John C. Frémont

• 1. Introduction

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  John Charles Frémont was born on the 21st of January 1813, the illegitimate son of a French-Canadian schoolteacher and a Virginia planter's daughter who had fled her elderly husband. He died destitute in New York City in 1890. Between those two facts lies one of the most turbulent careers in American history: explorer, senator, accused war criminal, the first presidential nominee of the Republican Party, and a general who nearly handed Kentucky to the Confederacy by acting without orders.

  His biographer Allan Nevins wrote that Frémont lived a dramatic life of remarkable successes and dismal failures. Several historians argue that the key to his character lies in that illegitimate birth, and what it produced: a drive for self-justification so intense it repeatedly destroyed the very victories he had worked to achieve.

  How does a man who climbed a 13,745-foot peak and planted the American flag on it end up court-martialed for mutiny? How does the nation's most celebrated explorer become the commander who helped give Ulysses S. Grant his first field command, only to be fired for insubordination four months later? And why did the man who issued the first emancipation edict of the Civil War die with nothing? Those questions run through every chapter of Frémont's life.

• 2. Origins and Outsider Drive

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  On the 10th of July 1811, Anne Beverley Whiting and her French-Canadian lover Charles Frémon fled together to Williamsburg, Virginia, leaving behind her husband Major John Pryor, a wealthy Richmond resident in his early sixties. Pryor published a divorce petition in the Virginia Patriot, but the Virginia House of Delegates refused to grant it, meaning the couple could never legally marry. They eventually settled in Savannah, Georgia, where their son was born out of wedlock.

  On the 8th of December 1818, Charles Frémon died in Norfolk, leaving Anne a widow with several young children and a limited inherited income. The family moved to Charleston, South Carolina. A domestic slave named Black Hannah helped raise young John. A lawyer named John W. Mitchell provided for his early education, and in May 1829 Frémont entered Charleston College, though he was expelled in 1831 for irregular attendance, the same charge that would follow him out of other institutions.

  What saved him was the attention of Joel R. Poinsett, an eminent South Carolina politician and supporter of Andrew Jackson. Poinsett secured Frémont an appointment as a teacher of mathematics aboard the sloop USS Natchez, sailing the South American seas in 1833. When Poinsett later became Secretary of War, he arranged for Frémont to assist the French explorer and scientist Joseph Nicollet in exploring the lands between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Frémont trained in astronomy, geology, and topography under Nicollet, documenting fauna, flora, soil, and water resources across the frontier. It was during Nicollet's work that Frémont met the powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and through Benton's Washington home, Benton's sixteen-year-old daughter Jessie.

• 3. Jessie, Benton, and the Expeditions

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  In 1841, Frémont, then twenty-eight years old, and Jessie Benton eloped and were married by a Catholic priest. Her father, Thomas Hart Benton, Democratic Party leader in the Senate for more than thirty years, was furious. But because he loved his daughter, he accepted the marriage and became Frémont's most powerful patron.

  Benton championed Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States was destined to control the North American continent from coast to coast. Through his Senate power, he obtained for Frémont the leadership, funding, and patronage of three western expeditions. The partnership between the ambitious senator and his restless son-in-law would shape American expansion.

  Frémont's first major expedition began on the 15th of June 1842, when he and a party of twenty-five men, including by chance meeting the mountain man Kit Carson, departed from the Kansas River. They followed the Platte River to the South Pass and explored the Wind River Range. Frémont climbed what is now called Frémont's Peak at 13,745 feet and planted an American flag at the summit. The five-month journey returned to Washington in October, and Frémont and Jessie co-authored the Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, published in 1843. Newspapers across the country printed it, and the public embraced his vision of the West as open, inviting land to be settled rather than a wilderness to be feared.

  A second expedition began in the summer of 1843, this time with nearly forty well-equipped men and, controversially, a twelve-pound howitzer cannon obtained in St. Louis. On the 18th of January 1844, the party reached the Carson River, then turned west into the Sierra Nevada. Carson led them through a new pass Frémont named Carson Pass in his honor. They descended the American River to Sutter's Fort, where Frémont observed that Mexican authority over California was very weak. Back in Washington, the Senate and House each ordered the printing of 10,000 copies of the second report to distribute to the press and public.

• 4. Violence on the Western Trail

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  Frémont's third expedition, launched on the 1st of June 1845, departed St. Louis with sixty armed men, with Carson as guide alongside scouts Joseph Walker and Alexis Godey. The War Department secretly instructed Frémont that if war with Mexico began, he was to convert his scientific party into a military force. He arrived at Sutter's Fort on the 9th of December and immediately sought to stir up patriotic enthusiasm among American settlers there.

