Chapter One
AID ME WITH YOUR INFLUENCE
C.J. Fremont, 1813–1840
Charleston and the West
Long before he was famous for wandering the West, John Charles Frémont grew up in a family that wandered the South. They moved restlessly from city to city, beset by scandal, then tragedy, then poverty. The scandal was John’s illegitimate birth.
John’s mother, Anne Pryor, was the offspring of an elite Virginia family. She was married when she fell in love with Charles Fremon, a French immigrant and French teacher. Confronted by her husband in 1811, Anne left him and moved with Charles to Savannah, Georgia, where John was born to them on January 21, 1813. Their life in modest rented rooms was a change for Anne from the plantation houses where she had grown up; Charles Fremon made a bare living by opening a “French and Dancing Academy” for elite young ladies and gentlemen, and taking in boarders who wanted to study his native language. But they were not entirely without help. Anne had come from Virginia with a living token of her aristocratic past: a maid named Hannah, a family slave in her midthirties described as having a “redish complexion.” She had an independent spirit. Having accompanied Anne when she followed her heart to Savannah, the maid tried to follow her own heart, and escaped in 1812 with a free black boatman. But all the rules were different for Hannah; she either returned or was captured, and was on hand to help when baby John arrived.
The family faced trouble from the start. The state of Virginia refused to grant a divorce, meaning Anne could not marry the father of her child. Beyond that, something didn’t work for them in Savannah. The baby was only nine months old when they relocated with him to Nashville, where Charles started another French and dancing school. Tennessee also did not hold them long, and they rambled back eastward to Norfolk, Virginia, while two more children, Elizabeth and Francis, were born to them along the way. They no doubt grew poorer with the demands of each new child. Then Charles Fremon died around 1818, leaving Anne with next to nothing, and five-year-old John without any clear memory of his father.
John never said what he felt about the collapse of his family, except indirectly by what he edited out of his life. He did not speak of his father, and was still a youth when he began effacing his father’s name. First, he changed Fremon to Fremont. Then his given name went through an evolution. His earliest known signature, from age fifteen, was written J. Charles Fremont—he was going by Charles, like his father. As late as his eighteenth year, some documents called him Charles Fremont or even reversed his initials to make him C.J. Fremont. But he later put the initials back in order, giving John as his first name. Not until his twenties did he add an accent mark, completing his identity as John C. Frémont.
Before his teenage years, when people still called him Charles or C.J., his mother moved the family to Charleston, South Carolina. C.J. sometimes walked to its harbor, lingering at the Battery, a waterfront promenade, where he could “go and feel the freedom of both eye and thought.” He felt that “the breast expands” when “the eye ranges over a broad expanse of country, or in the face of the ocean.” He could watch white sails on the horizon as ships approached from Liverpool or Boston, along with black smoke from the regular steamer coming up the coast from Savannah. Approaching ships angled past Fort Sumter, a brick pile that was just getting under construction on a shoal in midwater.
He couldn’t spend much time looking, because his family needed him to work. At thirteen he interrupted his education to work for a lawyer, serving subpoenas. But the youth’s intelligence prompted the lawyer to pay for him to go back to school, the first of many times that Charles would attract an older male sponsor. A schoolteacher became the next sponsor, and recorded a description of his student: “middle size, graceful in manners, rather slender . . . handsome; of a keen piercing eye and noble forehead.” The teacher took extra time to instruct him in Greek, passing on a love of Greek plays, and at sixteen Charles was admitted to the College of Charleston, starting as a member of the junior class.
