Chapter Twelve
JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT WAS THE BETTER MAN OF THE TWO
Two Californians, 1849
San Francisco, San Jose, and Monterey
Jessie was on deck beneath her flag when the Panama turned eastward toward the early morning light on June 4. It steamed between rugged mountain slopes through the passage that her husband had named the Golden Gate. Ahead lay the rocky knob of Alcatraz Island and the open water of the bay. On the shoreline to the right was the presidio that John had raided by boat in 1846, and just beyond it the little town of Yerba Buena, which many were calling by a new name, San Francisco. From the deck of the Panama, she found the town to be “a bleak and meagre frontispiece to our Book of Fate. A few low houses, and many tents, such as they were, covered the base of some of the wind-swept treeless hills, over which the June fog rolled its chilling mist.” The tents held the sudden increase in population. People “swarmed” around “the mud shore of the bay,” but the waters of the harbor were eerily quiet: “Deserted ships of all sorts were swinging with the tide.” Something about the sight of the place caused many passengers to hesitate before going ashore. They lingered, ate another meal or two from the ship’s stores, and spent a last few hours in the floating society they had built. A man rowed out to the ship and offered sobering information: many men in the goldfields were working for ten dollars per day, excellent wages but hardly the fortune that was inspiring so many to make the passage, and “so hard was the work” that some discouraged men had already given up to find jobs in the shantytown that was San Francisco.
It was too late to turn back. The passengers hoisted their “salt pork, tin kettles, tools, and India rubber contrivances,” and started finding ways ashore, and the moment they went over the side of the ship many abandoned their orderly and generous society. “The mere landing of the passengers was a problem,” Jessie said, because “the crews who took boats to shore were pretty sure not to come back.” Fortunately a San Francisco merchant sent his own boat to help pick up passengers. Once ashore, the three hundred people from the Panama had to find places to stay in a town that had no room for those already present; one of the men who arrived that summer said it was typical to sleep on a plank while fending off “the attacks of innumerable fleas,” and to be awakened before sunrise “by the sounds of building, with which the hills are all alive.” But passengers from the Panama promptly established the patterns of new lives, as the correspondent for the New York Evening Post observed: “The parson, who had each Sunday during the voyage, read to us the service, and preached against this world with its lusts, was off to the mines, with tin pan and shovel. A sober, staid, and smooth-faced man, that had conducted himself like a saint on board ship, was to be seen, much to the surprise of all, dealing cards at a faro table, at the Parker Hotel.” Amid the “wooden sheds, mud huts and streets, scattered pell mell along the gorge,” some men set up as “speculators and financiers,” even if they did not have offices and had to do business on a “tin plate.”
Jessie was able to launch her own new life with a feeling of triumph and relief. On the way up the coast she had received glorious news: when a boat put ashore during a stop at San Diego, its crew brought back word that John was alive, and had been seen in Los Angeles, heading north. Jessie’s decision to complete her journey was vindicated, and the rest of the way up the coast she was able to imagine him riding a parallel course in the interior. But he was not yet in San Francisco when she arrived. She managed to find a place to stay in one of the best houses in town, which was unexpectedly available: the home of William Leidesdorff, the merchant and former vice-consul. The black diplomat, who had hosted John in his house at the start of 1846, had recently died short of his fortieth birthday, and the location of his “girl-like” Russian wife was unclear. Their house was now occupied by a “club of wealthy merchants,” who shared it and hired Chinese immigrants as servants. Standing on the veranda, Jessie admired the “beautiful garden kept in old-world order by a Scotch gardener.” She walked inside, studied the carpets, and noticed the English brand name Broadwood on the piano. The merchants offered her, as the only woman among them, “the one room with a fire-place,” a luxury in a town where, it was said, “there daily blows a hurricane.”
