1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [148]
When not traveling and speaking he was writing, usually in Mrs. Frémont’s garden. He composed a new oration on Daniel Webster—conveniently glossing over the Compromise of 1850, he admitted privately, but taking the occasion to remember the senator’s words when California achieved statehood: “At last we have seen our country stretch from sea to sea, and a new highway opened across the continent from us to our fellow-citizens on the shore of the Pacific. Far as they have gone, they are yet within the protection of the Union, and ready, I doubt it not, to join us all in its defence and support.” On April 19, he spoke on the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington—another opportunity to turn American history to the uses of the present.
Even the Eastern press was taking notice now. “The ghost of old Sam Adams abides with Mr. King,” wrote the New York Times’ West Coast correspondent. “While he charms his hearers with eloquence, he charges them with the very spirit that filled the air about Bunker Hill in 1774 and ’75…. He has brought every element of power that his popularity gives him to bear in all our cities in favor of liberty and human rights.”78
To be sure, the “Pacific-Republic folly” lingered, but now its would-be founding fathers were in full retreat. Asbury Harpending’s Alcatraz plot was foiled when one of his own coconspirators—a failed Senate candidate who had publicly called for Lincoln’s assassination—approached General Johnston to enlist him in the scheme. General Johnston may have been a Southerner, but he was a man of honor first. His response was to fortify all the federal outposts at risk, especially Alcatraz, and to transfer weapons from the Benicia arsenal to the less vulnerable island fortress. A few months later, the general would resign his commission and cross a thousand miles of the West on foot to take command of a Confederate army—but until then, as he promised the governor of California, he would defend the property of the United States, “and not a cartridge or a percussion cap belonging to her shall pass to any enemy while I am here as her representative.” The Alcatraz plot was dead, and Harpending and his friends slunk off into other, more promising, pursuits.79
Thomas Starr King, the awakened Christian warrior, relished the sense of combat. “I do not measure enough inches around the chest to go for a soldier,” he told Jessie Frémont, “but I see the way to make this fight.” What a remarkable war, to enlist even him as a hero!
And he considered her a soldier, too—if anything, a more potent force than he. “Have you met Mrs. Frémont?” he would later ask a friend. “Her husband I am very little acquainted with, but she is sublime, and carries guns enough to be formidable to a whole Cabinet—a she-Merrimack, thoroughly sheathed, and carrying fire in the genuine Benton furnaces.”80
Indeed, he had spent precious little time with Colonel Frémont. The Pathfinder was off on an extended trip through Europe in pursuit of capital for his mining ventures—accompanied by his mistress, a certain Mrs. Corbett of San Francisco.81 Mrs. King, for her own part, hardly appeared at Black Point. Irritable and chronically unwell, she missed Boston and despised their new home—“an ardent hater of this city, coast, and slope,” King called her.82 Whether he and Jessie Frémont ever took the opportunity to advance their mutual admiration past friendship is doubtful, however. Both seem to have remained devoutly observant of Victorian sexual proprieties, despite long hours alone together, including at least one overnight trip spent strolling in the meadows of San Mateo, skipping rocks on a stream, and lodging at a country inn.83 But they were ecstatic comrades-in-arms all the same: they shared in the giddy exhilaration of wartime, and thrilled at the events unfolding around them. “What a year to live in!” he exulted. “Worth all other times ever known in our history or in any other.”
Mrs. Frémont observed, with somewhat more restraint but greater penetration: “All over our country now we are being