PART ONE
Friendly Fire
Jessie Benton Frémont
JESSIE FRĂMONTâS CIVIL WAR
NOTE: West Virginia became a state in 1863.
CHAPTER 1
âthe place a son would have hadâ
Jessie Benton FrĂ©mont gaped as a âswarmâ of dugout canoes, manned by ânaked, screaming, barbarous negroes and Indians,â approached her overcrowded steamboat in the mouth of Panamaâs Chagres River. It was almost exactly the midpoint of the nineteenth century, and travel from the East Coast of America to the west was not for the faint of heart. After more than a week of rough Atlantic seas aboard the SS Crescent City from New York around Florida to the east coast of Panama, twenty-five-year-old Jessie and her fellow passengers faced an even more arduous trip by river and land across the slender, rugged isthmus to Panama City on the Pacific coast. Before the passengers could recover from the river trip, she recalled, a horde of native entrepreneurs descended on them, claiming exorbitant prices to rent âsmall, badly fed, ungroomed, wretchedâ mules for the two-day trip along steep, narrow âmule staircasesâ over the mountains.1
Once in Panama City, Jessie and her six-year-old daughter Lily eagerly anticipated the last leg of their trip to San Francisco on the SS California. But the California was not there; nor was there any idea when it would appear. Nearly two more months would pass before Jessie heard the boom-boom of the cannon that signaled the arrival of another vessel, the Panama. âIt could only be conjectured why the California did not return,â Jessie wrote thirty years later, âand it was supposed, as was afterwards proved, that all her crew had deserted to go to the mines, and no men could be induced to take their places. The madness of the gold fever was upon everybody. âŠâ It was April 1849, and Jessie was riding a tidal wave of humanity to the goldfields of California.
By the standards of the day, Jessieâs journey to that point, though daunting, was unremarkable. But during those seven weeks of unplanned âdetention,â sheâand thousands of other Americans stranded mid-journey in Panama Cityâcontracted an array of illnesses. Many died. Jessie came down with what she called âbrain fever,â which left her bedridden and utterly dispirited. Two doctors prescribed wildly conflicting remedies for her illness, but both agreed her survival depended upon returning to New York. Jessie refused. She believed her survival depended on reaching San Francisco. Despite her illness and frailty, Jessie never lost her nerve or her hallmark stubbornness. She was determined to continue to California, no matter what the cost. Unlike the Argonauts, as the hordes of gold-seekers were called, Jessieâs goal was not the yellow metal. It was something much more precious: it was her heartâs desire, her husband, John Charles FrĂ©mont.2
When she began her journey to California from New York that March 15, Jessie felt she was âlaunched literally on an unknown sea ⊠towards an unknown country.â Although she had been married for eight years by that time, her husbandâs âlong absences had taken him from home more than five years.â When the prospect of another of FrĂ©montâs âlong absencesâ loomed in late 1848, in the form of yet another survey expedition to California, Jessie would not remain behind. She decided they should make California their home; while he traveled overland, she and Lily would venture by ship. This trip to California was yet another of Jessieâs many journeys to be by her husbandâs side. She made them in rich times and poor, in sickness and health, in fame and infamy. Hers were not only geographical trips, nor did she merely follow FrĂ©montâs lead. She rushed with himâsometimes ahead of himâinto the worlds of politics and war as eagerly as she set out from that New York pier on the Ides of March in 1849 to meet her husband on the other side of America. Jessieâs lifelong love for John Charles FrĂ©mont fueled her passion to overcome the many obstacles that geography and society raised between them.
