The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  Señor Bandini made a fine show. “He had a slight and elegant figure, moved gracefully, danced and waltzed beautifully, spoke good Castilian, with a pleasant and refined voice and accent, and had, throughout, the bearing of a man of birth and figure. Yet here he was, with his passage given him (as I afterward learned), for he had not the means of paying for it, and living upon the charity of our agent.” He was polite to one and all, from the captain to the lowliest sailor. He tipped the steward four reals—“I dare- say the last he had in his pocket.” The sight was rather touching. “I could not but feel a pity for him, especially when I saw him by the side of his fellow-passenger and townsman, a fat, coarse, vulgar, pretentious fellow of a Yankee trader, who had made money in San Diego, and was eating out the vitals of the Bandinis, fattening upon their extravagance, grinding them in their poverty; having mortgages on their lands, forestalling their cattle, and already making an inroad upon their jewels, which were their last hope.”

  The decadent pride of the Bandinis, as Dana interpreted it, appeared more broadly in the Californians at large. “The men are thriftless, proud, extravagant, and very much given to gaming; and the women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty, and their morality, of course, is none of the best.” The Californians would hazard everything on small points of honor and were given to murderous feuds. Meanwhile they were careless of the natural wealth around them, and were apparently impervious to any notion of progress. The contrast Dana perceived between the character of the Californians and the character of California struck him with a kind of moral force. “Such are the people who inhabit a country embracing four or five hundred miles of sea-coast, with several good harbors; with fine forests in the north; the waters filled with fish, and the plains covered with thousands of herds of cattle; blessed with a climate than which there can be no better in the world; free from all manner of diseases, whether epidemic or endemic; and with a soil in which corn yields from seventy to eighty fold. In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!”

  DANA’S ACCOUNT APPEARED in the year America’s sixth census showed the population of the United States to be just under 17 million people. To a later generation this number would seem minuscule, but to many of Dana’s contemporaries it occasioned claustrophobia. America in 1840 was a land of farmers, and farmers—and their children and grandchildren—always needed more land. Since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory from France, the only appreciable addition to the American patrimony had been Florida—swampy, disease- ridden Florida. The country was filling up; where would all the people live? What fields would they farm?

  Adding to the worries was the dismal condition of the American economy. The previous decade had begun with the “bank war” between Nicholas Biddle, the powerful, prideful director of the Bank of the United States, and Andrew Jackson, the determined, prideful president. Jackson won the war by killing the Bank, but in doing so gravely wounded the economy. The Panic of 1837 bankrupted farmers, who saw the price of their crops fall 50 percent or more, and cast tens of thousands of laborers out on the streets and highways of America. Many headed west, as Americans had always done in times of trouble, hoping to make a new life where land was cheaper and opportunity more abundant. Yet land in 1840 wasn’t as cheap as it had been when there weren’t so many people trying to buy it, and opportunity was accordingly less abundant. As the economic depression continued into the new decade, it intensified demands for more land.

  The demands acquired evangelical overtones. During the first half of the nineteenth century, American Protestantism—which was to say, the religion of nearly all Americans—bubbled and boiled with one reform movement after another. The “second Great Awakening” (the first having occurred during the previous century) saw people speaking in tongues and thrashing about wildly. One man jerked so violently—resisting grace, the pious said—that he broke his own neck. Camp meetings lasted weeks or months and spun off temperance crusades, abolitionist rallies, and missionary voyages. The religious ferment fostered an outlook that had no difficulty interpreting the pressure for territorial expansion in providential terms. If God had smiled on the United States of America—and almost none doubted that He had—wouldn’t He want America to grow? Wouldn’t He want Americans to spread their blessings into neighboring lands? And wouldn’t He want this all the more, considering that the inhabitants of those neighboring lands were heathen Indians and papist Mexicans?

  Of course He would—or so concluded the publicists of what came to be called Manifest Destiny, the ideology of expansion in the 1840s. This ideology was seductive, stroking the conscience of America even as it flattered America’s vanity and served America’s self-interest. It appealed most powerfully to the religiously minded majority of Americans, but the secular, too, could sign on, as advocates of the export of democracy. The popularity of Manifest Destiny naturally caught the attention of politicians, especially those in the Democratic party, who were hungry to regain the presidency after a surprising defeat in 1840. In 1844 the Democrats nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee on a platform promising the vigorous extension of America’s frontiers westward. Looking southwest, Polk vowed to bring Texas into the Union. Looking northwest, he pledged to take all of Oregon.

  Polk won the presidency and proceeded to act on his promises. As it happened, he didn’t get all of Oregon (which at that time stretched to the southern border of Alaska), but, in negotiations with Britain, he got the largest and best part. Nor did he take Texas, which was annexed after Polk’s election victory but before President John Tyler vacated the White House.

