A Nation Rising (23 page)

Anne and Fremon moved first to Norfolk and later settled in Georgia, where they purchased a house. She took in boarders while Fremon taught French and dancing. On January 21, 1813, their first child, John Charles Fremon, was born. By coincidence, the Fremons
were staying in a Nashville hotel in 1813, when Andrew Jackson and the Benton brothers had the shootout in which Jackson was wounded. As the infant John C. Frémont slept, his parents heard the whistling of balls and the “report of fire arms.” It is not clear whether John Frémont himself added the accented
é
and
t
to his name, or if his father had done so. But it does seem certain that John Charles Frémont was illegitimate.

While preparing to lead his first expedition, Frémont sought a guide and met Kit Carson on a Missouri River steamboat in 1842. Their five-month journey, made with twenty-five men, was a complete success, and Frémont's report “touched off a wave of wagon caravans filled with hopeful emigrants” heading west.

Over the course of their next two journeys, Frémont and Carson opened up new routes to the West, and it was apparent that both Frémont and his sponsor, Senator Benton, were eyeing California as ripe for American possession. Ruled by Mexico from a distance, California was sparsely settled; and as more and more Americans moved west, it became clear that this was going to be another flash point with Mexico, which was already preparing for war with the United States over the future of Texas.

 

F
OR THE FIRST
time in its short history, the United States didn't go to war with a foreign power over independence, provocation, or global politics. This was a war fought unapologetically for territorial expansion. One young lieutenant who fought in Mexico later called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” His name was Ulysses S. Grant.

The war with Mexico was the centerpiece of the administration of James K. Polk, perhaps the most adept of the presidents between Jackson and Lincoln. Continuing the line of Jacksonian Democrats in the White House after Tyler's abbreviated Whig administration, Polk was dubbed “Young Hickory.” A slaveholding states' rights advocate from North Carolina, Polk slipped by Van Buren in the Democratic convention and was narrowly elected president in 1844. His victory was made possible because the splinter antislavery Liberty Party drew votes away from the Whig candidate Henry Clay. A swing of a few thousand votes, especially in New York State, which Polk barely carried, would have given the White House to Clay, a moderate who might have been one president capable of forestalling the breakup of the Union and the Civil War.

The 1844 presidential contest was a Manifest Destiny election. The issues were the future of the Oregon Territory, which Polk wanted to “reoccupy,” and the future of Texas, which Polk wanted to “reannex,” implying that Texas was part of the original Louisiana Purchase. (It wasn't.) Even before Polk's inauguration, Congress had adopted a joint resolution on his proposal to annex Texas. The congressional decision made a war with Mexico all but certain, and this suited Polk and other expansionists. In response to the American actions, Mexico severed diplomatic relations with the United States in March 1845.

Treating Texas as U.S. property, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor into the territory with about 1,500 troops in May 1845, to guard the undefined border against a Mexican invasion. After months of negotiating to buy Texas, Polk ordered Taylor to move to the bank of the Rio Grande. This so-called Army of Observa
tion numbered some 3,500 men by January 1846—about half of the entire U.S. Army. Its mission was anything but “observation.” Escalating the provocations, Polk next had Taylor cross the Rio Grande. When a U.S. soldier was found dead and some Mexicans attacked an American patrol on April 25, pro-war American papers, such as the
Union
, shrieked, “American blood has been shed on American soil.” President Polk had the pretext he needed to announce to Congress, “War exists.” Although Senator Benton was not an advocate of the war, a large Democratic majority in the House and Senate quickly voted to expand the army by an additional 50,000 men. America's most naked war of territorial aggression was under way.

Whig opposition to the war was muted, although as the war continued the party tried to expose it as unnecessary and argued that Polk had deceived the nation in order to provoke an unjustified war. A freshman Whig congressman from Illinois made his first speech opposing the conflict with Mexico, challenging the president to reveal the exact spot where the first blood had been spilled. Abraham Lincoln said the war was the product of “a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.” In assaulting Polk, he found few Whig friends, and he was advised to drop his vocal opposition to the war, which was very popular back home. He followed that advice but was not returned to the House. Voicing opposition to a popular war has never been a good political move in American history. Opposition should wait until the war becomes unpopular.

