by H. W. Brands
THE DELEGATES BROUGHT their work to a close on October 12, six weeks after the convention began. That night was devoted to a grand ball hosted by the people of Monterey (but paid for by contributions of $25 each from the delegates). Bayard Taylor described the celebration:
The hall was cleared of the forum and tables and decorated with young pines from the forest. At each end were the American colors, tastefully disposed across the boughs. Three chandeliers, neither of bronze nor cut-glass, but neat and brilliant withal, poured their light on the festivities. At eight o’clock—the fashionable ball-hour in Monterey—the guests began to assemble, and in an hour afterward the hall was crowded with nearly all the Californian and American residents. There were sixty or seventy ladies present, and an equal number of gentlemen, in addition to the members of the convention. The dark-eyed daughters of Monterey, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara mingled in pleasing contrast with the fairer bloom of the trans-Nevadian belles. The variety of feature and complexion was fully equalled by the variety of dress. In the whirl of the waltz, a plain, dark, nun-like robe would be followed by one of pink satin and gauze; next, perhaps, a bodice of scarlet velvet with gold buttons, and then a rich figured brocade, such as one sees on the stately dames of Titian.
The dresses of the gentlemen showed considerable variety, but were much less picturesque. A complete ball-dress was a happiness attained only by the fortunate few. White kids [kid gloves] could not be had in Monterey for love or money, and as much as $50 was paid by one gentleman for a pair of patent-leather boots. Scarcely a single dress that was seen belonged entirely to its wearer, and I thought, if the clothes had power to leap severally back to their respective owners, some persons would have been in a state of utter destitution….
Gen. Riley was there in full uniform, with the yellow sash he won at Contreras; Majors Canby, Hill and Smith, Captains Burton and Kane, and the others stationed in Monterey, accompanying him. In one group might be seen Captain Sutter’s soldierly mustache and clear blue eye; in another, the erect figure and quiet, dignified bearing of Gen. Vallejo. Don Pablo de la Guerra, with his handsome, aristocratic features, was the floor manager, and gallantly discharged his office. Conspicuous among the native members were Don Miguel de Pedrorena and Jacinto Rodriguez, both polished gentlemen and deservedly popular. Dominguez, the Indian member, took no part in the dance, but evidently enjoyed the scene as much as anyone present.
The dancing lasted till midnight, when dinner was served. The guests feasted on turkey, roast pig, beef, tongue, and paté, washed down with assorted wines, liquors, and coffee. The dancing thereupon resumed, and continued till dawn.
After a few hours’ sleep, the delegates regathered to sign the constitution. One by one they affixed their names to the document. At the appropriate moment, the guns at the fort of Monterey boomed a salute to the delegates and to the new constitution—thirty-one times, for the thirty-first state.
John Sutter may still have been merry from the night before, but the symbolism and significance of the moment overwhelmed him. “All the native enthusiasm of Capt. Sutter’s Swiss blood was aroused,” Taylor recorded. “He was the old soldier again. He sprang from his seat, and, waving his hand around his head, as if swinging a sword, exclaimed: ‘Gentlemen, this is the happiest day of my life! It makes me glad to hear those cannon: they remind me of the time when I was a soldier. Yes, I am glad to hear them—this is a great day for California!’ Then, recollecting himself, he sat down, the tears streaming from his eyes.”
To Sutter was accorded the honor of leading the delegates to the quarters of Governor Riley. “General,” Sutter declared, “I have been appointed by the delegates elected by the people of California to form a Constitution, to address you in their names and in behalf of the whole people of California, and express the thanks of the Convention for the aid and cooperation they have received from you in the discharge of the responsible duty of creating a State Government.”
To which Riley replied, “Gentlemen, I congratulate you upon the successful conclusion of your arduous labors, and I wish you all happiness and prosperity.”
11
Shaking the Temple
To carry the new constitution east to Washington, Californians chose John Frémont. The master of the Mariposa was California’s leading citizen—which said as much about California as about him. Whether many of those who voted for the state legislature specified under the Monterey constitution recalled Frémont’s arrest for mutiny in California and his subsequent court-martial is unclear; nearly all those voters were far from California at the time and next to none had ever dreamed of going there. If they did remember Frémont’s clash with the army and the president, they apparently were more impressed with his role in exploring the West and conquering California. Those who didn’t remember or never knew could simply admire the enormous wealth that was pouring from Frémont’s part of the Mother Lode into the Pathfinder’s pockets. By this measure alone, Frémont was the embodiment of success in Gold Rush California; and when the new legislature met, it was proud to select Colonel Frémont to be California’s first senator.
