Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  But Kearny allowed the man some latitude. He did not view Frémont as a military man—a topographical engineer was to a general of dragoons only nominally “army” to begin with, and the officer was young, ambitious, with a splendid wife and influential in-laws, and had accomplished much in his explorations. Soon after their initial meeting, Kearny wrote Senator Benton that Frémont had arrived in Los Angeles, fit and well. He asked, “Will you please in my name congratulate Mrs. Frémont upon the honor and credit gained by the Colonel and with my best wishes for her and all your family.”

  It was a kind thing to do and demonstrated Kearny’s confidence that Frémont would serve well under his command.

  20

  Last Battle

  1

  Owl Russell had warned Frémont that there were two camps in Los Angeles and a wide gulf between them, that big trouble was brewing between Commodore Stockton and the army’s senior officer in California, Brigadier General Kearny. Owl had earned his nickname—he saw things and heard things—and was an utterly dependable and loyal Frémonter. The explorer believed what Russell said but when he marched into the village in mid-January, 1847, he naively thought that he stood outside and aloof from the problems of the two senior officers.

  He had the Cahuenga treaty in his saddlebag, had confidence that the commanders would work out their differences and that he, a mere lieutenant colonel, had no role in their conflict. He had been in California for thirteen months and under Stockton’s command for six of them. Kearny had a mere six weeks in the country and it was common knowledge that he had bungled one battle, had to be rescued by the commodore’s men under Archibald Gillespie, and had turned over land operations to Stockton at San Gabriel and the Mesa.

  To Frémont, the chain of command was not disputable: Stockton had led in the conquest of California, had recovered Los Angeles, and remained in command now.

  But, trapped between the colliding forces, he learned that nothing was so simple: his arrival in Los Angeles with his four-hundred-man California Battalion served as a long-awaited signal to Kearny to assert his command over all American forces and all civil governance in California.

  * * *

  The source of difficulty between the two senior officers was as old as war: ambiguous orders from a government far removed from the battlefield, orders written inexplicitly because of the time that would lapse between the issuance and receipt of them, orders rendered moot and unworkable by the time they reached their destination.

  Kearny had marched to California with orders from President Polk dated June 3, 1846—six months before he arrived there—to subdue the country and take control of it, and these orders contained the ruinous “… should you conquer” equivocation.

  Stockton’s orders from the Navy Department were similar and dated nineteen days after Kearny’s orders. But the commodore had been the senior officer in situ during most of the actual conquest and he maintained that he had already conquered California before Kearny arrived on the scene and that therefore the general’s orders were nullified. Moreover, he said, Kearny did not have a sufficient force to win any battle and had had to be supplemented by the navy’s sailors and marines and Frémont’s volunteers. In Washington, he would later say, with a certain vagueness of his own, “My right to establish the civil government was incident to the conquest, and I formed the government under the law of nations.”

  Frémont saw all this as irrefutable, and of his partnership with the commodore, H. H. Bancroft said, “Notwithstanding the blunders and braggadocio and filibusterism of Frémont and Stockton, really the greatest obstacles to the conquest, these officers might plausibly claim to be conquerors.…”

  The real obstacle, which Stockton did not mention but that did the greatest injury to his position in the argument, was the September 23 revolt in Los Angeles.

  Had there been no revolt, President Polk and his entire government would have accepted Stockton’s precedence without question. But the Los Angeles rising and Gillespie’s surrender tainted and clouded the conquest thereafter. Stockton’s attitude that California had been won by the time Kearny reached Warner’s Ranch on December 3, 1846, overlooked the fact that with the exception of San Diego, all of southern California had to be re-won in three battles, in all of which Kearny played a role and Frémont none.

