Chapter Six, Imperfect Union

Chapter Six

THE MANIFEST PURPOSE OF PROVIDENCE

Thomas Hart Benton and the Frémonts, 1843–1844

Washington and St. Louis

The country palpably changed while John was away from May 1843 to the summer of 1844. Prophetic events pointed toward a new phase of American history—beginning with the National Convention of Colored Citizens.

On August 15, 1843, as John camped on the Green River in the Rockies, about forty people arrived for the convention in Buffalo, New York. They gathered in a public hall at the corner of Washington and Seneca streets, and Henry Highland Garnet called the meeting to order. The principal subject of the convention was the abolition of slavery, and Garnet had escaped slavery in Maryland. This meeting was not unprecedented; free black Americans had organized other such conventions in past years, and some white people had long campaigned against slavery. But the meeting in Buffalo took the dramatic step of discussing violent resistance. Describing slavery’s inhumanity in terms that left the room “infused with tears,” Garnet called upon slaves to demand freedom from their masters, and “if the master refused it, to tell them, then we shall take it.” It sounded like a call for revolution, though Garnet did not say precisely how slaves should take their freedom.

The crowd roared its approval—until another former slave rose to object. Frederick Douglass was only twenty-five, but he’d had enough life experience to speak with authority. He had been born enslaved in eastern Maryland around 1817, and was separated from his mother as an infant so she could be made to work in the fields. Sent as a youth to serve a family in Baltimore, he learned to read through a flaw in the slave system: it was run by people susceptible to human feelings. His new master’s wife, he said, “at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness,” and helped the boy learn the alphabet and basic spelling. Her husband discovered the lessons and ordered her to stop, fearing that education would ruin the youth for slave work, but the boy covertly enlisted white schoolchildren to give him lessons. Later he met a free black woman, Anna Murray, who aided his escape to the North and then married him. And he began a life as an antislavery activist, a disciple of the radical white newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison of Boston, turning the words he had learned into weapons.

Douglass told the convention that they should continue to rely on words. He warned that if slaves demanded their freedom in the way that Garnet proposed, it would lead to a futile “insurrection,” and Douglass “wanted emancipation in a better way,” through peaceful moral persuasion. Douglass prevailed. The convention called for the establishment of an antislavery newspaper, and for traveling lecturers to make the antislavery case. Afterward, Douglass and two white men followed up on their commitment to moral persuasion by beginning a speaking tour of western states, including an event in Pendleton, Indiana. Thirty stone-throwing white men drove the speakers off the stage, and one chased Douglass and broke his hand with a club.

Brutal as their actions were, the attackers’ underlying sentiment was no different from official federal policy: slavery was best not discussed. Talk was dangerous. Neither major party had an interest in raising the issue, because both sought votes from the North and South by emphasizing less divisive issues. It required selective vision for Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer and former state lawmaker from the free state of Illinois, to join the same Whig party as Alexander H. Stephens, a slave owner elected to Congress from Georgia in 1842. The House of Representatives imposed a gag rule blocking discussion of antislavery petitions. But agitation was growing harder to contain. Improving transportation meant that like-minded people could gather for events such as the Convention of Colored Citizens, and activists could range more widely giving speeches. Increasing numbers of newspapers meant that dissident voices could be heard. Antislavery papers covered antislavery politicians, such as former president John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, who had been elected to Congress and was campaigning to end the House gag rule. As the abolitionist movement grew, Southern leaders were becoming more extreme in defense of their institution. Slavery was a barrel of gunpowder waiting for a fuse—and that slow-burning fuse was lit accidentally by the next prophetic event while John was away.

In February 1844, a navy warship turned into the Potomac below Washington. The river was choked with ice for forty miles below the capital, but the ship cracked through the white sheets easily, leaving behind a trail of clear smooth water the width of the hull. The USS Princeton resembled a standard three-masted sailing ship, but its wooden hull hid features that made it unlike any warship seen before. A steam engine was churning belowdecks. It burned smokeless coal called anthracite, and had a funnel that could be retracted out of sight in order to surprise enemy sailing ships with its mysterious speed. Rather than the vulnerable paddle wheels of most steamers, the engine turned a screw propeller below the waterline. Each cannon on deck was mounted so it could swivel to fire to either side, rather than poking from a gunport on one side, and its two main guns were so massive they had been given names: one was the Peacemaker, while the other was named for a territory over which the ship might someday fight: Oregon.

