Capital Dames

by Cokie Roberts

  Despite the glow provided by new gas lamps installed on the streets in 1853, times were tough in Washington, as Louisa Meigs described them in a letter to her sister: “Provisions of all kinds are very high at this time—alarmingly so. . . . I fear the poor will suffer very much. Vegetables are scarce and not very good . . . the pumps are often dry.” The country was experiencing an economic downturn—just the kind of situation calculated to create a political party like the Know-Nothings, looking for someone to blame for hard times and finding scapegoats in the millions of mostly Catholic Irish and German immigrants inundating the country. And while the new political party vented its venom on immigrants, the old ones ratcheted up their quarrels over slavery and whether the newly organized territories of Kansas and Nebraska would come into the Union as slave states or free.

  Attempting to answer that question, Illinois U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas pushed through legislation that ironically had the effect of creating the Republican Party in 1854, a party that eventually ruined him politically. Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty” allowed people in Kansas and Nebraska to decide on slavery for themselves, instead of the federal government making that determination. The Kansas-Nebraska Act broke the previous covenant covering the spread of enslavement—the Missouri Compromise of 1820—and called into question whether the Compromise of 1850 could be abrogated as well. Bloody battles between proslavery settlers who rushed into Kansas and the abolitionists who followed them provoked political combat in the rest of the country. Those wars ended up destroying the Whig Party, with the Republicans rising to take in the northern Whigs opposed to slavery while most of the southern Whigs fled to the Democrats. The shaky stage was set for the presidential election of 1856.

  CHAPTER 2

  LEFT: Harriet Lane, niece of bachelor president James Buchanan, acted as his de facto First Lady during the difficult 1850s. RIGHT: Jessie Benton Frémont, once the most famous woman in America, was thought of as the real politician in her marriage to John C. Frémont.

  (Granger, NYC—All rights reserved; Granger, NYC—All rights reserved.)

  Jessie Runs for President but Harriet Takes

  the White House and Mary Jane Reports

  1856–1858

  Anna Carroll had been pestering Former President Millard Fillmore for months, audaciously advising him that with her help he could be the candidate of the Know-Nothings: “I can have very much to do with your nomination by that party.” Having taken the high-minded name of the American Party, the nativists had scored significant victories in congressional and state legislative elections in 1854, emerging with real hope for the presidency. In February 1856 party stalwarts met in Philadelphia and did what Anna had been hoping for—nominated Millard Fillmore. Acting as the unofficial head of the media effort, she published propaganda pamphlets followed by something of a Know-Nothing bible, The Great American Battle, advertised as “the contest between Christianity and Political Romanism, with Portraits” and selling for $1.25. Writing under her own name, Miss Carroll produced more pamphlets and yet another book as she trumpeted to Fillmore, “For the first time in our history a woman has ventured openly and without disguise to espouse the cause of her Country.” But for all of her public pronouncements about politics, Anna Carroll was not the most well-known woman campaigning in 1856. That honor went to Jessie Benton Frémont.

  Jessie had grown up surrounded by politics. The daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, who served as senator from Missouri for three decades, the young girl spent much of her childhood at the home of her best friend, Elizabeth Blair, whose father, the publisher of the leading Democratic newspaper, occupied a choice position in Andrew Jackson’s “kitchen” Cabinet. As children, both Lizzie Blair and Jessie Benton were great favorites of President Jackson, who gave them the run of the White House and even bestowed his beloved late wife Rachel’s wedding ring on Lizzie. Both girls developed strong interests in politics as they grew up, with Lizzie Blair doing a good bit of her father’s secretarial work and adding her own thoughts to his correspondence, and Jessie spending much of her time in the Capitol learning about public policy. Neither the Blairs nor the Bentons approved of their daughters’ marriages, Lizzie to Samuel Phillips Lee, a navy man, and Jessie to John Charles Frémont, an army man and swashbuckling explorer. Nicknamed “the Pathfinder,” Frémont was elected to the Senate from the new state of California in 1850, the same year that Thomas Benton was defeated after thirty years in office because of his opposition to slavery. The Blairs soon accepted Phil Lee, who was off at sea most of the time, but though Benton for a time reconciled with the hot-tempered Frémont, in 1856 family friction ignited over politics.

  The fact that President Pierce had signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act—and that he didn’t take Blair and Benton into his inner circle—made him anathema to many Democrats like them who opposed the spread of slavery into the new territories. When the newly formed Republican Party made an impressive showing in the 1854 off-year election, Blair switched allegiances. Despite the fact that he was a slave owner and the Democrats derided the new party as “Black Republicans” for its stand on slavery, Blair became an enthusiastic convert and decided that the famous and handsome John C. Frémont would make the perfect presidential candidate. Benton disagreed about the choice of his somewhat unreliable son-in-law as Republican standard-bearer, causing his relationship to sour not only with his daughter but with his old friend Preston Blair as well. When Frémont established his Washington base at the Blair country house in Maryland, Lizzie Lee did her best to try to keep peace between the erstwhile allies but peace was hard to come by in the politics of 1856.

