1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [134]
Jessie Frémont took perhaps even greater pride in being the human link between the dream and the land; the senator and the soldier. In many respects, she was more remarkable than either of the two men. Jessie had inherited all of her father’s toughness or even more: President Buchanan once called her, admiringly or not, “the square root of Tom Benton.” She had a cooler head and sharper wits than the old senator, though—and was a more brilliant politician, philosopher, and strategist than her soldier husband. A better writer, too: she had taken the dry data of the colonel’s expeditions and crafted them into literary epics of the American West, official government reports that became best sellers and made her husband a national hero.* (Some even went so far as to say that Jessie Frémont had made her husband what he was.) Her own vision of the West—unlike her father’s baroque fantasies—was clean, compelling, and modern. “How can I tell all that the name, California, represents?” she once wrote, reflecting on her time there before the war. “If our East has a life of yesterday, and the [Midwest] of to-day, then here to-morrow had come.… What a dream of daring young energy—of possibility—of certainties—of burdens dropped and visions realized!”21
Burdens dropped and visions realized. Senator Benton and the two Frémonts were all Southerners, from slaveholding families, who had reinvented themselves as Westerners and in the process had become foes of slavery. How could human bondage coexist with the Western dream? The old man, though he owned slaves until the day he died, had made no secret of his distaste for the “peculiar institution,” and ultimately sacrificed his political career to his conscience.22 His daughter went considerably further. In 1849, California’s new territorial legislature debated whether to allow slavery; some settlers from the South had brought their slaves with them, while many others had visions of gold mines worked by black and Indian bondmen. Jessie Frémont made her home the command center for the opposition, presiding at the dinner table—in the absence of her husband, usually—plotting strategy with the men.
Once she even invited fifteen proslavery lawmakers to her house to debate them single-handedly. Having received a piece of her mind, one of them replied dismissively, “Fine sentiment, Mrs. Frémont, but the aristocracy will always have slaves.”
“But why not an aristocracy of emancipators?” she retorted. “It isn’t a pretty sight in a free country for a child to see and hear chain gangs clanking through the streets.”
The legislature voted to keep California free. A few months later, the debate was carried to Washington, when Congress considered statehood for the fast-growing territory. Jefferson Davis argued in the Senate that slavery was part of California’s natural destiny: “It was to work the gold mines on this continent that the Spaniards first brought Africans to the country. The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat and sudden changes of climate, to which the African race are altogether better adapted.” In the end, though, Washington ratified the verdict already reached in Sacramento.23
In 1856, the Frémonts carried their antislavery ideals into the national arena. When the new Republican Party sought its first presidential nominee, it was John C. Frémont who—with considerable prodding from his wife—agreed to run, under the slogan “Free Speech, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont.” Unlike any previous candidate’s wife in American history, Jessie figured prominently in the campaign (more than her soft-spoken husband, some critics would snipe). Republican marchers waved banners reading frémont and jessie, and women, shockingly, joined these political demonstrations,