Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Celestial observations told Frémont that Sutter’s empire was near the 38th parallel, almost directly west of both Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. They were near 121 degrees west, which meant he had traveled 44 degrees west of Washington, nearly one-eighth of the circumference of the earth. He was nearer the kingdom of Hawaii than Washington. He was nearer Mexico City than Washington. He was in Mexico illegally, a US Army officer who had appeared without papers or permission. While he had an explanation, authorities would have been within their rights to question or even expel him. Sutter had a duty to report Frémont’s presence: he had taken an oath of citizenship to Mexico and acted as a local government official. But he took his time notifying the departmental authorities nearly two hundred miles away in the coastal town of Monterey, waiting until Frémont had completed his purchase of animals and supplies and ridden away.

  Frémont had risked his men’s lives with little need, much as when he climbed “the highest point in the Rocky Mountains,” except on a grander scale. Again he got away with it, as persistence and endurance overcame his erratic decisions. The experience shifted the orientation of his life. Fate had momentarily brought him to California, a great stage where he sensed there would be more acts for him to play.

  The men had hardly started home on a warmer, more southerly route when Frémont began thinking about returning to California. He no doubt recognized in Sutter a self-invented wanderer like himself, who seemed to have made his own prosperous world. The appeal of the landscape was apparent: the expedition was a little smaller as it started east, because several of his men chose to resign and take positions working for Sutter. Frémont himself was “inspired with California,” he said. “Its delightful climate and uncommon beauty of surface; the great strength of vegetation and its grand commercial position; took possession of my mind. My wish when I first saw it settled into intention, and I determined to make there a home.”

  James K. Polk’s inauguration, said to be the first depicted in a newspaper illustration.

  Chapter Six

  THE MANIFEST PURPOSE OF PROVIDENCE

  Thomas Hart Benton and the Frémonts, 1843–1844

  Washington and St. Louis

  The country palpably changed while John was away from May 1843 to the summer of 1844. Prophetic events pointed toward a new phase of American history—beginning with the National Convention of Colored Citizens.

  On August 15, 1843, as John camped on the Green River in the Rockies, about forty people arrived for the convention in Buffalo, New York. They gathered in a public hall at the corner of Washington and Seneca streets, and Henry Highland Garnet called the meeting to order. The principal subject of the convention was the abolition of slavery, and Garnet had escaped slavery in Maryland. This meeting was not unprecedented; free black Americans had organized other such conventions in past years, and some white people had long campaigned against slavery. But the meeting in Buffalo took the dramatic step of discussing violent resistance. Describing slavery’s inhumanity in terms that left the room “infused with tears,” Garnet called upon slaves to demand freedom from their masters, and “if the master refused it, to tell them, then we shall take it.” It sounded like a call for revolution, though Garnet did not say precisely how slaves should take their freedom.

  The crowd roared its approval—until another former slave rose to object. Frederick Douglass was only twenty-five, but he’d had enough life experience to speak with authority. He had been born enslaved in eastern Maryland around 1817, and was separated from his mother as an infant so she could be made to work in the fields. Sent as a youth to serve a family in Baltimore, he learned to read through a flaw in the slave system: it was run by people susceptible to human feelings. His new master’s wife, he said, “at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness,” and helped the boy learn the alphabet and basic spelling. Her husband discovered the lessons and ordered her to stop, fearing that education would ruin the youth for slave work, but the boy covertly enlisted white schoolchildren to give him lessons. Later he met a free black woman, Anna Murray, who aided his escape to the North and then married him. And he began a life as an antislavery activist, a disciple of the radical white newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison of Boston, turning the words he had learned into weapons.

  Douglass told the convention that they should continue to rely on words. He warned that if slaves demanded their freedom in the way that Garnet proposed, it would lead to a futile “insurrection,” and Douglass “wanted emancipation in a better way,” through peaceful moral persuasion. Douglass prevailed. The convention called for the establishment of an antislavery newspaper, and for traveling lecturers to make the antislavery case. Afterward, Douglass and two white men followed up on their commitment to moral persuasion by beginning a speaking tour of western states, including an event in Pendleton, Indiana. Thirty stone-throwing white men drove the speakers off the stage, and one chased Douglass and broke his hand with a club.

  Brutal as their actions were, the attackers’ underlying sentiment was no different from official federal policy: slavery was best not discussed. Talk was dangerous. Neither major party had an interest in raising the issue, because both sought votes from the North and South by emphasizing less divisive issues. It required selective vision for Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer and former state lawmaker from the free state of Illinois, to join the same Whig party as Alexander H. Stephens, a slave owner elected to Congress from Georgia in 1842. The House of Representatives imposed a gag rule blocking discussion of antislavery petitions. But agitation was growing harder to contain. Improving transportation meant that like-minded people could gather for events such as the Convention of Colored Citizens, and activists could range more widely giving speeches. Increasing numbers of newspapers meant that dissident voices could be heard. Antislavery papers covered antislavery politicians, such as former president John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, who had been elected to Congress and was campaigning to end the House gag rule. As the abolitionist movement grew, Southern leaders were becoming more extreme in defense of their institution. Slavery was a barrel of gunpowder waiting for a fuse—and that slow-burning fuse was lit accidentally by the next prophetic event while John was away.