  Bancroft said of Stockton-as-conqueror: “He had shown a creditable degree of energy and skill in overcoming obstacles for the most part of his own creation, in putting down a revolt that but for his own folly would have had no existence. No more can be honestly said in praise of the commodore’s acts and policy in California.” The historian gave Kearny credit for realizing he was in no position to supersede the commodore upon entering San Diego, and Kearny later said that he had acquiesced to Stockton’s role as commander out of “respect for his [Stockton’s] situation,” but that he fully intended to supersede this junior officer “as soon as my command was increased.”

  Ironically, a month before Kearny entered California, clarifying orders had been dispatched west by the army’s senior general, Winfield Scott, soon to command the Vera Cruz expedition against Mexico. Scott wrote to Kearny on November 3, 1846: “After occupying with our forces all necessary points in Upper California, and establishing a temporary civil government therein, as well as assuring yourself of its internal tranquillity … you may charge Col. Mason … or the land officer next in rank to your own, with your several duties, and return yourself to St. Louis.”

  He also ordered that Frémont’s volunteers be mustered into the regular army service retrospective to May 13.

  These orders were entrusted to Colonel Richard Mason of the First Dragoons, to be carried over the Isthmus of Panama and to California by warship.

  Unfortunately, the orders did not arrive before the storm broke.

  2

  On January 14, Stockton, ready to sail south to Mazatlán and find some action along the Mexican coast, and still nettled over the unauthorized treaty his subordinate had written, fulfilled a promise by tendering to Frémont the appointment as governor of California. In his proclamation, the commodore took care to permit no question of his authority to make such an appointment; indeed, he seemed to have written it expressly for the eyes of his bête noire, Kearny.

  Having, by authority of the President and Congress of the United States of North America, and by right of conquest, taken possession of that portion of territory heretofore know as upper California; and having declared the same to be territory of the United States, under the name of the territory of California; and having established laws for the government of the said territory, I, Robert F. Stockton, governor and commander-in-chief of the same, do, in virtue of the authority in me vested, and in obedience to the aforementioned laws, appoint J. C. Frémont, esq., governor and commander-in-chief of the territory of California, until the President of the United States shall otherwise direct.

  Kearny, as Stockton must have expected, reacted with barely contained fury and in a letter written on January 16, questioned Stockton’s authority, asserting that such appointments were his, Kearny’s, specific domain and that if the commodore had such authority from the President, or from “any other channel of the president’s,” he asked to see “certified copies” of the documents. “If you do not have such authority,” the general wrote, “I then demand that you cease all further proceedings relating to the formation of a civil government for this territory, as I cannot recognize in you any right in assuming to perform the duties confided to me by the president.”

  The Frémont appointment, the ensuing Kearny letter, and Stockton’s bitter response occurred with orchestrated timing. The commodore answered the general with alacrity and hid a round shot in his return note. He repeated his assertion that California had been conquered before Kearny entered it and that he had communicated to the President the details of the civil government he had formed before Kearny’s arrival. Then he appended acidly: “I will only add that I cannot do anything, nor desist from
doing anything, or alter anything on your demand; which I will submit to the president and ask for your recall. In the meantime you will consider yourself suspended from the command of the United States forces in this place.”

  Frémont was caught in the no-man’s-land of this letter shrapnel from the outset. Stockton had appointed him governor on January 14; two days later, Kearny had written his objection to the commodore and the commodore had returned his blistering response; now, on January 17, Kearny summoned Frémont to his headquarters in an adobe building near the town plaza: “Dear Colonel, I wish to see you on business,” the note said.

  The explorer knew the subject of this meeting. Kearny, on the day he had voiced his objection to Stockton’s appointment, had sent his adjutant, Lieutenant William Emory, with instructions for Frémont. Kearny said that the explorer was to maintain his command of the California Battalion, not to turn it over to Gillespie—which Stockton had ordered—and to remain in that position until notified otherwise. These orders, undermining Stockton’s authority, were clearly the “business” at hand.

  Before reporting to Kearny’s headquarters, Frémont hastily wrote a letter to the general and left instructions that it be delivered by Kit Carson to Kearny’s office as soon as it was copied.

