All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Frémont’s wife worked closely with John Bigelow, of the New York Evening Post, to provide the candidate with claims to a legitimate family background. Bigelow’s campaign biography was a classic fairy tale of a poor young man revealed to be truly of noble descent.

  His mother’s father was the brother of Catharine Whiting, the grand aunt of George Washington. Colonel Thomas Whiting was “one of the most wealthy and prominent men of his day,” a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, a king’s attorney, member of the naval board. But the father died, the daughter Ann sent to live with evil relatives was dispossessed and forced into an unhappy marriage with an old landowner, Major Pryor, who “lacked refinement and sensibility, and was in every respect repulsive to the young creature, who was sacrificed to him.” After they divorced she married Charles Frémont, a French immigrant who was “a man of superior accomplishments and high breeding, spoke English fluently, and was a welcome guest in the best society.” He died when their son, John Charles Frémont, was five years old. The boy was confirmed in the Episcopal Church of his mother, graduated from Charleston College, joined the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, and set off on his famous adventures.

  “John C. Fremont . . . shown to be a Roman Catholic . . . inelligible [sic] for the Presidency”

  Frémont, in fact, was illegitimate. His father, Louis-Rene Fremon, a French-Canadian schoolteacher and dance instructor, who called himself Charles, ran off with the married Anne Whiting Pryor, whose divorce was never granted. John Charles Fremont, born in Savannah and raised in Charleston, later changed the family name, adding the “t” and an accent mark. He was raised Protestant, like his mother. But, above all, he was well married.

  By creating a personal counter-narrative, Frémont’s wife intervened in an effort to save him as she had throughout his entire career. Jessie Benton Frémont, educated from the cradle in the political arts, was the most formidable female political figure of mid-nineteenth-century America. She lent him legitimacy in drawing rooms and smoke-filled rooms. The country’s most celebrated individualist counted on her as his “second mind,” as he called her. Even when he was roaming the wilderness or European capitals alone or with his sidekick Kit Carson, she was indispensable as his protector and promoter, organizer of his thoughts and writing, manager of his campaigns, and dealing with party bosses, senators, and presidents without the slightest bit of deference but as an equal. None of their political lineages compared to hers, except the Blairs, who were also her family.

  Jessie was the favorite of Thomas Hart Benton’s six children and protégé, “his consort and collaborator, his apprentice and creation,” according to her biographer Sally Denton. He took her everywhere with him in St. Louis and Washington, educated her in the classics, resting her for long periods amid Thomas Jefferson’s six thousand books at the Library of Congress, and taught her to speak several languages. She was brought literally to sit at the knee of President Jackson during conferences at the White House while the president played absentmindedly with her hair. She studied birds with her father’s friend John James Audubon, heard stories from Washington Irving, and discussed exploration of the West with frequent houseguest William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame). While in her teens, President Martin Van Buren, a widower, proposed marriage. Benton, champion of Manifest Destiny, brought a trail of scientists and explorers to dinner, and it was there that sixteen-year-old Jessie was introduced to twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant John C. Frémont, fresh from surveying the region between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. They were instantly infatuated with each other, but her father disapproved of the match with the young man of little means, so they eloped, hastily securing a Catholic priest to perform the wedding ceremony.

  Some years earlier, Benton and Francis Preston Blair had informally agreed on an arranged marriage between Benton’s daughter and Blair’s son Francis Jr. That way, Blair told Benton, the two men would “be blended together when we have left the stage of life in history.” Blair hero-worshipped Benton as the personification of Western democracy. The two families were raised together, virtually one and the same. The Benton children called Blair “Father Blair” and his children their “cousins.” They were, in fact, distant cousins by shared lineage through the Preston family of Virginia. (Jessie’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side was General Francis Preston.) Montgomery and Frank apprenticed in St. Louis in the law under Benton’s tutelage. Benton called Frank “Young Ajax.” Elizabeth Blair, the Blair daughter, was Jessie’s closest friend. The night Jessie met Frémont, she said, “At last I’ve met a handsomer man than Cousin Preston.” Jessie and Frémont named their first son Francis Preston.