  In February 1844, a navy warship turned into the Potomac below Washington. The river was choked with ice for forty miles below the capital, but the ship cracked through the white sheets easily, leaving behind a trail of clear smooth water the width of the hull. The USS Princeton resembled a standard three-masted sailing ship, but its wooden hull hid features that made it unlike any warship seen before. A steam engine was churning belowdecks. It burned smokeless coal called anthracite, and had a funnel that could be retracted out of sight in order to surprise enemy sailing ships with its mysterious speed. Rather than the vulnerable paddle wheels of most steamers, the engine turned a screw propeller below the waterline. Each cannon on deck was mounted so it could swivel to fire to either side, rather than poking from a gunport on one side, and its two main guns were so massive they had been given names: one was the Peacemaker, while the other was named for a territory over which the ship might someday fight: Oregon.

  The Princeton’s commander, Captain Robert F. Stockton, had designed the ship in collaboration with John Ericsson, a brilliant engineer who was an immigrant from Sweden. Calling his ship’s innovations the most important “since the invention of gunpowder,” Stockton had championed the big guns over the objection of the army’s chief of ordnance, who warned that such huge iron barrels might contain imperfections and come apart when fired. Now he brought the ship to Washington to show off his creation, anchoring within sight of the Capitol’s green dome. On February 16, President Tyler boarded the ship for a short exhibition cruise. On February 28 the president returned with other officials, including Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Had Jessie not been away in St. Louis, she surely would have come: Dolley Madison, w
idow of President James Madison, was one of several women on board as the Princeton cruised downriver past the grave of George Washington at Mount Vernon. The crew demonstrated the big guns several times, and late in the voyage, the secretary of the navy announced a final blast of the Peacemaker. President Tyler was delayed belowdecks, but other dignitaries gathered. Captain Stockton—stern-faced, with a full head of hair and boundless energy—stood near Senator Benton and took hold of the lanyard. “I saw the hammer pulled back,” said Benton, “heard a tap—saw a flash—felt a blast in the face, and knew that my hat was gone: and that was the last I knew of the world, or of myself, for a time, of which I can give no account.” He regained consciousness a moment later to see “Stockton, hat gone, and face blackened, standing bolt upright, staring fixedly upon the shattered gun.” The left side of the barrel had come apart, showering the deck with shrapnel. The deck was strewn with bodies. The secretary of state was killed. The secretary of the navy was killed. Others of the dead included a black man, a slave who worked as President Tyler’s valet.

  The disaster had a notable aftereffect. Tyler had to choose a new secretary of state, who would face an especially sensitive task. The late Secretary Upshur had been negotiating for the United States to annex the independent Republic of Texas. Mexico still claimed Texas and threatened to go to war over it, while Texas’s admission would face domestic opposition because the Texans permitted slavery. It would take great subtlety for Upshur’s successor to avoid disaster, but President Tyler nominated John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who threw aside all subtlety. As soon as the Senate confirmed him as secretary, he demanded the annexation of Texas as an essential move for the protection of slavery. American politics soon began to fall apart. David Lee Child, an antislavery journalist, voiced astonishment that Calhoun could ever have been entrusted with Texas when the stakes were so high: “It is almost as if [Calhoun] had been appointed cannoneer to fire off the ‘Peacemaker’ after the evil genius of another had contrived and charged it.”

  * * *

  CALHOUN WAS THE FORMER VICE PRESIDENT who had been in league with the South Carolina nullifiers when John was growing up there. He was also a political theorist and a stiff, stern-faced, brooding tribune of slavery, who persuaded himself that it was “a positive good.” Discarding the thinking of men like Thomas Jefferson, who called slavery an inherited evil that he wished he knew how to end, Calhoun declared in 1837 that slavery was no more unfair than any other economic system: “There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” Northern free laborers were also exploited by the rich, he said, and Northern capitalism was less orderly. Revealing the paranoia of a white man who represented a majority black state, he alleged that Northern abolitionists wanted not merely to free black slaves but to turn them into masters and their masters into slaves.

  Now it fell to Calhoun to justify the annexation of Texas. Although he could have chosen arguments that downplayed slavery, he embraced a conspiracy theory that was popular in proslavery circles. The United States must seize Texas, he said, because the British empire was plotting to take it and abolish slavery there, with destabilizing effects on the American South. When the British ambassador in Washington denied any such conspiracy but expressed a general wish to end slavery around the world, Calhoun took the bait and responded with a letter defending slavery. He argued that Southern slaves were better off than free black citizens in the North, who suffered from high rates of “deafness, blindness, insanity, and idiocy.” It was on these terms that the administration sent a treaty of Texas annexation to the Senate.