It was a priceless opportunity. The college’s brick building was new, its cornerstone having been laid just three years earlier, and though its roof leaked in the rainy climate it was a vibrant institution. Aware that the top colleges were in the North—Princeton, Harvard, Yale—Charlestonians wanted a good school of their own, and leading citizens became trustees. There were three thousand books in the library, and the size of the student body had recently reached a record high of sixty-two. The college president, Jasper Adams, had been recruited from Brown University in New England, and his curriculum blended readings from ancient Athens and Rome with the ideology of the new American republic. That ideology went on display when students performed at a college exhibition: Charles Fremont recited an “Extract from Mr. Crafts’ Oration, 4th July 1812.” William Crafts was a Charleston politician who in that speech declared, “This country appears to have been created on a magnificent plan, destined for the production of great events, and the display of extraordinary powers.” Americans would develop “mental and moral greatness” as they met the challenge of spreading across the continent and conquering the West. “Our rivers,” C.J. repeated to the audience, “flowing with boundless velocity—our mountains, rising in awful grandeur—our rocks, braving the fury of the elements, are marked with the characters of independence, and proclaim the residence of freemen.”
The faculty member who took attendance recorded the way C.J.’s academic career gradually drifted off course. In the fall of 1830, he missed the first few weeks of class. The faculty understood; attendance records noted that “C.J. Fremont” was “teaching in the country by permission.” Probably he was helping to support his family by giving private lessons to affluent families, as his father once had. C.J. returned to college a few weeks later, and his high grades suggested that he caught up with his classmates. But he began missing more classes, sometimes vanishing for a week. His behavior stood out, even in a school with generally spotty attendance (“The whole course of . . . Philosophy,” one campus record complained, “will be badly understood by the Senior Class on acc. of the frequent absences!”). His professors gave him “frequent reprimands.” His friends were mystified. At last, on February 5, 1831, Charles was summoned to meet the faculty. The confrontation (on a Saturday, after Charles had been absent the previous Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) could not have been easy for President Adams, for he knew his students well and sometimes visited their parents. He understood that Charles came from a struggling family. Yet the young man gave no explanation for his absences. Adams informed him that he was expelled, and his academic record ended with the sentence: “C.J. Fremont was dismissed from the college for incorrigible negligence.”
The young man shrugged. “I knew that I was a transgressor,” he said. The punishment “came like the summer wind,” for the “edict only gave me complete freedom . . . I smiled to myself while I listened to words about the disappointment of friends—and the broken career.”
WHAT HAD HAPPENED? Charles eventually confessed a secret. He was “passionately in love,” cutting class to visit a fourteen-year-old girl. Her name was Cecilia, and she lived with her family in a house on a Charleston street corner. She was one of five brothers and sisters overseen by their mother and grandmother. They had become his surrogate family; he was part of a “little circle of sworn friends” with the brothers and sisters, and together they explored the woods and islands around the harbor. Sometimes they went shooting or picnicking. Once, in a rowboat, they were nearly swamped by the waves around Drunken Dick, a hazardous shoal on which ships sometimes foundered. Returning to her home, John sat with Cecilia in a side room that had a door opening onto the street, allowing them to flee when the grandmother approached. There is no record of what the grandmother thought of this eighteen-year-old college dropout lounging in her house with an adolescent girl. When Charles revealed this relationship in his memoir, he did not declare whether he’d had his first sexual encounter with her, but he did write: “This is an autobiography and it would not be true to itself if I left out the bit of sunshine that made the glory of my youth. . . . I lived in the glow of a passion that now I know extended its refining influence over my whole life.”
Who was the young woman who so affected him? He never gave her family name, and said little of her personality, but described her appearance: she had a “clear brunette complexion” with “large dark eyes and abundant blue-black hair.” She also had a compelling family history: her people came from Haiti, in the West Indies, and were Creoles, meaning they descended from French colonists who had once ruled Haiti. The French were expelled by a revolt among Haiti’s black slave population, which culminated in 1804 with the massacre of many white residents and the creation of an independent black-led republic. Cecilia’s family were refugees.
Notably, John said Cecilia’s siblings had the same “brunette complexions,” dark eyes, and blue-black hair. Although these words could describe French people who identified as white, they easily suggest people of color. Charles did not state their race, yet the implication of his description was clear enough. One of his early biographers was apparently uncomfortable about this description, and solved the problem by effectively putting the young man’s lover in whiteface—rewriting her description to give her “clear ruddy skin” instead of brown. Perhaps the biographer concluded that Fremont misspoke.
