1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [144]
In October 1860, shortly before she injured her leg, Jessie Frémont brought several friends along to the American Theatre on Sansome Street to see Baker give a campaign speech for Lincoln. The senator had arrived in town by steamer the week before, met at the wharf by a phalanx of Wide Awakes, his ever-present “bodyguard” for the duration of his stay. Thousands of San Franciscans turned out to hear his address at the theater; Baker’s friendship with Lincoln went back more than twenty years, to a time when they had both been young lawyers in Springfield, and no doubt many of his listeners hoped to hear personal anecdotes of the Rail-Splitter. It turned out, however, that Baker had very little to say about his party’s nominee. He addressed larger themes, in words that spoke directly to an audience of Western pioneers:
The normal condition of the Territories is freedom. Stand on the edge of the Sierra Nevadas, or upon the brow of any eminence looking down upon the Territories beyond, and what do you behold? You find there the savage, the wild beast, and the wilderness; but you do not find slavery.… The Western man goes into the Territory with his family, his horses, his oxen, his ax and other implements of labor. The Southern man goes with his slave.
A savvy politician, the senator reassured everyone that a vote for the Republicans was simply a vote for free white labor, not a vote for black emancipation: the party was committed not to interfere with slavery wherever it was already legal. Yet, at the climax of his speech, Colonel Baker, as he was often called, seemed to advocate nothing less than an American revolution:
Everywhere abroad, the great ideas of personal liberty spread, increase, fructify. Here—ours is the exception! In this home of the exile, in this land of constitutional liberty, it is left for us to teach the world that slavery marches in solemn procession! that under the American stars slavery has protection, and the name of freedom must be faintly breathed—the songs of freedom be faintly sung! Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, hosts of good men are praying, fighting, dying on scaffolds, in dungeons, oftener yet on battle fields for freedom: and yet while this great procession marches under the arches of liberty, we alone shrink back trembling and afraid when freedom is but mentioned!
At this, one newspaper reported, the entire hall broke out into “terrific cheers.” And that was not all: “While the people were cheering, Mr. Harte, who sat on the platform, apparently carried away with enthusiasm, rushed to the footlights, and with extended arms, excessive vehemence and loud voice, declared: ‘It is true! it is true, gentlemen! We are slaves, compared with the rest of the world. The colonel is right!’—then, pale as a ghost, staggered back to his seat, the people cheering vociferously.”60
It was, to say the least, out of character for the shy young poet. People said afterward that his patroness must have put him up to it. More than a few said that but for being a lady, and a famous man’s wife, Mrs. Frémont would have liked to be shouting from the footlights herself.61
But the voice that would carry farthest and loudest across California in the months to come was neither the distinguished senator’s nor the mercurial poet’s. It was another of Jessie Frémont’s protégés who accompanied her to the American Theatre that evening. He was perhaps the most unlikely-looking hero in the entire hall. But in years to come, people would call him “the man who saved California for the Union.”62
Mrs. Frémont had become acquainted with the young Reverend Thomas Starr King one evening in the spring of 1860, when he and his wife had come to dinner at Black Point—an obligation of all interesting newcomers to San Francisco. The hostess, possessing as she did a keen eye for masculine beauty, cannot have been particularly impressed as she clasped King’s frail white hand in welcome. The clergyman stood barely over five feet tall, with greasy hair that