The merchants’ house would have contained the latest issues of the San Francisco newspaper, the Alta California, which described a region near anarchy. A military governor was in charge down the coast at Monterey, but there was no fully developed civil government, and the institutions that existed were overwhelmed by the flood of population and wealth. “Every man carried his code of laws on his hip and administered it according to his own pleasure,” said one of the new arrivals. “There was no safety of life or property. . . . We were absolutely in a state of chaos.” Congress had failed to organize a territorial or state government, and an improvised California legislature was clashing with the military governor over its authority. The governor, General Bennet Riley, had proposed a solution the day before Jessie arrived: his proclamation called on Californians to elect representatives to a constitutional convention to organize a state government, which would appeal to Congress for recognition. Soon San Franciscans were announcing a mass meeting to discuss proposals for statehood. Jessie might well have attended the meeting, and was surely nearby when it was called to order at Portsmouth Square, barely a thousand feet from the house where she was staying, at three o’clock in the afternoon on June 12. The speakers included current and former lawmakers who had just arrived on the same steamer as Jessie, yet now addressed the crowd as if they were longtime California leaders. Word was spreading that the Georgia congressman Thomas Butler King was in California as a confidential agent of Zachary Taylor, the newly inaugurated president of the United States. King’s job was to bring California into the Union as a state; the two military officers who had traveled on the Panama were his aides. A witness to the mass meeting said King spoke “with his accustomed eloquence and ability.” The speakers also included the former Mississippi congressman from Jessie’s ship, William M. Gwin, a man with a chiseled face and high cheekbones and burning ambition. Each of the eastern lawmakers dreamed of returning to Congress as one of California’s first United States senators. The Post correspondent sarcastically marveled that the men could “understand the wants and necessities of California after only a few weeks’ residence in the Territory! . . . It is to be regretted, however, that they could not have found some Territory nearer home worthy of their patriotism and sacrifices.”
If Jessie heard or read such remarks, she had to make an effort not to take them personally. Her husband had an ambition similar to that of the other new arrivals; John would have been delighted to become governor once military rule had ended. He would have an advantage over other newcomers in seeking such a post: he, at least, had a past connection to California. Jessie could see that John’s family name—their name—was visible all over. The Alta California carried advertisements that summer for tradesmen and services at a new town called Fremont, established by the Sacramento River and serving the nearby goldfields. It was in this period or soon after that San Francisco named Fremont Street. One of the new businesses in San Francisco was called the Frémont Family Hotel, which became, among other things, the location for regular drawings in “The Grand Californian Lottery.” Shortly after Jessie’s arrival, a ship arrived in San Francisco Bay from Baltimore; it was called the Colonel Fremont. (The newspaper advertised the goods it brought for sale: “whiskey, 4th proof brandy, apple brandy, cordials, champagne, wine, gin, rum, gunpowder, shot,” along with dried beef, pork, shovels, boots, and “Penn[sylvania] cheese.”) Not all of John’s publicity was favorable: the Alta California that was current when Jessie arrived included a long article on its front page detailing an old controversy over the payment for horses that John had purchased during his disputed tenure as the military governor of California. Yet even this awkward news underlined his ties to the place. He was as well positioned as anyone to rise to power, whenever he finally turned up.
AS JESSIE WAS ARRIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO, John was approximately two hundred miles southeast, at Tulare Lake in the Central Valley, swatting away insects. On the first of June, he sat down to write a greeting to a friend elsewhere in California. He kept it short: “The mosquitoes torment me here so much that I absolutely cannot write. You have passed them here yourself and know them by experience.” He signed the letter and handed it to Alex Godey, who was to deliver the note and ask if the friend had any horses to sell. John was short of cash, and hoped his friend would sell horses cheap and put them “on my account,” meaning on credit. Godey had already made a long ride to Monterey on the coast and had been unable to find animals that they could afford.
