Citizens of St. Louis promptly taught him a lesson. Several hundred of them gathered as an angry mob outside the Anzeiger’s office, and only with difficulty were restrained from committing another lynching. The next morning’s issue of the St. Louis Commercial Bulletin, a leading English-language newspaper, chastised the editor for insulting in an “unjust manner the whole community.”46
But the newcomers were not to be intimidated so easily. Over the succeeding years, as their ranks swelled, they grew ever bolder and more outspoken. In 1848 and 1849, the steady flow of arrivals became a flood as Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians fled the aftermath of the failed liberal revolutions across Europe. Among those it swept into St. Louis was Franz Sigel, the daring military commander of insurgent forces in the Baden uprising, comrade of Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini; in his new homeland, Sigel became a teacher of German and school superintendent. Another political refugee was Isidor Bush, a Prague-born Jew and publisher of revolutionary tracts in Vienna, who settled down in St. Louis as a respected wine merchant, railroad executive, and city councilman—as well as, somewhat more discreetly, a leader of the local abolitionists.*
Most prominent among all the Achtundvierziger—the Forty-Eighters, as they styled themselves—was a colorful Austrian émigré named Heinrich Börnstein. Whether Börnstein was a hero or a scoundrel depended on whom you asked. In Europe he had been a soldier in the imperial army, an actor, a director—and, most notably, an editor. During a sojourn in Paris, he launched a weekly journal called Vorwärts!, which published antireligious screeds, poetry by Heine, and some of the first “scientific socialist” writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. When Börnstein helped organize a German Legion to aid the 1848 revolution, things became a bit hot for him with the Parisian authorities, and he prudently decamped. In America he became Henry Boernstein: homeopathic physician, saloonkeeper, brewer, pharmacist, theatrical impresario, hotel owner, novelist—and, naturally, political agitator. After purchasing the ever more influential Anzeiger des Westens in 1850, he swung the paper even harder to the left. Though he may have cut a somewhat eccentric figure around town, with his flamboyant clothing and a pair of Mitteleuropean side-whiskers that would have put Emperor Franz Josef to shame, Boernstein was a force to be reckoned with in St. Louis, a man both admired and hated.47
For such men, and even for their less radical compatriots, Missouri’s slaveholding class represented exactly what they had detested in the old country, exactly what they had come here to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs, boorish aristocrats obstructing the forces of modernity and progress. By contrast, the Germans prided themselves on being, as an Anzeiger editorial rather smugly put it, “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity, than most peoples of the earth”—more imbued with true democratic spirit, indeed more American, than the Americans themselves. Such presumption did not exactly endear them to longtime St. Louisans. The city’s leading Democratic newspaper excoriated the Forty-Eighters as infidels, anarchists, fanatics, socialists—“all Robespierres, Dantons, and Saint-Justs, red down to their very kidneys.” Clearly these Germans were godless, too: one need only walk downtown on a Sunday afternoon to see them drinking beer, dancing, and flocking to immoral plays in their theaters—flagrantly violating not just the commandments of God but the city ordinances of St. Louis.48
Few if any of the city fathers were prepared, however, to risk enforcing the blue laws. Those beer drinkers and theatergoers had become a powerful voting bloc. Many Missouri Germans cast their first votes for Thomas Hart Benton, when the old maverick—not unmindful of demographic shifts in his home state—steered toward populism. Then they rallied to the new Republican Party. Their special hero in 1856 was John C. Frémont. Here was a leader in the true style of the Forty-Eighters: no dough-faced politician but a dashing idealist, a man of action, a bearded paladin. (That Colonel Frémont happened to be the illegitimate son of a French mural painter only enhanced his Romantic cachet.) It was with somewhat less enthusiasm that they would unite behind Lincoln four years later—split rails held little charm for the acolytes of Goethe and Hegel. But support from intellectuals like Boernstein encouraged them: the editor, who was fast becoming one of Missouri’s top Republican power brokers, hailed his party’s nominee, in proper Achtundvierzigerisch terms, as “the man who will see his way through a great struggle yet to come, the struggle with the most dangerous and ruthless enemy of freedom.”49
A few months later, the Wide Awake craze reached St. Louis. Capes! Torches! Secret meetings! It was just like the good old days back in Dresden and Heidelberg. Before long, Germans by the thousands were joining up, and relishing the opportunity to get back into fighting trim. One of the local movement’s leaders (discreetly writing in the third person) later recalled:
