A Nation Rising (24 page)

One man who did not profit from the boom was John Sutter. He lost money in the business ventures he attempted to set up after gold was discovered on his property, and he died poor while petitioning Congress for financial relief.

 

A
PART FROM THE
profitable return on investment brought about by the gold rush, the aftermath of the Mexican War and the Oregon Treaty—signed a few years before, in 1846—produced other, less happy results. The addition of these enormous parcels of new territory made the future of slavery a bigger question; there was now that much more land to fight about. From the outset of the fighting, abolitionists such as the zealous William Lloyd Garrison of the American Anti-Slavery Society opposed the war, contending that it was waged “solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery.”

The antislavery pacifist Horace Greeley also protested against the war with Mexico from its beginning; his
New York Tribune
became a leading antislavery voice. Another ornery gadfly went to jail
in Massachusetts for his refusal to pay poll taxes that supported a war he feared would spread slavery. Henry David Thoreau spent only a single night in jail—an aunt paid his fine—but his lecture “Resistance to Civil Government” (later titled “Civil Disobedience”) was published in 1849 in the book
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
.

Perhaps the most horrible effect of the war with Mexico was the practical battle experience it provided for a corps of young American officers who fought as comrades in Mexico, only to face each other in battle fifteen years later in the Civil War. Among the many young West Pointers who fought in Mexico were two lieutenants—P. T. Beauregard and George McClellan—who served on General Scott's staff. Beauregard would lead the attack on Fort Sumter that began the Civil War. McClellan later commanded the armies of the North. Two comrades at the battle of Churubusco were lieutenants James Longstreet and Winfield Scott Hancock. They would face each other at Gettysburg in 1863. A young captain, Robert E. Lee, demonstrated his considerable military ability as one of Scott's engineers. A few years later, Scott would urge Lincoln to give Lee command of the Union armies, but Lee chose instead to remain loyal to his home, Virginia. When Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met years later at Appomattox Court House, Grant would remind Lee that they had once encountered each other as comrades in Mexico.

A
FTERMATH

W
HEN
M
EXICO LOST
the war, Spain's holdings in what became the United States of America were gone. An empire that once spanned much of the continent had disappeared. Florida, Texas, New Orleans, the Southwest, and California had all been grabbed from Spanish control. For centuries, since the establishment of Saint Augustine in 1565, the Spanish had struggled to strengthen their hold on their expansive North American territories, stretching from Florida across the continent to northern California. That struggle put Spain at odds first with the British and later with the Americans. But the once mighty Spanish, rulers of the first empire on which the sun never set, had crumbled. A shadow of its former glory, Spain ceded control of Florida to the United States in 1821, the same year it surrendered Mexico—its former source of amazing wealth and power—to independence. After being an American presence for nearly three centuries, Spain had ultimately become the loser.

In California, Jessie and John Charles Frémont proved to be among the winners. He had purchased a seventy-square-mile ranch called Las Mariposas in the Sierra foothills on a hunch, for $3,000. It proved to be a rich goldfield, and the Frémonts were soon wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. With income from their gold mines, they established a home in Monterey and later settled into San Francisco society. Flush with their gold, they purchased a prefabricated house from China with smooth, wooden interlocking pieces that were put together like a puzzle. Her father's daughter, Jessie was soon immersed in city politics. Of the experience, she later wrote, “I had done so many things that I had never done before that a new
sense of power had come to me.” Famous, wealthy, the son-in-law of a powerful man, John had his pick of offices. He served from September 9, 1850, to March 3, 1851, as one of California's first senators.

Then in 1856, Frémont emerged as a national political force on an antislavery platform. With America edging closer to the Civil War, Frémont's antislavery position was instrumental in his being chosen as the first Republican candidate for president. Jessie played an extremely active role in the campaign, rallying support for her husband. One campaign slogan read, “Frémont and Jessie too.” However, her father, a lifelong Democrat and a proponent of slavery, refused to endorse Frémont's bid for the presidency.

While Frémont collected many northern states, not a single southern state went Republican. Nor did he carry his adopted home state, California. Although Frémont did surpass the candidate of the American, or Know-Nothing, Party, Millard Fillmore, the election went to the Democrat, James Buchanan, who is now generally considered one of the two or three worst American presidents.

Once the war came in 1861, Frémont would go on to serve—but once again, not without controversy. While commanding Union troops in Missouri, he announced an emancipation plan that predated Abraham Lincoln's, earning the president's wrath. Frémont was sacked. In 1864, he was put at the head of a dissident Republican ticket that wanted a more radical approach to abolition. Eventually, Frémont was persuaded to quit the race, and Lincoln was reelected.