The war ended two weeks after Lincoln spoke.
¹⁵

Won quickly and at relatively little expense, the Mexican War basically fulfilled the dream of Manifest Destiny.

 

W
HILE THE WAR
was still being fought in Mexico, a small group of Americans in Sonoma, California, were inspired to follow the lead of Texas. They had the behind-the-scenes support of America's hero, John Charles Frémont, who was in northern California on another surveying trip—an ill-disguised incursion into California. Encouraged by an administration in Washington that openly wanted to purchase California and Oregon, a motley group of American settlers calling themselves
osos
, or bears, declared an independent republic in California and raised the “Bear Flag” on June 25, 1846. According to Hampton Sides, their flag was a “slightly deformed banner fashioned from scraps of ladies' undergarments, with a grizzly bear (or ‘something they called a bear'…) rising on its haunches, the crude image dribbled in berry juice.”
¹⁶

Moving south under orders from Commodore Robert F. Stockton, Frémont led a military expedition of 300 men to capture Santa Barbara in 1846. While they were crossing the Santa Ynez Mountains, Frémont's company nearly lost all their equipment in a rainstorm; but they made their way to the presidio and captured the town almost—though not entirely—without bloodshed.

On June 28, in an incident that recalls Andrew Jackson's treatment of the two Englishmen in Florida, Frémont captured three local men—Californios, the Spanish-speaking natives of California still under Mexican rule. Two of them were sons of the mayor of Sonoma. Kit Carson asked Frémont what to do with the men, and Frémont replied that he had no use for prisoners. Although the details were later disputed, Carson shot all three, apparently believing
that this was what Frémont had ordered. Frémont later disavowed any part in the shooting. Hampton Sides writes, “Neither Carson nor Frémont mentioned anything about this little atrocity in his memoirs. It remains one of the unfathomable episodes of Carson's life.”
¹⁷

The success, with little cost, added to Frémont's now legendary stature. One newspaper, the
Intelligencer
, reported on the arrival of Frémont's band in Monterey: “They are the most daring and hardy set of fellows I ever looked upon. They are splendid marksmen, and can plant a bullet in an enemy's head with their horses at full gallop.…They never sleep in a house, but on the ground, with a blanket around them, their saddle for a pillow, and a rifle by their side.”
¹⁸

A few days later, Frémont led his men to Los Angeles and captured the small settlement there as well.

Soon afterward, warships of the U.S. Navy sailed into Monterey harbor and raised the American flag in place of the Bear Flag. The man credited with first raising the Stars and Stripes over California was the naval officer Joseph Warren Revere, grandson of the Revolutionary hero Paul Revere and namesake of Revere's friend and compatriot Joseph Warren, one of the first martyrs of the Revolution, killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

On January 16, 1847, after the Mexican-American War in California ended, Commodore Stockton appointed Frémont military governor of California. But a clash of egos and military services was about to complicate matters. Shortly after Frémont assumed the post, Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny of the U.S. Army, who had marched on Los Angeles after easily taking New Mexico from the Mexicans, said he had orders from the president and secretary
of war to serve as governor. Kearny asked Frémont to give up the governorship. But Frémont was adamant in his refusal to submit to Kearny. Although Kearny gave him several opportunities to retract his refusal, Frémont stubbornly declined. When they returned east to Fort Leavenworth in August 1847, Kearny had Frémont arrested and bound in chains. He would stand trial for “Mutiny, disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to military discipline.”

