1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [149]
Several days after King’s speech on Washington, Jessie Frémont dared step into the public limelight as she had never done before: she published an article in a newspaper. The Frémonts’ former coachman, Albert Lea, a Negro, had been sentenced to death for murder, and although he was clearly guilty, she felt the sentence was unjust, motivated by the judge’s racism and pro-Southern leanings. Her open letter of protest in the daily Alta California, signed J.B.F., shocked the city: a lady of national prominence airing a political grievance in the press, and defending a Negro murderer to boot!
Lea would go to the gallows in the end, but in Mrs. Frémont’s life it was a turning point. Never again was she content merely to be one famous man’s daughter and another’s wife.84
Did Mr. King and Mrs. Frémont’s rhetorical campaign—in which she was the chief strategist, he the field marshal—actually save California for the Union? She would never stop believing that it had. Many others thought likewise; Ralph Waldo Emerson would write King the following year to say that “the salvation and future of California are mainly in your hands.”85
This was almost certainly an exaggeration. The shock of actual secession, and of the news from Fort Sumter, were surely more influential in making most Californians realize that no middle ground, no neutrality, was possible. Their state could not stand outside American history, any more than any other part of the country. California—and each of its citizens—would have to stand with the new Union, with the warlike Union, or be classed among its enemies. This realization awoke in many people an idealism they had not known they possessed. “The noble and beautiful side of the nation is now apparent,” Mrs. Frémont wrote to a friend back East.86
Yet there is no denying that King’s words, reaching millions in person and in print, articulated a rationale for linking California’s destiny to that of the beleaguered East. Speaking as if he were the voice of history itself, he reconnected what seemed the land of the past to the land of the future. In his Lexington speech—first delivered while news of Sumter’s surrender was crossing the plains in a Pony Express pouch—he asked the audience to imagine the sun rising on that first morning of the Revolution: shining first on the Maine coast and his beloved New England mountains, then sweeping over the Alleghenies and turning the Hudson into a thread of gold, crossing the Mississippi, flooding the prairies with light, climbing the far slope of the Rockies, then gleaming upon the highest peaks of the Sierras before dawn rolled at last over the western ocean—this heavenly path confirming the rightness of the continent’s unity.87
The men, women, and children in the room listened in silence. It was the kind of journey that almost every one of them had also taken. And it was a time when gorgeous words could move spirits in a way that they rarely can today.
King brought Eastern culture with him to the West, even into the mining camps. Curious people came just to see this expatriate Bostonian, this friend of Beecher and Emerson: names that all literate Americans knew. Another message that King carried with him wherever he spoke: This is yours, too.
In June 1861, Frank Buck—the man who had told his sister that he didn’t “give a straw” if the Union perished—went to hear King’s speech on Washington in the raw wooden meetinghouse up in Weaverville. As soon as he came home, still electrified by the experience, he sat down to write her another letter:
Who do you think we had to preach? ‘T. Starr King.’ … It was beautiful beyond description. Language just flows from his mouth so easily. Everybody was in ecstasies. He held the audience spell bound for two hours. It was a great treat for us I assure you. Even the men from Virginia and Texas admired him although he lashed the Secessionists without mercy.
I had intended to write you at some length on politics but there are