With Jessie’s help, John avoided some of this vitriol. She filtered his newspapers and mail. “Quite at the beginning,” she said, “I asked that all mail should pass through me and the few friends qualified to decide what part of it needed to reach Mr. Frémont. We agreed that in this way only, could he be left quite himself, to meet the more or less friendly crowds, who came daily to see him—there must be no effort to maintain his usual courteous dignity.” Each day John rose early and, to keep in shape, practiced fencing with another man in the hallway of the house on Ninth Street. Next he met visitors. One day a national publishers’ and booksellers’ convention in New York voted to support Frémont, signaling the literary establishment’s approval of him—and after the vote the convention adjourned so its nearly three hundred members could walk to the Frémont house, where the candidate invited as many as possible to cram inside. “As booksellers, we have all known you by your writings,” an Iowan declared to applause, praising John’s “energy of character.” John replied with gratitude that “the men who are most immediately engaged in elevating and directing our social progress” would be supporting “this great movement of the people to regenerate the Government.” When such visits were through for the day, the candidate went on “tremendous walks” through the city.
Jessie had a daily pattern of her own. She sat at the dining room table with a pot of coffee and fruit, and welcomed John Bigelow of the Evening Post and two other men who formed a correspondence committee. Eventually Francis P. Blair relocated to New York to join them. Each day the men brought “market baskets of mail matter.” They answered what they could, handed John what they had to, and let Jessie cull the newspapers before showing them to the candidate. Lily Frémont, who would turn fourteen around election time, said her father’s “nature was such that he could not have withstood” the “bitterness” of the campaign; “he was used to life in the open and wanted a square fight.” So the committee worked each morning “while the hearty laughs and broken words and stamping feet of the two skillful fencers in the hall rang up to the roof.”
Jessie, of course, did read the assaults on John, which “gave me all the pain intended.” Some of the attacks were against her, as Democratic and Southern papers seized on her prominence to paint her as radical. The Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle printed, and the Charleston Mercury reprinted, a slyly suggestive article about a “Jessie Circle” in New York City, which was alleged to consist of “the female friends and admirers of Mrs. Jessie Fremont.” It was said to be a “progressive” group abandoning traditional female roles: “It is now admitted that the ‘home circle’ is not a proper place for our American ladies . . . domestic duties are unworthy of their attention; and teething children, and invalid husbands, are permitted to nurse themselves, while wives and daughters are fired with an ardent love of country, don their bonnets and calico, and meet in ‘Jessie Circles’ to regulate the affairs of the nation.”
Jessie had played no larger role in the movement for women’s rights than she had for abolition. She had not openly questioned gender roles since her teenage years, when she had cut off her hair, and as an adult she managed an adventurous and unusual life without throwing off her assigned roles as wife and mother. (This was true of many women’s activists; Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a mother of seven.) But the early women’s movement apparently troubled enough of the public that it seemed profitable to smear Jessie with it. She learned of such attacks while filtering her husband’s mail, and then, at the end of each day, she left the house. One-year-old Francis Preston had grown sick while teething, and Jessie had sent him with a nursemaid across New York Harbor to Staten Island, believing the ocean air at a hilltop farmhouse would help. In the evening Jessie walked to the Manhattan shoreline and caught the last ferryboat to the island, “taking my watch with the baby from midnight to six,” then returning on a morning boat for another day’s work in town.
* * *
FOR ALL HER EFFORTS, she failed to keep the secret of John’s illegitimate birth. The Richmond Enquirer had its own sources of information. John’s father, Charles Fremon, was described suggestively as “a small, swarthy individual” who had “French peculiarities, strongly developed,” while his mother “was never divorced” before running off with him. Jessie’s only consolation was delaying John from seeing the articles about his mother—“which by the way I have still managed to keep him ignorant of,” as she wrote Francis Blair.
If he was the illegitimate son of a “swarthy” foreigner, it was only a short leap to allege that John himself was a foreigner. An article reprinted in Democratic papers suggested that Charles Fremon and Anne Pryor had left the country when they departed Richmond together in 1811: “If, as alleged, and as believed by many, the French father of Colonel Fremont took the mother of Colonel Fremont out of the United States, with the intent to live abroad, the son born abroad is Constitutionally disqualified from being President.” This conspiracy theory was doubly false: contemporary newspaper advertisements traced Charles Fremon’s presence in Savannah and then Nashville at the time of John’s birth and infancy—and even if it were true that he had been born abroad, the son of a United States citizen was still a “natural-born citizen,” as the Constitution said, eligible for the presidency. But it was a damaging accusation when Republicans were hoping to passively capture much of the nativist vote. Millard Fillmore, the Know-Nothing candidate, was still in the race along with Frémont and Buchanan.
Even worse than the claims of John’s foreign birth were the claims about his religion.
FREMONT’S ROMANISM ESTABLISHED.
