Chapter Three, Imperfect Union

Chapter Three

THE CURRENT OF IMPORTANT EVENTS

Jessie and John, 1841–1842

Washington

John and Jessie’s courtship peaked in Washington’s most crowded season, the time of a new presidential administration. Martin Van Buren had been defeated for reelection, and Democrats gave way to an opposition party called the Whigs, whose nominee, William Henry Harrison, was sworn in March 4, 1841. He mounted a white charger for his inaugural procession, riding down Pennsylvania Avenue near the Benton house. Without doubt Jessie and John were in the crowd as the sixty-eight-year-old delivered his address in front of the green-domed Capitol, speaking in a “clear, strong and harmonious” voice, according to a Whig newspaper, displaying an “erect and manly form.” One month later he was dead. His doctor blamed pneumonia, giving rise to a myth that he had caught it in the cold of his inauguration, but researchers later identified more likely causes, such as an infection from sewage dumped in marshland near the White House.

It was said that all of Washington was thrown into mourning, but this was an overstatement. Lieutenant Frémont did not lose sight of his priorities, and asked to be relieved of his duty to march with hundreds of other men in uniform in Harrison’s funeral procession April 7. The workroom where he was mapmaking, on 4½ Street near the Capitol, had an excellent view of the procession, which he wanted to watch with invited guests: the family of Senator Benton. From the windows they saw the presidential coffin pass on a horse-drawn wagon, draped in black velvet and decorated with two crossed swords and a scroll of the Constitution. John wrote later that the event “was something to see and remember,” but did not write down anything about the procession that he saw or remembered. He was paying attention to Senator Benton’s second-oldest daughter, his true reason for wriggling out of his marching duty: “The funeral occasion proved, as I had hoped, my red-letter day,” a day to cherish.

These were the lengths to which they had to go to see each other, since Mr. and Mrs. Benton did not fully approve of the penniless lieutenant as a suitor. The young couple’s path grew even narrower in early June: John’s commanding officer, Colonel J. J. Abert, ordered him to spend the summer conducting a survey of the Des Moines River, one thousand miles west of Washington, beginning “without delay.” Jessie, too, left Washington, attending a wedding in Virginia, near her grandparents’ house in Rockbridge County. It was a last moment of childhood for her: in a house that was jammed with relatives for days, she climbed with cousins to an upper floor, rummaging through closets and changing into “old uniforms and gowns.” One cousin was a young man on leave from West Point, whose features resembled Jessie’s, and she persuaded him to trade clothes to see if anyone noticed—the second time that something about attending a wedding prompted Jessie to try looking like a man. “Go to your room and dress properly,” one of the uncles barked when they emerged.

John and Jessie both returned to Washington at the end of the summer, each unchanged in their feelings. “The survey was a health-giving excursion,” John said, “but it did not cure” his “special complaint.” Jessie, too, was in love—and overcome with the fear that her father would marry her off to someone else. As closely as she had clung to him, she rebelled; the grand wedding to which her family’s status entitled her was not anything she wanted. She decided to elope with John in October. Seeking a pastor who would agree to marry them without telling Senator Benton, John approached his mentor Joseph Nicollet, and the Frenchman referred him to a Catholic priest. The cleric agreed to marry them even though neither bride nor groom was Catholic. The simple ceremony “was in a drawing room,” Jessie said afterward, with “no altar lights or any such thing.”

For weeks afterward they continued their lives as before. If they consummated their union, it could only have been done desperately and in secret, since Jessie was still living at home. Only a few people knew the truth, including a friend of John’s named F. H. Gerdes, who warned him on November 7, “Any delay of an open declaration, which some time or another must follow, makes your excuse less well, as this declaration itself, more difficult.” A few days later the young couple finally told Senator Benton, who was enraged. According to the family story, he ordered John to leave the house. Jessie held her ground, or rather held her spouse: she took John’s arm and quoted from the book of Ruth, “Where you go I will go also.” Her threat to leave with John melted her father’s heart.