Yet Frémont’s election was as much Jessie’s doing as his own. John Frémont was elected senator not only for his wealth and fame, but also for his opposition to slavery. And his opposition to slavery, while principled enough, had become an article of his political faith primarily at the insistence of his wife. This was somewhat surprising, given that Missouri, the home of the Bentons, was a slave state (as all those overlanders noticed). But the Benton household rejected slavery. Jessie’s mother set the tone on the issue. As Jessie recalled, her mother “gave freedom to her slaves because of her conscientious feeling on the subject.” Elizabeth Benton’s conscience in turn dictated the actions of Thomas Benton. “While he did not share these ideas from the same religious and logical thoughts that made them obligatory on my mother, he yet made it thoroughly easy for her to carry out her feelings.” Twice the Bentons turned down large inheritances because they came encumbered by slaves. Whatever John Frémont’s original feelings on slavery, he discovered at the time of courting Jessie that there would be no slaves in her household.
Jessie’s California acquaintances learned the same thing in Monterey. No wages could persuade any of the few American women in the area to do the Frémont wash, so Jessie tried to get some Indian women to take on the task. They agreed, but followed their own custom of beating the dirty clothes between flat stones in a stream, employing as soap a native plant called amole. “Everything looked very white and smelled fresh, but they had been merely washed and dried; there was no starching, no ironing, and a very distorted-looking lot of garments they were,” Jessie recalled. The Indians had never heard of pressing clothes and, upon having the concept explained, wondered why on earth anyone would go to the trouble. They certainly wouldn’t and, saying so, departed. Jessie had just about resigned herself to becoming the family’s laundress when a neighbor from one of the southern states loaned her a black woman servant to do the job. Jessie’s initial delight evaporated when the lender insisted that the Frémonts purchase the woman, a slave. “We gave her up,” Jessie wrote. “It required no thinking or effort to make this decision; it was simply following out the habit of mind which came from my education and the example shown me at home.”
The daughter of the distinguished senator, the wife of the famous explorer and soldier, was always in the public eye in California, and this decision increased the scrutiny. Jessie determined to demonstrate that even on this frontier, where good help really was hard to find, one could maintain a respectable household without bound labor. “Everyone knows the important part of a good dinner in diplomacy,” she recounted. “The great Napoleon knew and acted on this.” So did Jessie Frémont. The public eating houses in Monterey were expensive and of notoriously poor quality; Jessie made a point of hosting dinners for the delegates. She and two Indian men—who worked for wages—set a hearty and festive board, served on the best Frémont china (“I
had to get used to Juan and Gregorio breaking a great deal of this”). “Our house and table were open, after the hospitable fashion of a new country, to all who had been, or would like to be, friends, and they saw for themselves that it was quite possible for the most cheerful hospitality to exist without the usual working forces.” She recalled one fence-sitter making up his mind: “All these women here are crying out to have ‘suv-vents’—but if you, a Virginia lady [Jessie didn’t bother to correct him], can get along without, they shan’t have them—we’ll keep clear of slave labor.”
In another sense as well, the Frémonts were considered a test case regarding slavery. The Mariposa mines seemed suited to slave labor if anything in California was. Advocates of slavery told John that his labor troubles—this at a moment when the Sonoran miners were about to go home, and no replacements had been found—would end if he could simply purchase replacements. But Jessie wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would he.
As a result of their opposition to slavery, the Frémont household in Monterey became a meeting place for the antislavery men of the constitutional convention—which was another reason Jessie placed such store in setting a good table. And when the convention decided against slavery, John became a leading candidate for one of the state’s two Senate seats.
How much encouragement he required from Jessie to make himself available for election is unknown. His ambition still burned, but till now it had sought, and found, outlets in activities suited to the soldier and explorer. Politics was something else—something that came far more naturally, by temperament and upbringing, to her than to him. Although she took pains to avoid appearing pushy, her ambition was evident to those who knew them both. Edward Bosqui, who for a period managed Frémont’s Mariposa mines, explained, “Mrs. Frémont was a highly accomplished woman of fine intellect, with a towering ambition and courage equal to her husband’s.” Another acquaintance put the matter more bluntly, calling Jessie “the better man of the two, far more intelligent and more comprehensive.” Almost certainly, John’s decision to enter politics was Jessie’s decision also.
John’s election took place in December 1849. Following the adjournment of the Monterey convention, the constitution was referred to the voters of California for approval. Only about 13,000 trooped to the polling places, the rest apparently being too busy gathering the last gold before the winter rains shut down the mines. But by a margin of fifteen to one they ratified the new charter. They also selected the members of California’s first legislature, which convened at San Jose on December 17. (The opening of the session had been scheduled for December 15, but those winter rains, now arrived, postponed a quorum.) An early order of business was the election of California’s two senators. Frémont was elected on the first ballot, with 29 of 46 votes. William Gwin was chosen on the second ballot, with 24 votes.
Jessie received the good news at Monterey a short while later.
One evening of tremendous rain, when we were, as usual, around the fire, Mrs. M’Evoy, with her table and lights, sewing at one side, myself by the other, explaining pictures from the Illustrated Times to my little girl, while the baby rolled about on the bear skin in front of the fire, suddenly Mr. Frémont came in upon us, dripping wet, as well he might be, for he had come through from San Jose—seventy miles on horseback through the heavy rain. He was so wet that we could hardly make him cross the pretty room; but “beautiful are the feet of him that beareth glad tidings,” and the footmarks were all welcome, for they pointed home. He came to tell me that he had been elected Senator, and that it was necessary we should go to Washington on the steamer of the 1st of January.