  That didn’t end the Texas story, however. Nor did it satisfy the aggressive appetite of Manifest Destiny. Although Texas had claimed independence from Mexico in 1836, the Mexican government rejected the claim and sent troops to suppress the rebellion. The Texans lost at the Alamo, but won at San Jacinto and forced the Mexicans to withdraw. Even so, Mexico refused to make peace or recognize the independence of the Texas republic. Consequently, when the United States annexed Texas in 1845, Mexico protested vehemently.

  James Polk, inheriting the dispute, might have ignored the Mexican protests, except for one thing. Polk had read Richard Dana’s book, and he became convinced that California—that marvelous land so neglected by its feckless people—should be brought into the Union. He offered to buy California from Mexico. When the Mexican government refused, he insisted. When the Mexicans refused again, Polk determined to take California by force.

  The dispute with Texas provided the pretext. The president ordered General Zachary Taylor to assume a provocative position on the border between Texas and Mexico, intending for Taylor to be attacked. The attack was slow in coming, and the frustrated Polk began drafting a war message without it. But at the last minute the welcome news arrived that hostilities had commenced. Eleven Americans had been killed—on American soil, Polk explained to Congress. War was necessary and justified. Congress agreed, and in June 1846, Manifest Destiny went to war.

  THE DECLARATION OF WAR came none too soon for John Frémont, who was in California anxiously awaiting the belligerent word. Frémont’s anxiety reflected both his personal ambition and his uneasy conscience. His ambition drove him to dream of conquering California for the United States; his conscience nagged him for having started the war already, without authorization from Washington.

  Frémont was one of the great enigmas of his generation. For ten years during the 1840s and 1850s he was as famous as anyone in America, a celebrity-hero whose star rose like a rocket in the West and flashed brilliantly from coast to coast. Young men idolized his physical courage and political audacity; young women swooned over his sad eyes, his black curls, and olive complexion, and the catlike grace with which he walked. In an era entranced by exploration, Frémont was the explorer par excellence, the “Pathfinder of the West.” Thousands followed the trail he blazed toward Oregon; thousands more read the reports he published on the vast region that stretched f
rom the Great Plains to the Pacific.

  Yet though the whole country knew Frémont, almost no one knew him well. His origins were shrouded in mystery and scandal. His father was an itinerant French adventurer, an émigré from the French Revolution with a trail of transatlantic amours who seduced Frémont’s mother and cuckolded the man to whom she was married. Consumed by her desire, she ran off with her lover and lived with him in common-law bigamy. From this illicit union sprang John Charles Frémont, who inherited his father’s handsome face and dangerous habits, and his mother’s passionate impulsiveness. But he inherited little else, certainly nothing on which a man could build a career.

  Where he got his burning ambition was another mystery. Neither parent displayed anything comparable. Perhaps it had skipped a generation or two; perhaps it came from having to live down his illegitimate birth. In any event, it caused him to join the army, that historic institution of elevation for the ambitious but badly born. It provoked him to risk his own life and those of his men on daring crossings of the Rockies, the Great Basin, and the Sierras. And it drove him, in the spring of 1846, to dream of liberating California from Mexico and to grossly exceed his military orders.

  Frémont had reached California some months earlier, on his second visit to the province. Amid the bellicose clamor of Manifest Destiny, his presence, with that of his wilderness-toughened band of cavalrymen, made John Sutter and other Mexican officials nervous. The commandant of California, José Castro, ordered Frémont to leave the province. He obliged, but slowly and with a studied insolence intended to elicit a violent response. He came close to getting it when Castro issued a proclamation calling on Californians to take arms against the “band of robbers commanded by a captain of the United States army, J. C. Frémont.” Frémont claimed injury and vowed, “If we are unjustly attacked we will fight to extremity and refuse quarter, trusting to our country to avenge our death….If we are hemmed in and assaulted here, we will die, every man of us, under the flag of our country.” But the tense moment passed, and Frémont reluctantly headed north toward Oregon. On the way he heard rumors that Castro was encouraging local Indians to attack American settlers; still hoping to start something, Frémont launched a raid on an Indian village. Scores of Indians—as many as 175 by one count—were killed.

  Yet the tinder refused to light, and Frémont continued north to the vicinity of Oregon’s Klamath Lake, where he waited impatiently for an excuse to return. In May 1846 a secret messenger arrived from Washington. Precisely what this messenger said has been lost to history, for he destroyed his orders before crossing Mexican territory. But whatever he said prompted Frémont to move south at once.

  Back in California, he resumed his campaign against the Indians. He led a mounted sweep of several Indian villages on the west bank of the Sacramento River; an indeterminable number of Indians were killed and hundreds were rendered homeless.

  But still the war wouldn’t start. By now Frémont was beginning to wonder if it ever would—and, if it didn’t, whether he would be held accountable for the Indian war he had been waging, unauthorized, on Mexican soil.