John was at the head of the remnant of his expedition. Just short of twenty men had spent two months, from mid-February to mid-April, crossing the mountains and deserts to southern California. They passed near desert hot springs known as Agua Caliente, later the site of a town called Palm Springs. They reached a rancho controlled by an American outside Los Angeles. Some then broke off to seek their fortunes, while John gathered supplies from Los Angeles and continued north. Jackson Saunders, the black servant, was still with him, as was Preuss the mapmaker, although Preuss would soon find work in California. John was also traveling with a large group of people he had recently met: men, women, and children who were migrating from the Mexican state of Sonora. The Mexicans had experience working in Sonora’s gold mines, and wanted to put their skills to use in California. It may have been when John met them in the southwestern desert that he first heard of California’s gold—and he quickly understood what it could mean for him. The two groups traveled together for a time for mutual protection against Indians, and John recorded in his notes: “Some of the Sonorians decide[d] to go . . . with me to look for gold which I told them would be found [on my land].”
His land: he was a significant landowner in California. He had been for more than two years, after obtaining property during the war. Given the central role that his interest in California real estate had played in his past actions, it should have been no surprise that while collaborating with Commodore Stockton, clashing with General Kearny, fending off the Mexican uprising in Los Angeles, assuming the governorship, and losing it, he had also found time to purchase real estate. Conducting land deals while commanding troops in a war zone created considerable risk that he could abuse his power—indeed, it seemed the definition of an abuse of power—but he did not hide his transactions: “I had always intended to make my home in the country if possible,” he explained, “and for this purpose desired a foothold in it.” He bought properties on the peninsula near the Golden Gate, anticipating the city that would grow there. In early 1847 he asked the consul Thomas O. Larkin to help him buy more land, and Larkin found an opportunity that seemed too good to refuse: an enormous land grant in the Central Valley, extending into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, near Yosemite Valley.
The grant belonged to Juan B. Alvarado, a former governor of Alta California, although his claim might have surprised the Miwok Indians who lived there. The land was not settled by outsiders or even surveyed. It was believed to extend over ten square leagues, or 44,280 acres, more than sixty-nine square miles—an area more than three times the size of the island of Manhattan, and slightly larger than the District of Columbia. The grant centered on Mariposa Creek, and would be known as Las Mariposas. Alvarado had received it from the Mexican government on condition that he would never sell, but with Mexican authority crumbling, he disregarded this and sold to John for three thousand dollars, less than seven cents per acre. It was pure speculation. “I had never seen the place,” John said, and he knew “nothing of its character or value.” Weeks later he was ordered eastward by General Kearny for his eventual arrest and court-martial, and he never inspected the land; later he contemplated suing Larkin to undo the sale.
He also made plans to set up as a land baron in the manner of John Sutter. He arranged for sawmill machinery to be shipped to California by sea, along with items suitable for a country squire. William Aspinwall, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company executive who had eased Jessie’s passage across Panama, performed another favor by making arrangements to build a special traveling coach for the Frémonts. This had been sent by sea and, John hoped, was awaiting pickup at a warehouse in San Francisco.
When he met the Sonorans in the desert, he proposed a deal. They had mining skills; he had land. If some wanted to prospect on his property, John would split the proceeds. Twenty-eight accepted. Once enough fresh horses were in hand, John escorted them to Las Mariposas and left them to their work.
Next he went in search of Jessie, reaching San Francisco in mid-June. They spent only a few days together there; she felt the climate was damaging her health, so they tried the air in Monterey. It was a half-empty town, where almost the only men who had not left for the gold region were those such as the consul and businessman Thomas Larkin, who was already rich, or US troops whose enlistments prevented them from seeking their fortune—and even many soldiers deserted. One of the few men who remained for Jessie to meet was “long thin young” William Tecumseh Sherman, the officer who had been among the first to be told of the gold strike. There were also Californian women, among them the wife of General José Castro, the former Mexican official whose troops had once confronted John’s force. General Castro was away but his spouse shared their house, renting the Frémonts one wing of it, with a window overlooking the bay. Jessie sensed that she was not the most welcome visitor; to the Californians “my name represented only invasion and defeat,” but they helped her scrounge milk and food for Lily: “every eatable thing had been eaten off the face of the country, and nothing raised.”