  Calhoun’s attitude triggered another prophetic event: Senator Thomas Hart Benton rose in opposition to annexation. He set aside his lifelong support of national expansion, including the acquisition of Texas, and argued that taking Texas would be wrong. An about-face of this magnitude called for an explanation, which Benton gave in a speech on the Senate floor beginning May 16, 1844. Working from a stack of items on his desk—books and newspapers in multiple languages, documents obtained from the Tyler administration, and even extracts from his own old speeches—he delivered a speech that eventually spread across portions of three days. He said northern Texas should belong to the United States, but Texans also claimed the Rio Grande Valley to the south, which they had never controlled. The Rio Grande was simply part of Mexico, and seizing it would be a “sudden, reckless, and monstrous course.” Mexico prohibited slavery, which meant the land along the Rio Grande was free soil and should remain that way: “I shall not engage in schemes for [slavery’s] extension into regions where it was never known . . . where a slave’s face was never seen!” Seizing Texas would lead to “the crime and infamy of unjust war.”

  Every senator must have appreciated the irony: Benton himself was still a slave owner. It was likely that his view of African Americans had evolved slightly: because he used free workers in his home, he had come to know Jacob Dodson, the son of family servants who had volunteered to take risks in the West by John’s side. Benton respected the young black man enough that he would later find him a job in the Senate, asking his colleagues to vote Dodson “the same extra compensation” paid to other workers. But Benton’s stand on Texas was not based on racial equality. He was defending the Union. He suspected that Calhoun and the slave interests wanted Texas in order to make the South large enough to declare independence.

  When it came time to vote on the treaty of annexation, Benton’s side appeared to triumph. He peeled away several Democrats to join nearly all the Whigs to crush it. Yet the debate was not over. The presidential election was looming. Taking Texas was broadly popular, and the election could turn into a referendum on it.

  * * *

  DURING THE SAME DAYS IN MAY that Senator Benton made his Senate speech, a prophetic activity was taking place beneath his feet. Below the semicircular Senate chamber was the semicircular chamber of the Supreme Court, a vaulted red-carpeted room where the judges’ bench backed up against a row of windows. The court was out of session that May, but the lamps were lit, and passers-by could be forgiven for wondering what was happening. Men had run copper wires into the room and attached them to a Grove battery, made with nitric acid in a ceramic container. The wires also connected to a device made of wood and metal, small enough to rest on one of the tables. A man sometimes pressed a lever on the device, which produced a clicking sound. Other times the device appeared to click on its own, and the man paid strict attention, as if the clicks were some kind of language.

  Samuel F. B. Morse had been working on this project for years. Jessie Benton Frémont had seen him around Washington; he visited the patent commissioner, a neighbor of the Bentons, and she noticed his desperation: “He was so worn-out that his dead-white face and brilliant hollow eyes startled one.” He was a clean-shaven New Englander in his fifties, deep into a life of frustrated ambition. In the 1820s he was a painter, who created an epic scene of the House of Representatives in session but failed to interest Congress in buying it. In the 1830s, he became a political activist in New York, and wrote newspaper essays under headlines such as FOREIGN CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE LIBERTIES OF THE UNITED STATES. He alleged without evidence that European powers were using the religion of Catholic immigrants as a way to control the country. His career as a conspiracy theorist ended when he ran for mayor of New York as an anti-immigrant candidate and the city of immigrants defeated him. Next, in the 1840s, Morse asked Congress to help fund a long-distance test of his “electro-magnetic telegraph.” The hollow-eyed man “was laughed at in Congress,” Jessie said. One representative mockingly suggested that if subsidizing telegraphy made sense, Congress should also subsidize mesmerism. But lawmakers narrowly approved Morse’s thirty-thousand-dollar payment, and by May 1844, crews under his direction had hung cable from chestnut poles, with the bark still on, that marched some forty miles alongside the railroad tracks from Washington to
Baltimore. He arranged for the Washington end of the cable to terminate inside the Capitol, which was how the Supreme Court chamber became the nation’s first telegraph office.

  On May 24, as two dozen people stood watching, the fifty-three-year-old used the code that would bear his name to tap out “What hath God wrought,” a phrase from the book of Numbers. It had been suggested to him by a young woman he liked, the patent commissioner’s teenage daughter, Annie Ellsworth. Morse was elated when confirmation of his message arrived from Baltimore, and on May 27 he began a more ambitious demonstration. The Democratic National Convention opened that day in Baltimore, where delegates from every state gathered to choose the party’s nominee for the fall presidential election. Morse made arrangements for news updates from the crowded convention hall to be raced to his telegraph set at the Baltimore railway station. His operator tapped out each update for the benefit of those in the capital city.

  9¾ o’clock. Buchanan stock said to be rising

  That was the Bentons’ neighbor James Buchanan, one of numerous presidential contenders. Former president Martin Van Buren was considered the favorite.