ACKNOWLEDGED BY ARCHBISHOP HUGHES . . .
Hughes, Seward, Fremont and the Foreigners—a most foul coalition.
So began one of the pamphlets that spread across the country. John was Catholic, it said. Fragments of evidence supported this conspiracy theory. His French father was presumably Catholic, and John and Jessie had been married by a Catholic priest. Before his nomination, a Republican paper in Boston had mistakenly referred to him as Catholic. The Daily American Organ, a nativist newspaper in Washington, printed the alleged story of one of John’s men during the conquest of California, a man who “might say he had slept under the same blanket as [Frémont] for eight months.” The former comrade—or rather, a friend of the former comrade who alleged he had told the story—asserted that John was Catholic and “made no secret of it.” Scouring his famous reports, nativists found the detail that he had carved a cross into the stone of Independence Rock: Could this be a Catholic rather than a Protestant symbol?
Thurlow Weed, one of the Republicans’ sharpest operators, reported that the claims of John’s Catholicism were “doing much damage.” John Bigelow received a note from an Indiana congressman who said the failure to answer the Catholic charge made it seem true; the same congressman wrote Blair to say if the story was not put to rest, “we shall lose Pa., N.J., Inda., Conn., & the Lord knows how many other states.” John was Episcopalian like his mother, and his children had been baptized in that Protestant denomination, but Republicans across the country reported an alarming loss of support. What had happened to John when he lost his California Senate seat was happening again: for the sake of ambition he had dabbled in nativism, only to be outdone by far more committed nativists. There was no way to win over bigots by being just a little biased, just a little ruthless; others would be more ruthless. They did not merely make him out to be soft on the enemy, they turned him into the enemy.
Republicans tried to counter the charge. Protestant clergymen visited the house on Ninth Street, privately questioned the candidate, and came away offering public testimonials to his faith. Several Republican papers tried satire. One article, much reprinted, was headlined MORE EVIDENCE; FREMONT A MOHAMEDAN! The article told an extended joke purporting to prove that John was Muslim, adding, “We bring this charge at a time when he is unquestionably proved to be a Catholic and a Protestant.” Nothing worked. At last some of his
advisers felt John himself must issue a public statement about his faith. Francis Blair began drafting a statement, for which his daughter Lizzie Lee wrote Jessie with a list of questions about the Frémonts’ association with Catholics. Jessie, while looking after little Francis on Staten Island, replied that John had spent time with Catholics, particularly at St. Mary’s College in Baltimore while visiting his mentor Nicollet, “but he never was at any time or in any way more closely connected with that Church.”
His advisers disagreed about whether the statement would help: How would a man prove his innermost beliefs? And if he answered this charge, what would he be accused of next? The decision had to be left to John himself. According to his daughter, Lily, John was told, in essence, “The charge is losing votes for you.”
And John replied, in essence, “Then I must lose them. My religion is a matter between myself and my Maker, and I will not make it a matter of politics.”
He would not approve the statement. To declare that he was Protestant in such circumstances would be to deny the freedom of worship. It would admit, even if only by implication, that a Catholic was not fit to be president. It would refute the equality of men who had brought him fortune and fame. He would have to turn his back on Joseph Nicollet, who had taught him the art of exploration, and on the Chouteau family, who had outfitted his early expeditions, and the Frenchman Basil Lajeunesse, his favorite companion, who had been killed by Klamath men and buried in Oregon (“With our knives we dug a shallow grave, and . . . left them among the laurels”). To proclaim his Protestantism was to deny the truth of what the country really was and always had been, accepting the nativists’ narrow vision of what it should be. He would not do it. John’s refusal was not quite the final word—he did want to win, and the attacks so alarmed his managers that they arranged a conference of leading Republican figures at the Astor House to consider what to do. But after much debate they agreed that John should remain silent.
It was arguably the bravest decision of his life. He had often shown physical courage, choosing a hazardous vocation and pursuing his work in ways that made it more dangerous than duty required. This was an act of moral courage: maintaining his silence in the face of abuse that he could hardly bear, and doing so for a cause larger than himself. In purely political terms, one of the most thorough analysts of the 1856 election later concluded that the decision was “a mistake.” The story had to be countered more effectively. Still, John remained silent on this and all the charges that built up through the summer and fall—charges that, despite Jessie’s efforts, he mostly knew by August. Once John talked of leaving New York to find and confront James Buchanan, who had returned from his ambassadorial post to spend the summer at a Pennsylvania resort. “I would go with him,” Jessie said in a letter to Lizzie Lee, but “I don’t know what mischief might come of temptation.” A face-to-face encounter could never happen. “Mr. Frémont will keep silence until November. I suppose they wish to force him into some act of resentment. I wish they could understand how useless that is. He considers himself as belonging to the greatest cause ever at stake since the Revolution & his whole life shows that he ‘throws away his body’ for his duty. In this case he ‘throws away his heart’ & lets them slander & attack, in silence—knowing . . . how inadequate anything but death would be as punishment to such slanderers.”
