Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  A Democratic/Know-Nothing combination was what John’s friend Carrington proposed, and John seriously considered tying his fortune to this collection of misled patriots, bigots, and cynics. Carrington revealed himself as an emissary from a group of politicos who thought Frémont could be their presidential candidate. John B. Floyd, a former governor of Virginia, was said to be among the Frémont enthusiasts; so, too, was William Preston, another of Jessie’s politically active relations. In the summer of 1855, Floyd and other Democrats met John in New York at the St. Nicholas, a new luxury hotel on Broadway. Amid its “profusion of mirrors, gilding, tapestry, and crystal,” which reminded one visitor of “the palace of some Eastern prince,” John and his political suitors walked velvet-pile carpets and conferred across marble tables. The men suggested they could support John at the following year’s Democratic convention. Floyd and others also made clear that any Democrat must support the South, upholding the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. These were terms that John found “impossible . . . to accept.” The meeting broke up without agreement; John walked away doubting that he could work with the Southern men, who themselves walked away with a lower opinion of the great explorer. The Democrat Floyd later insisted that he was the one who had rejected John: “I . . . considered him very light metal (notwithstanding Mariposa,) and extremely ill-formed on all political subjects. . . . The influences which governed him were Abolition.”

  John was indeed being influenced by antislavery forces, as was apparent by a friend he brought to the meeting: Nathaniel P. Banks, the Massachusetts Democratic congressman turned nativist. Banks was taken with the idea that John’s heroic reputation made him an ideal presidential candidate. But he was also an antislavery man, and triggered arguments by stating his views during the meeting; he may not have minded that the conference failed. Professional politicians such as Banks were puzzling over the problem of assembling a majority in a fragmented electorate. There was a very large proslavery vote. There was a very large nativist vote. It was hard to imagine winning a national election without pandering to one constituency or both. Yet there was also a very large antislavery vote, and some states had a substantial immigrant vote. How could a candidate attract any of these groups without fatally alienating others? Solving this problem would take the perfect blend of issues, words, and men. Clearly John’s friend Banks did not think the politicos at the St. Nicholas had the winning combination, though there might be other combinations available.

  * * *

  AFTER THE DEMOCRATIC CONFERENCE John visited his most important political adviser. He caught the relay of trains and boats northeastward toward Cape Cod and took a ferry to Nantucket Island. He passed through the wealthy old whaling town by the harbor, with its brick-and-glass storefronts and horses clattering on cobblestone streets, and crossed the sandy hills of the island toward the lighthouse at its far end. Jessie had taken the children there for the summer.

  She was hoping the ocean air would help her recover from childbirth. A son had been born to the Frémonts on May 17, the third of their children to survive: Francis Preston Frémont, named in honor of Lizzie Lee’s father, Francis Preston Blair. Jessie and the children were staying at Siasconset, on the seaward point of the island; she wrote a letter to Lizzie saying it was a village of “old sailors and whaling captains” and their families, where four-year-old Charlie played with “a little crowd of boys who will inevitably go whaling in their turn.” The air was invigorating, the ocean beyond the lighthouse was awe-inspiring, and Jessie hated it. “I shall not begin to tell you how forlornly lonesome this island is,” she wrote Lizzie. For days they shared the house with a Quaker family, including grandchildren of the famed abolitionist Lucretia Mott. Jessie agreed with Mott about slavery but took offense at her self-righteous style: “Badly as she thinks of southern people I always thought worse of a ‘strong-minded’ speech making woman,” she said, and she was disappointed to find Mott’s relations to be as irritating as Mott.

  John arrived a few days after Jessie mailed this letter. They went for a walk out to the Siasconset lighthouse, and he told her of the Democratic conference in New York. Despite its failure, John’s prospects seemed bright; Banks still favored him, and Jessie was able to report that John also had support from key politicos who had met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1855. One of the people at the meeting had gone on to stay on Nantucket near Jessie, and kept her posted on the Pennsylvanians’ efforts. Jessie concluded that John needed more advice, and when he departed Siasconset she sent a letter ahead to her newborn baby’s namesake, Francis Preston Blair.