While Jessie moved in upper-middle-class circles of society from her birth, FrĂ©mont grew up in very different conditions. He was the illegitimate son of Anne Pryor, the desperately unhappy wife of a wealthy Virginian nearly thirty years her senior, and her impoverished French tutor, Charles Fremon. Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1813, John Charles later reclaimed his fatherâs real surname, FrĂ©mont, which Charles had altered when he fled Canadian authorities and entered the United States. FrĂ©mont was a bright child, who became a clever, ambitious young man. He attended the College of Charleston, where he excelled in drawing and math, two skills that would help make his fortune. Beginning early in his life, FrĂ©mont attracted the help of a succession of mentors, including, most importantly, Joel Poinsett, first United States minister to Mexico and secretary of war in the late 1830s. With Poinsettâs help in 1838, FrĂ©mont obtained a commission in the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, although he had no formal military education. The Corps was charged with, among other things, exploring and mapping the United States. It was part of the U.S. Army and one of the most indispensable bureaus of the nationâs government during this era of rapid American expansion. Even though the phrase was not in vogue until the 1840s, the concept of Manifest Destiny was, in fact, manifest by the second decade of the 1800s. The push to develop road, rail, and river transportation in order to populate the continent required a dedicated corps of explorers, engineers, surveyors, and mapmakers. FrĂ©mont found his calling in the exciting, exacting, lonely work.3
Loneliness never seemed to be a problem for FrĂ©mont; he appeared to prefer mountains to men. FrĂ©mont was a very private man who lived a very public life. Sensitive about his illegitimacy and his lack of West Point credentials, he longed for respect and recognition, encouraged adulation, and was intolerant of slights. His strong sense of personal reserve and equally strong belief in his infallibility combined to project an imperial nature, which led to problems wherever FrĂ©mont was placed in a chain of command. If introverted and prickly, FrĂ©mont was also remarkably handsome and charming. He captivated women with his flattering attentions and men with his quiet composure. He was a good-looking man all of his life. As a young man, FrĂ©montâs curly black hair, brilliant blue eyes, and slim figure appeared to equal advantage in crisp military uniforms or rough Western garb. When his hair began to turn gray in his thirties, FrĂ©mont was, if possible, even more attractive. The adjective âdashingâ seems to have been invented for the man who became known in American history as the Pathfinder.
Second Lieutenant Frémont arrived in Washington, D.C., in September 1839. As part of a team led by the brilliant but frail Joseph Nicollet, a French scientist who had been assigned to the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, Frémont had spent the previous fifteen months exploring and surveying the Mississippi River basin from southern Minnesota to Iowa. The two men settled into a small townhouse a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol to prepare a report and detailed maps for publication by Congress, the first accurate guide to that vast, fertile territory. News of their work traveled quickly in the capital city, and inquisitive Washingtonians stopped in to meet the explorers and hear firsthand accounts of their travels. Among the most interested and persistent visitors was a Capitol Hill neighbor, Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton.4
Benton was one of the first two senators to represent Missouri when it entered the Union in 1821. By 1839, he was a dynamic and influential fifty-seven-year-old politician in the fourth of five terms he would serve in the Senate. As a young man, Benton had managed his widowed motherâs landholdings and slaves in Tennessee before abandoning farming for the law. He was a big, powerfully built, regal-looking man, who never shied away from a fight. When Andrew Jackson entered the Senate in 1823, he and Sen. Tom Benton together waged unrelenting legislative war in favor of âhard moneyâ (gold coin or gold bullion) against paper money backed by gold. In the course of that decades-long battle, Benton was dubbed âOld Bullion,â the nickname by which he was known to generations of politicians, including Abraham Lincoln.5
Bentonâs special passion was Americaâs westward expansion. His keen interest in the geography, geology, and natural wonders of the American West led the senator to spend many hours in FrĂ©montâs garret, as the second lieutenant labored over the task of transforming field notes and calculations into accurate maps and detailed botanical descriptions. The elder statesman craved validation of his belief in the vast potential of the continent. The young explorer was flattered and pampered by the wealthy and influential national political figure, who invited him to elegant dinners at his home with leading politicians, scientists, and artists of the day. Sometime in 1839, Benton also invited FrĂ©mont to attend a concert at the senatorâs daughtersâ boarding school. There, to his everlasting regret, Benton introduced FrĂ©mont to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Jessie Ann.6
Jessie Ann was inseparable from her fatherâs world from the day she was born: âHe made me a companion and a friend from the time almost that I could begin to understand. We were a succession of girls at first, with the boys coming last, and my father gave me early the place a son would have had,â Jessie recalled. Old Bullion may have instinctively recognized his own strong character in his infant daughter. Apparently others saw the resemblance, too. In President James Buchananâs memorable phrase, Jessie was âthe square root of Tom Benton.â7