  The letter and its author arrived at the general’s office almost simultaneously. Frémont reread it, signed it, and handed it over to Kearny. After a polite introductory, the letter got to the point:

  I found Commodore Stockton in possession of the country, exercising the functions of military commandant and civil governor, as early as July of last year; and shortly thereafter, I received from him the commission of military commandant, the duties of which I immediately entered upon, and have continued to exercise to the present moment.… I feel myself, therefore, with great deference to your professional and personal character, constrained to say that, until you and Commodore Stockton adjust between yourselves the question of rank, where I respectfully think the difficulty belongs, I shall have to report and receive orders, as heretofore, from the Commodore.

  He signed the letter “Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army and Military Commandant of the Territory of California.”

  In all his career, since he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the 13th Infantry in 1813, Kearny had never heard, much less seen written down, such an astonishing case of disobedience of a lawful command of a superior officer, such an instance of prejudice of good order and military discipline—such a clearly defined example of mutiny.

  Yet he made allowances that he would never have permitted any other officer in similar circumstances. Frémont was an explorer and topographer, scarcely “army,” and doubtlessly unaware of the gravity of what he had written; he was the son-in-law of one of the most powerful of American political figures, Thomas Hart Benton, who was a Kearny friend, as was Benton’s daughter Jessie, Frémont’s wife, toward whom the general had a genuine affection.

  The letter was a grievous mistake, Kearny counseled. He urged Frémont to destroy it and said that if he would do so, there would be no consequences, provided there would be no questioning the general’s orders thereafter. On the matter of the governorship, Kearny said he intended to return to St. Louis within a month and implied a willingness to appoint Frémont to replace him as governor at that time. He called upon his long friendship with Senator Benton and Mrs. Frémont and urged that the colonel not destroy his career and embroil others in the consequences of his disobedience.

  This momentous scene was unwitnessed and neither man left a satisfactory record of it. There were two extraordinary features of it: Kearny’s uncharacteristic willingness to counsel his subordinate on the evils of his letter, and Frémont’s failure to ask questions about the command controversy and seek Kearny’s advice—even his assistance—on the matter of how he could serve two masters without alienating either. Kearny, probably because of his regard, if not his fear,1 of Benton, seemed willing to help, but Frémont did not take advantage of the offer; instead, he seems to have said something about his decision having Commodore Stockton’s support, then saluted and walked out of the room.

  (A year later, in Washington, Frémont pointed out that Kearny, in suggesting he rescind the letter, was in effect willing to “break the rules of the service and of war.” H. H. Bancroft’s devastating rejoinder to this was that “dishonor in such cases pertains not to the officer who shows such leniency but to the recipient who uses it against him.”)

  Bancroft wrote further: “Against Kearny’s position in the dispute, nothing can be urged, and against his conduct—his blunder at San Pascual affecting only himself and his men—nothing more than a savor of sharp practice in certain minor proceedings indicating a lack of confidence in the real strength of his position, or perhaps an excess of personal bitterness against his rival.”

  And of Frémont: “His action in disobeying Kearny’s order, or rather in leaving the two chiefs to settle their own quarrel, must I think be approved; that is, compared to the only alternative. Like Stockton, he merits no praise for earlier proceedings. He had perhaps done even more than the commodore to retard the conquest. His mishaps as a political adventurer call for no sympathy.… There is, or should be, honor even among filibusters.”

  3

  Kearny had no choice but to bide his time. Addressing Stockton as “Acting Governor of California,” he wrote, “I must for the purpose of preventing collision between us, and possibly a civil war in consequence of it, remain silent for the present, leaving with you the great responsibility of doing that for which you have no authority, and preventing me from complying with the president’s orders.”

  To Secretary of War William Marcy he sent a dispatch stating that Stockton had prevented him from carrying out the President’s orders “and as I have no troops in the country under my authority, excepting a few dragoons, I have no power of enforcing them.” He included copies of his orders to Frémont on continuing in command of the California Battalion, Frémont’s fatal letter, and his own exchange of letters with Stockton.