The Princeton’s commander, Captain Robert F. Stockton, had designed the ship in collaboration with John Ericsson, a brilliant engineer who was an immigrant from Sweden. Calling his ship’s innovations the most important “since the invention of gunpowder,” Stockton had championed the big guns over the objection of the army’s chief of ordnance, who warned that such huge iron barrels might contain imperfections and come apart when fired. Now he brought the ship to Washington to show off his creation, anchoring within sight of the Capitol’s green dome. On February 16, President Tyler boarded the ship for a short exhibition cruise. On February 28 the president returned with other officials, including Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Had Jessie not been away in St. Louis, she surely would have come: Dolley Madison, widow of President James Madison, was one of several women on board as the Princeton cruised downriver past the grave of George Washington at Mount Vernon. The crew demonstrated the big guns several times, and late in the voyage, the secretary of the navy announced a final blast of the Peacemaker. President Tyler was delayed belowdecks, but other dignitaries gathered. Captain Stockton—stern-faced, with a full head of hair and boundless energy—stood near Senator Benton and took hold of the lanyard. “I saw the hammer pulled back,” said Benton, “heard a tap—saw a flash—felt a blast in the face, and knew that my hat was gone: and that was the last I knew of the world, or of myself, for a time, of which I can give no account.” He regained consciousness a moment later to see “Stockton, hat gone, and face blackened, standing bolt upright, staring fixedly upon the shattered gun.” The left side of the barrel had come apart, showering the deck with shrapnel. The deck was strewn with bodies. The secretary of state was killed. The secretary of the navy was killed. Others of the dead included a black man, a slave who worked as President Tyler’s valet.

The disaster had a notable aftereffect. Tyler had to choose a new secretary of state, who would face an especially sensitive task. The late Secretary Upshur had been negotiating for the United States to annex the independent Republic of Texas. Mexico still claimed Texas and threatened to go to war over it, while Texas’s admission would face domestic opposition because the Texans permitted slavery. It would take great subtlety for Upshur’s successor to avoid disaster, but President Tyler nominated John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who threw aside all subtlety. As soon as the Senate confirmed him as secretary, he demanded the annexation of Texas as an essential move for the protection of slavery. American politics soon began to fall apart. David Lee Child, an antislavery journalist, voiced astonishment that Calhoun could ever have been entrusted with Texas when the stakes were so high: “It is almost as if [Calhoun] had been appointed cannoneer to fire off the ‘Peacemaker’ after the evil genius of another had contrived and charged it.”

CALHOUN WAS THE FORMER VICE PRESIDENT who had been in league with the South Carolina nullifiers when John was growing up there. He was also a political theorist and a stiff, stern-faced, brooding tribune of slavery, who persuaded himself that it was “a positive good.” Discarding the thinking of men like Thomas Jefferson, who called slavery an inherited evil that he wished he knew how to end, Calhoun declared in 1837 that slavery was no more unfair than any other economic system: “There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” Northern free laborers were also exploited by the rich, he said, and Northern capitalism was less orderly. Revealing the paranoia of a white man who represented a majority black state, he alleged that Northern abolitionists wanted not merely to free black slaves but to turn them into masters and their masters into slaves.

Now it fell to Calhoun to justify the annexation of Texas. Although he could have chosen arguments that downplayed slavery, he embraced a conspiracy theory that was popular in proslavery circles. The United States must seize Texas, he said, because the British empire was plotting to take it and abolish slavery there, with destabilizing effects on the American South. When the British ambassador in Washington denied any such conspiracy but expressed a general wish to end slavery around the world, Calhoun took the bait and responded with a letter defending slavery. He argued that Southern slaves were better off than free black citizens in the North, who suffered from high rates of “deafness, blindness, insanity, and idiocy.” It was on these terms that the administration sent a treaty of Texas annexation to the Senate.