  Jessie was as much a trailblazer as her husband. She anonymously coauthored his thrilling account of his expeditions, traveled across the Panama Isthmus in 1849 to meet him in California, and tried to protect him from perils, most of his own making. During the Bear Flag Revolt, Frémont refused to take orders from his superior officer, General Stephen Kearny, and challenged him for the title of military governor of California. During the struggle for power, Frémont circumvented regular channels by dispatching his wife to intervene with President James K. Polk. Jessie considered the martinet Kearny an upstart who had gained his commission through the influence of her father. On June 7, 1847, armored in a green cashmere dress, in the company of her husband’s scout Kit Carson, she belted down a drink before heading to the White House. “Mr. Carson and Mrs. Fremont,” she announced to the happily surprised mountain man, “will now have a glass of sherry before going into battle.”

  Jessie handed the president a letter from Frémont proclaiming his innocence. “Doesn’t Colonel Fremont’s course seem reasonable in this case?” she demanded. Polk, polite to a member of the Benton family, did not reply. In his diary, he wrote: “Mrs. Fremont seemed anxious to elicit from me some expression of approbation of her husband’s conduct, but I evaded [making any]. In truth, I consider that Col. Fremont was greatly in the wrong when he refused to obey the orders issued to him by Gen’l Kearney. . . . It was unnecessary, however, that I should say so to Col. Fremont’s wife, and I evaded giving her an answer.” Frémont was court-martialed for mutiny, Polk declined to intervene, Frémont resigned in dishonor, Jessie fumed at the president, but Frémont returned as senator from California, vindicated by an adoring public that forgave his failings as the envy of rivals.

  In 1855, Jessie launched Frémont’s covert presidential campaign for the nomination of the newly formed Republican Party by writing an appeal for assistance to “Father Blair,” asking him also to help mitigate Benton’s jealous resentment of his son-in-law. Together Jessie and Blair acted as stage-managers of Frémont’s meteoric rise to the top of the Republican ticket.

  Jessie ran the campaign with Blair from headquarters at her 56 West Ninth Street residence in New York City. The open involvement of women as activists was among the campaign’s novelties. Women already were at the center of the abolitionist cause, and feminism grew out of abolitionism. In 1856, Jessie became its symbol. “The Frémont campaign marked the first time in American history when women were drawn into the political process, the zeal for Jessie unparalleled,” wrote historian Sally Denton. “The ‘Fremont and Jessie’ campaign, as it immediately became known, inspired thousands of women to take to the street. Widely seen as a full-fledged partner in her husband’s pursuits, Jessie became an overnight heroine to women. . . . She straddled the boundaries of Victorian society—outspoken but polite, irreverent but tactful, opinionated but respectful—a woman so far ahead of her time that other women flocked to her.” Jessie was conscious that as a woman in politics she, too, was a pathfinder. “I can say as Portia did to Brutus, ‘Should I not be stronger than my sex, Being so Fathered and so Husbanded?’ ” she wrote. Before Frémont won the nomination, but when his name was already being floated, Jessie observed, “Just now I am quite the fashion—5th Avenue asks itself, ‘Have we a Presidentess among us—’ ” “What a shame women c
an’t vote!” wrote Lydia Maria Child, the abolitionist and feminist. “We’d carry ‘our Jessie’ into the White House on our shoulders.”

  Jessie called the campaign “a trial by mud.” Perhaps the worst blow was her father’s endorsement of Buchanan—a “Brutus stab,” she called it. Frémont could not cope with the innuendoes. The harsher the smears, the more he withdrew. His daughter, Lily Fremont, recalled, “my father’s nature was such that he could not have withstood its bitterness. He was used to life in the open and wanted a square fight, not one filled with petty innuendoes and unfounded recriminations.” He left the campaign, including tracking the details of his murky parentage, to his capable wife. She hid the newspapers and correspondence from him to preserve his equipoise while she handled things. He spent much of his time riding and fencing. Jessie, according to Bigelow, could “look into the political cauldron when it was boiling without losing . . . [her] head.”