Lincoln would later say of the general who had challenged him, “I have great respect for General Frémont. But the fact is that the pioneer in any movement is not generally the best man to carry that movement to a successful issue. It was so in olden times, was it not?
Moses began the emancipation of the Jews, but did not take Israel into the promised land, after all.”

After the war, the Frémonts moved to New York. But when a postwar panic struck the U.S. economy in 1873, Frémont, who had invested heavily in railroad stock, lost everything and was forced to declare bankruptcy. To support the family, Jessie began a career as a writer and produced a string of successful books, including
A Year of American Travel: Narrative of Personal Experience
(1878), an account of her harrowing journey to California in 1849.

Near poverty, Frémont was appointed governor of the Territory of Arizona from 1878 to 1881. After being granted a small pension, the seventy-seven-year-old Frémont died in 1890 in a New York hotel.

After her husband's death, Jessie Benton Frémont was struggling financially as well. When a newspaper called attention to her poverty, Congress granted her a pension of $2,000 a year. In 1891, she moved into a home at the corner of 28th and Hoover Streets in Los Angeles, which was provided for her by a committee of women of the city.

Once, when asked about her husband, she told an interviewer, “Time will vindicate General Frémont. I am past sixty-six years old. I may not live to see his enemies sitting in homage at the unveiling of his statue, as in the case of my father, but John C. Frémont's name can never be erased from the most colorful chapters of American history. From the ashes of his campfires, cities have sprung.”

Jessie Benton Frémont died at age seventy-eight on December 27, 1902.

She had blazed a path all the way to the twentieth century.

I
NTRODUCTION
: “T
HE
D
REAM OF
O
UR
F
OUNDERS”

1. Cited in Schlesinger,
1,000 Days.

2. Burstein,
The Passions of Andrew Jackson
, p. xix.

I. B
URR'S
T
RIAL

1. Isenberg,
Fallen Founder
, p. 321

2. Ibid., p. 321.

3. Chernow,
Alexander Hamilton
, pp. 303–304.

4. Gordon,
An Empire of Wealth
, p. 75.

5. Wheelan,
Jefferson's Vendetta
, p. 5.

6. Lucas,
The Aaron Burr Treason Trial
, p. 10.

7. Wheelan, p. 1.

8. Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
, p. 110.

9. Witham,
A City Upon a Hill
, p. 57.

10. Wheelan, p. 27.

11. Herman,
How the Scots Invented the Modern World
, p. 243.

12. Fleming,
Liberty
, p. 154.

13. Wheelan, p. 29.

14. Isenberg, p. 36.

15. Ibid., p. 72.

16. Wheelan, p. 34.

17. Ibid., p. 32.

18. Isenberg, p. 170.

19. Gordon, p. 117.

20. Isenberg, pp. 218–219.

21. Ibid., p. 232.

22. Chernow, p. 704.

23. Isenberg, pp. 265–266.

24. Fleming,
Duel
, p. 345.

25. Cited in Isenberg, p. 277.

26. Smith,
John Marshall: Definer of a Nation
, p. 352.

27. Ibid., p. 354.

28. Burstein, The
Passions of Andrew Jackson
, p. 73.

29. Collier and Collier,
Decision in Philadelphia
, p. 231.

30. Ibid., pp. 157–158.

31. Wheelan, pp. 285–286.

32. James Parton,
The Life and Times of Aaron Burr
, Vol. 2, cited in Lucas, p. 100.

II. W
EATHERFORD'S
W
AR

1. O'Brien,
In Bitterness and in Tears
, p. x.

2. Ibid., p. xi.

3. Ibid., pp. xii–xiii.

4. Ibid., p. xiii.

5. Cited in Borneman,
1812: The War That Forged a Nation
, p. 146.

6. Meacham,
American Lion
, p. xxii.

7. Remini,
Andrew Jackson
, pp. 4–5.

8. Ibid., p. 9.

9. Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country
, p. 178.

10. Ibid., p. 226.

11. Utley and Washburn,
Indian Wars
, p. 117.

12. Calloway,
The Shawnees and the War for America
, pp. 138–139.

13. Utley and Washburn, p. 126.

14. Borneman,
1812: The War That Forged a Nation
, p. 1.

15. An excellent summary of this case is available in Gordon-Reed,
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
, pp. 59ff.