When Kearny tried to have the court-martial moved away from Washington, D.C., where Senator Benton still had powerful friends and allies, President Polk overruled him. Brought to the capital to stand trial, Frémont endured a court-martial that proved to be another media sensation, drawing the nation's attention and evoking comparisons in the press to Aaron Burr's trial in 1807. With the support of powerful Senator Benton and an overwhelmingly admiring press, Frémont was depicted as the wronged party—a legendary figure who had risked all to blaze a path west. He was the “great Pathfinder,” a war hero, and dashing explorer, and a friend of the famous trapper Kit Carson, now being undermined by a man who wanted to steal Frémont's thunder for the conquest of California.

Almost unanimously, the national press sided with Frémont. When Frémont was reunited with Jessie in Saint Louis on the way to the trial, the press was there to capture the emotional scene as the young wife ran into the arms of the returning hero. One correspondent wrote that the court-martial would make Frémont “ten times more popular than ever.”
¹⁹

A battle of egos—General Kearny's, Commodore Stockton's, and Frémont's—as well as a turf war between army and navy, the trial was “a feeding frenzy for the media and political melodrama of
the first order,” wrote Hampton Sides. “Senator Benton roared his displeasure at the whole affair, arguing that his son-in-law had been unfairly caught in the crossfire of an interservice rivalry between a jealous army and a jealous navy.”
²⁰

In the end, Frémont was convicted on all three counts. But the public, it seemed, shared the feelings of a columnist for the
New York Herald
: “Most men in the place of Frémont would have done precisely what he did.”
²¹
After a visit to the White House during which Kit Carson and Jessie Frémont both pleaded John's case, President Polk approved of the decision of the court, though he accepted the court's suggestion of leniency for the American hero. Polk commuted his sentence to a dishonorable discharge.

But Frémont would have none of it. He was furious and considered his conviction an injustice and a grave dishonor. In February 1848, he wrote to Polk, threatening to resign his commission unless the president overturned his conviction. One month later, having received no reply from the president, Frémont resigned from the army. Pregnant throughout the arduous trial, Jessie had been ordered to bed. She gave birth to a son, Benton Frémont, on July 24, 1848, in Washington, D.C.

Bitter, Frémont again set his sights on the West. With Senator Benton's support, he received private backing for an expedition to map a route for a railroad to the west coast. With Jessie, Lily, and the new baby, he set off for Saint Louis. The baby died there on October 6, and both the Frémonts and Senator Benton blamed the child's death on Frémont's accuser, General Kearny.

Two weeks later, John set off for the West. The grief-stricken Jessie promised that she would meet him in California the following
spring. It was this promise that brought her to Panama City in the spring of 1849.

 

S
OMETHING ELSE HAD
changed during the trial. The first rumors of the discovery of gold in California were filtering back east. Then came what seemed a divine confirmation of the popular notion that God had ordained that America should spread from coast to coast. On the morning of January 24, 1848, James Marshall, a mechanic from New Jersey who was building a sawmill for John Sutter on the American River not far from what is now Sacramento, spotted some flecks of yellow in the water. Although Marshall is always credited as the discoverer, JoAnn Levy offers a different view in
They Saw the Elephant
, claiming that Marshall and the others at the site didn't know what gold actually looked like. A woman named Jennie Wimmer who worked for Sutter was making soap, and when she saw the ore, she told Marshall, “This is gold, and I will throw it into my lye kettle…and if it is gold, it will be gold when it comes out.” The next day, she removed the nugget from a bar of soap. And the gold rush was on.
²²

The gold rush transformed California and the United States. Tens of thousands of Americans set out for the West during the next few years, and $200 million worth of gold would be extracted from the hills of California. “Something very close to mass hysteria was the result,” John Steele Gordon comments in his history of American economic power. “In 1849, about ninety thousand Americans set off for California, and as many followed in 1850. That is not far short of 1 percent of the population.” He adds, “By 1860,
more than two thousand banks were in operation in the United States…. As California gold flowed into the American economy, the money supply increased markedly. The minting of gold coins by the federal government increased, as did the issuance of bank notes based on gold reserves. Because the country had no central bank, there was no mechanism to regulate the money supply or to use monetary policy to control what Alan Greenspan would famously call ‘irrational exuberance.' The result was a huge, but unsustainable boom.”
²³