Calhoun’s attitude triggered another prophetic event: Senator Thomas Hart Benton rose in opposition to annexation. He set aside his lifelong support of national expansion, including the acquisition of Texas, and argued that taking Texas would be wrong. An about-face of this magnitude called for an explanation, which Benton gave in a speech on the Senate floor beginning May 16, 1844. Working from a stack of items on his desk—books and newspapers in multiple languages, documents obtained from the Tyler administration, and even extracts from his own old speeches—he delivered a speech that eventually spread across portions of three days. He said northern Texas should belong to the United States, but Texans also claimed the Rio Grande Valley to the south, which they had never controlled. The Rio Grande was simply part of Mexico, and seizing it would be a “sudden, reckless, and monstrous course.” Mexico prohibited slavery, which meant the land along the Rio Grande was free soil and should remain that way: “I shall not engage in schemes for [slavery’s] extension into regions where it was never known . . . where a slave’s face was never seen!” Seizing Texas would lead to “the crime and infamy of unjust war.”

Every senator must have appreciated the irony: Benton himself was still a slave owner. It was likely that his view of African Americans had evolved slightly: because he used free workers in his home, he had come to know Jacob Dodson, the son of family servants who had volunteered to take risks in the West by John’s side. Benton respected the young black man enough that he would later find him a job in the Senate, asking his colleagues to vote Dodson “the same extra compensation” paid to other workers. But Benton’s stand on Texas was not based on racial equality. He was defending the Union. He suspected that Calhoun and the slave interests wanted Texas in order to make the South large enough to declare independence.

When it came time to vote on the treaty of annexation, Benton’s side appeared to triumph. He peeled away several Democrats to join nearly all the Whigs to crush it. Yet the debate was not over. The presidential election was looming. Taking Texas was broadly popular, and the election could turn into a referendum on it.

DURING THE SAME DAYS IN MAY that Senator Benton made his Senate speech, a prophetic activity was taking place beneath his feet. Below the semicircular Senate chamber was the semicircular chamber of the Supreme Court, a vaulted red-carpeted room where the judges’ bench backed up against a row of windows. The court was out of session that May, but the lamps were lit, and passers-by could be forgiven for wondering what was happening. Men had run copper wires into the room and attached them to a Grove battery, made with nitric acid in a ceramic container. The wires also connected to a device made of wood and metal, small enough to rest on one of the tables. A man sometimes pressed a lever on the device, which produced a clicking sound. Other times the device appeared to click on its own, and the man paid strict attention, as if the clicks were some kind of language.

Samuel F. B. Morse had been working on this project for years. Jessie Benton Frémont had seen him around Washington; he visited the patent commissioner, a neighbor of the Bentons, and she noticed his desperation: “He was so worn-out that his dead-white face and brilliant hollow eyes startled one.” He was a clean-shaven New Englander in his fifties, deep into a life of frustrated ambition. In the 1820s he was a painter, who created an epic scene of the House of Representatives in session but failed to interest Congress in buying it. In the 1830s, he became a political activist in New York, and wrote newspaper essays under headlines such as FOREIGN CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE LIBERTIES OF THE UNITED STATES. He alleged without evidence that European powers were using the religion of Catholic immigrants as a way to control the country. His career as a conspiracy theorist ended when he ran for mayor of New York as an anti-immigrant candidate and the city of immigrants defeated him. Next, in the 1840s, Morse asked Congress to help fund a long-distance test of his “electro-magnetic telegraph.” The hollow-eyed man “was laughed at in Congress,” Jessie said. One representative mockingly suggested that if subsidizing telegraphy made sense, Congress should also subsidize mesmerism. But lawmakers narrowly approved Morse’s thirty-thousand-dollar payment, and by May 1844, crews under his direction had hung cable from chestnut poles, with the bark still on, that marched some forty miles alongside the railroad tracks from Washington to Baltimore. He arranged for the Washington end of the cable to terminate inside the Capitol, which was how the Supreme Court chamber became the nation’s first telegraph office.