For some days the Frémonts explored the country in their carriage, taking a kind of holiday and sleeping on the cushions. Then, while keeping their rooms in Monterey, they moved to San Jose, just south of San Francisco Bay, where John was setting up the sawmill machinery he’d had shipped from the East. He saw an opportunity. The shrewder characters in California grasped that while it was a gamble to seek one’s fortune by mining, they could make a more certain income selling supplies to miners. That was the plan of Collis P. Huntington, the New York hardware store owner who, along with Jessie, had been on the Crescent City out of New York; arriving on a different ship in late August, he peddled goods in the goldfields and then opened a store in Sacramento, his first step toward becoming one of the richest men in California. A similar possibility was open to John when he started his sawmill and a steam engine to turn it. Timber was wanted everywhere—for every building, for underground mines, even for the creation of wood-plank streets in San Francisco—and John soon had men hacking down enormous redwood trees to feed them into the whining saw.
In the overcrowded town they were able to rent only a single dusty room (“Fleas swarmed there,” Jessie said unfairly, “as they do wherever the Spanish language is spoken”), and she cast about to find a servant. John had intended for Jackson Saunders to work as a cook, but the African American man made a request the Frémonts could not refuse: his wife back east was enslaved, which meant that by law his children were enslaved, and upon reaching California he realized that he could dig for the gold to buy their freedom. John helped him obtain equipment and sent him off to Las Mariposas among the Sonorans. Next Jessie learned of a “cook, washer, and ironer for sale.” A white migrant to California had brought along a black slave and was now willing to part with her. Residents informed Jessie of the opportunity, “as I was thought to be the most helpless woman in town,” but she held to the principles she had learned from her mother and refused to become a slave owner. Another person in San Jose later bought the woman for the extravagant price of four thousand dollars.
IN AUGUST, JOHN WAS ON A PORCH IN SAN JOSE when he looked up to see his friend Edward F. Beale approaching. Incredibly, the naval officer turned gold promoter had completed the ordeal of returning to California yet again, having become one of the first Americans to lead a bicoastal life. Since spotting Jessie in Panama in May as he traveled to the East, Beale had reached New York and held up his eight-pound lump of gold in front of a crowd of men on Wall Street before turning back toward the Pacific. Now he was moving about California with a journalist, who wanted the opportunity to introduce himself to John. The journalist took a careful look at Colonel Frémont, who was “wearing a sombrero and a Californian jacket, and showing no trace of the terrible hardships he had lately undergone.” John was so reserved and unassuming that the journalist, Bayard Taylor, would not have guessed that he was looking at “the Columbus of our central wildernesses”; perhaps this was another way of saying that John’s celebrity made him so much larger than life that John, when encountered in person, seemed a bit smaller than expected. Still the reporter was impressed that John was “compactly knit—in fact, I have seen in no other man the qualities of lightness, activity, strength and physical endurance in so perfect an equilibrium.” His thin, tanned face featured a “bold aquiline” nose and deep-set eyes that were “keen as a hawk’s.”
Edward F. Beale had come carrying a letter for John from the East, which John opened and read. It said President Zachary Taylor had appointed him to a commission assigned to draw the new boundary between the United States and Mexico. John sent an immediate letter of acceptance, thanking the president for “the mark of confidence bestowed upon me”; he viewed the appointment as vindication, presuming the government’s call to service implied an acknowledgment that the judgment of his court-martial had been wrong after all.
The Frémonts were still in San Jose when they received even more uplifting news. A convoy of animals arrived, driven by some of the Sonorans who had been digging for gold at Las Mariposas. One animal bore a buckskin bag holding the first diggings, which Jessie believed to be one hundred pounds of gold, or at least of quartz shot through with gold. Either way it was a fortune, and more bags soon arrived. Jessie said they “were put for safety under the straw mattress. There were no banks nor places of deposit of any kind. You had to trust some man that you knew, or keep guard yourself.” Whenever possible, the Frémonts shipped the bags to Monterey, “and it accumulated in trunks in our rooms there.” They were rich—so absurdly rich they hardly knew what to do, so rich they stopped trying even to keep track of their wealth. When, after a few months, the Sonorans reported to John that they were ready to take their share of the gold and go home, John did not take the time to travel with them to open the trunks of gold in Monterey. He simply gave them the keys to the trunks, trusting them to divide the fortune and leave the proper share behind. The lure of gold had driven much of the settlement of the New World, had enticed men to the greatest heights of bravery, ingenuity, cruelty, and madness—yet Jessie said afterward that the Sonorans divided the gold “with scrupulous honor, not taking an ounce more than their stipulated portion.”