From their headquarters … the Wide Awakes marched in procession to the places of appointed political gatherings, and while the meeting continued, (if at night,) each man, with a lighted lamp placed securely on the end of a heavy stick, stationed himself on the outside of the assembled crowd, thus depriving ruffianly opponents of their hiding-places in the dark. At the first two meetings which the Wide Awakes thus attended, the enemy, not understanding the purposes of the club, began their usual serenade of yells and cheers, but they were speedily initiated into the mysteries of the new order; which initiation consisted in being besmeared with burning camphene, and vigorously beaten with leaded sticks. The least sign of disorderly conduct was the signal for an assault upon the offender, and if he escaped unmaimed he was lucky indeed.50
The national Republican establishment was quick to exploit this touching display of pro-Lincoln sentiment in the heart of a slave state. William Seward hastened to the city and, from the balcony of his hotel room, addressed a crowd of Wide Awakes who had come to serenade him by torchlight. The master politician—forearmed, as usual, with flattery specific to his audience—exulted: “Missouri is Germanizing herself to make herself free.” (Frederick Douglass had already expressed similar enthusiasm: “A German only has to be a German to be utterly opposed to slavery,” he wrote.)51
Of all those attempting to harness the unruly energy of St. Louis’s Wide Awake Germans, none was more assiduous or effective than Francis Preston Blair, Jr. The younger brother of Montgomery Blair—Lincoln’s postmaster general, and his cabinet’s strongest proponent of defending Fort Sumter—thirty-nine-year-old Frank Blair, a former protégé of Senator Benton, had won a seat in Congress as a Missouri Republican. Although publicly opposed to slavery (he favored resettling the nation’s blacks as a new American colony somewhere in Central America), Blair was first and foremost a narrow-eyed opportunist, a tireless strategist for his own sake and for that of his vast web of kin by blood and marriage, a network whose nerve center was the family’s Washington mansion, which faced the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue. His canny instincts told him early on that secession and civil war were inevitable. In the Wide Awakes of St. Louis, he saw not a constituency of any national electoral importance—there was no way that Lincoln could carry Missouri anyhow—but rather a personal power base, a legion of Republican centurions who might march at his back through the chaotic days to come.52
Blair made sure that the Wide Awake clubs did not disband after the election. By Christmas, in fact, rumor had it—correctly, for once—that he was starting to arm them with Sharps rifles provided by certain unofficial sources in the East. (Some of the Germans’ new weaponry arrived hidden, appropriately enough, in empty beer barrels shipped to Tony Niederwiesser’s saloon and others.) Under the supervision of General Sigel, and with veterans of the Prussian officer corps acting as instructors, they began their clandestine drills, practicing with wooden muskets when they lacked real ones. St. Louis, however, was not a place where such things could be kept secret for long. By early March, Democratic papers carried reports of a terrifying new battalion known as the Black Jaegers (it sounded even more horrib
le in German, the Unabhängige Schwarzer Jägerkorps), allegedly so named because they would fight under a black flag, signifying no quarter to their foes.53
The Jaegers’ foes, for their part, were not sitting idly by. The secessionists formed their own force of armed Minute Men—“the grimmest of German-haters,” Boernstein called them—establishing a headquarters in the old Berthold mansion at the corner of Fifth and Pine. Many of the city’s old-line militia groups affiliated themselves with the new organization. Unlike Blair’s forces, the Minute Men had little need for secrecy. On February 13, in fact, they were officially mustered en masse into the Missouri State Guard—a clear signal of Governor Jackson’s intentions, in case anyone was still in doubt.54
Democratic newspapers fanned the flames more vigorously than ever against “the Red Republicans or Infidel Germans,” the “ ‘fugitives from justice’ of foreign lands, who by some trickery have become citizens of our country.” Abolitionist fanatics were concocting some dark plot, one editor warned, and “the German population of our city are to be used as the means for carrying out the objects of the dastard enterprise.” Ordinary Missourians used more direct language: along with the usual racial epithets, “Damn Dutch,” a corruption of Deutsch, became a term of abuse throughout the state.55
Such was the atmosphere in which the statewide convention assembled in St. Louis to determine Missouri’s fate.