  My dear Mr. Blair,

  Mr. Frémont has under consideration so important a step, that before taking it he wishes for the advice and friendly counsel which have heretofore proved so full of sagacity and led to such success. In talking of it together I offered to ask it from you again, and my own little judgment being favorable I almost ventured to promise your assistance.

  Within days, Blair not only met with John but began drafting a platform of ideas on which he might run. The central plank was restoring the Missouri Compromise. From that moment, with characteristic energy, he became John’s principal political manager, guiding him toward an antislavery candidacy.

  An observer in the 1850s described Blair as “a little old gentleman, thin, slender, and feeble in appearance,” who was “given a top-heavy appearance by the fact that his head is too big for his body, and his hat too big for his head.” When he doffed the hat, it revealed a nearly bald head. His eyes blazed with enthusiasm; he was a gregarious man, talented at making and keeping friends. He was also brilliant with words. In the 1820s he was a Kentucky court clerk, political partisan, and newspaper writer who worked to elect Andrew Jackson; in 1830 Jackson brought him to Washington. The Democratic Party founder installed him as the editor of the new Democratic newspaper, the Washington Globe, which Blair ran for fifteen years. He was Jackson’s voice and shameless promoter, recasting the stubborn, furious, half-dead old duelist as a colossus who shrugged off all attacks. (“The storms of faction beat around him unheeded,” Blair wrote early on. “The cloud rests upon him but a moment and leaves him more bright than before, towering in the sunshine of spotless honor and eternal truth.”) He became one of the newsmen in Jackson’s informal kitchen cabinet, then a permanent counselor to presidents, with a house across Pennsylvania Avenue from the executive mansion and an estate outside town called Silver Spring. He worked closely with Jackson’s successor, Van Buren, although more recent Democratic presidents had discarded him. He was still angry that Polk had removed him from the Globe (and, to Blair’s further fury, had changed the newspaper’s name to the Union, thus ending the Globe and erasing Blair’s legacy). Blair blamed slave interests for his political exile because, although he was a slave owner himself, he shared Benton’s dim view of slavery expansion. If he could find the right candidate in 1856 he could strike back and recover his influence.

  At first Blair thought of running John as an independent Democrat, but he was drawn toward the Republicans. The new party was attracting converts, such as Seward, the once-discouraged Whig from New York, and Salmon P. Chase, an antislavery Democrat elected governor of Ohio in late 1855. Both had statewide political organizations behind them. Nathaniel Banks—once a Democrat, then a Know-Nothing—was drifting toward the new party, and Blair prepared for his own party switch while Jessie traded conspiratorial notes with him. She reported on the movements of “Mr. B,” which was how she referred to Banks, fearing that Democratic postmasters appointed by President Pierce were reading Blair’s mail. Banks was maneuvering to become Speaker of the House. In another letter she relayed a message from John: “I am told to tell you that satisfactory intelligence has been brought in from the east & west—the details are to be given you in your own library.”

  In December, Blair wrote a letter to the Republican Association of Washington effectively pledging his support to the party. His shift made news, denounced
in Democratic papers and embraced by Republicans. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” an Albany man wrote Blair, saying his link to the old Unionist Andrew Jackson “carries with it a prestige that you yourself may not be fully aware of.” Blair had been writing articles for John Bigelow, the editor of the New York Evening Post, and when Bigelow asked for a series of articles about prospective Republican candidates, Blair delivered a single article about John Charles Frémont. He drew Bigelow into the circle of Frémont advisers, and the circle gradually gained members such as Thurlow Weed, Seward’s political manager. He invited major party figures to a Christmas dinner at his home. Having been present at the creation of the Democratic Party in the early 1830s, Blair was present as the Republicans took shape.