There is another, less romantic account of this confrontation. In this story, Benton was enraged not only at John but also at Jessie. According to a relative, the senator was so angry that he “would not let her remain in his house,” and ordered them both to go away. Mrs. Benton tried to make peace, proposing a second, Protestant ceremony to make the union seem more proper; the senator refused, fearing it would amplify the scandal. But within a few weeks he surrendered, acknowledging his daughter’s free will and placing a brief notice of the marriage in a newspaper. Because John could not afford the lifestyle to which Jessie was accustomed, he moved out of his boardinghouse and into Jessie’s room in the Benton house. John adopted the whole family much as he had once folded himself into his girlfriend Cecilia’s family in Charleston.

Not long after they married, John wrote her a letter. “Fear not for our happiness,” he said. “If the hope for it be not something wilder than the Spaniards’ search for the fountain in Florida, we will find it yet.” It was a curious choice to compare their quest for happiness to Ponce de León’s fabled search for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in the 1500s. In the apocryphal story, the explorer never found what he was looking for, plunging into the American wilderness in search of a goal that did not exist. But the metaphor suggested the way John and Jessie’s marriage was intertwined with both ambition and exploration. John’s work mapping the West served Senator Benton’s goal of establishing a trade route to Asia; the two could be of great use to each other. Jessie’s choice of John had its own logic: while she refused to let her father dictate her life, she wanted to be close to him. The gender roles of the time would not allow her to become Senator Benton’s assistant—so she married a man who was certain to assist him.

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1842, a newspaper announced a civic ritual. “The President of the United States,” a brief note read, “will receive the visits of his fellow-citizens this day, between the hours of 12 and 3 o’clock.” It was customary for the president to begin each year by throwing open his home to shake hands with all comers. Top officials and diplomats attended—someone spotted the Russian ambassador Baron de Bodisco and his teenage bride—and so did many others, “the dashing dweller of the city, in fashionable array, and the hardy farmer, proud of his homespun costume,” as a newspaper described the crowd that filled the ceremonial rooms of the presidential mansion. Mr. and Mrs. Frémont took their place in the receiving line for what amounted to their public coming-out as a couple. Jessie wore a blue velvet gown with a blue cape and lemon-colored gloves, topped with a hat adorned with ostrich feathers. John’s Army Corps of Topographical Engineers uniform was at least as eye-catching—his hat decorated with the image of an eagle, topped by a plume, and twice as large as his head. He would have to make sure he had space around him before removing the hat in the crowd.

The president at the front of the receiving line was John Tyler, who had assumed office after Harrison’s death. If his conversation with the Frémonts resembled holiday encounters with presidents in later eras, then John and Jessie each said something brief and awkward, which the sore-handed president received as gracefully as possible before moving on to the next guest. The point of the encounter was not the words but the face time: the president of a republic must expose himself to the people, who were his employers. Perhaps John was nervous to meet him, but seventeen-year-old Jessie would have been less so—Tyler was a Virginia aristocrat who’d turned to politics, the sort of man she had known since she was born.

After the republican ritual the Frémonts returned home, where Senator Benton asked to have a word with his son-in-law about the year to come. He reminded John that there was money available for the Corps of Topographical Engineers to mount another expedition in the West. Now that Joseph Nicollet, with John’s aid, had mapped much of the region east of the Missouri River, the next expedition would range west of it. The Frenchman was in declining health and could not command this time, so Benton suggested that John should succeed him—and the senator had confidence that he could persuade the army to give him command. Even if his Democratic Party was out of power, he remained on the military affairs committee and had ties to key military officers. Whatever lingering anger he may have felt about the elopement, he set it aside—for practical politics demanded the channeling of passion, the suppression of anger. If Benton could reconcile with Andrew Jackson, who had tried to kill him, he could reconcile with the young man who had stolen his daughter’s heart.

“I felt I was being drawn into the current of important political events,” John said. For the senator was not simply planning a mapping expedition. He had larger ambitions. He wanted to use John’s mission to advance his long-standing plans to capture the Oregon country—or rather recapture, since he felt the United States had given up its rights to that territory by sharing it with Britain. As long ago as 1825, he had introduced a bill titled “An Act to Authorize the Occupation of the Oregon River.” By this he meant the Columbia River, which emptied into the Pacific: he wanted his American seaport to be established there, ready to trade with China. Senators rejected the idea, unwilling to risk war with Britain. In 1842, President Tyler was no more inclined to take up Benton’s notion than the Senate had been in 1825; his administration was negotiating away conflicts with Britain, not creating new ones. But Benton was about to develop his own foreign policy.

