by H. W. Brands
Frémont’s appeal wasn’t lost on the Democrats, who were having problems of their own finding an acceptable candidate. By his and others’ accounts, he was approached by prominent Democrats and offered the Democratic nomination in exchange for a pledge to accept the Fugitive Slave and Kansas-Nebraska Acts. He was sufficiently interested to present the offer to Jessie, then vacationing on Nantucket.
Jessie’s political instincts where sharper than his, and her opposition to slavery more reflexive. She immediately vetoed the offer. Pointing to a lighthouse on the island, she said, “It is the choice between a wreck of dishonor, or a kindly light that will go on its mission of doing good.” (This was what she recollected for publication. Almost certainly she was more straightforward in person.) Frémont told the Democrats to keep their nomination.
The Republican nomination came with no conditions. During the spring of 1856 an overwhelming enthusiasm for Frémont arose in the Midwest; one observer likened the surge to a “prairie fire,” while the Chicago correspondent of the New York Tribune observed, “A sort of intrusive feeling pervades the people that he will be nominated and elected. The same sentiment is extending over Iowa and spreading into Wisconsin. He seems to combine more elements of strength than any man who has yet been named.” Frémont’s strength continued to increase as the Republican delegates gathered in Philadelphia for their inaugural nominating convention, and it carried him to victory on the first ballot. The platform on which the party placed him opposed the expansion of slavery and endorsed the California railroad.
HER HUSBAND’S NOMINATION thrust Jessie Frémont into the national spotlight as never before. She doubtless knew it would, and by all evidence she relished the experience.
She first emerged as a distinct figure in the campaign during the week after the Republican convention, when a boisterous crowd of well-wishers rallied at New York’s Tabernacle in support of the Frémont ticket. One of the speakers recited the candidate’s qualifications: explorer of the West, pathfinder through the Rocky Mountains, conqueror of California. The speaker added, “He also won the heart and hand of Thomas H. Benton’s daughter!” At this, the crowd erupted into three cheers and many more loud hurrahs, for Jessie Benton Frémont.
The crowd then poured from the Tabernacle up Broadway to Ninth Street, where the Frémonts had purchased a large house. They clambered over the stonework outside the door, shouting to see the candidate and his wife. In the crush, a stone balustrade collapsed, sending scores of bodies sprawling across the pavement. Miraculously, no one was hurt—which seemed to the pious and superstitious among them a sign of God’s or some other agency’s blessing. Frémont spoke briefly, prompting applause followed by demands that Mrs. Frémont come out. “Jessie! Jessie! Jessie!” the crowd shouted.
In an era when the candidates themselves often held aloof, considering it unseemly to solicit votes on their own behalf, calls upon a candidate’s wife to appear in public were essentially unheard-of. Frémont tried to turn the calls aside, but the crowd made plain it would keep shouting for Jessie till she appeared. Finally she did, prompting an explosion of enthusiasm—“as though all their previous cheering were a mere practice to train their voices for this occasion,” remembered one participant whose ears were still ringing decades later.
At thirty-two years of age, Jessie had matured into one of the great beauties of American politics. With their wealth, connections, and personal history, she and John made the most glamorous pair in American life. Yet there was more than personal appeal that brought out the crowds for Jessie. The Democratic nominee, Buchanan, was a bachelor, with all the questions bachelorhood raised regarding his masculinity and private life. While Republican posters and cartoons showed him in a dress, Republican orators made the character question a test of Buchanan’s capacity for leadership. “I hold that no man who has not had the courage to marry a wife ought to be put up for the president,” asserted a typical speaker. More- discreet members of the party simply let the existence of Jessie, and their enthusiasm for her, underscore the point.
