1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [225]
Mrs. Frémont, hoping she could stay Lincoln’s hand, went immediately to the White House. She found the president adamant in his position; he annoyed her still further when he said condescendingly, “You are quite a female politician.” Lincoln told John Hay afterward that Mrs. Frémont had pressed him so hard that it was all he could do to avoid having an open quarrel with her.
(Mrs. Frémont, hearing of this many years later, wrote: “Strange, isn’t it, that when a man expresses a conviction fearlessly, he is reported as having made a trenchant and forceful statement, but when a woman speaks thus earnestly, she is reported as a lady who has lost her temper.”)
His emancipation order revoked, John C. Frémont’s career in public life abruptly ended soon after, but Jessie Frémont was just beginning a prolific and successful career of her own as a writer. Her first work, an account of the early months of the Civil War in Missouri, appeared in 1863. It included a passage in which Mrs. Frémont said she hoped readers would not think it “unwomanly” of her to publish a book, but, she added, “the restraints of ordinary times do not apply now.”
During the financial crisis of the 1870s, the Frémonts lost what remained of their once vast fortune. Throughout the next two decades, as they struggled on the edge of poverty, Jessie kept them afloat with the income from her many books and magazine articles. After John’s death in 1891, newspapers ran articles about the Great Pathfinder’s widow, now living in destitution.
Embarrassed, the California legislature voted her a pension, and some Los Angeles women raised money to build a house for her in their city. Jessie Frémont died there on December 27, 1902, her death mourned as the passing of a vanished West.9
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The house and gardens at Black Point were seized by the federal government during the Civil War and demolished to build earthworks and an artillery battery. The Frémonts, still on the East Coast, were not informed, and Jessie learned only when a Union officer she met at a party happened to mention it in casual conversation. (“Your boys’ room was so pretty I hated to put soldiers in it,” he said, “still more to tear down the walls, where you had pasted pictures of ships and horses and written verses.”) Throughout the rest of her life she tried unsuccessfully to recover the property, which became part of Fort Mason. For more than a century, no trace of her gardens was thought to survive, but in 2010, horticultural experts identified a rosebush that is believed to date from the Frémonts’ occupancy.10
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The “Gray Eagle,” Senator Edward D. Baker, was killed at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, in October 1861, at the head of the First California Regiment.
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Thomas Starr King continued working tirelessly for the Union cause in California. Beginning in the autumn of 1861, he became a leading organizer and fund-raiser for the United States Sanitary Commission, a government agency that organized citizen volunteers, especially women, in aiding wounded and sick Union soldiers. (It later inspired the founding of the American Red Cross.) King spent nearly all his time on the lecture circuit giving patriotic speeches and soliciting money for the commission; he is said to have been personally responsible for more than one and a half million dollars in contributions from the West Coast. Exhausted by these labors, he died of diphtheria in San Francisco on March 4, 1864, at the age of thirty-nine.
He and Jessie Frémont had never seen each other again. At her request, telegraphed from New York, a small bouquet of violets was placed on his chest at the funeral.
In 1931, the state of California placed a statue of King in the U.S. Capitol, thus honoring him as one of the two heroes permitted to be enshrined there by each of the fifty states. In 2009, his statue was removed and replaced with one of Ronald Reagan.11
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Nathaniel