WHEN JESSIE FRéMONT arrived at Washington in March 1850, no one greeted her more warmly than Thomas Benton. And no one inspected her more closely. Jessie’s father had followed the trials of her outbound isthmus crossing (hearing from the steamship people details Jessie omitted from her letters) with concern matched only by the knowledge that there was nothing he could do about it (beyond ensuring that the steamship folks looked after her as much as she would allow). He knew of the fabulous fortune John had fallen into at the Mariposa, and of course now he knew that John had been elected California’s first senator. He wondered what Jessie’s role in the election had been; he himself had never thought of John as the political type. And he wondered what California had done to his daughter. She couldn’t have grown more willful; that would have been impossible. But as he watched her get off the train from New York, where their steamship back from Panama had landed, she seemed more capable, more calmly confident. Perhaps she shared with him the sentiment she later put to paper: “I had done so many things that I had never done before that a new sense of power had come to me.” But she didn’t really have to tell him, for he could see it himself.
She had every reason to feel confident. Beyond the knowledge of competencies she hadn’t known she possessed, she occupied what to most observers must have seemed a charmed position in American life. She was one of the wealthiest women in the country, and growing wealthier by the week. Her father was one of the nation’s most powerful men—in fact, the senior member of the Senate, by length of service. And her husband was now a senator also, at the start of what promised to be an illustrious political career. Travel to and from the West Coast was getting easier, as the recent journey back had demonstrated; Jessie could readily imagine herself splitting time between California, her new home and the seat of her and John’s wealth, and Washington, her old home and the seat of national power.
There was one hitch in this scenario, however. John wasn’t actually a senator yet, and he wouldn’t be until Congress accepted the Monterey constitution and officially made California the thirty-first state.
And this was by no means a sure thing. The roots of the opposition to California’s admission ran to 1846, when Democratic congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced a measure to ban slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico in the war just begun. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House of Representatives yet failed in the Senate, a circumstance that both reflected and exacerbated the tension between North and South. For years the North’s population had been growing faster than the South’s; the greater numbers in the North gave that region a distinct advantage in the population-apportioned House. But a balance held in the Senate, where the fifteen northern states were matched by the fifteen southern states. The voting on the Wilmot Proviso reminded northerners of the imperfectly democratic character of Congress, in which southerners wielded more power per person than northerners, and it inspired many northerners to try to break the southern hold by admitting more free states. The Wilmot voting reminded southerners of the same thing, with the opposite effect. Southerners recalled that congressional democracy was deliberately imperfect—how else to guard states’ rights?—and they feared a northern plot to overturn the system so carefully crafted by the Founders.
Until John Frémont and the other members-elect of California’s congressional delegation arrived at the national capital in 1850, the debate over the Wilmot Proviso remained theoretical: an argument about what to do when the time came to organize the territory taken from Mexico. The arrival of the California delegation made plain that the time had come. Indeed, the time was past, for the Californians had organized themselves. Congress now had to accept their accomplishment or reject it.
But things weren’t that simple, for the California question reopened the entire sectional dispute. Twice in living memory, thrice in American history, crises between North and South that threatened to disunite the states had been resolved by compromise: at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when the three-fifths formula settled the argument over how to count slaves toward representation; in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which divided the Louisiana Territory between future slave states and free at the line of 36° 30′; and with the Compromise of 1833, which saved face for both sides in the nullification controversy between South Carolina and the supporters of states’ rights on one hand, and the Jackson
administration and the partisans of federal power on the other. Perhaps a fourth compromise would resolve the California question, but any such compromise wouldn’t come easily. Seventeen years had passed since the settlement of 1833, thirty years since the Missouri Compromise. In that time the rift between North and South had grown wider and deeper, and the conciliatory spirit in Congress that made those earlier settlements possible had been diminished by retirement and death.
As it had for most of the nineteenth century, the nation looked to three members of Congress for guidance, three statesmen who towered above the rest. Henry Clay literally did tower above his colleagues. Monumentally tall, with a high forehead, piercing eyes, and flowing hair, he was a sculptor’s model of a statesman. As a Kentuckian, a man of the West, Clay had guided the North and South to amicable settlements in the compromises of 1820 and 1833, and he believed he could do the same now. He wrapped California in a compromise package of several legislative parts. First, California would be admitted as a state, with the Monterey (antislavery) constitution. Second, territorial governments would be organized for the rest of the Mexican cession (construed as New Mexico and Utah) without restriction on slavery. Third, the disputed boundary between Texas and New Mexico would be arbitrated. Fourth, the federal government would assume Texas’s debts. Fifth, slavery would continue to be allowed in the District of Columbia (where, in the capital of democracy, it had come under attack as especially inappropriate). Sixth, the slave trade within the federal district would be abolished (the commerce in flesh being judged the most egregious aspect of slavery). Seventh, the fugitive slave law would be stiffened. Eighth, Congress would explicitly disavow any interference with the slave trade in or between slave states.