On May 24, as two dozen people stood watching, the fifty-three-year-old used the code that would bear his name to tap out “What hath God wrought,” a phrase from the book of Numbers. It had been suggested to him by a young woman he liked, the patent commissioner’s teenage daughter, Annie Ellsworth. Morse was elated when confirmation of his message arrived from Baltimore, and on May 27 he began a more ambitious demonstration. The Democratic National Convention opened that day in Baltimore, where delegates from every state gathered to choose the party’s nominee for the fall presidential election. Morse made arrangements for news updates from the crowded convention hall to be raced to his telegraph set at the Baltimore railway station. His operator tapped out each update for the benefit of those in the capital city.

9¾ o’clock. Buchanan stock said to be rising

That was the Bentons’ neighbor James Buchanan, one of numerous presidential contenders. Former president Martin Van Buren was considered the favorite.

10¼—A Van Buren cannon in front of the Telegraph office with a fox tail attached to it

Runners shuttled to the Baltimore telegraph office, bringing bits of color from the crowded convention hall.

6¼—Senator Walker is speaking in favor of the two-thirds rule—was cheered by many—hissed by some

The crowd in Washington was cheering and hissing too. The dozens of spectators who’d come to watch Samuel Morse became hundreds. He read each news bulletin aloud. A correspondent for a newspaper called the Whig Standard declared: “Those attending at the Capitol may almost be said to have been in attendance at [the convention in] Baltimore!” At some point the crowd undoubtedly included Senator Benton. A correspondent wrote to the New York Herald that there was no news in Washington; nobody was doing anything important except following the latest burst of information from elsewhere. People sensed that they were witnessing a profound change in the human condition—“the annihilation of space,” as more than one person called it. Who could imagine the possibilities once people could learn about any event anywhere, instantly? “Professor Morse’s telegraph,” the Herald correspondent said,

has originated in the mind . . . a new species of consciousness. Never before was any one conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city—40, 100, or 500 miles off. For example, it is now precisely 11 o’clock. The telegraph announces as follows—“11 o’clock—Senator Walker is now replying to Mr. Butler upon the adoption of the ‘two-thirds’ rule.” It requires no small intellectual effort to realize that this is a fact that now is, and not one that has been.

The arcane updates about a “two-thirds rule” contained the key to the presidential nomination. Van Buren needed two-thirds of the delegates and fell short. To avoid an impasse, delegates began coalescing behind another candidate: James K. Polk, a former Speaker of the House and former governor of Tennessee.

Mr. Saunders declares it is necessary to have a candidate in favor of annexation

And Polk, unlike other contenders, wanted to annex Texas. Delegates chose him unanimously. When Morse read out the news, cheers went up from the crowd at the Capitol, along with “mutterings” from those opposed. A runner hurried across town to the office of one of the newspapers, which in an unprecedented feat was able to rush the news of Polk’s nomination into print on the same day it happened.

Polk’s supporters exulted—and not all were from slave states. George Bancroft, a noted historian turned politico, attended the convention from Massachusetts, and turned toward Polk; he wanted both Texas and Oregon, and soon wrote in a public letter that it was “the manifest purpose of Providence that the light of freedom should be borne from our fires to the domain beyond the Rocky Mountains.” But Senator Benton felt his own expansionist goals had been hijacked. If Polk won the election, a second effort to annex Texas would be inevitable. Days after the convention, he rose at his Senate desk and told his colleagues that war with Mexico loomed: “Senators say this is a small war—a little predatory war—a war between weak powers—and, therefore, it is nothing to engage in it. I tell them that is nonsense, and worse. War is war, whether great or small!” But party unity forced Benton to stifle his own doubts as the election neared.