A more straightforward explanation is that Charles described her accurately and knew what his description would imply. Haiti had many people of mixed race—and people of all racial identities had to flee Haiti when suspected of aiding the colonizers. And so it’s plausible that C.J. Fremont’s first love was a person of mixed race, as were all her siblings, his close friends. This would help explain why his classmates at Charleston College were baffled about where he went instead of studying: he could not tell them. An interracial relationship was a greater transgression than missing class. Such relations were common, as was obvious from the city’s population of several thousand people of mixed race, known as mulattoes (many of them descended from white slave owners, who did as they liked with enslaved women they controlled). But like Charles’s birth out of wedlock, this could not be discussed.
Charles’s affair with Cecilia did not last. His mother still needed financial help, and before long his time was taken up with minor teaching jobs, including one in which he and a partner taught French. But he had begun dreaming of the wider world—the world he saw from the Battery, or while roaming with Cecilia by the harbor—and his dreams were fueled by a pair of books he had read. One was a book on astronomy, which awakened his interest in celestial navigation. The book was in Dutch, which Charles could not understand, but he could study the “beautifully clear maps of the stars,” and he had the math skills to follow the “many examples of astronomical calculations.” The other book collected stories of “men who had made themselves famous by brave and noble deeds, or infamous by cruel and base acts.” This book reflected the aspirations and the anxieties that churned within C.J. himself.
HE FOUND HIS WAY OUT of Charleston with the help of his next mentor: Joel R. Poinsett, a politician, diplomat, and amateur botanist. Appointed the United States minister to Mexico in the 1820s, Poinsett earned two distinctions: he was the first US ambassador to the newly independent country, and while there he sent home a red flower that became known in the United States as the poinsettia. Returning to Charleston in 1829, Poinsett attended the same church as C.J. Fremont’s family and served as a trustee of Charleston College. He was the same age as John’s mother, and took notice of her wayward son.
The first and most important thing that Poinsett did was give C.J. a political orientation. Poinsett was a Unionist, meaning he favored preserving the country as it showed early signs of coming apart. In 1831, the year of Fremont’s affair with Cecilia, Charleston residents held a “states-rights ball,” while other South Carolina towns held “disunion dinners” to promote the South breaking away from the North, and citizens of Beaufort performed a “Disunion Drama.” The issue was not slavery, at least not directly. Some South Carolina leaders proclaimed their right to nullify what they called the Tariff of Abominations, federal taxes on imported goods that protected American industries but raised the price of products bought by Southern planters. If Fremont’s mentor in these years had been one of South Carolina’s radical thinkers—such as John C. Calhoun, who was serving as vice president of the United States yet secretly aiding the nullifiers—his life might have taken a different course. But Unionists such as Poinsett supported President Andrew Jackson and his administration (one South Carolina paper said the idea that the federal government could not enforce its laws was “beyond patient endurance from a people not absolutely confined in their own mad-houses”). Poinsett also held a nuanced view of slavery. In 1832 he told a visiting French writer named Alexis de Tocqueville that slavery was a disadvantage to the South—that Northern and western states were gaining far more rapidly in population, which meant the South was steadily losing power. It would be a mistake to call him antislavery: he said nothing could be done about slavery, a position that allowed him to accept the status quo while deflecting the questions of disapproving outsiders. But as Charles later said, Poinsett “saw the dark spot on the sun,” understanding that the divide over slavery endangered the country.
Young Fremont’s Unionist associations allowed him to perceive an opportunity when it sailed into the harbor. In January 1833, a US Navy warship glided past the unfinished bulk of Fort Sumter and dropped anchor, sent by President Jackson to signal his determination to enforce federal law. While many Charlestonians saw the USS Natchez as a threat, Fremont saw a chance to get away. He learned of a job on board, and Poinsett agreed to recommend him, even though he thought the job—as a shipboard mathematician—was a waste of Fremont’s talent. He would spend long, dull days at sea, tutoring poorly schooled seamen to calculate the figures necessary to take navigational readings by the sun and stars. His abbreviated education and his study of the pictures in the Dutch book he couldn’t read apparently gave him enough knowledge to persuade the ship’s captain that he was qualified.