Benton had learned of a route through the Rockies to Oregon, crossing the Continental Divide at a gap in the mountains called South Pass. Fur traders, a few settlers, and missionaries had used it. If more Americans emigrated on this Oregon Trail to the Pacific, they would alter the facts on the ground: a significant population of Americans in Oregon would make it a de facto part of the United States. Emigrants would form a constituency demanding that the United States give them protection and formally annex the territory, and if it came to war with Britain, hardy and well-armed settlers could be turned into a military force. As Benton well knew, this was how the United States commonly expanded—not by overt invasion but through settlement. It was the way Benton’s onetime home of Tennessee became a state: white families carved out farms on land belonging to Indian nations and went to war when natives resisted. It was the way the United States captured the eastern portion of the state of Louisiana: American settlers seized this Spanish-controlled territory in 1810, and the United States swiftly annexed it. In 1836, American settlers in northern Mexico rose in revolt (as Benton had long wanted them to do) and declared the independent Republic of Texas. The Texans immediately requested annexation to the United States, which had not happened by 1842 but still seemed possible. Surely American settlers could work similar wonders in Oregon.

To encourage emigration, Benton wanted to use the media. The onetime newspaperman had so much influence over the Washington Globe, the leading Democratic paper, that a critic claimed its editor, Francis Preston Blair, allowed Benton’s “undried copy” to be placed “directly into the hands of the compositor” to be set in type. Now Benton wanted to make John C. Frémont the leading character in a news story. He would send his son-in-law beyond the Missouri River, and Lieutenant Frémont would plan his expedition so that he was mapping the approaches to Oregon. His maps would define the trail more clearly. His advice on the availability of wood, water, and supplies would make travel safer and more practical. His story, well publicized, would make the route better known. The mere fact of a government-supported expedition up the Oregon Trail would imply federal support for settling Oregon. When they discussed this after dinner on New Year’s Day, John grasped it all. “Daily intercourse under [Benton’s] own roof had given me a familiar knowledge of Mr. Benton’s plans,” he said afterward. “I gave henceforward to him . . . unstinted devotion.”

John received his appointment to command. Next Benton lobbied the army to send him on a route toward Oregon, though he did not mention Oregon by name. “I think it would be well,” Benton wrote Frémont’s commander, Colonel Abert, “for you to name, in the instructions for Mr. Frémont, the great pass through the Rocky Mountains [South Pass]. . . . It is the gate through the mountains . . . [and] will be a thorough fare for nations to the end of time.” If John set his course for South Pass he would naturally be on the Oregon Trail. Abert was opposed: he wanted John to survey the Kansas and Platte rivers, two major waterways of the Great Plains that were ripe for settlement, and felt that sending him to the mountains was too much for a single season. But knowing Benton’s influence, Abert reluctantly told Lieutenant Frémont to visit South Pass if he could do it without jeopardizing the river surveys. That was enough for Benton, who knew he could count on John to ride for South Pass no matter what. “Upon its outside view,” Benton said, the expedition was “the conception of the Government,” but in reality it was “conceived without its knowledge and executed upon solicited orders, of which the design was unknown.”

JOHN BEGAN ASSEMBLING EQUIPMENT. He borrowed a sextant and surveying instruments (to the annoyance of Colonel Abert, who said Frémont was not following procedure), and when spring arrived he made a shopping detour to New York. The transportation network had improved so dramatically in the past few years that it was possible to move the 230 miles or so from Washington to New York without ever riding a horse or carriage; it took a day or two on a relay of steam trains and ferry crossings. A boat carried John across the Hudson to the New York City docks by May 4, 1842.

The New York weather was unpleasant (“Fickle, changeable, cold, and uncomfortable,” one of the newspapers complained) but the city was soaring. Trinity Church was under construction on lower Broadway, with a spire that was projected to rise nearly three hundred feet. Its builders looked down on a city of more than three hundred thousand, most jammed into lower Manhattan Island within a mile or so of the church. While John was in town, the American Temperance Union held a meeting that drew more than six thousand people, a crowd hard to imagine in any other place he had seen. He passed near the Broadway meeting hall, where spectators filled every seat, according to a newspaper, with additional “hundreds and hundreds standing all down the four broad aisles,” including “young, lovely, and most beautiful women.” The streets crackled with the energy of migrants from the countryside and immigrants from different corners of the world.

