Frémont reveled in the attention, and his letters reveal an inflated sense of self-importance. “Throughout the Californian population,” he wrote his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, “there is only one feeling of satisfaction and gratitude to myself.” He reported Californios greeting him on the streets with the phrase “viva usted seguro, duerme usted seguro”—live safe, sleep safe—and young boys singing his praises:
Viva los Estados Unidos,
Y viva el Coronel Frémont,
Quien nos ha asegurado las vidas
Long live the United States,
And long live Colonel Frémont,
Who has secured our lives.
A little of this went a long way, but Frémont laid it on thick, in the process alienating a number of Americans, who viewed his conduct with suspicion. “He wears the sombrero and other things, and makes himself ridiculous,” one of them noted. “He gave rowdy balls, and so became popular with the lower classes,” said another. The most persistent rumor concerned Frémont’s philandering. “Frémont’s a low fellow,” Benjamin Davis Wilson told a visitor to the pueblo, “and patronized common prostitutes in public.” When, in 1856, Frémont stood as the first nominee of the Republican Party for president of the United States, allusions to those stories were published in an attempt to sully his character. Henry Hamilton, editor of the Los Angeles Star, mouthpiece of the local Democratic Party, wrote of Frémont’s “harem, publicly established and maintained in this city, where sisters, mothers, and daughters were indiscriminately collected, [to] the shame of the American people.” Hamilton claimed to possess “facts, names, and dates,” but he never produced them.
The differing views of Frémont’s policy during his short tenure as governor are illustrated by two encounters at one of the many balls he hosted at his headquarters. As Frémont was greeting the guests, across the room he saw a Californio named Geronimo López, the young messenger who had carried the note from Andrés Pico that initiated the negotiations resulting in the Treaty of Cahuenga. Frémont strode over to López with an outstretched hand, congratulating him on his role in ending the conflict. The gesture impressed the Californios who were present, among them Francisco Higuera, el güero, the man who had attacked and wounded Archibald Gillespie at San Pasqual. In the spirit of the moment, Higuera approached Gillespie, introduced himself, and said he wished to return the saddle and blanket he had taken during the battle. Gillespie turned beet red. “You damned rascal!” he exclaimed, “keep the property and welcome!” He turned his back on Higuera and stomped off. Gillespie was explicit about his feelings in a letter to Thomas Larkin. Frémont “favors the country people in every particular, and I think to the injury of the foreign residents.” Had he been in charge, Gillespie wrote, American policy would be far different. “I would make every one of these rascally Californians pay most dearly for every drop of American blood they have spilt, through their treachery and want of faith.” Frémont had shifted with the tide, Gillespie had not. This incident would be the parting of the ways for the former confederates in conquest.
KEARNY ARRIVED in San Diego on January 23. The following day he received word that the Mormon Battalion—some four hundred men under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke—had arrived at Warner’s Ranch, completing a five-month trek of nearly two thousand miles. Recruited as part of Kearny’s Army of the West, the Mormons had followed in the wake of the First Regiment of Dragoons. Kearny noted their arrival with pleasure. “I will, agreeably to the instructions of the President, have the management of affairs in this country, and will endeavor to carry out his views in relation to it.” At last his fortunes were rising.
A week later he sailed for Monterey, where to his delight he found Commodore William Bradford Shubrick, sent to relieve Stockton as commander of the Pacific Squadron. When Stockton received the news of his replacement, he was crestfallen. “You see how transitory all my high sounding titles have proven to be,” he wrote his brother-in-law back in the states. “I have in one moment’s time been reduced to plain Captain Stockton.” Little more than two weeks after his dramatic standoff with Kearny in Los Angeles, Stockton quietly retired from the California stage.
Frémont did not go so easily. With Stockton’s fall he lost the cover of official authority for his claim to be California’s governor. But with the armed power of the California Battalion to back him, he continued to stand his ground. “Viewing my position and claim clear and indisputable,” he wrote, “I cannot permit myself to be interfered with by any other, until directed to do so by the proper authorities at home.” That directive arrived within days, explicitly confirming Kearny’s command. On March 1 Kearny published a circular proclaiming himself military governor, appointing Lieutenant Colonel Cooke as commander of the southern military district, and ordering Frémont to muster the volunteers of the California Battalion into regular service under Cooke, discharging all who refused.
Three weeks later, on March 23, Cooke rode into Los Angeles at the head of the Mormon Battalion. Beside him was Stephen Clark Foster, Yankee graduate of Yale College (1840) who would later be elected mayor of Los Angeles. Foster had spent the previous six years in a peripatetic search for a career, teaching school in Virginia and Alabama, attending medical college in Louisiana, and practicing medicine in western Missouri, before heading to New Mexico with a trading caravan in 1845. He was clerking at a store in Santa Fe, “waiting for something to turn up,” in his words, when the Mormon Battalion passed through on its way to California. Foster, who had acquired a fluency in Spanish, hired on as Lieutenant Colonel Cooke’s translator. Years later he recalled his arrival in Los Angeles after the long trek across the desert. “My place in the column as interpreter was with the colonel at the head,” he wrote, “and I rode with my rifle slung across the saddle, powder-horn and bullet-pouch slung about my shoulders. My beard rivaled in length that of the old colonel by whose side I rode, but mine was as black as the raven’s wing, and his was as grey as mine is now.”