ONE DAY TOWARD THE END OF 1860, Jessie Frémont tripped over a board that had come loose on one of San Francisco’s rickety plank sidewalks, hurting her leg so badly that for the next six months she was largely confined to the cottage at Black Point. But Mrs. Frémont hardly needed to go down into the city anyhow: San Francisco, as usual, came up to see Mrs. Frémont.56
In her aerie above the Bay, she presided over a salon—almost all male—of the quickest wits and keenest minds on the Pacific Coast. The lure of a golden land had already drawn to California a remarkable array of thinkers, dreamers, talkers, and schemers, all of whom rejoiced to discover a distant shore where the social proprieties and cultural pieties of Boston and Philadelphia did not apply. At Jessie Frémont’s gatherings, silver-haired politicians chatted with youthful poets; famous novelists collected sea yarns from the captains of China-trade clippers. The house itself suggested a kind of newfangled cultural mélange unlike anything seen in the East: silk hangings and damask-shrouded furniture in the latest Paris taste intermingled with American Indian baskets and photographs of Western landscapes, along with a splendid Albert Bierstadt painting of the Golden Gate. On the walls of her young sons’ room Mrs. Frémont pasted cutout pictures of ships and horses.
Guests lingered for hours over luncheon on the veranda, or strolled together through the gardens, enjoying the perfume of flowers mixing with the smell of the sea. They relished, too, the charisma of their famous hostess, who enthralled them with her tales of a girlhood spent dandled on the knees of presidents. She had never been a conventional beauty, and was growing stout and matronly as middle age approached, but she still retained all the charm that had won her, at the age of seventeen, the handsomest man in Washington as husband.57
When Herman Melville, in the gloomy eclipse of his literary fame, passed through San Francisco, he naturally called at Black Point, where a lively afternoon of conversation cheered him considerably. A much more frequent visitor was a shy, intense young writer named Bret Harte, whom Jessie Frémont had discovered while he was working as a typesetter and living in a tiny apartment above a restaurant. Harte’s comic poems and tales of life in the mining camps enchanted her, as did his newspaper columns, signed The Bohemian, which evoked a particularly Californian kind of cultural life in which writers and artists lived as rugged free spirits. Each Sunday afternoon, he would come to dinner and read aloud from his latest manuscript for her to critique. “Sometimes her comments cut like a lash, but her praise is sincere and freely given,” Harte told a friend. “To know her is a liberal education.” Mrs. Frémont soon shared her “pet,” as she called him, with the Eastern literary establishment, helping him land a short story in The Atlantic Monthly—and thus introduced a new, distinctively Western voice into American letters.58
As for the famous Pathfinder, when he was there at all he was usually just a taciturn presence hovering at the margins of his wife’s sparkling soirees. More often, Colonel Frémont was away from San Francisco attending to his troubled gold-mining enterprises and other personal affairs.
Even when the former presidential candidate was absent, though, politics was very much in the air at Black Point. Senator Edward D. Baker, the West Coast’s most prominent Republican—indeed, one of the national party’s rising stars—was a habitué. A handsome, hot-tempered, powerfully built Midwesterner, the Gray Eagle probably reminded Mrs. Frémont of her father. Like old Tom Benton, Baker was one of the most captivating orators in Congress. His skills had been honed back in Illinois, where he had joined the Disciple sect to become, like James Garfield, a youthful sensation on the preaching circuit.59 Only after migrating to the West Coast, however, did he develop his own distinctive brand of Republicanism.