  At about this time, he had made up his mind to arrest Frémont when they reached Fort Leavenworth, and see him court-martialed.

  Stockton too wrote to Washington, addressing his remarks to the secretary of the navy on February 4, recounting his troubles with Kearny and demanding the recall of the general to “prevent the evil consequences that may grow out of such a temper and such a head!”

  The Stockton-Kearny-Frémont imbroglio could not be kept secret. Even a newcomer such as twenty-seven-year-old artilleryman Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, who arrived in California on the warship Lexington after a voyage around Cape Horn, saw the confusion, heard the arguments, and asked, “Who the devil is the governor of California?”

  * * *

  As he promised, Kearny distanced himself from Stockton. On January 18, after sending Lieutenant William Emory east via Panama with dispatches on the command impasse, he gathered the remnant of the Army of the West—fifty reasonably able-bodied dragoons—and rode south to San Diego.

  Within two weeks of his departure from Los Angeles, the descending star of his brigadiership began to rise; his enervating experiences with Stockton and Frémont were replaced by the exhilarating confirmation of his role as generalissimo of American military forces in California and head of its civil government.

  The first of three arrivals in the abrupt turnabout of Kearny’s fortunes was that at Warner’s rancho of the Mormon Battalion of 350 volunteers led by Kearny favorite Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke of Leesburg, Virginia, a West Pointer (class of ’27), veteran of the War of 1812 battles and the Black Hawk War, and a fifteen-year veteran of the First Dragoons.

  Kearny had explained to the War Department that he temporarily deferred to Stockton’s leadership because, especially after San Pascual, he had too few fighting men under his immediate command to argue about it. He had depended upon adding Frémont’s volunteers to his dwindled regulars to assert his right to the
command in chief, but Frémont’s disobedience had confounded that plan. Now the arrival of Cooke’s battalion gave the general the manpower he needed to seize the military and civil supremacy the President had directed.

  Cooke brought his haggard battalion into San Diego on January 29 and Kearny posted them at San Luís Rey to rest, recuperate, and await further orders while he and his staff sailed on the Cyane to Monterey. There, where Commodore John Sloat had first raised the American flag over California and launched the conquest six months earlier, Kearny intended to set up his headquarters. Consul Thomas Larkin, now a Kearny ally, had generously offered his home for the purposes.

  Monterey, the general had decided, would be the capital of American California during his governorship.

  With an uncanny interdicting precision, while the general and his officers were making a leisurely eight-day voyage upcoast from San Diego, there arrived in Monterey Bay the naval officer sent to take over command from Robert F. Stockton of the Pacific Squadron.

  Commodore William Branford Shubrick was a solid, stolid, fifty-seven-year-old salt from Bull’s Island, South Carolina, and from a family of navy men. His older brother, John Templar Shubrick, had been a hero of the War of 1812 and was lost at sea in 1815. William Branford Shubrick, commissioned a midshipman in 1806, had, like Stockton, served in 1812, in the Mediterranean, West Africa, and the West Indies. There the similarities ended. He had none of Stockton’s flamboyance and vainglory, no wealth, no political connections, and, as it quickly became evident, no use for Robert Field Stockton.

  Shubrick arrived in Monterey on the razee—a refitted frigate—Independence in late January, and when the Cyane sailed into the harbor, the new commodore ordered a thirteen-gun salute in Kearny’s honor. At dinner aboard his flagship, Shubrick got a lengthy briefing on the command question, took one look at the general’s orders from President Polk and instantly concurred with them. He notified Kearny that new and clarifying orders would soon be arriving from Washington and wrote the Navy Department that “I have recognized in General Kearny the senior officer of the army in California; have consulted and shall cooperate with him as such.…” Stockton’s civil government measures, Shubrick said, “have been, in my opinion, prematurely taken … and an appointment of governor made of a gentleman who I am led to believe is not acceptable to the people of California.”