Other prospectors were more troublesome. Many raced to Las Mariposas without making any arrangements with John. He declared in a letter that “hundreds—soon becoming thousands—crowded to the same place.” He could do little except hope that some would give him a share of their bounty in tribute for access to his property: his title had not included mineral rights, and his claim to the land itself was uncertain, since he had bought it from a man who had committed not to sell it and its boundaries were undefined. Even if his title was unquestioned, the lure of gold would have overwhelmed his defenses—John Sutter’s far better-established empire to the north was being trampled. John faced years of litigation over his ownership, and in the meantime watched as a town called Mariposa grew up to become the seat of a new county. By 1850, when California participated in its first United States census, Mariposa County had gone from a non-Indian population of virtually no one to 1,512, including a scattering of merchants, hotelkeepers, carpenters, stonecutters, and a justice of the peace; 43 women, who mostly seemed to be the wives and daughters of miners or other recent emigrants; and 1,105 miners, no more than a few of whom worked for John Frémont.
THE DELEGATES TO CALIFORNIA’S constitutional convention gathered in Monterey at the start of September. They had come from all over the territory; delegates from San Francisco had taken passage down the coast in the ship called Colonel Fremont. They met in Monterey’s new town hall, two stories high with a sloping roof and walls of solid yellow stone. It was called Colton Hall, after Walter Colton, a Monterey resident who had overseen its construction as the city’s alcalde, or mayor. He had paid for the building by collecting fines from criminals, which was why he called it “the culprit hall,” and said his name would “go down to posterity with the odor of gamblers, convicts, and tipplers.”
The upper floor of Colton Hall formed a single room for public meetings. A railing separated the forty-eight delegates from spectators including William T. Sherman, the red-haired army officer, who had been sent as an observer by the military governor. It was a gathering of many big names in California’s recent history: delegates included John Sutter, though he was said to be “a sort of ornamental appendage,” rapidly losing influence; businessman Thomas O. Larkin, who was no longer consul, since California was no longer Mexican soil, but remained influential, daily hosting other delegates for dinner at his New England–style home; and Lansford Hastings, an ambitious self-promoter whose place in history had been established with the Hastings Cutoff, his problematic shortcut on the trail to California that was tried, to their sorrow, by the Donner Party on the way to their doom in 1846. Leaders of the Bear Flag Rebellion were in the room with former enemies among the old Californians. “The Spaniards,” said one delegate, “served in the convention because they saw the necessity. . . . American occupation was inevitable, and they submitted with what grace they could.” Mariano G. Vallejo, the Mexican general who had been imprisoned by John Frémont, was also a delegate. A journalist who met Vallejo at the convention described him as “tall and of commanding presence,” his “eyes dark with a grave, dignified expression.” He maintained his dignity amid the very sorts of foreign interlopers who had once invaded his house: one delegate was a Florida man who, it was said, “carried an enormous bowie knife & was half drunk most of the time.”