Beyond this, the 1856 Republican campaign was the first national campaign that gave substantial voice to women. The American feminist movement grew up with—or rather grew out of—the antislavery movement, most conspicuously after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and other women delegates to an 1839 antislavery convention in London were forced to sit in a curtained gallery, sequestered from the rest of the convention. Stanton and Mott subsequently organized the first American women’s rights conference, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, where they demanded equal rights for women. In the 1850s neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were about to accord women equal rights, but the Republicans, as the more progressive party, seemed far more congenial to the women activists than the Democrats—besides being correct on the crucial issue of slavery. Women’s hopes rested with Frémont, wrote Lydia Child. “I would almost lay down my life to have him elected.” Few of the feminists, even in demanding a larger role for women, aimed to overturn traditional patterns of family life. Equal partnership between husbands and wives would have been quite satisfactory. In this regard, the partnership between John and Jessie Frémont seemed a model, which made the Frémonts—together—that much worthier of women’s support.
Had they known how large a role Jessie actually played in John’s campaign, the activists would have been even more impressed. No less a judge of political astuteness than Abraham Lincoln remarked, to her face, that she was “quite a female politician.” And so she proved in fighting to get her husband elected. She took control of his correspondence, determining which letters he should see and which not. She covertly coauthored a campaign biography of Frémont that obfuscated his illegitimate birth behind a veil of prevarication. (Democratic reviewers criticized the book—fairly— as reading like a novel, and supplied their own version of the story of Frémont’s father. One reviewer remarked, “These incidents in the life of the progenitor of the free-soil candidate for the Presidency show that he was at least a disciple of Free-love, if not of Free-soil.”) She wrote numerous letters rebutting allegations that he was a closet Catholic, allegations resting on his French ancestry and the fact that he and Jessie had been married by a priest. (Henry Ward Beecher turned this latter evidence into an opportunity to compliment Jessie. “Had we been in Col. Frémont’s place,” the famous Congregational minister declared, “we would have been married if it had required us to walk through a row of priests and bishops as long as from Washington to Rome, winding up with the Pope himself.”)
Although most of her activities on her husband’s behalf remained secret, Jessie became a lightning rod in the campaign. Her supporters recited how at eighteen she had defied the War Department to launch her husband’s most famous expedition, and asserted that the same defiant spirit still burned within her. Rallies sprouted signs reading “John and Jessie,” “Jessie Bent-on Being Free,” and even “Jessie for the White House.” Frémont’s opponents predictably seized on such outpourings as suggesting that she was the real candidate, the one who wore the pants in the family, the one who would run the country in case of her husband’s election.
The Democrats made much of a split in the Benton household. Thomas Benton, having been retired from the Senate for opposing slavery’s extension, nonetheless had no use for Republicans, whom, he judged, were harbingers of disunion. Some of the old anger at Frémont for eloping with his daughter seems to have resurfaced, and perhaps resentment at Frémont’s having carried her off to California. Whatever the mix of motives, Benton refused to make an exception for his son-in-law in condemning Republicans. “I am above family, and above self when the good of the Union is concerned,” he declared. A Republican victory—that is, a Frémont victory—would be lethal to the Union. “We are treading upon a volcano that is liable at any moment to burst forth and overwhelm the nation.”
This became the theme of the opposition’s campaign. Frémont and the Republicans would wreck the Union, the Democrats said.
“The election of Frémont would be the end of the Union, and ought to be,” declared Robert Toombs of Georgia. James Mason of Virginia insisted that the only answer to a Frémont victory must be “immediate, absolute, eternal separation.” Adding personal invective to the party posturing, Henry Wise of Virginia asked rhetorically, “Tell me, if the hoisting of the Black Republican flag in the hands of an adventurer, born illegitimately in a neighboring state, if not ill-begotten in this very city [Richmond]—tell me, if the hoisting of the black flag over you by a Frenchman’s bastard, while the arms of civil war are already clashing, is not to be deemed an overt act and declaration of war?”
Buchanan meanwhile positioned himself as the candidate of compromise and union. He had a point. Unlike Frémont, who didn’t even appear on the ballot in most of the South, Buchanan could credibly claim to be a national candidate. (The candidate of the American Party, former president Millard Fillmore, provided Buchanan’s chief opposition in the South.) Buchanan self-consciously adopted the mantle of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, to the point of persuading sons of the two deceased lawmakers to endorse his candidacy.