  Republican leaders were confounded that the religious falsehood against Frémont gained credence. Protests against it had a perversely confirming effect. If Frémont were not really a Catholic and part of a Vatican conspiracy of course he would deny it; but if he did deny it he would be seen as dissembling. Meanwhile, attempts to refute the big lie helped circulate it, gave it more importance, and suggested that the Republicans protested too much because they were covering up. Thurlow Weed warned, “the Catholic story is doing much damage.” A worried group of several dozen men attended a hasty meeting with Frémont at Astor House, the Broadway luxury hotel where Weed maintained his headquarters in Room 11. Francis P. Blair and Horace Greeley were opposed to making any statement in the belief that it might offend Catholic voters. Frémont refused to dignify the accusation and was averse to dealing with private matters that might be true or half-true. It was decided that a letter under Frémont’s signature disclaiming his reputed Catholicism would do more harm than good. Surrogates were enlisted to debunk the smear. In a pamphlet, “Col. Fremont’s Religion. The Calumnies Against Him Exposed By Indisputable Proofs,” Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous Northern Protestant pastor, insisted,” Col. Fremont never was, and is not now, a Roman Catholic. . . . It is a gratuitous falsehood, utter, barren, absolute and unqualified. The story has been got up for politics effect, it is still circulated for that reason, and, like other political lies, it is a sheer unscrupulous falsehood from top to bottom, from the core to the skin, and from the skin back to the core again. In all it ports, in pulp, tegument, rind, cell and seed, it is it thorough and total, untruth, and they who spread it bear false witness.”

  Neither facts nor clerical authority could undo the damage. Seward wrote his wife, “Fremont, who was preferred over me because I was not a bigoted Protestant, is nearly convicted of being a Catholic.” Greeley decried antislavery men who would vote against Frémont in the fear he “would give us all over to the tender mercies of the Pope!” Congressman Schuyler Colfax of Indiana wrote Blair: “These Catholic reports must be extinguished or we shall lose Pa, N.J., Inda., Conn. And the Lord knows how many more states.” Thaddeus Stevens lamented that the accusation of Catholicism “lost us the Nation.” “It had the most effect,” concluded Thurlow Weed.

  But more ominous than the cynical and paranoid attacks on Frémont’s birth and religion were the consequences of the “disunionism” theme. Originally intended to besmirch the “Black Republicans” as divisive and unpatriotic it assumed a life of its own.

  Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, who anointed Buchanan “as reliable as Mr. Calhoun himself,” announced in September he would call up 150,000 troops to resist Frémont if he were elected. “Tell me if the hoisting of the black flag over you by a Frenchman’s bastard, while the arms of civil war are already clashing, is not to be deemed an overt act and a declaration of war?” he said, fusing the birther and disunionist themes.

  Wise called for a meeting of Southern governors to prevent Frémont from taking office and to prepare for secession. “The South could not, without degradation, submit to the election of a Black Republican President,” he stated at a rally. “To tell me we should submit to the election of a Black Republican, under circumstances like these, is to tell me that Virginia and the fourteen Slave States are already subjugated and degraded, that the southern people are without spirit, and without purpose to defend the rights they know and dare not maintain.” Only two governors showed up to Wise’s meeting. It was more a tactic than a strategy. His threat of secession was rhetorical. He anticipated that Buchanan would win. But he and others were laying a predicate to act on in the future. If a Republican won the presidency, secession was the logical response.

  The Richmond Enquirer argued the case on August 29 in an editorial entitled “Fremont and Disunion.”