  What followed constitutes the darkest chapter of Frémont's record. In early 1846, as his party headed north toward Oregon after a standoff with Mexican commandant Jose Castro, they carried out the Sacramento River massacre. The expedition's own members gave wildly different estimates of the dead. Thomas E. Breckenridge placed the number of Native Americans killed at 120-150; Thomas S. Martin said more than 175. The eyewitness Tustin claimed at least 600-700 were killed on land, with another 200 or more dying in the water. There are no records of any expedition members being killed or wounded. Kit Carson, one of the mounted attackers, later said of the assault: "It was a perfect butchery."

  Frémont's party continued north, killing Native Americans on sight. On the 9th of May 1846, Native Americans ambushed the camp at Klamath Lake in retaliation, killing three members of Frémont's party in their sleep. Frémont responded by attacking a Klamath fishing village named Dokdokwas the following day, though the residents may have had no involvement in the ambush. On the 12th of May 1846, the village at the junction of the Williamson River and Klamath Lake was completely destroyed, with at least fourteen people killed.

  That same engagement produced a moment both men remembered vividly. When Carson's gun misfired and a Klamath warrior drew a poison arrow, Frémont rode his horse over the warrior to save Carson's life. Carson felt afterward that he owed Frémont his life. On the 8th of May, Frémont had been overtaken by Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie from Washington, who delivered secret instructions from Benton and Buchanan justifying aggressive action and reporting that a declaration of war with Mexico was imminent.

• 5. California War and Court-Martial

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  On the 14th of June 1846, thirty-four armed rebels independently captured Sonoma, the largest settlement in northern California, and forced the surrender of Colonel Mariano Vallejo. The following day the rebels, called Osos by locals, hoisted a roughly sewn flag and formed the Bear Flag Republic, electing William Ide as their leader. Frémont publicly denied responsibility for the raid even as the prisoners were taken to his camp eighty miles away and imprisoned at Sutter's Fort under his orders. He had begun signing letters as "Military Commander of U.S. Forces in California".

  On the 28th of June 1846, three unarmed men came ashore at Point San Pablo. They were Don Jose Berreyesa and the twenty-year-old de Haro twin brothers Ramon and Francisco. Kit Carson, Granville Swift, and Sam Neal intercepted them and all three were murdered in cold blood. Exactly who gave the order remains disputed, but later accounts point to Carson acting at the direction of Frémont.

  Commodore John D. Sloat's Pacific Squadron formally declared California American territory on the 7th of July, and Frémont's California Battalion was eventually incorporated into the U.S. military with 428 men, Frémont commanding as major. On the 13th of January 1847, Frémont accepted Andres Pico's surrender at the Treaty of Cahuenga, which ended the war in upper California. General Kearny then ordered Frémont to submit to his command, which Frémont refused, believing he remained under the authority of Commodore Stockton.

  Frémont was arrested on the 22nd of August 1847 at Fort Leavenworth and charged with mutiny, disobedience, and assumption of powers. On the 31st of January 1848, he was convicted of disobedience toward a superior officer and military misconduct, though found not guilty of mutiny itself. President Polk commuted the sentence but refused a full pardon. Frémont resigned his commission in protest. Historians Mary Lee Spence and Donald Jackson concluded from the record that "neither side in the controversy acquitted itself with distinction."

• 6. Gold, Wealth, and the Senate

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  On the 10th of February 1847, Frémont had purchased a seventy-square-mile parcel of land in the Sierra foothills for $3,000, acquired through land speculator Thomas Larkin. The tract was called Las Mariposas, Spanish for "The Butterflies", an allusion to the Monarch butterflies found there. The land had previously been owned by former California governor Juan Bautista Alvarado. Frémont had hoped it lay near San Francisco or Monterey but discovered it sat further inland, near Yosemite, on Miwok hunting and gathering grounds.

  After his court-martial, Frémont moved to Las Mariposas. Sonora Mexicans informed him that gold had been discovered on his property. A five-mile quartz vein produced hundreds of pounds of placer gold each month, making Frémont instantly wealthy. He hired Trenor W. Park as managing partner and employed Mexican laborers to wash gold in exchange for a percentage of the profits.

  Legal disputes mounted quickly. Squatters invaded the land, the Merced Mining Company mined there without permission, and the boundaries of the "floating grant" from the Mexican government were poorly defined. The Supreme Court finally ruled in Frémont's favor in 1856, but the legal victory created lasting animosity among his neighbors.