  The presidential campaign that now loomed would be a vast, boisterous, roaring affair of rallies, speeches, bonfires, songs, pamphlets, parades, articles, and insults—but that was for the candidate’s supporters, not the candidate. A presidential contender was supposed to rise above it all. No matter how desperately he was scheming for election, he was to pretend he wasn’t trying, but was merely answering the call of the people. A presidential candidate avoided giving speeches, and if compelled to speak tried not to say anything important; if forced to say something important, he would express it in a private letter to a friend that would be deliberately leaked to the newspapers. The Frémonts followed this template in the winter of 1855 to 1856. The closest they came to a public statement was when they changed their address, moving north to New York City, in a state that any Northern candidate must win. Jessie marveled at the New York amenities of their rented house on the Bowery (“water, fire, and gas all over,” she gushed), but they soon moved to a still more elegant address, a marble-fronted house at 56 West Ninth Street, near Washington Square.

  John acted as though he was focused on exploration, not politics. After the move he unpacked containers holding carefully preserved metal plates, which were daguerreotypes—the images that Solomon Carvalho had captured during the 1853 to 1854 expedition across the Rockies. He carried the chemically treated metal plates to the studio of a New York photographer named Mathew Brady, and spent part of the winter having the images developed. Jessie set up a room in their house as an artist’s studio, where, by the light of a bay window, an oil painter and a woodcutter used the photos as the basis for images that could be reproduced in John’s next book.

  Brady, the photographer, was in his early thirties, clean-shaven, with tiny spectacles and a stylish mass of dark hair. He was the son of Irish immigrants. As a youth, coming from upstate New York to study art in the city, he was introduced to the New York University professor Samuel F. B. Morse, who had just recently passed through his short career of railing against Catholics and foreign influence and was experimenting with daguerreotypes. Morse was generous in sharing his knowledge, and the young Irish-American gave him some credit for the direction of his later career. By the mid-1850s Brady had two studios on Broadway with multiple employees, and while developing John’s images he also arranged to take a portrait of his famous customer. John arrived wearing a light-colored suit. Brady posed him sitting sideways, with his left shoulder to the camera, and had John turn his head for a three-quarter view of the face. John was bearded, hair combed but curling around his ears. His face looked weathered and strong, though his expression hinted at a man who was vulnerable, hidden.

  * * *

  REPUBLICANS PLANNED A PRELIMINARY CONVENTION in February to better organize the party, followed by a presidential nominating convention in June. They had several potential candidates, though most had disadvantages. John McLean, a Supreme Court justice, wanted the nomination but had no real antislavery record. Chase of Ohio believed he had earned the nomination, but had too much of an antislavery record; managers of the antislavery party wanted a man who had not taken such strong positions that he could be painted as extremist. Seward wanted the nomination, but his political adviser, Thurlow Weed, counseled him to hold back: Seward had been supportive of Catholics and immigrants, so he must wait until 1860 in hopes that the nativist wave would recede. John’s short Senate career and long absences in the West during many political controversies made him a nearly ideal choice. Horace Greeley, who had brought his New York Tribune into the new party, said that “a candidate must have a slim record in these times.”

  The Democrats nominated their candidate first, meeting in Cincinnati in May. Casting aside the unpopular President Pierce, they chose James Buchanan—the Bentons’ longtime neighbor, who escorted teenage Jessie at an 1840 wedding, and sent his frustratingly vague letter to John on the Pacific coast in 1846. Buchanan, the political survivor. He could win votes North and South—he had powerful Southern friends (he had been so close to William R. King, an Alabama senator, that one lawmaker referred to them as “Buchanan and his wife”) and could use his strong political organization to capture his home state of Pennsylvania. He had such vast government experience that few men had been so qualified on paper. Best of all, from the Democrats’ point of view, he was serving as ambassador to Britain, which meant that he had been absent for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. His positions could be trimmed as necessity required; the Democrats, too, wanted a man with “a slim record” on the issues that mattered most.