  Frémont’s predicament only deepened when some of the American settlers raised the flag of rebellion against the Mexican government. These rebels modeled their “Bear Flag revolt” on the American Revolution, and just as the patriots of 1776 had appealed to France for help, so the patriots of 1846 appealed to the French-descended Frémont. Frémont obliged, and in fact took effective control of the rebellion. He seized Sutter’s Fort— thereby confirming Sutter’s long-standing suspicions of his malign intentions—and arrested nearby officials of the Mexican government.

  These actions elevated his liability to a new level. Thus far his aggressions had been directed against Indians, who though living under Mexican jurisdiction lived somewhat outside Mexican law. But now Frémont was taking on the Mexican government itself. If war didn’t break out, he would be at the center of a major international incident.

  Frémont raised the stakes still further by ordering the killing of some Californians. Shortly after the start of the Bear Flag rebellion, Frémont’s soldiers spied a small boat of Californians crossing San Pablo Bay. Frémont sent Kit Carson, the famous scout and Indian fighter who was Frémont’s frequent partner in exploration, and some other men to intercept the boat. According to an eyewitness, Carson asked Frémont, “Captain, shall I take those men prisoner?” According to this same witness, Frémont answered, with a wave of the hand, “I have no room for prisoners.” Carson and the others rode to where the boat had landed and shot three of the Californians dead. (A fourth escaped.) Frémont defended his action as punishment for the murder of two Americans, apparently by some Californians. But there was no evidence that the three men killed on Frémont’s order had any connection to the murder of the Americans, and the incident created the distinct probability that Frémont would be charged with murder if no war followed.

  Finally, to Frémont’s relief, the news of Washington’s war declaration arrived. This effectively ended the Bear Flag revolt, which was swept up in the larger contest against Mexico, and it lifted the cloud that hung over Frémont. Technically, of course, he was still guilty of having illegally waged war in a foreign country. And there was the moral matter of the blood of the Indians and Californians on his hands. But in the age of Manifest Destiny, it didn’t seem likely that anyone in Washington would fault him for arriving at the same conclusion the United States government did, only sooner; and as for the deaths of the Indians and Mexican Californians, no one ever said the West was an easy or safe place to live. Americans applied different rules beyond the plains and mountains, especially to Indians and Mexicans. Frémont was confident that if the war made him a military hero—if he showed the same success in battle he had shown in the wilderness—all would be forgiven.

  So he flung himself into the fighting. He raised a regiment of Americans (including James Marshall), whom he led to Monterey. By the time he got there, however, the provincial capital had already surrendered to an American naval squadron. Frustrated again, and more eager for action than ever, Frémont sailed to San Diego, where he joined the force of Commodore Robert Stockton. With Stockton he marched against Los Angeles and took part in the defeat of the Mexican garrison there. As this seemed to end the war in California, Frémont returned north to recruit a larger force for an invasion of Mexico proper. But in his absence, fighting resumed at Los Angeles. He raced back into the breach, and when the uprising was suppressed, he received the honor of accepting the Mexican capitulation. This really did terminate the fighting in California, and though Frémont couldn’t claim sole credit for liberating the province, he could take satisfaction from having accomplished more toward that goal than anyone else.

  His reward was appointment by Stockton as governor of California. For two months he exercised the authority of his office, which was by far the highest he had ever held. But then things began to go wrong. He fell afoul of a conflict between Stockton and Stephen Kearny, the senior army general in California, who had come overland after conquering New Mexico. Frémont assumed, with nearly everyone else in the vicinity, that Stockton outranked Kearny. Kearny differed, and after hot fighting in Washington between the War and Navy Departments, and attendant confusion and unrest in California, Kearny’s view prevailed. Kearny resented Frémont’s defection from army solidarity and ordered him arrested on charges of mutiny and insubordination. Frémont briefly considered resisting the arrest but thought better of it. He allowed himself to be taken ignominiously east, a prisoner, to stand trial before a court-martial.

  At the trial, Frémont conducted his own defense. The charges were mutiny, disobedience to a lawful command of a superior officer, and conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline. Frémont indignantly denied all charges, contending that he had always conducted himself as an officer and a gentleman, that he had never disobeyed an order he knew to be lawful, and that mutiny was the farthest thing from his mind. In closing he pleaded the honor
able work he had done during his governorship. “My acts in California have been all with motives and a desire for the public service,” he declared. “I offer California, during my administration, for comparison with the most tranquil portion of the United States; I offer it in contrast to the condition of New Mexico at the same time. I prevented civil war against Governor Stockton, by refusing to join General Kearny against him; I arrested civil war against myself by consenting to be deposed.”

  To the surprise of no one familiar with military justice, the court returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. Frémont was sentenced to dismissal from military service. Yet several members of the court recommended clemency, citing the prisoner’s valor and the confused conditions in California.

  President Polk accepted the recommendation, after a fashion. He said he believed Frémont guilty of the two lesser charges but innocent of mutiny. Therefore he commuted the prisoner’s punishment. “Lieutenant- Colonel Frémont will accordingly be released from arrest, will resume his sword, and report for duty,” the commander in chief declared.