As the election approached, Buchanan seemed the safe choice, Frémont the risk. And when voters went to the polls, they chose safety—albeit in an ominously sectional fashion. Buchanan carried all the slave states but Maryland, which he lost to Fillmore. Frémont carried all but five free states, which he lost to Buchanan. These last furnished Buchanan’s margin of victory.
The result didn’t surprise Jessie, who had seen it coming. Indeed, after the Republicans lost a preliminary contest in Pennsylvania, but before the general election, she declared, “I heartily regret the defeat we have met and do not look for things to change for the better.” An opportunity had been lost: for the Union, and for her husband—and for herself. She almost certainly was thinking of the two of them in partnership when she wrote, “I wish the cause had triumphed. I do wish Mr. Frémont had been the one to administer the bitter dose of subjection to the South, for he has the coolness and nerve to do it just as it needs to be done, without passion and without sympathy. As coldly as a surgeon over a hospital patient would he have cut off their right hand, Kansas, from the old unhealthy southern body.”
NEITHER JOHN NOR Jessie Frémont could know that his 1856 defeat marked a portentous break in the run of their stunning personal good luck since 1849. For the moment it seemed no more than a temporary setback, from which they would soon recover. And in defeat they could congratulate themselves that the simple fact of a Frémont candidacy had advanced the cause of antislavery by drawing the line between slavery and freedom more clearly than ever.
Ironically, even as California gave the nation’s new antislavery party its first presidential candidate, California itself was rethinking its opposition to slavery. Or perhaps this wasn’t ironic, but merely a measure of how determined and resourceful the advocates of slavery were becoming as their enemies organized against them—and of how California itself was changing, almost a decade after the gold discovery. By the mid-1850s, immigration to California had slowed considerably, as word got out that mining was hard labor, getting harder by the year. Increasingly, new arrivals followed the path of Leland Stanford and William Sherman: into endeavors other than mining. Farmers discovered the virtues of California’s climate and soil for growing all manner of crops, and the valleys the argonauts had seen as simply additional distance to be covered en route to the mines attracted populations of their own. The institutions of government and the conventions of society approximated more closely those found in the longer- settled regions of the country; despite renewed outbreaks of vigilantism like that in San Francisco in 1856, lynch law and other extralegal activity was becoming a source of civic embarrassment rather than pride. John Frémont’s candidacy for president afforded California a legitimacy that would have been difficult to capture by other means, but it also elevated expectations that California would act like a normal state, with normal law and politics.
“Normal,” however, was an ambiguous term during the 1850s, with its meaning largely dependent on which part of the country one inhabited or came from. The South grew more aggressive in its defense of slavery, the North less willing to indulge southern sensitivities. In California, a kind of expatriate politics developed, reflecting the rift in the East. The expatriatism had been implicit since the start of the Gold Rush, but in the early days—for example, at the Monterey convention of 1849—both northerners and southerners had been too distracted by gold to make a big issue of their differing views on slavery and race. As the opportunities in the mines diminished, though—and as the rancor between North and South escalated—California became a battleground over slavery.
Southern Democrats had actually landed the first blow, during the inaugural session of the California legislature. The Monterey constitution barred slavery, but the Democrats won passage of a bill declaring that “no black or mulatto person or Indian shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of or against any white person.” This law left African-Americans (and Indians) at the mercy of white-controlled courts, and of white petitioners in those courts.
California’s blacks, who constituted between 1 and 2 percent of the state’s population during the 1850s, combated this legal discrimination. They repeatedly petitioned the legislature for relief; when their petitions failed, they organized statewide “colored conventions” to publicize the unfairness of their predicament. More than a few whites supported the cause—some from altruism, others from self-interest. The Sacramento Bee came out for colored testimony following the 1857 lynching of three white men in Butte County. The lynched were infamous for robbing and abusing Chinese miners, but because the Chinese (who were legally lumped with blacks and Indians) couldn’t testify against their tormentors, the thugs ran free. Eventually even whites in the area grew disgusted and hanged the trio. To the Sacramento Bee this represented a step backward toward vigilante justice. In the interest of public welfare and due process, the paper’s editor declared, colored testimony must be allowed.