William Gwin had been elected. The former Mississippi congressman who had arrived on Jessie’s boat was well prepared, carrying copies of the state constitutions of Iowa and Ohio, which he believed could be used as templates for the California constitution to save time. Delegates with a longer history in California pushed back against Gwin’s efforts to dominate the proceeding, but eventually did crib from the constitutions he had brought, and leaned on his experience as a legislator. Gwin’s influence was significant because he had a definite position on an especially sensitive issue: slavery. The proposed state constitution must declare California to be a free state or a slave state. Of Gwin’s personal view there could be no doubt: he was the owner of a Mississippi plantation worked by slaves, and called slavery “the foundation of civilization.” He was in a position to urge that view—yet did not. He knew that if he and other delegates from the South demanded the right to bring slaves to California, they might create a deadlock with delegates from the North, reproducing the chaos then prevailing in Washington. Congress had failed to organize a territorial or state government in California because lawmakers could not agree on whether to allow slavery there. If California also failed to act, Gwin would lose: he wanted to be a senator, which required California to become a state. “Gwin, with good grace adopted the clause prohibiting slavery,” said his follow delegate and friend, Elisha Crosby of New York. Section 18 of the state constitution read: “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State.”
“The admission of California to the Union was paramount to every other consideration,” said delegate Crosby. Thus the clause was adopted almost unanimously, thanks in part to the ambition of a man who so strongly favored slavery that in future years he would side with the Confederacy. Thomas Butler King, the presidential emissary, was also a Southerner but favored the clause too; he had been told that President Taylor preferred a free state as part of his larger strategy for resolving the dispute over slavery in the conquered territory. The constitution certainly was not driven by an overwhelming desire for social equality: having approved the antislavery clause, the convention nearly approved a clause that prohibited the entry of any black people at all. That was eventually removed, but what remained was a clause similar to that in Iowa’s constitution, explicitly granting the vote only to “every white male citizen of the United States.” Free white Mexicans could also vote if they assumed American citizenship. People of African descent, Indians, Chinese, and others were defined out of the electorate.
The constitution was made less unfair through the intervention of the Californian delegates, who on issue after issue offered a different perspective than the newcomers from the United States. The Americans may have come from the land of liberty, but the Mexicans had a broader conception of it. Mexico had always outlawed slavery, which made it easy for the Californian delegates to endorse the antislavery clause. When it became clear that Indians would be denied the vote, the Californians objected: some of the delegates themselves had Indian ancestry, and a nephew of General Vallejo informed the assembly that landowning Indians had previously enjoyed the franchise. The American delegates grudgingly added a clause that the legislature could, by a two-thirds vote, allow voting to select Indians. The Californians scored a clearer victory in upholding the rights of women. A delegate from Virginia urged that wives should be denied the right to own property because their husbands could better provide for them; a committee that included General Vallejo and other Californians rejected this. They prevailed on the delegates to agree that “all property” that a woman brought into marriage, including real estate, “shall be her separate property.”
In a further gesture, General Vallejo tried to have a Mexican vaquero added to the various images that crowded the new state seal. The seal featured grapes, mountains, ships in harbor, the Roman goddess Minerva, and a bear. Vallejo thought the vaquero should be lassoing the bear, but by a single vote he was defeated.
WHERE WERE THE FRÉMONTS during the convention? John, at least, made no impression. He had not chosen to stand for election to the convention and was taking a short break from public service. Having accepted his appointment to the boundary commission, he resigned; he wanted the vindication that the appointment represented to him but had no time for the work. Moving about in his sombrero and Californian jacket, he focused on business and his sudden fortune. He did appear in Monterey, where William T. Sherman saw him; he also appeared in San Francisco, lingering at the United States Hotel and showing off samples of gold from Las Mariposas. He encountered the newspaperman Bayard Taylor there, and told him that the Mariposa land had a vein of gold that seemed to be a mile long; he was trying to drum up investments that would allow him to more fully exploit it.
Jessie, by her own account, had more time for the convention. She said she was staying in Monterey, in the rooms the Frémonts had been granted within Madam Castro’s house, and she began to play a political role. Convention delegates visited. Men in an overcrowded town, which apparently had just one restaurant, welcomed refreshments, a comfortable chair, and an opportunity to talk with that rarity in California, a lady from the States. Having drawn them in, Jessie took the opportunity to assure them “that I really did not want slaves”—in other words, that upscale women could make homes in California without them. (She had hired two Indian men as domestic help.) “Our decision,” she said of herself and her husband, “was made on the side of free labor. It was not only the question of injustice to the blacks, but justice to the white men crowding into the country.” Prospectors should be allowed to seek their fortune without facing unfair competition from other prospectors who had gangs of enslaved men at their command. This was, she suggested later, the beginning of her life as an antislavery activist.