An empire was available for the taking. Democrats were for Texas; Democrats were for Oregon; and grand as these ambitions were, their presidential nominee held a grander one: Polk wanted California. It was his biggest goal. He did not publicize this; few if any of the delegates who voted for him would have known it. No word of it came down the telegraph line from Baltimore, so it was unknown to the members of the public who crowded around Samuel Morse at the Capitol as he translated the telegraph clicks and read out the news. They listened, rapt, to the clattering sound of the future, but Morse’s translations were not enough to tell them what the sound really meant.

JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT HAD NO WAY of knowing any of this before he at last crossed the frontier that summer, reaching St. Louis on August 6, 1844. It was after dark. His men who lived in St. Louis headed home, and John walked through dim streets to the Benton house, only to find the lights out. Gabriel, the Bentons’ coachman, explained that Jessie was not home, having gone to care for a sick relative. John crossed town to the relative’s house, only to find it also dark. Unwilling to wake anyone, he sat in a public square beneath the stars, then checked into a hotel, sleeping long past daylight. Another man might have pounded down doors to find his wife and child, knowing the household would forgive the intrusion; John’s reserve would not allow it, nor did he seem in a hurry to step back over the threshold into ordinary life.

Not until later in the day did Jessie see her husband, when he came to the relative’s house “in his uniform and thin as a shadow.” They did not have much time alone. As soon as word of John’s arrival spread, the house “was thronged with welcoming friends.” The throng apparently included a reporter, to whom John described his exploits. And then they were packing. Within days the Frémonts were moving toward Washington, the shoreline passing them as they stood on the deck of a steamboat, wheels churning the water and Jessie doubtless trying to restrain the curiosity of twenty-one-month-old Lily as she once had seen her mother restrain little Randolph. John had an entourage: Jacob Dodson was still with him, as was William, the Indian from Oregon who wanted to see the white man’s world. There was also a Mexican youth, one Pablo Hernandez; the expedition had rescued him when he was separated from a Mexican trade caravan that was attacked by Indians. At first John intended to arrange for Hernandez to return home, but having been borne eastward by fate, the young man wanted to get an education, and was on his way to become part of the crowded Benton household.

By August 21 the party was in Washington, D.C., and John and Jessie were fending off visitors. John’s knowledge of the West made him a source for anyone with questions about Oregon or, as Jessie noticed, about California. So many people called at the Benton house that the Frémonts had trouble beginning their report—and there needed to be a report, for as with John’s previous expedition the purpose was not only to explore but to publicize. “We were forced,” Jessie said, “into leaving home every day. There was a good small house within a square from us,” a square being the way she referred to a city block, “and this Mr. Frémont rented.” They developed a routine. Each evening John organized his notes for the next day’s writing. In the morning, John said, Jacob Dodson “kept up the camp habit and very early brought me coffee,” and then John and Jessie went to work upstairs in the rented house, which they used as an office. “Nine o’clock always found me at my post, pen in hand,” Jessie said, “and I put down Mr. Frémont’s dictation.” John would talk, “pausing only for a more fitting word, for the whole of the four hours—walking about. The freedom of movement was essential to his freedom of expression—it was my great reward to be told that but for me the work could not be done.”

“The narrative,” John said, “will be strictly confined to what was seen.” They decided “to present nothing, either in the narrative or in the maps, which was not the result of positive observation.” Maps would show only the expedition’s lines of travel across the countryside, with white spaces to either side. In this way they avoided information from unreliable sources and ensured that the narrator John C. Frémont would always be at the center of the story. He was present in every scene, like the first-person narrator of a novel. He described his actions straightforwardly. His plunge into the unknown on November 25 was simply a decision he made, and he did not reflect on the wisdom of it. He admitted to abandoning the howitzer as his commander had predicted, although he still said it was good to have brought it. And just as his first report described him vomiting at a crucial time, the second report confessed to unheroic moments. On February 23 in the Sierra Nevada, he was walking with Kit Carson and came to an icy creek: “Carson sprang over, clear across a place where the stream was compressed among rocks.” John tried to copy him and fell in. He was a democratic everyman waging civilization’s fight against nature—often in peril, at times overmatched, but never giving up.

