest of California. They would complete Senator Benton’s vision of a road to Asia, linking the eastern United States with the Golden Gate. Although John was not involved in the first transcontinental railroad, its construction began soon after the war. It was finished in 1869, and was celebrated soon after by Walt Whitman in a poem that John and Senator Benton would have appreciated. Whitman wrote that the tracks unified not merely two coasts but the world:

  Passage to India!

  Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

  The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,

  The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage . . .

  I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte . . .

  Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,

  The road between Europe and Asia.

  John was trying for his own transcontinental project. He served as the de facto president of a railroad called the Memphis, El Paso, and Pacific, with a name that spoke of its ambitions to become a transcontinental line reaching Los Angeles. But the company struggled to raise money in the United States for construction, and when its agents sold millions of dollars’ worth of bonds in Paris, they were accused of fraud. More than a few railroad builders multiplied their fortunes through self-dealing and misrepresentation, but John was not among those artful enough to get away with it. He was tried in absentia and convicted by a French court in 1871, and though he never served prison time, he lost control of the railroad and, soon, his fortune. He had spent twenty years since the gold rush as an absurdly rich man, or at least seeming to be one; now it was during the Gilded Age that the Frémonts lost their gilding. They were eventually forced to surrender an estate they had bought on the Hudson River above New York City, exchanging it for an apartment in Manhattan.

  They remained famous. Thousands of newspaper articles mentioned them between 1875 and 1889. Some chronicled their past exploits, including a retelling of John’s four-hundred-mile horse ride through California during the conquest. Others covered their more recent humiliations: because they were celebrities, they lived their growing financial nightmare in public. One headline in 1878 read, GENERAL FRÉMONT: ALTHOUGH NOT STARVING, HE IS IN VERY REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES. The article included the detail that “since the sale of General Frémont’s library some months ago by the Sheriff, it is true that he has been without income.” Some articles spoke far better of Mrs. Frémont than of her husband. “It was no great disappointment that Gen. Fremont was never President,” said one newspaper writer, “but I think that we all regret that his wife should never have been Mrs. President.” The writer, who seemed to have met Mrs. Frémont, added that “she is in a high sense a masculine woman. Her powers are those we call masculine, as representing greater strength . . . If she had the fortune to be born a man, she would beyond doubt have achieved a place among the controlling spirits of this country from which the limitations of her sex have debarred her.”

  John was rescued in 1878 by Rutherford B. Hayes, the lawyer who once had arranged for his hometown to be renamed Fremont, Ohio. Hayes was now president, and appointed the great explorer as the governor of Arizona Territory. Traveling westward by train, then by coach through the region he had helped to open, John was greeted as a hero, to the relief of Jessie, who rode along with him and tried to keep up his spirits. (She wrote that the region “deserves its name of the Great West—great-hearted we have found it.”) John completed three years of undistinguished service but still struggled to pay bills, and afterward Jessie’s letters reflected the bitter decline of their fortunes. In 1883, regarding a friend whose newborn girl had died, fifty-nine-year-old Jessie wrote that “for the death of a baby girl there should be no sorrow,” because “life is hard on women.”

  The Frémonts began to rely on Jessie’s income. She was writing under her own name now—books and magazine articles, commonly reflecting on their earlier lives; A Year of American Travel, for example, recounted her voyage to California in 1849. As a memoir, it was observant and entertaining, although it was as notable for what it left out as for what it said. She included references to her depression and despair, but never mentioned that her baby Benton had died just days before the beginning of the story. The same was true of John’s autobiography, which she helped him to complete in 1887. The 655-page volume contained brief references to John’s mother, but no mention of his father at all, and it left out decades of his life. It ended with the events of early 1847, just after he accepted the surrender of Los Angeles, and just before his arrest and court-martial—omitting the forty years the followed, including his later expeditions, the presidential campaign, the Civil War, and his business career. “I close the page,” he wrote at the end of the narrative, “because my path of life led out from among the grand and lovely features of nature, and its pure and wholesome air, into the poisoned atmosphere and jarring circumstances of conflict among men.”