The courtroom color bar might have been lifted but for the demoralizing outcome of the Dred Scott Supreme Court case. When Chief Justice Roger Taney and the federal high court ruled in 1857 that African- Americans could not be citizens of the United States, the ruling dealt a nationwide blow to hopes for anything approaching black equality. In California it spurred African-Americans to further political and legal efforts. In October 1857 they held another colored convention in San Francisco; more than ever, the delegates deemed their battle the battle of colored people all across the country.
Their battle was also the battle of one black man in particular. Archy Lee was a native of Mississippi, a slave by birth. He came to California in company with a white man named Charles Stovall, whose family had owned Archy (who, like many slaves, went by a single name, only adding Lee later) in Mississippi. Whether Charles Stovall still owned Archy lay at the heart of one of the more convoluted cases in the history of California jurisprudence.
Archy and Stovall arrived in California in the autumn of 1857. Whether the two had departed Mississippi together or rendezvoused in Missouri after leaving Mississippi separately became a matter of conflicting testimony. Stovall’s reason for going west was to improve his health. Archy’s reason was either to be Stovall’s servant or to flee the wrath of a white man he had wounded in a fight in Mississippi. (The white man definitely had been wounded, and by Archy; the question was whether Archy credibly feared retribution.) In any event, the two young men reached Sacramento in October 1857.
By Stovall’s subsequent account, he intended to stay no more than a year or eighteen months, until his health was restored. This became an issue of central importance, for although California barred slave ownership to permanent residents of the state, like several other states it allowed travelers and visitors to retain their slaves during brief stopovers. Unfortunately for Stovall’s story, he hadn’t been in Sacramento long before he put a notice in a local paper
advertising: “Private School for Boys and Girls… Terms—$5 per month, in advance.” It is uncertain how many pupils accepted his offer, but the notice alone suggested something more than a rest-and-recuperation visit. Meanwhile, Stovall hired Archy out to other employers, taking part of the wages and allowing Archy to keep the remainder.
However long Stovall intended to stay, he decided after two months to send Archy back to Mississippi. Conceivably, Stovall hadn’t realized before coming that California barred slavery; he seems to have been a rather oblivious young man. Perhaps he knew about the bar but simply proposed to ignore it; slave-owners in those last years before the Civil War were notorious for what they thought they could get away with. Moreover, despite the antislavery article in California’s constitution, the state’s pro-South Democrats might be inclined to wink at Stovall’s possession of Archy. But by the end of 1857, Stovall was worrying that he wouldn’t be able to keep Archy in California. In Mississippi a slave of Archy’s age, sex, and robust condition might sell for $1,500; Stovall didn’t wish to forfeit such an investment. So he prepared to send Archy to San Francisco to meet a man traveling back to Mississippi, who would escort Archy home.
But Archy didn’t want to go home. Not surprisingly, he at first was even less aware than Stovall of the status of slavery under California law; equally unsurprisingly, Stovall declined to share what he learned that might make Archy think he need no longer be a slave. The presence, and activism, of free blacks in California, however, opened Archy’s eyes. And as luck would have it, the agitation for black rights after the Dred Scott decision peaked at precisely the moment Archy was to leave Sacramento for San Francisco, Panama, and Mississippi. Some of those engaged in the struggle in California had worked on the Underground Railroad back east, and they saw in Archy a young man who ought not be spirited from the land of the free to the home of the slave. One suggested that Archy take refuge at Hackett House, a rooming establishment run by Negroes in Sacramento. Archy did so, only to be arrested by local authorities serving a warrant initiated by Stovall to have his property—that is, Archy—returned.