Their writing ended each day at one o’clock, and they had lunch with toddler Lily before “going off for a long brisk walk,” as Jessie said. “A slight rain, we did not mind—only a rain storm.” At last she was alone with him. Walking south, they crossed a bridge over a canal and reached the National Mall, an expanse of green space that stretched westward from the green-domed Capitol. They made a handsome couple. Tested by motherhood, her mother’s illness, and John’s absences, the “girlish beauty” John had first met at sixteen was now a poised and experienced woman of twenty. John was lean and formal in his uniform. Their walks would have been a chance to get to know each other, because for all they had been through, they had not been through much together. When they reached their third anniversary in October 1844, she might have counted the thirty-six months and noted that he had been absent for twenty. Her desire to be near him made her especially grateful to help him write about the experiences that occupied more of his time than she did.

It was only human that she would wonder what her place really was in his work and life. The report they produced included a timeline of dates, locations, and miles traveled each day, so it was easy for her to compare chronologies: What was she doing on this or that day? At the start of December 1843 she had received his message that he expected to be home in January, news she passed on to Mrs. Talbot in a reassuring tone. Now she knew her reassurance was out of date before she had given it. Her husband had changed his plans, delayed his return, and condemned her to extra months of agony. If she said a word to him about how she’d felt, no trace made it into the report.

She at least could think of her suffering as the price of fame. When he had given his story to the reporter in St. Louis, it had been picked up by other papers so rapidly that the news had reached Washington before the Frémonts did; many people in the capital had read of his exploits battling snow that was “from five to twenty feet deep” on peaks that rose “seventeen thousand feet above the sea.” (The highest peaks in all the Sierra Nevada were closer to fourteen thousand.) One day a Washington paper contained a remarkable phrase: “Fremont’s Peak beyond the South Pass.” His name was being given to “the highest point in the Rocky Mountains,” the summit he had taken such risks to ascend in 1842. His name was also attached to more modest items: He’d returned with hundreds of plant specimens slipped into envelopes or pressed into books, and while most had broken apart during the journey home, they included a shrub that John’s botanist called Fremontia vermicularis. Its leaves, John informed the botanist, “have a very salty taste which perhaps you do not know.” James Hall, a paleontologist, wrote an appendix to the report describing “fossil ferns” that the expedition had brought back; he named one Sphenopteris Fremonti. In the spring of 1845 the Convention of American Geologists and Naturalists, meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, held an extended discussion of the meaning of fossils John had found in eastern Oregon, which some scientists viewed as evidence that the region must have contained some vast lake in the distant past.

Before the report was even complete, the secretary of war sent a message to Congress, declaring that John’s mission had been “peculiarly arduous and dangerous.” The description of John “and his bold adventurous party in situations and perils the most critical, and requiring the utmost fortitude to encounter and overcome” was enough to make any truly modest officer blush. It was reprinted in the Daily Madisonian in Washington, and then on the front page of the New York Herald. The army was promoting him by brevet—rewarding him for meritorious service—not once but twice: from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, and then from first lieutenant to captain. A brief Senate debate emphasized John’s growing celebrity. The Senate ordered ten thousand copies of the still-unfinished report, and then considered a proposal to meet demand for it by printing “five thousand extra copies,” bound up with the report of John’s 1842 expedition to make a single volume. The Bentons’ friend and neighbor, Senator James Buchanan, disagreed with this proposal and successfully shepherded through a change: Why five thousand extra copies? Make it ten thousand extra copies.

People across the country were waiting for their copies—not least the people of Nauvoo, Illinois, a Mormon settlement on the Mississippi River. The Mormons were considering migration farther west and had been eager for John’s report ever since news accounts of his expedition had appeared in the Nauvoo paper in January 1845. In September, after the full report arrived, the Nauvoo newspaper reprinted three long excerpts describing John’s explorations. That December, church officials gathered in the attic of Nauvoo’s Mormon temple while one of them staged a reading of sections of John’s report. Brigham Young climbed the stairs to the reading and sat quietly, listening to the descriptions of the Great Salt Lake.