  Living with John in Washington and then, as money ran even lower, in an inexpensive house on the New Jersey shore, Jessie grew concerned about her husband’s health, and decided in 1887 that California’s drier climate would better suit him. Unable to afford train tickets to cross the continent, she went into New York City to see Collis P. Huntington. Since arriving in California to start his Sacramento hardware store serving gold prospectors in 1849, Huntington had become an investor in the first transcontinental railroad, then the dominant figure on other railroads, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country—the magnate that John had never managed to be. Huntington had always admired John C. Frémont. He had voted for him in 1856 and felt he owed his fortune in part to John’s explorations. To honor the conqueror of California, Huntington provided Jessie with tickets, letters of introduction along the route, and expense money.

  Shepherding John and Lily westward, Jessie would live the rest of her life in Los Angeles, in the state her husband had helped to bring into the Union. The Frémonts were surrounded by admirers, who asked John to speak on special occasions and honored him for his service. For a short time, it even seemed that he could make a living. He involved himself in Los Angeles real estate, but in the fall of 1888, at age seventy-five, he felt the urge to move again. Having so often left her in order to travel the West, he told Jessie he must return to the East, lobbying for a military pension in Washington and pursuing business opportunities in New York. He remained in the East, with only a short visit back to Los Angeles, for most of the final two years of his life. He died a continent away from Jessie, in a New York boardinghouse, on July 13, 1890.

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  DID THE FRÉMONTS, for all their manifest flaws, help to build a more just and equal nation? Eventually they did. The sharpest judgment of how they advanced the cause of equality came from John Bigelow, the New York Post editor and John’s early biographer, who lived long enough to look back upon them from a different century. Having distanced himself from the Frémonts after 1856, Bigelow supported Lincoln for president in 1860 and was rewarded with a position at the US embassy in Paris, the start of a lengthy diplomatic career. Later he returned to New York, and in 1895, in his late seventies, was appointed the first president of the New York Public Library. He oversaw the construction of its main building, which opened in 1902 and still stands on Fifth Avenue, fronted by its famous stone lions. Shortly before his death in 1911 at the age of ninety-four, Bigelow wrote a memoir that included an assessment of John’s presidential campaign. It was a cutting judgment, colored by Bigelow’s later distaste for John, but fair. B
igelow insisted that it would have been “impossible” for Republicans to select a better nominee in 1856 than John C. Frémont, who “rendered his country as a candidate all the service he was capable of rendering it.” Only the hero of western exploration had the celebrity and reputation to unify the new antislavery coalition, which held together after his defeat, eventually saving the Union and ending slavery. But Bigelow confessed that John might have been a terrible president. “He owed such success as he had at this election—and it was very flattering—largely to his wife, a remarkably capable and accomplished woman . . . and to his utterly neuter gender in politics.” He wasn’t a statesman, Bigelow said, shuddering at the idea that it could have been Frémont, rather than Lincoln, who faced the crisis of secession. “Much as the country was to be congratulated for his nomination, it was equally to be congratulated upon his defeat.”

  For all the disappointments of the Frémonts’ later lives, their contemporaries reflected upon the 1840s and ’50s and sensed that the pair had done something special, and some offered a token of thanks to John’s widow after his death. In 1891, Jessie’s friend Caroline Severance, a women’s rights activist, learned that Mrs. Frémont was destitute and borrowing money to pay expenses. Severance formed a committee of California women who raised money to build Mrs. Frémont a house in recognition of her past services. Living in the house with her unmarried daughter, Lily, Jessie continued writing about her life, sometimes telling the same story again and again in different ways. Collaborating with her son Frank, she composed a memoir of John’s later life—the ultimate act of ghostwriting, although it was never published. She began drafting a memoir of her own, and in recounting episodes of her life she included details that she had never written down before—details that might have seemed too personal to put down earlier. She had previously published an acerbic account of the 1840 wedding of her school classmate to the Russian ambassador, but only now did she reveal that the experience so troubled her that afterward she cut her hair and briefly proposed to live as if she were a man.