In shops that lined the crowded streets, the twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant spent more money than he ever had, writing drafts for merchants to be reimbursed by the government. Ducking into a store off Wall Street, he paid three hundred dollars for a “first-class” chronometer, a precise clock that could go two full days without winding. Knowing the exact time would allow him to make navigational readings based on the position of the sun at certain hours. He paid ten dollars for a carrying case “with extra pillows, cushion, &c” to insulate the clockworks from bumpy rides. He bought a barometer in a leather case, and thermometers encased in mahogany. Strolling up Broadway, past the white stone city hall in its triangular park, he discovered a district of camera sellers. The “daguerreotype apparatus” was a popular new invention—a new form of art, it was said—which made images from life by exposing chemically treated metal plates to light. “It is sun-painting,” proclaimed an ad for a daguerreotype portrait gallery at Broadway and Chambers Street. John was convinced. He found a doctor selling cameras on the side, and paid $78.50 for a set with twenty-five plates. He planned to be the first western explorer who was known to try to illustrate the landscape with this new technology.

He failed to follow army procedure, neglecting to obtain advance approval for his purchases. When his commander discovered these irregularities, he sent an angry letter down the road after him, but it was too late. Leaving New York, John struck out directly for St. Louis, and by the time the letters went in the mail he was far to the west and beyond recall.

In Washington, Jessie knew John would be absent half a year. They had been married barely half a year, and she understood that his separation from her was a choice, not his fate. “It would have needed only a request from my father,” she said, “to obtain for Mr. Frémont duty which should keep him in Washington . . . but self-renunciation lies at the root of great work, and this was to be my part in being of use to my father.” So she bid John good-bye. “Mr. Frémont was gone into the silence and the unknown, how silent how unknown it is impossible to make clear.” He would pass beyond not only her touch and sight, but beyond even the reach of the mail.

It would be especially hard because Jessie, not quite eighteen, was pregnant. Maybe he would be home for the baby’s birth and maybe not. All the hazards of the West lay ahead of him, and all the hazards of childbirth lay ahead of her. Death was common in labor or soon afterward, and the joy of pregnancy was mixed with foreboding. Medical science was baffled by the complications of childbirth, which killed so many that almost anyone could name a lost neighbor or relative. “Young women,” a scholar said after studying women’s letters from the era, “perceived that their bodies, even when healthy and vigorous, could yield up a dead infant or could carry the seeds of their own destruction.” Jessie had to contemplate whether the struggle might signal her final hours on earth.

Realizing that his pregnant daughter needed some distraction, Senator Benton put her to work. He led her to his home library, telling her that he needed some “translations from Bernal Díaz’ Conquest of Mexico, and this occupied my mornings.” Diaz was a Spanish conquistador, one of the men who invaded and took over the Aztec empire beginning in 1519. Jessie lost herself, as much as she could, in the story of the badly outnumbered Spaniards who approached the Aztec capital built on islands in a lake.

Our number did not amount to four hundred and fifty, we had perfectly in our recollection the accounts we had received on our march, that we were to be put to death on our arrival in the city which we now saw before us, approachable only by causeways, whereon were several bridges, the breaking of one of which effectually cut off our retreat. And let who can, tell me, where are men in this world to be found except ourselves, who would have hazarded such an attempt?

Jessie translated such drama while thinking of John’s even smaller force. The story was as close as she could come to joining his adventure.

The pleasure of the story could not distract her for long. Her mother, Elizabeth, began suffering “an intolerable headache.” She summoned a doctor and submitted to the old-fashioned medical treatment of bleeding, and when it failed, allowed herself to be bled again. Jessie blamed the treatment, rather than the disease, for what happened next: Elizabeth suffered a “paralysis of the throat” that made it impossible for her to eat, and lay for days “looking dead.” Her condition improved, but she was never entirely right again, and wandered the Benton house with its English-made mahogany furniture, sometimes disoriented in her nightclothes. All this Jessie bore without her husband by her side. He was away on a prairie, or in the mountains, or dead—she had no way to know.