I shall never forget the months I spent as a spectator in the Washington Arsenal watching the fiendish glare that Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny directed at my daughter’s husband, John Charles Frémont. I had never seen anything like it. General Kearny had fixed his unblinking scowl upon my son-in-law with the full intent of intimidating the young man.
The court-martial of Colonel Frémont began on November 2, 1847, and ran eighty-nine days. General Kearny had brought the charges, including mutiny, disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to good order. These sprang from the period when Frémont and his battalion of irregulars, along with Commodore Robert Stockton, had largely conquered California with little help from the regular army. Commodore Stockton, the senior United States officer in the region, had appointed Colonel Frémont the governor of the newly conquered province, a position he ardently defended against the meddling of Brigadier General Kearny, until the malice-soaked Kearny stripped him of the office, accused him of insubordination, and then hauled him east as a prisoner.
Kearny must have seethed, for the young and celebrated conqueror of California was neither a veteran line officer nor a West Pointer but a junior officer, an explorer and map-maker with the Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers, who happened to be near the Pacific coast when war broke out. Not only that, but Frémont and Stockton had won California with minimal bloodshed, and Frémont had made a generous peace with the conquered Californios.
It didn’t end with that, either, for the young man was also a national hero, well known to his countrymen as the Pathfinder. In previous explorations he, along with a company of gifted scientists and cartographers, had mapped large portions of the little-known West, and the accounts of these journeys had been published by the government and made available to pioneering Americans bent on settling the West. Thus the Pathfinder had been a great instrument of westward expansion, an enterprise dear to my heart, and one to which I had devoted my entire career in the Senate.
But all this success, which seemed to wrap my son-in-law in a golden aura, was too much for the old guard in the army, and in General Kearny it found the means to ruin the most celebrated young officer in the republic. I knew, even as the two sides prepared for the trial, that Colonel Frémont would have to endure a special burden, the rage of envious senior officers who vented their rank hostility and contempt toward my son-in-law at every opportunity, sometimes stating their case in the sensational daily press.
I took steps in my own fashion to salvage my son-in-law’s career, one day interviewing President Polk about the matter. I noted his tepid response, and I marked him as a pusillanimous opponent of the Bentons, though we had made common cause for many years. I took to the Senate floor, where I still commanded a faction of my Democratic party, and did not hesitate to let the whole body know of the malign effort to disgrace Colonel Frémont, and by extension, bring ruin upon my family.
How I ached for my daughter Jessie, who was forced to listen day after day to the most disgraceful and base accusations against her beloved husband, even while she bore his unborn child. It was plain to the whole world that the charges against my son-in-law were utterly without merit, concocted by a vindictive old general who had arrived in California too late and with too little force and had suffered the mortal indignity of defeat by the Californios. Was it any wonder that a bilious stew began to boil in the bosom of the old soldier or that it was soon to spew over the true conqueror of California?
I took my own measures as I watched the trial progress through the weeks and months. When General Kearny took the witness stand, I stared back, as relentlessly and unblinkingly as he had glared at my son-in-law, and my steadfast gaze had its effect. The general exploded in rage, and the tribunal directed its attention toward me, even as I sat with glacial calm among the spectators. But the conduct that was perfectly acceptable to the tribunal in Kearny’s case was not acceptable to them in my case, and I suffered the rebuke of its presiding officer, Brevet Brigadier General G. M. Brooke. That gave me the measure of the thirteen members of that tribunal. I knew where the Bentons stood with them, and some things I do not forget or forgive.
I like to think that the whole lot of them were recollecting an earlier utterance of mine that still follows me around, much to my advantage: “I never quarrel, sir, but I do fight, sir, and when I fight, sir, a funeral follows, sir.”
They found Frémont guilty on all charges and directed that he be thrown out of the army. The miserable Polk affirmed the charges but remitted the sentence, permitting my son-in-law to remain in the service. But that additional rebuke was too much for the young man; he resigned in deepest sadness, and thus the Pathfinder, the young republic’s most honored young man, found himself tarnished and alone. Those were hard days for my daughter Jessie and her husband, and I ached for them.
It mattered not that the American people, along with the press, were solidly behind Frémont for it was plain to the whole country that sheer spite among senior army officers had brought the Pathfinder to his ruin. It mattered not that this vindictive verdict caused grave illness in Jessie and threatened the life of her unborn child. It mattered not to the Polk administration that it had wrought an injustice and that the American people were aware of it and outraged by it.
But I have my own ways and means, and I thought of an enterprise that not only would regain Frémont’s reputation for him as the nation’s foremost explorer but also would open a way for Saint Louis to funnel the entire commerce of the West and the Pacific into the States and to hasten the day when the republic would stretch from sea to sea. I proposed to several Saint Louis business colleagues that they fund a private survey along the 38th parallel, with the intent of running a railroad to San Francisco along the midcontinent route. I received somewhat hesitant backing because the gentlemen feared that Frémont might once again fail to use sound judgment, but in the end, we raised enough to finance Frémont’s fourth expedition. It would be up to the Pathfinder to restore his name and reputation. But in this case he would not be defying a superior officer; he would answer only to himself. This time there was no one looking over his shoulder.