1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [133]
Now, in early 1861, the game had suddenly changed. It would be played in Congress no longer: the Southerners had called forfeit and gone home in a huff. Already, in the first few months of that year, Kansas had been admitted as a free state and Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada as free territories. An Illinois railroad lawyer was in the White House, and everyone expected that the long-blocked pathway to the Pacific would soon be open for business.
As the Civil War began, a new game opened on the chessboard of the West. There were two key places where it might be won or lost: one on the shores of the Pacific, the other on the banks of the Mississippi. It would be decided in one of these places with words; in the other, with guns.
FROM HER VERANDA, the Pathfinder’s wife watched the sun vanish between the two great western headlands, leaving America behind until next dawn. She loved this place more than any other that she had ever known, either on this continent or in her wide travels abroad. Her quaint Gothic cottage commanded all of Black Point, the finest spot on the whole bay, with dark thickets of scrub oak and laurel covering steep hillsides that sloped down to a sandy beach. She had recently built the porch around three sides of the house, laid out gardens and gravel paths, and planted climbing rosebushes and trellised vines. She took joy even in the tolling of the fog bells on oceanbound vessels, and in the night beacon that flashed on the harbor fort: “my night light,” she called it. When the wind was off the bay, she claimed, she could hear the flapping of sails on the schooners as they rounded the point, and the swearing of captains pacing their decks.17
But Jessie Benton Frémont could also look out at this wide, God-given landscape and almost believe that she and her family had brought it all into being, had conjured the ships and the fort and the bay—and a prospering American city whose growth was the marvel of the entire world—as surely as she had planted the clambering roses.
Her father, the legendary Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, had fought for three decades in Congress to advance his vision of a transcontinental American empire, the grand historical culmination that Providence and nature had foreordained. As long ago as 1818, he had written:
Europe discharges her inhabitants upon America; America pours her population from east to west.… All obey the same impulse—that of going to the West, which, from the beginning of time, has been the course of the heavenly bodies, of the human race, and of science, civilization, and national power following in their train. Soon the Rocky Mountains will be passed, and the “children of Adam” will have completed their circumnavigation of the globe.18
After the American imperium had extended itself to the shores of the Pacific, he said, it would reach farther yet, to East Asia, as “science, liberal principles in government, and the true religion … cast their lights across the intervening sea,” while the newly liberated masses of China and Japan poured forth eastward, in turn, to settle the valley of the Columbia River. This empire, Benton said, would advance not by military conquest but by peaceful commerce, bringing in train universal principles of enlightenment. The senator championed his cause with all the tenacity and toughness to be expected of a man who had once gotten into a gunfight with Andrew Jackson, and had slain another opponent in a duel with pistols at three yards.19
Jessie’s husband, Colonel John C. Frémont, had—in the eyes of many Americans—made her father’s dream a reality. From the upper Mississippi to the southwestern deserts, he had mapped a quarter of the North American continent, gathering a wealth of geographical and scientific knowledge that made Lewis and Clark’s contributions look meager in comparison. He had opened highways to the Pacific, and planted the Stars and Stripes on