  The Democrats and Republicans would be joined by a third party: the remnants of the Whigs were absorbed by a faction of Know-Nothings and rebranded the American Party. Meeting in Philadelphia, they nominated former Whig president Millard Fillmore. Their vice presidential choice reflected the fracturing political world: delegates selected Andrew Jackson Donelson, the former president’s nephew and adopted son. While the Democrats were the party of Jackson, and the Republicans had won over Blair and other acolytes of Jackson, the nativists nominated a Jackson; the dominant political movement of the past generation was split in three.

  If John were nominated, then, he would be facing a deeply experienced presidential candidate and a former president. He needed to polish his own credentials. His principal qualification was his inspiring life story, and so Jessie began the critical work of gathering information for two writers who produced book-length campaign biographies. The most ambitious effort was by John Bigelow, the editor of the Evening Post, who in the spring and summer of 1856 was “obliged to apply to Mrs. Frémont for information about her husband’s parentage.” This created a problem: John’s illegitimate birth was deeply embarrassing, and Jessie did not want this fact printed. She traveled to Virginia to talk with John’s mother’s relations and find a presentable story, but only so much could be done. So Jessie became an uncredited coauthor, writing the first chapter of Bigelow’s book herself, offering a sympathetic version of Anne Pryor’s separation from her spouse (the much older husband was “repulsive,” Jessie reported), and adding the false claim that Anne divorced and remarried before John’s birth. Nowhere in the book was Jessie credited with this act of ghostwriting, although Bigelow acknowledged it more than half a century later in his memoirs. (He also seemed to confess to the falsehood at the heart of the chapter: “Her account of the colonel’s origin and early life was not as full as I desired, but it answered our purpose very well.”)

  Another biography was to be written by Charles Upham, a former congressman. Jessie proofread Upham’s manuscript and saw a passage she disliked—a description of the young couple’s elopement in 1841. With playful formality she wrote a letter to the biographer, appealing to him in the third person:

  Will Mr. Upham let my alterations stand? There was no “dash” [to get married]—it was done in sober sadness on my part and as sober judgment on Mr. Frémont’s.

  An act of “sober judgment” would play better with the voting public, who might make judgments of their own about John rashly “dashing” off with Jessie when she was hardly more than a girl. The biographer apparently cut the section she disapproved; his published volume described the marriage in a few sentences and did not directly mention that it
was an elopement.

  More revisions were to come. Isaac Sherman, a politico attached to the campaign, wrote Upham to say he was troubled that the manuscript described the California gold-mining bill that Senator Frémont had proposed in 1850. Some of “our friends,” wrote Sherman, “doubt the propriety of making any observation on the Bill which legitimated Americans only to procure gold from the public lands. Could you forward that chapter by express to the Col. [on] 9th Street?” Republicans were aiming to co-opt nativists, but did not want their candidate to be one of the nativists, with their bigoted ideas and affection for violence. Upham forwarded the manuscript and soon received a note from Jessie Benton Frémont—it was in her hand, signed “J.B.”—regarding “the second section of the bill,” which limited gold-mining permits to citizens. Jessie liked not a word of the four pages Upham had devoted to it: “Decidedly, this ought to be struck out.” Upham complied. The published version of the biography mentioned other parts of the mining bill while ignoring the ban on noncitizens.

  Jessie was becoming a campaign adviser despite a personal cost. Virtually all members of her family by blood or marriage were Southern, and if a few agreed with her views of slavery, virtually none approved of the new Northern party. According to Jessie, John understood that his candidacy would disrupt her personal relationships, and he said he would not proceed unless she consented. She did. “This ended my old life,” she said. “Except for my Father, and the one cousin, now and always our loving sister-friend, I was dropped by every relative.” Even some of her siblings cooled toward her. Her father agreed with her antislavery stance—yet her relationship with him had become the most fraught of all. In late 1855, as John began moving toward the presidency, it became clear that Thomas Hart Benton would not support him. Jessie could not persuade him. His old friend Francis P. Blair could not persuade him either. Benton would neither give political advice to his son-in-law nor endorse him. He said a sectional party would destroy the Union.