When the nullification crisis eased (President Jackson’s threat of force was followed by a compromise in Congress over the tariff) and the Natchez moved on, twenty-year-old C.J. Fremont bid good-bye to his mother and went out into the world beyond the harbor. Never having been at sea, he joined a crew who made their lives on it: one was Lieutenant David G. Farragut, who had served in the War of 1812 at age eleven. Within a few months the ship was patrolling the coast of South America, which was a magnificent adventure, although Poinsett was right that the work did not test the young mathematician. When the Natchez returned, John wavered over what to do next. He rejected a permanent position as “Professor of Mathematics in the Navy,” but then wrote Poinsett asking for a mathematician’s berth on a ship bound for the Mediterranean.
Your kindness to me on a former occasion . . . induced me to hope for it also on this—an excuse which you will think rather worse than none at all, but which was true, and all I had to offer . . . Should it suit your convenience to aid me with your influence, I need not say how great would be my obligation to you . . .
I have the honor to be
With much respect
Your Ob’t Servt
J. Charles Fremont
Poinsett didn’t get him the job. He had a different journey in mind for his protégé: moving inland instead of out to sea. He was about to give the young man his first experiences in westward expansion.
In the 1830s the major cities on the Eastern Seaboard were competing to become portals to the developing interior. New Yorkers had already opened the Erie Canal, which connected to the Great Lakes. The tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad were under construction over the Appalachians, and a similar venture was called the Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad. Joel Poinsett of Charleston was among the investors. “The Rail Road will be built,” declared a letter published in the Charleston Courier in 1836. “Real estate in Charleston will appreciate 100 percent; and our own particular Rail Road Stock will rise in two years 100 per cent. . . . Every dollar judiciously laid out in Charleston in real estate, will double itself in five years.” That was just the rosy scenario necessary to persuade men to invest in a plan to lay more than six hundred miles of iron rails over some of the roughest parts of the Appalachians to reach the Ohio River Valley. To find a route, the investors assembled a survey party under the direction of an army engineer, and Fremont was hired to go along. They rode northwestward through South Carolina and into Tennessee, spending long days in the woods and stopping at night at the homes of farmers along the way.
The project was a fateful failure; the railroad was never built. Although Charleston eventually was connected by more roundabout routes to the Mississippi River Valley, it remained a provincial city on its coast, where regional resentments and dreams of independence festered. But for Fremont the railroad survey was a priceless experience, and the army officer who led it later hired him for a second assignment that launched his career as a soldier of the American empire. He was to map Indian country—the Cherokee Nation. President Jackson had imposed a treaty requiring the Cherokees to surrender their land in North Georgia and surrounding states. They were to move west of the Mississippi by the spring of 1838, but because it was an illegitimate treaty, signed by a breakaway faction of elite Cherokees and not the Cherokee government, no one knew if the fifteen thousand Cherokees would go. The army prepared to clear them off the land by force if necessary, and Fremont was assigned to a surveying party ordered to map Cherokee territory in case it became a battlefield.
The men rode into Cherokee country in early 1837, splitting into small groups and moving “hurriedly,” as Fremont recalled, through rough mountains. Told to sketch the Hiwassee River, he walked twenty miles along its winding course in a day, climbing huge stones and fallen trees. He woke “so stiff next morning I moved like a foundered horse,” and could no longer lift his feet. He had to sit on obstacles and yank his legs over one at a time. But he recovered in the evenings at Cherokee farms. These were his first meaningful encounters with Indians, who had adapted their culture to life among white people: “many of their farms were much the same as those that are to be met with elsewhere on our remote frontier.” Cherokees welcomed him into their homes and let him sit by their fires. Nobody threatened him, even though he was working for the government that threatened them. Cherokees were conducting a sustained act of nonviolent protest, simply declining to move west. Their protest would not end until some were rounded up at gunpoint and their leaders at last consented to start along the Trail of Tears in 1838.