16. Cited in Boller,
Presidential Campaigns
, p. 20.

17. Cited in O'Brien, p. 63.

18. Cited in Richter, p. 228.

19. Remini,
Andrew Jackson
, p. 57.

20. Reynolds,
Waking Giant
, pp. 2–3.

21. Cited in O'Brien, p. 150.

22. Cited in Borneman, p. 152.

23. Anderson and Cayton,
The Dominion of War
, p. 234.

24. Ibid., p. 236.

25. Burstein,
The Passions of Andrew Jackson
, pp. 131–133.

26. O'Brien, p. 240.

27. Burstein, p. 133.

III. M
ADISON'S
M
UTINY

1. Berlin,
Many Thousands Gone
, p. 362.

2. Rediker,
The Slave Ship
, p. 292.

3. Hendrick and Hendrick,
The Creole Mutiny
, pp. 11–12.

4. Rediker, p. 292.

5. Northup,
Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853.
Electronic Edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

6. Jones,
Mutiny on the Amistad
, p. 17.

7. Irons,
A People's History of the Supreme Court
, p. 151.

8. Lepore,
New York Burning
, p. xii.

9. Hochschild,
Bury the Chains
, p. 269

10. Ibid., p. 279. This is also my source for Leclerc's warning, below: “You will have to exterminate…”

11. Cited in Higginson,
Black Rebellion: Five Slave Revolts
, p. 72.

12. Egerton,
Gabriel's Rebellion
, p. 101.

13. Berlin, p. 362.

14. Hendrick and Hendrick, p. 110.

15. Howe,
What Hath God Wrought
, pp. 673–674.

16. Mayer,
All on Fire
, p. 316.

IV. D
ADE'S
P
ROMISE

1. Cited in O'Brien,
In Bitterness and in Tears
, p. 239.

2. Laumer,
Dade's Last Command,
pp. 177ff.

3. Ibid.

4. Mahon,
History of the Second Seminole War
, p. 105.

5. Knetsch,
Florida's Seminole Wars
, p. 72.

6. Ibid., p. 82.

7. Laumer, p. 15.

8. Meacham,
American Lion
, p. 95.

9. Ibid.

10. Cited in Meltzer,
Hunted Like a Wolf
, pp. 818–820.

11. Oates,
The Fires of Jubilee
, p. 15.

12. Reynolds,
John Brown, Abolitionist
, p. 52.

13. Oates, p. 25.

14. Ibid., p. 122.

15. Stampp,
The Peculiar Institution
, p. 134.

16. Reynolds, p. 241.

17. Price,
Maroon Societies
, p. 15.

18. Cited in Bennet,
The Shaping of Black America
, p. 106.

19. Utley and Washburn,
Indian Wars
, p. 131.

20. Ibid., pp. 130–131.

21. Cited in O'Brien, p. 239.

22. Cited in Meltzer, p. 137.

23. Mahon, p. 325.

24. Meacham, p. 92.

V. M
ORSE'S
C
ODE

1. The Project Gutenberg eBook of
Awful Disclosures
, by Maria Monk. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

2. Clark,
The Irish in Philadelphia
, p. 17.

3. Peter Quinn, “Immigration's Dark History,”
America Magazine
, February 18, 1995.

4. “The Riots,”
Pennsylvania Freeman
, July 18, 1844.

5. Howe,
What Hath God Wrought
, p. 505.

6.
Life and Times in Colonial Philadelphia,
cited in Brands,
The First American
, pp. 216–217.

7. Brookhiser,
Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris—The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution
, p. 32.

8. McCullough,
John Adams
, p. 505.

9. Gaustad and Schmidt,
The Religious History of America
, p. 170.

10. Morse,
Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States
.

11. Silverman,
Lightning Man
, p. 136.

12. Ibid., p. 138.

13. Carmine A. Prioli, “The Ursuline Outrage,”
American Heritage,
February/March 1982.

14. Beecher,
A Plea for the West
.

15. Howe, p. 822.

16. Carroll,
The Great American Battle
, p. 129.

17. Howe, pp. 751–752.

18. Ibid.

19. Boller,
Presidential Campaigns
, p. 97.

20. Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days
, p. 74.

VI. J
ESSIE'S
J
OURNEY

1. Frémont,
A Year of American Travel
, p. 26.

2. Ibid.

3. Cited in Levy,
They Saw the Elephant
, p. 42.

4. Herr,
Jessie Benton Frémont
, p. 194.

5. Excerpted in Beebe and Senkewicz,
Lands of Promise and Despair
, p. 11.

6. Ibid., p. 10.

7. Paddison,
A World Transformed
, p. xiii.

8. Stannard,
American Holocaust
, pp. 136–137.

9. Ibid., p. 139.

10. Cited in Brands,
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times
, p. 190.

11. Denton,
Passion and Principle
, p. x.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., p. xiii.

14. Ibid., p. 85.

15. Lincoln's speech cited in Oates,
With Malice toward None
, pp. 86–87.

16. Sides,
Blood and Thunder
, p. 117.

17. Ibid., p. 120.

18. Cited in Herr,
Jessie Benton Frémont
, pp. 145–146.

19. Denton, p. 143.

20. Sides, p. 255.

21. Cited in Herr, p. 173.

22. Cited in Levy, pp. xx–xxi.

23. Gordon,
An Empire of Wealth
, pp. 183–184.