  Politics consumed the capital as the Congress debated what would happen in Kansas and Nebraska. And the women of Washington spent a great deal of time in the galleries of the House and Senate following every legislative maneuver. In among their numbers, generally excluded from the official press gallery, were several female correspondents. Newspaper writing was considered respectable employment for women needing to support themselves; then as now Congress could be counted on for good copy. And it was not just the speeches on the floor but the scene among the spectators that filled the dispatches of women reporters like Mary Jane Windle: “Groups of gentlemen might be seen clustered around ladies . . . while behind mosaic columns were others ‘tête-à-tête’ in a quiet flirtation. Reader, there are secrets in the keeping of those cosy galleries, secrets which might incite the most flagging goose-quill to flowing.” Miss Windle’s quill flowed freely with a telling eye and taut humor as she wrote for newspapers and journals, mainly in Charleston, South Carolina. “The change produced in the tone of an ordinary man by the letters Hon. preceding his name is unmistakable,” she chortled about members of Congress. “Here he is a public man! and everybody is his most obedient servant.” The delightful dispatches must have provided welcome relief for her readers from the regular Washington fare, which was filled with foreboding about the crumbling consensus in Congress.

  As pro- and anti-slavery settlers waged all-out war in Kansas, with murders and assassinations common occurrences, the rising death toll caused abolitionists like the fiery senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, to proclaim that “Bleeding Kansas” demonstrated the evils wrought by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. With what Lizzie Lee described as “intense excitement in the city about Kansas matters,” everyone knew Sumner was preparing a broadside on the subject. The following Monday would be a “big Senatorial day,” Lizzie wrote to her husband on May 14, when Sumner would “ ‘draw the sword and throw away the scabbard,’ to attack Butler.” For two days Sumner railed against the 1854 law and its authors, Stephen Douglas and Andrew Butler. Famously, his diatribe wreaked the revenge of Butler’s cousin Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a member of the House of Representatives who stormed into the Senate chamber a few days later and brutally beat Sumner with his gold-tipped cane. Lizzie and her father galloped into Washington from the family’s country house when they heard the news about the atta
ck in the Capitol and then they brought the bloodied and badly injured Sumner home to be nursed by the Blair women, and ironically, the family slaves. The beating turned each lawmaker into a hero in his own region—Brooks received dozens of canes from sympathetic southerners—but in Washington the South Carolina congressman fell into disfavor “after his historic assault on Mr. Sumner,” according to fellow southerner Virginia Clay. Sumner’s “martyrdom”—the rallying cry of “bleeding Sumner” joined with “Bleeding Kansas”—provided momentum for the new Republican Party when it met in Philadelphia in June to nominate its first presidential candidate.

  Jessie Benton Frémont did not doubt that her husband would be chosen. The couple had moved to New York and their home off Fifth Avenue was “a meeting ground for conspirators,” she joked that spring when she also found herself “quite the fashion.” Jessie boasted to her friend Lizzie Lee, “5th Avenue asks itself, ‘Have we a Presidentess among us’—and as I wear fine lace and purple I am in their eyes capable of filling the place.” Though ill, Preston Blair, accompanied by Lizzie, traveled to the Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia to push for Frémont’s nomination. Since it was considered unseemly for the candidates to attend their political conventions, Jessie had begged Lizzie to come from Philadelphia to New York “to triumph with us I hope.” After the popular “Pathfinder” won on the first official ballot, all of New York seemed ready to share in the triumph when a torchlight parade followed Frémont home from a rally and stood outside his house shouting, “let us see Jessie, let us see Jessie,” guaranteeing that for the first time the candidate’s wife would play a major role in a presidential campaign, not just behind the scenes but on the public stage.

  IT’S EASY TO see why Jessie Frémont captured the public’s fascination. The somewhat scandalous tale of the seventeen-year-old daughter of powerful Senator Benton defying his orders by running off with the exciting explorer fifteen years earlier was interesting enough, but Jessie’s married life also provided adventuresome fodder. After the elopement, Benton eventually reconciled with his wayward daughter and helped Frémont land a job exploring the Rocky Mountains in 1842. When John returned to Washington just before the birth of their baby girl, Jessie worked with him crafting the report of his travels, giving it the flourishes of her sprightly style. Newspapers published excerpts, John’s fame grew, and soon he was tapped for another western trip, this one taking him all the way to California and, with the 1845 publication of an account of that feat, written again with Jessie’s help, genuine celebrity status. “As for your report, its popularity astonished even me, your most confirmed & oldest worshipper,” Jessie rejoiced to John, who had once again headed west. The outbreak of the Mexican War found Frémont still in California, where he marched from settlement to settlement planting the American flag, making him a conquering hero in the eyes of his countrymen. He finally went home to his wife and baby after more than two years away, marked by some bruising bureaucratic battles resulting in a court-martial—an altercation with authorities that only increased Frémont’s popularity. Then, in 1848, the wanderer decided to settle in California; Jessie would have to leave the home she loved and the father who depended on her and make her way to a distant place “cut loose from everything that had made my previous life.”

