Authors: H.W. Brands
How much encouragement he required from Jessie to make himself available for election is unknown. His ambition still burned, but till now it had sought, and found, outlets in activities suited to the soldier and explorer. Politics was something else—something that came far more naturally, by temperament and upbringing, to her than to him. Although she took pains to avoid appearing pushy, her ambition was evident to those who knew them both. Edward Bosqui, who for a period managed Frémont’s Mariposa mines, explained, “Mrs. Frémont was a highly accomplished woman of fine intellect, with a towering ambition and courage equal to her
husband’s.” Another acquaintance put the matter more bluntly, calling Jessie “the better man of the two, far more intelligent and more comprehensive.” Almost certainly, John’s decision to enter politics was Jessie’s decision also.
John’s election took place in December 1849. Following the adjournment of the Monterey convention, the constitution was referred to the voters of California for approval. Only about 13,000 trooped to the polling places, the rest apparently being too busy gathering the last gold before the winter rains shut down the mines. But by a margin of fifteen to one they ratified the new charter. They also selected the members of California’s first legislature, which convened at San Jose on December 17. (The opening of the session had been scheduled for December 15, but those winter rains, now arrived, postponed a quorum.) An early order of business was the election of California’s two senators. Frémont was elected on the first ballot, with 29 of 46 votes. William Gwin was chosen on the second ballot, with 24 votes.
Jessie received the good news at Monterey a short while later.
One evening of tremendous rain, when we were, as usual, around the fire, Mrs. M’Evoy, with her table and lights, sewing at one side, myself by the other, explaining pictures from the
Illustrated Times
to my little girl, while the baby rolled about on the bear skin in front of the fire, suddenly Mr. Frémont came in upon us, dripping wet, as well he might be, for he had come through from San Jose—seventy miles on horseback through the heavy rain. He was so wet that we could hardly make him cross the pretty room; but “beautiful are the feet of him that beareth glad tidings,” and the footmarks were all welcome, for they pointed home. He came to tell me that he had been elected Senator, and that it was necessary we should go to Washington on the steamer of the 1st of January.
W
HEN JESSIE FRéMONT
arrived at Washington in March 1850, no one greeted her more warmly than Thomas Benton. And no one inspected
her more closely. Jessie’s father had followed the trials of her outbound isthmus crossing (hearing from the steamship people details Jessie omitted from her letters) with concern matched only by the knowledge that there was nothing he could do about it (beyond ensuring that the steamship folks looked after her as much as she would allow). He knew of the fabulous fortune John had fallen into at the Mariposa, and of course now he knew that John had been elected California’s first senator. He wondered what Jessie’s role in the election had been; he himself had never thought of John as the political type. And he wondered what California had done to his daughter. She couldn’t have grown more willful; that would have been impossible. But as he watched her get off the train from New York, where their steamship back from Panama had landed, she seemed more capable, more calmly confident. Perhaps she shared with him the sentiment she later put to paper: “I had done so many things that I had never done before that a new sense of power had come to me.” But she didn’t really have to tell him, for he could see it himself.
She had every reason to feel confident. Beyond the knowledge of competencies she hadn’t known she possessed, she occupied what to most observers must have seemed a charmed position in American life. She was one of the wealthiest women in the country, and growing wealthier by the week. Her father was one of the nation’s most powerful men—in fact, the senior member of the Senate, by length of service. And her husband was now a senator also, at the start of what promised to be an illustrious political career. Travel to and from the West Coast was getting easier, as the recent journey back had demonstrated; Jessie could readily imagine herself splitting time between California, her new home and the seat of her and John’s wealth, and Washington, her old home and the seat of national power.
There was one hitch in this scenario, however. John wasn’t actually a senator yet, and he wouldn’t be until Congress accepted the Monterey constitution and officially made California the thirty-first state.