The hours spent fencing, the long walks in the evening, were the only ways that remained for him to burn off the rage.
* * *
THE PAIN MIGHT HAVE BEEN MORE BEARABLE to Jessie had it not also been for her father. Though they exchanged polite letters, he still declined to become a Republican or endorse his son-in-law. He did not defend John when his former colleagues in the Senate began investigating John’s California finances. Jessie wrote that John was outraged: “Mr. Frémont says if Father takes no notice of that & continues to work with them he will never speak to him nor shall any of his children.” So she said in a letter to Lizzie Lee: “That I only tell you—you are my confessional.” She did not convey the threat to her father.
Still hoping to bring Benton around, or at least keep him busy, Francis P. Blair had used his influence to help him mount a campaign for governor of Missouri. Blair’s son Frank had been building a political career in St. Louis and was running for Congress; Benton could run alongside him. Benton accepted the help but would not desert his party. The seventy-four-year-old attended the Democratic national convention in May, and said that Buchanan was the safest choice for the Union. In June he returned to Missouri for a three-way contest: the Benton Democrats, the proslavery Democrats, and the Know-Nothings each had a candidate. Riflemen fired a hundred-gun salute when Benton arrived at the St. Louis waterfront, and when he walked to Washington Square, in the center of the city, a crowd estimated at ten thousand roared for him. He told them he supported the Missouri Compromise. He said he wanted to restore “family harmony”—by which he meant the harmony of the Union, not necessarily of his family. He said the country needed national “parties founded on principle,” and then dismissed a sectional party “with which the name of a member of my family is connected.” He did not attack John but made it clear that he would never follow his son-in-law’s course. He stood for “order, law, and justice.”
He swept across the state, the gray-haired old lawmaker, traveling by train and by buggy to a round of mass meetings. One of the last was in St. Joseph, near the western edge of the state, which was a starting point for some emigrants on the Oregon Trail. It was as near as he ever got to Oregon. In his decades of work to win the Pacific coast for the United States, he never had seen it. He had thought of going to California with Jessie in 1849, but so certain was he of his vision that he had never really needed to go. On this summer day he addressed the St. Joseph crowd from a grassy hillside, where he could look out across the Missouri River to the plains of Kansas beyond. He told the crowd he wanted Kansas as a free state. He said he wanted the Union, and peace. And then he returned to St. Louis to await the election. On August 4, 1856, Missouri voters went to the polls and defeated him. The proslavery Democrat won the governorship; the Know-Nothing candidate finished second. Benton was third.
Benton returned to Washington, and in September Jessie came down the coast to see him, bringing along her two older children. “Father is very much changed I think,” she wrote Lizzie Lee. “Very much thinner and so still—it seems as if sadness and silence were so fixed upon him that he could not shake them off. I will keep with him all the time I can.” She persuaded herself that if John won the presidency it would “enliven” her father, for “he could not help taking interest too in public affairs.” After a week Jessie returned to New York and the campaign. She asked him to visit New York but he declined, remaining in Washington alone to complete a long-running project that allowed him to retreat into the past. It was a multivolume selection of the debates of Congress, every significant issue discussed from 1789 to 1850, a period of sixty-one years, thirty of them featuring appearances by Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Shortly before the presidential election day, he would return to Missouri for one final political speech in favor of James Buchanan.
All that summer and fall, Republicans organized enormous events across the North. It was to attend one such event that Abraham Lincoln, the Illinois lawyer, boarded a train in Chicago in August. Since his frustrated letter to a friend in 1855 (“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid”) he had found a political home, helping to organize the Republican party in Illinois. He received several invitations to speak outside his state, and agreed to attend a rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that also featured the state’s governor. His train arrived on the morning of the event and he went from the station to his lodgings, where he was shaving when the organizing committee arrived to pick him up. Lincoln cleaned his face, shook on his black coat, and accompanied the committee to the park, where thousands had gathered. There were several speakers’ stands, making a kind of political fest
ival, and the lanky visitor mounted one. “Fellow countrymen,” he called out, in his tenor voice that had a way of carrying through a crowd. “The question of slavery, at the present day, should not only be the greatest question, but very nearly the sole question. Our opponents, however, prefer that this should not be the case.”
Lincoln took no notice of the personal invective in the campaign. He focused only on slavery in the territories. “You who hate slavery and love freedom, why not . . . vote for Frémont? Why not vote for the man who takes your side of the question?” The people in the park listened. “We are a great empire. We are eighty years old. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity. . . . To give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity.” The one thing that made America the wonder of the world was that “every man can make himself. . . . The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” But slavery would smother that system. “Tell me not that we have no interest in keeping the territories free for the settlement of free laborers. . . . Come to the rescue of the great principle of equality.”
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