One delegate cast doubt on Jessie’s story—Elisha Crosby, the New Yorker, a critic of John Frémont. (“Frémont was a very nice little gentleman,” Crosby said, “but I thought as many others did, that Jessie Benton Frémont was the better man of the two, far more intelligent and comprehensive.”) Years later, Crosby denied that Jessie had influenced the convention and even that she was in Monterey at the time. To be fair to Jessie, she may have been in Monterey, even if Crosby did not remember her. She may have hosted delegates in her home, and it would have been natural, given her confidence in speaking to men about politics, that she would express her long-standing antislavery views. But in a larger sense, Crosby was right: Jessie could not have significantly influenced the convention. The antislavery provision passed for pragmatic reasons, with the votes even of proslavery men like Gwin, and for some delegates Jessie’s reasoned arguments against slavery were irrelevant.
Gwin, the Mississippi plantation owner, was like a sailor who placed his hand on the tiller to steer away from breakers and mistakenly thought it was a momentary change in course. The ship would never sail exactly the same heading again. For thirty years the nation’s leaders had consciously maintained a balance between free and slave states. When Thomas Hart Benton’s Missouri agitated for admission as a slave state in 1820, the free state of Maine had to be admitted in compensation. In the 1830s, the slave state of Arkansas was soon followed by the free state of Michigan. In the 1840s, the admission of both Texas and Florida made it urgent to follow with the free states of Iowa and Wisconsin. Now the free and slave states numbered fifteen against fifteen, which made them evenly balanced in the Senate. The admission of California as a free state would make it sixteen against fifteen, with other free states coming soon and no clear prospect of another slave state in view. Some Southerners talked of dividing California in two, forming a northern free and a southern slave state, with a border along the same Missouri Compromise line that had divided the Louisiana Purchase; but the Californians were preempting this talk by drawing their own borders and presenting their constitution as a fait accompli. If their act was upheld, Southerners would begin to lose their grip on the Senate. The North’s growing population had already given it a majority of the House, and with California’s rise, more and more of the electoral votes used to choose the president would be coming from free states. The balance of power was permanently shifting. Someday it might be possible to imagine the election of a president based on northern votes alone.
For Gwin, at the moment, all was working as planned. In mid-October 1849, the delegates signed the new constitution and sent it to Washington in hopes that Congress would approve it. In November, Californians elected a state legislature, and in December the lawmakers met in San Jose—in an adobe building that local leaders had purchased as an improvised state capital—to choose two prospective United States senators. Both would hurry to Washington, lobby for statehood, and then take their seats in the Senate if successful. One of the chosen was William M. Gwin. The New Yorker Elisha Crosby thought his presence might help the case for statehood, offering Southerners in Congress a reliable proslavery vote: “I was induced to vote for him as a U.S. Senator because he was known as an extreme Southern man.” Failure to send such a man to the Senate would have been “so palpable a cut or insult to the South that the State never would have had a chance of admission.”
For the other seat one name loomed above all others: John Charles Frémont. The conqueror of California had made it known that his brief hiatus from public life was over. In Jessie’s view, his ambition grew out of their antislavery activism—which was to say her activism. “What we had done in Monterey when the State Constitution was being framed there had enrolled us on the antislavery side,” she said. “It would have been deserting not to continue the work.” He might have sought California’s governorship instead, but a post in the Senate would allow them to return to Washington and “our old home life to be restored.”