  On the 13th of November 1849, General Bennet C. Riley called for a California state election, and on the 20th of December the state legislature voted to seat two senators. Frémont won the first seat with twenty-nine out of forty-one votes. By a random draw of straws, he received the shorter term. He served just 175 days, from the 10th of September 1850 to the 3rd of March 1851, and was present in Washington for only twenty-one working days. He voted against harsh penalties for those who assisted runaway slaves and favored abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Pro-slavery opponents called the Chivs blocked his re-election, and the San Jose Daily Argus newspaper he launched to fight back made no difference.

• 7. The First Republican Nominee

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  In 1856, Frémont was forty-three years old when he became the first presidential candidate of the newly formed Republican Party, established in 1854. He had initially been approached by former Virginia Governor John B. Floyd and the powerful Preston family to run as a Democrat. Republican leaders Nathaniel P. Banks, Henry Wilson, and John Bigelow persuaded him to join their party instead. The party nominated him at their June 1856 convention in Philadelphia, alongside William L. Dayton of New Jersey for vice president.

  The campaign's slogan was "Free Soil, Free Men, and Frémont," a crusade for homestead farming and against the Slave Power. Frémont did little active campaigning. He stayed mostly at his home at 56 West Street in New York City, as was typical for presidential candidates in the nineteenth century. His wife Jessie, along with John Bigelow and Isaac Sherman, ran the operation. Jessie had been raised in Washington as a senator's daughter and understood politics far more fluently than her husband. Republicans celebrated her as "Our Jessie" while treating Frémont himself as an amateur. Her own father, Senator Benton, publicly backed the Democratic candidate James Buchanan.

  The campaign turned ugly. Democrats attacked Frémont's illegitimate birth and spread allegations he was Catholic. They warned that a Frémont victory would bring civil war. On the 4th of November 1856, Buchanan won with 1,836,072 popular votes to Frémont's 1,342,345. Buchanan carried nineteen states; Frémont carried eleven and received 114 electoral votes against Buchanan's 174. Millard Fillmore ran for the American (Know Nothing) Party as the third candidate. The Mariposa estate, whose Supreme Court title had been confirmed that same year, was estimated by some observers to be worth ten million dollars, and Frémont returned to California to attend to it.

• 8. The Civil War Command

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  Lincoln appointed Frémont Union Army Major General on the 15th of May 1861, and on the 1st of July made him commander of the Department of the West. Frémont arrived in St. Louis on the 25th of July 1861 to take charge of a department in crisis. He was forty-eight years old, grey-haired, and ran his headquarters in St. Louis as what observers called a European autocrat. He had rented a lavish mansion in France for $6,000 a year before his appointment, paid for by the government, and surrounded himself with Hungarian and Italian guards in ornate uniforms. A headquarters bodyguard of three hundred Kentucky men was chosen specifically for their uniform physical appearance.

  Frémont was given only 23,000 men, most with expiring enlistments, no weapons for reinforcements sent by Western governors, no uniforms, and soldiers subject to food rationing and lack of pay. His faulty intelligence led him to believe Confederate forces were twice their actual size. He became embroiled in a feud with Frank Blair of the powerful Blair family, who accused Frémont's command of harboring "a horde of pirates" defrauding the army. A Congressional investigation confirmed many of the charges.

  The general made two decisions that defined his tenure. He interviewed a Brigadier General known as a "drifter and a drunkard" in the Old Army and concluded he was an "unassuming character not given to self elation, of dogged persistence, of iron will." That general was Ulysses S. Grant. Frémont appointed Grant to command Cairo and, on the 27th of August 1861, gave him field command of the combined Union offensive aimed at capturing Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans.

  The second decision ended Frémont's command entirely. At dawn on the 30th of August 1861, without notifying President Lincoln, Frémont issued a proclamation placing Missouri under martial law and declaring the slaves of all rebels immediately emancipated. Kentucky, still nominally neutral, came close to swinging toward the Confederacy. One Louisville group told Lincoln's friend Joshua Speed that "there is not a day to lose in disavowing emancipation or Kentucky is gone over the mill dam." Lincoln publicly revoked the emancipation clause on the 11th of September. Frémont refused to modify it voluntarily and sent Jessie to Washington to plead his case. Lincoln told Jessie that Frémont "should never have dragged the Negro into the war." On the 2nd of November, Lincoln's order removing Frémont from command was hand-delivered by Leonard Swett. When Lincoln placed him in the Mountain Department in March 1862 for one last command, Frémont pursued Confederate General Stonewall Jackson for eight days through the Shenandoah Valley before engaging at the Battle of Cross Keys on the 8th of June 1862, where he commanded 10,500 Union troops against roughly 5,000 Confederates under Richard S. Ewell. He withdrew without launching a second assault, and by the following afternoon Jackson's army had slipped out of the valley.