They forded the river, passed through the vineyards and groves on the east side of town, and entered the pueblo on Calle del Aliso, named for Louis Vignes’s estate. It was Foster’s first glimpse of the people of Los Angeles, among whom he would spend the rest of his life. Several hundred Indians, taking a respite from their labors, crowded together at the foot of Calle de los Negros. A group of women, heads covered with rebozos, exited the Plaza church and formed a small funeral procession along Calle de Eternidad to the campo santo at the base of the rolling hills north of town. Thirty or forty Californios, in their distinctive short jackets and breeches, lined Calle Principal. They greeted the Americans in silence. The only sound Foster heard was the battalion’s fife and drum playing “The Star Spangled Banner” as they paraded past Government House, then the loud huzza from the men when Cooke ordered them to break ranks and stack arms. They pitched their tents in the corral at the rear of Jonathan Temple’s townhouse.
Neither Frémont nor the California Battalion was present to greet them. Frémont had departed for Monterey the day before, intent on challenging Kearny’s orders. He had relocated the California Battalion to San Gabriel. Cooke found one of Frémont’s officers, who told him that the rifleros had refused to be mustered into regular service, and that Frémont would not allow their discharge. His commander, he said, considered it “unsafe at this time, when rumor is rife with a threatened insurrection, to discharge the Battalion, and will decline doing so.” No evidence of any such a threatened insurrection exists. Without the volunteers of the battalion, Frémont would have been powerless, which was his reason for keeping them in service.
Cooke had orders from Kearny to take possession of Frémont’s artillery and ammunition, but when he went to San Gabriel the quartermaster there told him he had direct orders from Frémont to release the weapons to no one. Cooke was flabbergasted. “I told him that the government authorities, the general of the army and governor, had committed the command here to
me,” he reported, “and I asked him if he did not acknowledge the authority of the United States Government.” He would acknowledge no authority but that of his commanding officer, the man replied. “The President of the United States, in person,” he declared, “would fail to get the artillery until Lieutenant-Colonel Frémont gave permission!” Cooke wrote to Kearny. “If these Americans are taught not to obey the legal authority of the government, what dangerous impression must have unavoidably been imparted to the late enemy.” He considered Frémont’s conduct treasonous, but was unwilling to press the issue. “I sacrifice all feeling of pride to duty, which I think plainly forbids any attempt to crush this resistance of misguided men.” Such a challenge, he feared, “would be a signal for revolt” among the Californios, who were paying close attention, soaking it all in.
FRÉMONT WAS PLAYING FOR TIME, hoping the next set of dispatches from Washington would acknowledge him as the “conqueror of California” and grant him what he considered his due, the governorship. But at Monterey he learned of the arrival at San Francisco of the New York Regiment of Volunteers, nearly eight hundred men under the command of Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson. The Polk administration had sent them as military backup, but also as colonizers. Most were young bachelors from the vicinity of New York City who enlisted with the explicit understanding that they would remain in California after the war, forming a nucleus for the Americanization of the territory. “There were men of pretty much every class except the most opulent,” one of the volunteers later remembered, “a large proportion of steady mechanics of all trades, with a smart sprinkling of the b’hoys of New York City, and not a few intemperates and ne’er-do-wells.” Stevenson’s regiment had sailed from New York in three vessels in September 1846 and arrived six months later, in March 1847. They provided Kearny with overwhelming force, and he treated Frémont accordingly, ordering him to return to Los Angeles immediately, to discharge the men of the California Battalion. He was then to accompany Kearny back to the states.
Frémont rejoined the California Battalion at San Gabriel at the beginning of April. During his final weeks in southern California his behavior became increasingly desperate. There was bad blood between the men of the California Battalion, many of them Missourians, and the men of the Mormon Battalion, many of whom had experienced a violent expulsion from Missouri in 1838. Frémont played up that antagonism, encouraging his men to confront the Mormons whenever they visited the pueblo, while also attempting to arouse ill-feeling toward them among Angelenos. A number of Californios reported that Frémont himself told them that “the Mormons were cannibals, and especially fond of eating children.”
Relations between the two battalions grew so tense that Cooke decided to take defensive measures in case of attack. He ordered his men to begin the construction of an earthenwork fort on the hill behind the Plaza church, in fear not of the Californios but of the California Battalion. “Last night we were called up and ordered to load and fix bayonets,” Private Henry Standage wrote on the morning of April 26. “The colonel had sent word that an attack might be expected from Col. Frémont’s men before day.” There was no attack, but the fear was real, and the conflict among the Americans could not be hidden from Angelenos. “With the prospect of the Mexicans again rising and the low murmurings of civil war hardly ceasing to salute our ears,” wrote Sergeant Daniel Tyler, “what the end would have been is difficult to say.”