Although the young mapmaker accepted the common view that it was “wise and humane” to move Indians out of the way of encroaching white settlers who preyed on them, he grasped that Cherokees were losing more than they gained. “There has been no continuous effective policy by the Government except in the removal of Indians from East to West, and out of the way of the white man,” he later said; promises to compensate and support Indians were never fully kept. His ambivalence about his mission did not prevent him from feeling exhilarated by the work. During “this accident of employment,” he wrote, “I found the path which I was ‘destined to walk.’ Through many of the years to come the occupation of my prime of life was to be among Indians and in waste places. . . . There were to be no more years wasted in tentative efforts to find a way for myself.” His sponsor was now in a position to help him find more work: Joel Poinsett became secretary of war in 1837, appointed by a new Democratic president, Martin Van Buren. Poinsett helped Frémont obtain a job in the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, a special unit devoted to surveying and mapping the American landscape. Accepting the appointment, John left Charleston for good. Only his mother remained for him there; his sister, Elizabeth, had died in her teens, while his brother, Frank, had left Charleston for a career in the theater. John moved to Washington and in 1838, at age twenty-five, was one of a group of ten men formally appointed second lieutenant, the newest and lowest-ranking officers in the army.
His qualifications came from life experience rather than formal training. This distinguished him from army officers who had graduated from the military academy at West Point, where cadets were forced to apply themselves in class, master the science of war, and generally grow up. West Pointers were early participants in the national trend of professionalization, which lawyers, physicians, engineers, scientists, educators, and others would eventually follow: raising formal standards, demanding specific credentials, and excluding those who did not measure up. John Frémont represented a different tradition: that of the intrepid amateur who found out how much he could get away with.
THE CORPS OF TOPOGRAPHICAL ENGINEERS was filling an enormous gap in the nation’s knowledge. The Louisiana Purchase, more than eight hundred thousand square miles west of the Mississippi, was much traveled but little understood; while native people and fur traders knew it intimately, only scraps of their experience had filtered eastward to be recorded. Lewis and Clark’s expedition beginning in 1803 had traced the Missouri River more than two thousand miles to its source and continued beyond it to the Pacific, but only a few formal explorations had followed. From the perspective of Washington, the Rocky Mountains were hardly known; the trails to Oregon and California were scarcely mapped; and great mountains and rivers that appeared on maps were merely rumors. The corps was organizing a mapmaking expedition to fill some of the blanks, and ordered John from Washington to the starting point, St. Louis. He reached the city in the spring of 1838 and mingled with army officers posted to a barracks there, among them Captain Robert E. Lee, who had recently finished making a detailed map of the St. Louis waterfront.
Lieutenant Frémont was the sole commissioned officer assigned to the expedition, which would mostly consist of hired civilians. The War Department engaged a uniquely qualified expert to command: Joseph Nicollet, a distinguished French geographer who had previously mapped the source of the Mississippi River. John was to become, in effect, the explorer’s apprentice as Nicollet further mapped the northern plains. He was a slight man with an intense focus on his craft; in a letter to his mentor Poinsett, Lieutenant Frémont described the geographer as “delightful” because of the “almost extravagant enthusiasm in the object of his present enterprise wh[ich] he seems to think the sole object of his existence.” He was an immigrant who had fled to the United States for a new start after going bankrupt while speculating in the Paris financial markets. His French background and language made him welcome in St. Louis, where many families had remained since French colonial times. The powerful Chouteau fur-trading family, whose ancestors were founders of the city, supplied Nicollet with provisions as well as with men—voyageurs, as they were called—who had learned the rivers and plains while transporting furs.