When asked to state his positions just before the vote, John spoke of slavery much more cautiously than Jessie did. Jacob R. Snyder, a California settler and frontiersman, wrote him a letter asking several questions, and John replied with a letter that was published in the Alta California on the day the legislature began its session. He declared his adherence to the Democratic Party (“By association, feeling, principle and education, I am thoroughly a democrat”) and then ducked any discussion of slavery, saying he was not “entering into any discussion of the question at issue between the two great parties.” He favored “a central, national railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.” Its “stupendous magnitude,” he said, working up to a Thomas Hart Benton level of enthusiasm about global trade, made the railroad “the greatest enterprise of the age,” which would bring changes “throughout the Pacific Ocean and eastern Asia—commingling together the European, American, and Asiatic races.” It probably was not politically shrewd to speak of “commingling” the races before the all-white legislature, but he was too excited to contain himself. Even the catastrophe of his recent expedition became a success. “The result was entirely satisfactory,” he wrote. “It convinced me that neither the snow of winter nor the mountain ranges were obstacles in the way of the road.” He acknowledged that he had not actually located the necessary pass, but believed it existed. He fielded a few pointed questions about his ownership of Las Mariposas, but nothing prevented his easy election.
When John learned the news, he promptly departed San Jose. It was a rainy day, but that did not stop him from riding seventy miles southwest to Monterey, where Jessie had gone in another effort to improve her health. She was spending her days in their wing of the Castro house, which featured a bearskin rug and a fire. “The rains set in furiously,” she said, “and I was completely house-bound; but I could see the bay, and even through the closed windows I could hear the delightful boom of the long rollers falling regularly and heavily on the beach.” She sewed new clothes. She read old magazines to Lily. She spent time with an Australian woman who had signed on as a cook. Jessie and Lily were sitting with the cook during an evening of “tremendous rain” when “Mr. Frémont came in upon us, dripping wet, as well he might be, for he had come through from San Jose. . . . He was so wet that we could hardly make him cross the pretty room,” but she urged him not to worry about the floor. He informed her that he had been elected senator, and added that he wanted to start for Washington within a few days.
Jessie was overjoyed. She wanted back her father and mother and siblings. She was lonely—she had only her husband, who was living with her yet not truly beside her, because he could not stop moving around California. When he was done delivering the news about the Senate, he spent but a single night in Monterey and then departed, riding the same horse seventy miles back again through the rain to San Jose. To judge by the time spent, he was happier in motion than with her. Was there something off about him? Something she truly didn’t know? He was, as ever, so respectful and reserved, so reluctant to drip water on the bear rug on his own floor. Yet that very reserve made him seem distant, even to her.
Jessie’s final evening in California was the final evening of the year. “When we heard the steamer’s gun, New-year’s night, the rain was pouring in torrents, and every street crossing was a living brook. Mr. Frémont carried me down, warmly wrapped up, to the wharf, where we got into a little boat and rowed out. I have found that it changes the climate and removes illness to have the ship’s head turned the way you wish to go.” Surely John Charles Frémont had his own emotions as the ship raised anchor and the year 1850 arrived. One year ago he had been reading Blackstone’s commentaries on the English law while sitting in a snowbound tent, his men near death all around him as he dreamed of building a career in California as a lawyer and a landowner. He had been thinking it might take seven years to establish himself. The gold rush had accelerated everything.
A newspaper reported that on his way out of California, Colonel Frémont had made “a timely and excellent donation for this state.” He had given away books to help in creating a new state library, one hundred volumes in all, according to the journal of the state senate. The volumes revealed something about his life and interests, as did his decision to part with them. He gave away books associated with his former life as a soldier and explorer: one on astronomy, one on drawing with shades and shadows, and a “treatise on field fortification.” He gave away books with which he had been preparing for a future as a lawyer: volumes on evidence and writing wills, and commentaries by the Supreme Court justice Joseph Story. He gave away the volumes of Blackstone that he had lifted from Senator Benton’s library and carried over the plains, the Rockies, and the southwestern deserts, holding on to them even when he was walking for help in the snow and starving. Now he didn’t need them anymore. He also let go a single work of fiction. It was a Spanish copy of Don Quixote, Cervantes’s novel about the travels of an overly romantic man who had lost touch with the world.