General Kearny sent Colonel Richard B. Mason to Los Angeles with a demand that Frémont disbanded the battalion. Frémont treated Mason with contempt, on one occasion showing up several hours late for a scheduled meeting. “Sir,” said Mason, “when I send for an officer whom I rank and command, I expect him to obey me.” Frémont bristled. “My business was closed to you, Sir, was my reason for not coming.” (Los Angeles gossips claimed that Frémont’s “business” was an assignation with a young woman; one man claimed he had never seen “so much fuss made about a whore.”) “None of your insolence,” Mason snapped back, “or I will put you in irons.” Frémont immediately asked whether Mason would stand personally accountable for those words, and when Mason replied that he would, Frémont dashed back to his quarters and wrote out a formal challenge. Mason adhered to the script, and arrangements were made for a duel the following morning. But at dawn Frémont received a note from Mason saying he had been called back to Monterey and proposing that they meet there to conclude their affair of honor. When Kearny learned of the dispute, he ordered both men to stand down, which they did, agreeing that they would meet in the states later to settle accounts. But that never happened.
Finally realizing that if Frémont was to be removed he would have to do it himself, Kearny went to Los Angeles, accompanied by Colonel Stevenson and two companies of New York volunteers. “I this morning started Lieutenant-Colonel Frémont to Monterey to close his public business there before he leaves for Washington,” Kearny reported to the adjutant general in Washington. “His conduct in California has been such that I shall be compelled, on arriving in Missouri, to arrest him, and send him under charges to report to you.” Frémont’s court-martial on a charge of mutiny, which took place the following winter, brought the principal American commanders of the California conquest together a final time. Their testimony exposed a sordid contest for power characterized by egotism, calumny, and recklessness. It was certainly no way to begin the complicated military occupation of a hostile country. Frémont was found guilty and sentenced to dismissal from the service, which many considered a mild punishment. The reputation of all the players was badly sullied.
Within a year Kearny would be dead, struck down by yellow fever, contracted in Mexico. Stockton resigned from the Navy, served a term as senator from his home state of New Jersey, then unsuccessfully sought the presidential nomination of the nativist American Party, campaigning under the banner “Americans Should Rule America.” Gillespie developed a drinking problem, resigned from the Marine Corps in disgrace, and ended up in San Francisco, where he became infamous for his frequent outbursts against his former colleague-in-arms. “Frémont disappointed everybody,” he declared bitterly. Frémont himself led two more exploring expeditions—one simply a failure, the other a complete disaster—then became one of the first two senators from the state of California, the first of numerous high assignments, notably as the first presidential candidate of the newly formed Republican Party in 1856. Over a long career he remained the brilliant opportunist, always with a fatal tendency to overplay his hand.
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CHAPTER 12 •
MILITARY OCCUPATION
DESPITE PRESIDENT JAMES K. POLK’S determination to seize California, his administration had given no thought to how the Mexican department would be governed for the duration of the war. Stockton had no instructions at all, but that did not prevent him from declaring California “a Territory of the United States” in his proclamation of August 17, 1846. When Polk released that document to the public four months later—as part of a cache of state papers on the conduct of the war—his congressional opponents were outraged by what they considered the president’s infringement on their constitutional authority to “make all needful rules and regulations” for territory acquired by the nation. On the floor of the House of Representatives, Whig congressman Garrett Davis of Kentucky itemized the list of offenses. “Foreign countries occupied by our army and navy, . . . officers of our Government proclaiming themselves governors of provinces, appointing subordinate officers, fixing their salaries and the duration of their offices, establishing, in a word, the whole machine of civil government.” By what authority had Polk sanctioned such actions? “What! Was our American President an emperor, sending forth his Agrippa and his Marcellus, his proconsuls, to establish and to govern the provinces they might conquer by force of arms?”
Polk might have shifted the blame to Stockton had he not explicitly directed Kearny to do much the same thing. The general’s hastily prepared instructions authorized him, once California was firmly in Americ
an hands, to establish a civil government “similar to that which exists in our territories,” one in which the Californios would “exercise the rights of freemen in electing their own representatives to the territorial legislature.” Such a policy was entirely without precedent. There was no provision in the Constitution for the establishment of an American empire. Polk’s men were making it up as they went along.
In early January 1847, in an attempt to clarify the character of the occupation authority, the administration issued new instructions to the military command in California. “The possession of portions of the enemy’s territory, acquired by justifiable acts of war, gives to us the right of government during the continuance of our possession,” but “only such right as the laws of nations recognize.” That is, a government strictly military and temporary, with no conveyance of the constitutional rights of American citizens to the inhabitants. The occupation authority was to recognize and enforce existing Mexican law until California had been legally joined to the United States by congressional action. American officers were obligated to protect the lives and property of the inhabitants, guarantee their freedom of religion, and permit them to select their own officials to make, execute, and enforce local laws. These instructions drew a fine line between the prerogative of the conqueror and the protection of the conquered—just how fine a line would be revealed in practice.
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