And this was by no means a sure thing. The roots of the opposition to California’s admission ran to 1846, when Democratic congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced a measure to ban slavery in any territory
acquired from Mexico in the war just begun. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House of Representatives yet failed in the Senate, a circumstance that both reflected and exacerbated the tension between North and South. For years the North’s population had been growing faster than the South’s; the greater numbers in the North gave that region a distinct advantage in the population-apportioned House. But a balance held in the Senate, where the fifteen northern states were matched by the fifteen southern states. The voting on the Wilmot Proviso reminded northerners of the imperfectly democratic character of Congress, in which southerners wielded more power per person than northerners, and it inspired many northerners to try to break the southern hold by admitting more free states. The Wilmot voting reminded southerners of the same thing, with the opposite effect. Southerners recalled that congressional democracy was deliberately imperfect—how else to guard states’ rights?—and they feared a northern plot to overturn the system so carefully crafted by the Founders.
Until John Frémont and the other members-elect of California’s congressional delegation arrived at the national capital in 1850, the debate over the Wilmot Proviso remained theoretical: an argument about what to do when the time came to organize the territory taken from Mexico. The arrival of the California delegation made plain that the time had come. Indeed, the time was past, for the Californians had organized themselves. Congress now had to accept their accomplishment or reject it.
But things weren’t that simple, for the California question reopened the entire sectional dispute. Twice in living memory, thrice in American history, crises between North and South that threatened to disunite the states had been resolved by compromise: at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when the three-fifths formula settled the argument over how to count slaves toward representation; in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which divided the Louisiana Territory between future slave states and free at the line of 36° 30′; and with the Compromise of 1833, which saved face for both sides in the nullification controversy between South Carolina and the supporters of states’ rights on one hand, and the Jackson administration and the partisans of federal power on the other. Perhaps a fourth compromise would resolve the California question, but any such compromise
wouldn’t come easily. Seventeen years had passed since the settlement of 1833, thirty years since the Missouri Compromise. In that time the rift between North and South had grown wider and deeper, and the conciliatory spirit in Congress that made those earlier settlements possible had been diminished by retirement and death.
As it had for most of the nineteenth century, the nation looked to three members of Congress for guidance, three statesmen who towered above the rest. Henry Clay literally did tower above his colleagues. Monumentally tall, with a high forehead, piercing eyes, and flowing hair, he was a sculptor’s model of a statesman. As a Kentuckian, a man of the West, Clay had guided the North and South to amicable settlements in the compromises of 1820 and 1833, and he believed he could do the same now. He wrapped California in a compromise package of several legislative parts. First, California would be admitted as a state, with the Monterey (antislavery) constitution. Second, territorial governments would be organized for the rest of the Mexican cession (construed as New Mexico and Utah) without restriction on slavery. Third, the disputed boundary between Texas and New Mexico would be arbitrated. Fourth, the federal government would assume Texas’s debts. Fifth, slavery would continue to be allowed in the District of Columbia (where, in the capital of democracy, it had come under attack as especially inappropriate). Sixth, the slave
trade
within the federal district would be abolished (the commerce in flesh being judged the most egregious aspect of slavery). Seventh, the fugitive slave law would be stiffened. Eighth, Congress would explicitly disavow any interference with the slave trade in or between slave states.
It was a lot to ask, as Clay conceded. “But it is impossible for us to be blind to the facts which are daily transpiring before us.” Everywhere the spirit of section raged, goaded by the spirit of party. “It is passion, passion— party, party—and intemperance; that is all I dread in the adjustment of the great questions which unhappily at this time divide our distracted country. At this moment, we have in the legislative bodies of this Capitol, and in the States, twenty-odd furnaces in full blast in generating heat and passion and intemperance, and diffusing them throughout the whole extent of this broad land. Two months ago, all was calm in comparison with the present
moment. All now is uproar, confusion, menace to the existence of the Union and to the happiness and safety of this people.”