In October 1860, shortly before she injured her leg, Jessie Frémont brought several friends along to the American Theatre on Sansome Street to see Baker give a campaign speech for Lincoln. The senator had arrived in town by steamer the week before, met at the wharf by a phalanx of Wide Awakes, his ever-present “bodyguard” for the duration of his stay. Thousands of San Franciscans turned out to hear his address at the theater; Baker’s friendship with Lincoln went back more than twenty years, to a time when they had both been young lawyers in Springfield, and no doubt many of his listeners hoped to hear personal anecdotes of the Rail-Splitter. It turned out, however, that Baker had very little to say about his party’s nominee. He addressed larger themes, in words that spoke directly to an audience of Western pioneers:
The normal condition of the Territories is freedom. Stand on the edge of the Sierra Nevadas, or upon the brow of any eminence looking down upon the Territories beyond, and what do you behold? You find there the savage, the wild beast, and the wilderness; but you do not find slavery.… The Western man goes into the Territory with his family, his horses, his oxen, his ax and other implements of labor. The Southern man goes with his slave.
A savvy politician, the senator reassured everyone that a vote for the Republicans was simply a vote for free white labor, not a vote for black emancipation: the party was committed not to interfere with slavery wherever it was already legal. Yet, at the climax of his speech, Colonel Baker, as he was often called, seemed to advocate nothing less than an American revolution:
Everywhere abroad, the great ideas of personal liberty spread, increase, fructify. Here—ours is the exception! In this home of the exile, in this land of constitutional liberty, it is left for us to teach the world that slavery marches in solemn procession! that under the American stars slavery has protection, and the name of freedom must be faintly breathed—the songs of freedom be faintly sung! Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, hosts of good men are praying, fighting, dying on scaffolds, in dungeons, oftener yet on battle fields for freedom: and yet while this great procession marches under the arches of liberty, we alone shrink back trembling and afraid when freedom is but mentioned!
At this, one newspaper reported, the entire hall broke out into “terrific cheers.” And that was not all: “While the people were cheering, Mr. Harte, who sat on the platform, apparently carried away with enthusiasm, rushed to the footlights, and with extended arms, excessive vehemence and loud voice, declared: ‘It is true! it is true, gentlemen! We are slaves, compared with the rest of the world. The colonel is right!’—then, pale as a ghost, staggered back to his seat, the people cheering vociferously.”60
It was, to say the least, out of character for the shy young poet. People said afterward that his patroness must have put him up to it. More than a few said that but for being a lady, and a famous man’s wife, Mrs. Frémont would have liked to be shouting from the foo
tlights herself.61
But the voice that would carry farthest and loudest across California in the months to come was neither the distinguished senator’s nor the mercurial poet’s. It was another of Jessie Frémont’s protégés who accompanied her to the American Theatre that evening. He was perhaps the most unlikely-looking hero in the entire hall. But in years to come, people would call him “the man who saved California for the Union.”62
Mrs. Frémont had become acquainted with the young Reverend Thomas Starr King one evening in the spring of 1860, when he and his wife had come to dinner at Black Point—an obligation of all interesting newcomers to San Francisco. The hostess, possessing as she did a keen eye for masculine beauty, cannot have been particularly impressed as she clasped King’s frail white hand in welcome. The clergyman stood barely over five feet tall, with greasy hair that hung lankly over the collar of his ill-fitting coat. His eyes, large and luminous, bulged slightly from their sockets like a sickly child’s; indeed, he seemed somehow not fully adult, a sexless boy-man in the garb of a preacher.
Yet behind those strange eyes flashed a wit as keen as Mrs. Frémont’s own. Almost as soon as they began conversing, both felt a marriage of true minds: a sense of communication as free, electric, and unimpeded as a telegraphic transmission. “An enchanted evening,” she would call it. The Gray Eagle was at the dinner table that night, too, as was the Great Pathfinder, but these political giants could only sit and watch as the bons mots flew back and forth between the mistress of Black Point and this odd little creature. Mr. King’s conversation was extraordinary: an incessant running commentary on life’s perplexities, spiced with literary references, antic puns, self-deprecating jokes, mimicry, and even some slightly risqué allusions. Only Jessie Frémont, perhaps, could have kept up with him. King was no less charmed by his new friend—not least because of her responsiveness to his performance. “She is a superb woman,” he wrote. “She is my one admirer in the universe.” Before long he was a regular at the cottage, coming and going almost as if it were his own home and talking with Mrs. Frémont for hours on the veranda.63
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