It was a stroke of fortune that John was able to learn from Nicollet, who had devoted his life to a great mystery of the age: how to study the surface of the earth when so little could be seen at any one time. It required a blend of science, stamina, and systems. Nicollet had brought notebooks, five by seven inches or smaller, in which his tiny handwriting recorded every observation. (“Departed Traverse des Sioux at 11:07 a.m. . . . appearance of rain . . . the heat is overwhelming.”) Enchanted by the prairie, he made a note in his journal about “the beautiful lawns we are crossing,” and as the expedition followed winding rivers, he sketched the shape of each bend until the river resembled a little snake on his page. From time to time he would halt the expedition and produce a triangular device called a sextant; peering through a lens, he measured the angle of the sun above the horizon at a certain moment of the day. He then stayed up long past dark to measure the angle of Polaris, the North Star. From these and other readings it was possible to determine latitude and longitude. A barometer measured air pressure, which varied with altitude. Once these readings were compared with readings that had been meticulously recorded at other times and places, Nicollet could determine exactly where he stood on the surface of the earth, how far he was from other points, and how far above sea level. He was a master at this craft, a disciple of the great European geographer Alexander von Humboldt; had Nicollet never emigrated to America, it would have been hard for Lieutenant Frémont to find anyone who had so much to teach him.
The explorer’s apprentice learned equally important lessons in wilderness survival from the French-speaking voyageurs. One night, when detached from the rest of the expedition, Frémont and two other men camped on the prairie, and woke in the night to a crackling noise. A prairie fire was sweeping in their direction, swift and unstoppable. The voyageurs understood that the only safe place was on ground that was already burned. They lit a prairie fire of their own, let the wind blow it away from them, and with moments to spare stepped into the blackened area. On another day John persuaded the expedition’s hunters to allow him to join the pursuit of a buffalo herd. “This,” he said, “was an event on which my imagination had been dwelling.” The men approached the herd on horseback, working toward it from downwind so the buffalo would not catch their scent. Topping a low ridge, the men looked down on a “compact mass” of brown creatures making “the loud incessant grunting noise peculiar to them.” And then the chase began as the buffalo thundered away in clouds of dust, which was so thick that as the hunters charged after the herd they couldn’t see the ground. Frémont learned how green he was: “I made repeated ineffectual attempts to steady myself for a shot at a cow after a hard struggle to get up with her, and each time barely escaped a fall. In such work a man must be able to forget his horse, but my horsemanship was not yet equal to such a proof.”
John accompanied Nicollet on a second expedition in 1839, and afterward returned with him to the East. They had grown close, the mentor and protégé. Nicollet, who was Catholic, was living on the grounds of St. Mary’s, a Catholic college in Baltimore, and John sometimes visited him there, meeting Nicollet’s friends among the Catholic clergy who ran the school. Returning to Washington, the two men set up a workroom near the Capitol and began to produce a map. The periodic celestial readings became dots on paper, the expedition’s precise location on certain dates. The men would then use the journal entries and sketches to reconstruct the routes they had taken between these points and the landscape they had seen. It was slow and painstaking work, as Lieutenant Frémont was awkwardly reminded one day when a man appeared in the doorway. He was a man in black, in his late fifties, with a massive body that filled the doorframe, a full head of hair, and piercing blue eyes. He introduced himself as Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He said he wanted to see Joseph Nicollet’s map of the northern plains. Frémont gestured with regret to the map projection, which was blank; they were still organizing the raw material.
Senator Benton was disappointed, but the two men made a connection: Benton wanted to absorb Frémont’s firsthand knowledge, as he did with every western traveler he met. Though he had never gone west of Missouri, he soaked up so many details from those who had that it could seem he must have walked the ground himself. Frémont began visiting the senator’s home a few blocks from the Capitol, where they sat in Benton’s upstairs library. Soon John had a new mentor. Sometimes John stayed for dinner at the Benton house, and got to know members of the family. He took an interest in the senator’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, when she came home from her boarding school in Georgetown, the little river port at the edge of Washington.
Elizabeth agreed to attend a school concert with him in Georgetown—and it was at the concert that he noticed Elizabeth’s sister Jessie, who was attending the same school. Afterward, John C. Frémont recorded the moment of their first encounter. “She was just then in the bloom of her girlish beauty,” he said. “There was no experience of life to brush away the bloom.” The “pleasure of seeing her sister” drew her out in “bright talk,” he said. “Naturally, I was attracted.” He came away thinking of Jessie rather than her older sister.
St. Louis, 1832: the gateway to empire.