  John would go by land in the winter, Jessie by sea the following spring, but first she decided to travel as far as the frontier with her husband. Bringing along five-year-old Lily and her new baby boy, the family reached St. Louis in October, then sailed up the Missouri River to the frontier town of Westport, Missouri. Ten-week-old Benton Frémont died on the boat, leaving his mother disconsolate and depressed to say goodbye to John and sadly take her little girl back to Washington. Jessie feared she “was to be launched literally on an unknown sea, travel to an unknown country, everything absolutely new and strange about me, and undefined for the future.”

  She wasn’t exaggerating about the unknown sea. It was to be an unbelievably difficult journey, down the Atlantic coast from New York, through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama, then up the Pacific Coast to San Francisco. As Jessie was preparing for the ordeal, the big news broke: gold, tons and tons of gold, lay under the soil of California. Americans by the thousands looking to get rich quick abandoned their farms and shops, grabbed picks and shovels, and set out to seek their fortunes. Gold diggers crammed onto the ship Jessie boarded in the spring of 1849 with six-year-old Lily plus a brother-in-law as chaperone. After her father and sisters said their farewells and went ashore, there was barely another woman to be found. When they arrived in Panama several days later, the ship’s captain tried to convince the intrepid young woman to turn back, “telling me that I had no idea of what I was to go through,” but Jessie pressed on despite the loss of her male protector—her brother-in-law was too sick to keep going. She too came down with a terrible fever during her almost two months in Panama waiting for transport to San Francisco. (Ships kept losing their crews in California as sailors jumped overboard to join the gold rush.) Though Jessie, as a prominent personage, was well taken care of by the aunt of the Panamanian ambassador to the United States, she still found herself in odd circumstances—served a baked monkey for breakfast one day, the astounded guest declared that it looked like “a little child that had been burned to death.” After she had spent almost two months stranded in this exotic outpost, the ship scheduled to carry Jessie Frémont to San Francisco arrived in the Panama City port.

  Designed for cargo, not people, the Panama packed more than four hundred itching-for-gold passengers into every possible space as it pushed up the Pacific coast for almost three weeks. Finally, on June 4, 1849, two and a half months after leaving New York, Jessie and Lily sailed into San Francisco Bay and the primitive settlement on its shore. “There were then some three or four regularly built houses,” as Jessie remembered it; “the rest were canvas and blanket tents.” No one wanted to stop looking for gold long enough to build a house; and “the whole force of San Francisco society” numbered sixteen women. Jessie didn’t last long in the damp air by the bay, and soon the family moved on to Monterey—“quite a town, with many good houses.”

  John Frémont had come to California as an explorer but, like everyone else, he had staked a claim on the land. The Spanish had given the huge tract he bought near Yosemite the charming name Las Mariposas, for the butterflies swarming the area. But Frémont found that his property contained something far heavier—gold. Lots of gold. So it was suddenly as people of wealth that the Frémonts greeted the men who assembled in Monterey for the state constitutional convention in September 1849. The issue confronting the gathering? The same as the one being debated on the other side of the continent: slavery. Emphatically insisting to amazed delegates that she would never “own or use a slave,” as Jessie remembered it later, “my pretty rooms were the headquarters of the antislavery party, and myself the example of happiness and hospitality without servants.” It was a story that would be embellished over the years as it served her husband’s political purposes, and those political purposes became paramount a few months later when the new legislature elected John C. Frémont as the first U.S. senator from California. The couple would return to Washington in triumph.

  Back in the thick of it, Jessie couldn’t have been happier. She returned to her father’s house a changed woman, “I had done so many things that I had never done before that a new sense of power had come to me.” And she was pregnant again. But her happy stay soon ended because John had to get reelected. In order to stagger the terms of the new state’s two senators, one would have to run again in the next election, and Frémont drew the short stick. So back across the country they trekked to find California even wilder than they had left it, filled with more gold seekers who had no romantic notions about the Pathfinder. A hopelessly deadlocked state legislature left John in limbo, so he decided to pursue his commercial interests, protesting that politics was “too costly an amusement in this country just now.” Jessie would not be returni
ng to the life she loved anytime soon. Still, she had a new baby boy named Charley and plenty of money, for a while. But Frémont proved a terrible businessman. After a series of missteps and embarrassments almost wiped him out, and a family sojourn in Europe failed to raise money for his enterprises, he went looking again for exploration jobs. With his connections in Washington, a job search there would be more likely to succeed. Home again with a new baby girl in 1853, Jessie quickly attracted the notice of prominent politicians. New York senator William Seward told his wife that Jessie “is a noble-spirited woman,” and then added, “She is very outspoken.” Mrs. Frémont was making her mark.

  Her old friends the Blairs served as a second family—Lizzie and her husband were little Charley’s godparents and when Jessie’s five-month-old baby girl got sick and died, Lizzie was with her, offering comfort. Another baby, a boy, was born in 1855 and promptly named after Lizzie’s father, Francis Preston Blair, and it was to Blair that Jessie turned asking for “advice and friendly counsel” when John was approached as a possible Republican candidate for president. Blair’s enthusiastic response jump-started the bandwagon for John C. Frémont.