Because California had precipitated the current uproar, Clay concentrated on the candidate state. Senators from the South complained that their section was being shut out of the prize for which all Americans had fought against Mexico. Clay asked the distinguished gentlemen to consider who, precisely, was shutting them out. Was it Congress? Was it the North? “No, sir, the interdiction is imposed by California herself. And has it not been the doctrine of all parties that, when a State is about to be admitted into the Union, that State has a right to decide for itself whether it will or will not have within its limits slavery?” Did Congress claim the right to prevent New York from abolishing slavery within its own borders? For that matter, did Congress claim the right to force abolition on Virginia? It did neither. Likewise, then, Congress should not presume to dictate to California regarding slavery.
Clay spoke at considerable length—for two days, in fact—on the rest of his compromise package. He would have continued into a third day, but when a weary colleague moved to adjourn, Clay promised, “I begin to see land. I shall pretty soon arrive at the end.” In getting there he acknowledged the deficiencies of any set of compromises, yet he contended that the alternative to compromise was something far worse. Extremists spoke of secession as though that could be accomplished without violence. They were woefully wrong. “War is the only alternative by which a dissolution could be accomplished….In less than sixty days, war would be blazing forth in every part of this now happy and peaceable land.” And it would be such a war as no one in America had ever seen. “We may search the pages of history, and none so furious, so bloody, so implacable, so exterminating, from the wars of Greece down, including those of the Commonwealth of England, and the revolutions of France—none, none of them raged with such violence, or was ever conducted with such bloodshed and enormities as will that war which shall follow that disastrous event—if that event ever happen—of dissolution.”
Clay closed with a plea.
I conjure gentlemen—whether from the South or the North, by all they hold dear in this world—by all their love of liberty—by all their veneration for their ancestors—by all their regard for posterity—by all their gratitude to Him who has bestowed upon them such unnumbered blessings—by all the duties which they owe to mankind, and all the duties they owe to themselves—by all these considerations I implore them to pause—solemnly to pause—at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken in the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.
And, finally, Mr. President, I implore, as the best blessing which Heaven can bestow upon me upon earth, that if the direful and sad event of the dissolution of the Union shall happen, I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.
N
O ONE EVER
called John Calhoun handsome, yet his appearance was even more arresting than Clay’s. Dubbed the “Cast-Iron Man” in honor of his unyielding character, the South Carolinian earned the label almost equally by his visage, which brought to mind the prophet Ezekiel, had the latter shaved his beard and put on a collar and cravat. (Milton’s Satan was another image that came to the mind of at least one man who knew Calhoun.) By 1850, though, Calhoun was a shadow, or specter, of his former self; tuberculosis was drawing him ineluctably to the grave. He could only croak a whisper, and then not for long. The Senate readily granted permission when he asked if a colleague might read his reply to Clay.
Calhoun concurred with Clay that the Senate confronted a single central question—“the greatest and the gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the Union be preserved?” But he differed with Clay on almost everything else. The present danger arose not from any extremism in the South, he said, but from the intolerance of the North. The antipathy of the North for the South had been evident for decades, and was manifest most recently in the conspiracy to admit California.
For conspiracy it was, plotted between the executive branch, whose agent in California had authorized the irregular Monterey convention, and the antislavery elements in the federal legislature, who wished to force California on Congress.
The case of California, Calhoun said, was premised on the “monstrous assumption” that sovereignty over the territories resided with the people of those territories, rather than with Congress. This was utterly false. Had California—like Texas, for example—won independence from Mexico on its own, then it would have had the right to fashion its own government. But California was acquired from Mexico by American blood and American treasure. The American government, therefore, controlled the destiny of California. “The individuals in California who have undertaken to form a constitution and a State, and to exercise the power of legislating without the consent of Congress, have usurped the sovereignty of the State and the authority of Congress, and have acted in open defiance of them both. In other words, what they have done is revolutionary and rebellious in its character, anarchical in its tendency, and calculated to lead to the most dangerous consequences.” The supporters of California’s admission had laid before the Senate a document purporting to be a constitution, and they spoke of California as having rights, as though it were already a state. Nothing could be more wrong. “Can you believe that there is such a State in reality as the State of California? No; there is no such State. It has no legal or constitutional existence. It has no validity, and can have none without your sanction.”