  In voting for Fremont, a portion of the North tenders to the South the issue of this Union or unconditional submission. If Fremont be elected, he comes in as the professed enemy of the South. No Southerner, without treachery to his section of the Union, can become a member of his cabinet. . . . We do not believe that any portion of the South will submit to his administration. . . . Disunion then, in event of his election is inevitable. . . . Let Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana and Illinois, see whether their interests will not be best promoted by uniting with the Southern confederacy. Let California, too, study well the question. . . . But let no one indulge the fatal delusion that Fremont may be elected and yet the Union preserved.—There is not one single possibility of such result. It is hard to keep it together even now. Then, it would fall to pieces without even a struggle to preserve it.

  John Minor Botts, a prominent Old Whig from Virginia, enlisted as a Fillmore presidential elector, protested the cynical siren calls for secession, stating that the South would honor the results of the election even if Frémont were to be elected. The Richmond Enquirer urged him to flee the state. “Do not wait for the honors or ostracism nor provoke the disgrace of Lynching . . . the best atonement for the treason you have committed, will be to hurry North—and never more.”

  Several days after Botts was threatened with lynching, Senator James M. Mason of Virginia sent Secretary of War Jefferson Davis a private letter, informing him of Wise’s pre-secession plans, for “your most private ear.” Mason passed on Wise’s secret request in case of a Republican victory, “to exchange with Virginia, on fair terms of difference, percussion for flint muskets” for the state militia. “If so, would it not furnish good reason for extending such facilities to the States? Virginia probably has more arms than the other Southern States, and would divide in case of need. In a letter yesterday to a committee in South Carolina, I gave it as my judgment, in the event of Fremont’s election, the South should not pause, but proceed at once to ‘immediate, absolute, and eternal separation.’ ” Mason added his hope that Wise’s view that “Old Buck” would be elected was “not delusive.” In not one Deep South state and only four border states did Frémont’s name appear on the ballot.

  Throughout the North vast crowds materialized for the Frémont campaign, the likes of which had not been seen before—60,000 people led by fifty bands in Indianapolis, 25,000 in Cleveland, a parade that was six miles long in Michigan. In Beloit, Wisconsin, 30,000 staged a “celebration” with floats, including one with “thirty-two beautiful young ladies” under the banner “Opposition to Old Bachelors.” In city after city, the prettiest young woman was chosen for parades to represent the “Queen of Hearts,” “Our Jessie.” In New York City, a rally at the Academy of Music was packed “from pit to dome,” reported the New York Tribune.

  Walt Whitman, fired from his job as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle for supporting the Free Soil Party in 1848, felt inspired to compose an exhortatory essay, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” addressed to “to each Young Man in the Nation, North, South, East, and West.” The year before, in 1855, he self-published a book of poetry he titled Leaves of Grass. Now Whitman wrote of Franklin Pierce, “The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force
it on The States. The cushions of the Presidency are nothing but filth and blood. The pavements of Congress are also bloody.” He derided Buchanan and Fillmore as “relics and proofs of the little political bargains, chances, combinations, resentments of a past age, having nothing in common with this age.” He imagined the coming of “the Redeemer President of These States, [who] is to be the one that fullest realizes the rights of individuals, signified by the impregnable rights of The States, the substratum of this Union. The Redeemer President of These States is not to be exclusive, but inclusive.” He appealed to “young men” of the South: “How much longer do you intend to submit to the espionage and terrorism of the three hundred and fifty thousand owners of slaves? Are you too their slaves, and their most obedient slaves?” And Whitman wondered how and when the future would bring an inevitable cataclysm. “What historic denouements are these we are approaching? On all sides tyrants tremble, crowns are unsteady, the human race restive, on the watch for some better era, some divine war. No man knows what will happen next, but all know that some such things are to happen as mark the greatest moral convulsions of the earth. Who shall play the hand for America in these tremendous games? A pretty time to put up two debauched old disunionist politicians, the lees and dregs of more than sixty years! A pretty time for two dead corpses to go walking up and down the earth, to guide by feebleness and ashes a proud, young, friendly, fresh, heroic nation of thirty millions of live and electric men!”