1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [143]
Such was the atmosphere in which the statewide convention assembled in St. Louis to determine Missouri’s fate.
ONE DAY TOWARD THE END OF 1860, Jessie Frémont tripped over a board that had come loose on one of San Francisco’s rickety plank sidewalks, hurting her leg so badly that for the next six months she was largely confined to the cottage at Black Point. But Mrs. Frémont hardly needed to go down into the city anyhow: San Francisco, as usual, came up to see Mrs. Frémont.56
In her aerie above the Bay, she presided over a salon—almost all male—of the quickest wits and keenest minds on the Pacific Coast. The lure of a golden land had already drawn to California a remarkable array of thinkers, dreamers, talkers, and schemers, all of whom rejoiced to discover a distant shore where the social proprieties and cultural pieties of Boston and Philadelphia did not apply. At Jessie Frémont’s gatherings, silver-haired politicians chatted with youthful poets; famous novelists collected sea yarns from the captains of China-trade clippers. The house itself suggested a kind of newfangled cultural mélange unlike anything seen in the East: silk hangings and damask-shrouded furniture in the latest Paris taste intermingled with American Indian baskets and photographs of Western landscapes, along with a splendid Albert Bierstadt painting of the Golden Gate. On the walls of her young sons’ room Mrs. Frémont pasted cutout pictures of ships and horses.
Guests lingered for hours over luncheon on the veranda, or strolled together through the gardens, enjoying the perfume of flowers mixing with the smell of the sea. They relished, too, the charisma of their famous hostess, who enthralled them with her tales of a girlhood spent dandled on the knees of presidents. She had never been a conventional beauty, and was growing stout and matronly as middle age approached, but she still retained all the charm that had won her, at the age of seventeen, the handsomest man in Washington as husband.57
When Herman Melville, in the gloomy eclipse of his literary fame, passed through San Francisco, he naturally called at Black Point, where a lively afternoon of conversation cheered him considerably. A much more frequent visitor was a shy, intense young writer named Bret Harte, whom Jessie Frémont had discovered while he was working as a typesetter and living in a tiny apartment above a restaurant. Harte’s comic poems and tales of life in the mining camps enchanted her, as did his newspaper columns, signed The Bohemian, which evoked a particularly Californian kind of cultural life in which writers and artists lived as rugged free spirits. Each Sunday afternoon, he would come to dinner and read aloud from his latest manuscript for her to critique. “Sometimes her comments cut like a lash, but her praise is sincere and freely given,” Harte told a friend. “To know her is a liberal education.” Mrs. Frémont soon shared her “pet,” as she called him, with the Eastern literary establishment, helping him land a short story in The Atlantic Monthly—and thus introduced a new, distinctively Western voice into American letters.58
As for the famous Pathfinder, when he was there at all he was usually just a taciturn presence hovering at the margins of his wife’s sparkling soirees. More often, Colonel Frémont was away from San Francisco attending to his troubled gold-mining enterprises and other personal affairs.
Even when the former presidential candidate was absent, though, politics was very much in the air at Black Point. Senator Edward D. Baker, the West Coast’s most prominent Republican—indeed, one of the national party’s rising stars—was a habitué. A handsome, hot-tempered, powerfully built Midwesterner, the Gray Eagle probably reminded Mrs. Frémont of her father. Like old Tom Benton, Baker was one of the most captivating orators in Congress. His skills had been honed back in Illinois, where he had joined the Disciple sect to become, like James Garfield, a youthful sensation on the preaching circuit.59 Only after migrating