Jessieâs education was not merely excellent, it was superlative, owing to her fatherâs vast knowledge and love of books. The best library west of the Mississippi was reputed to be in the Benton home in St. Louis, where he regularly debriefed those travelers from the West he could trap before they headed east. The best library east of the Mississippi was a close call between the Library of Congress, where Senator Benton âpasturedâ Jessie daily on his walks to work in the U.S. Capitol, and his own study in the Benton house nearby on C Street. In both places, Senator Benton supplemented Jessieâs education at ladiesâ schools with sterner stuff from his own shelves. Jessie assisted her father in his work by researching and taking dictation for his letters and speeches. She spoke fluent Spanish and French (and read Greek and Latin) and often played hostess at dinner to the many distinguished American and international guests whom Benton entertained. If Senator Benton deliberately cultivated Jessieâs intelligence, he likely regretted that she inherited his streak of stubborn independence. Raised like a son, Jessie flailed against societyâs restrictions on womenâs conventional roles in nineteenth-century American society.8
In a century and a half of literature on women of the Civil War, only Mary Todd Lincoln has eclipsed Jessie Benton FrĂ©montâs combination of celebrity and notoriety. Jessieâs partisans are fierce and her detractors equally ferocious. She has inspired numerous books, including Irving Stoneâs âbiographical novel,â Immortal Wife, a paean to a paragon of absolute perfection. Jessieâs early biographers were generally only slightly less fawning, beginning with Catherine Coffin Phillipsâs 1935 volume. A recent biography portrays Jessie as the flawless female half of a power couple who âshaped nineteenth-century America.â Jessieâs approach to shaping historyâand her husbandâwas aggressive: she fought fiercely and publicly, though perhaps not always wisely, for everything she loved. When Jessie rebuffed her parents and married FrĂ©mont, Senator Benton became merely the first in a series of powerful men whom Jessie challenged on behalf of the husband she not merely loved, she worshipped.9
Some of Jessieâs rebellion against Victorian societyâs rules for women may have been the product of her ambivalent relationship with her mother, who was in many respects the perfect image of a nineteenth-century woman. Elizabeth McDowell was the beautiful, refined daughter of a wealthy planter. She lived and traveled in styleâwith maids and footmen and her own bright yellow carriage lined with red leather that had been made in London. Raised at Cherry Grove, a magnificent estate in southwestern Virginia (where Jessie Ann was born in 1824), Elizabeth loved every aspect of luxurious plantation life, except for the engine of her fatherâs wealth, slavery. Jessie later told abolitionist Lydia Maria Child that her mother âbrought us up to think it good fortune to be free from owning slaves. She urged upon us many reasons why we ought never to own them. She dwelt especially on the evil influence of slavery on the temper of children, making them domineering, passionate, and arbitrary.â10
Benton courted Elizabeth for six years, gradually wearing down her opposition to his army commission (many friends still referred to the senator as Colonel Benton), his Democratic politics, and his red hairâall of which she cited as insurmountable barriers to her happiness. Benton gave up the first for her, but pleaded that his principles and his heritage prevented him from doing more. Though she finally married him, Elizabeth never felt at ease in the frontier town of St. Louis, where famed explorer Gen. William Clark was still a fixture of society, or in Washingtonâs rough-and-tumble political atmosphere. Even before a stroke in 1844 rendered her nearly mute and immobile, Elizabeth suffered unidentified chronic illnesses, and she withdrew from the mainstream of her husbandâs life. Jessie recalled that when she was a young girl, she regularly dined with her father and her siblings and an array of fascinating guests. Then she would go upstairs to her motherâs room to entertain the recluse with amusing anecdotes from the evening. In contrast to the many words that Jessie wrote about her father and her husband, she wrote relatively little about her mother. âMy motherâs long illness deprived my father of her companionship to a great extent, and made him turn to me still more,â Jessie wrote in 1878. âHow great a loss this was to him and to us can only be known to those who knew her; but I do not speak of that life, for it is not, like mine, in a manner public property.â Such veiled references speak to a sense of competition for her fatherâs love, perhaps even scorn for the woman who would not fully share his life. Jessieâs marriage would be different.11
The difference began the moment Jessie and John met. She was swept off her feet by FrĂ©montâs good looks and elegant manners. After the concert, she told her sister that FrĂ©mont was the handsomest man she had ever met. âIâm so glad I wore the pink candy-stripe with the rose sash instead of the dotted muslin with the blue,â she said, âIt made me look much older.â She hoped she had made an impression on the young lieutenant. She had. FrĂ©montâs roommate, Nicollet, recalled that when he returned to their townhouse that evening, the young man told him he was in love.12
Was FrĂ©mont smitten with Jessieâs looks? It is difficult to determine how pretty Jessie was. In her memoirs, Jessie was unhappy with her appearance, criticizing the long âRoman noseâ that she had inherited from her father, which she felt would have been more attractive in a son than a daughter. An early drawing by artist John Wood Dodge shows a round-faced Jessie with plain features, but the artist Thomas Buchanan Read later created a cameo of the young woman that reveals a striking oval face with regular features, lovely dark eyes, and long dark hair parted down the middle and knotted at the back of her neck. A white blouse open at the throat and a pale blue scarf emphasize her youth and beauty. It is a very flattering portrait, ...