The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (7 page)

Meanwhile, William Gwin became one of the wealthiest politicians in Mississippi. Thanks to Jackson’s appointing him U.S. marshal for Mississippi, he collected $150,000 per year in fees and, after expenses, probably pocketed half that amount. Joining forces with Robert Walker, John A. Quitman, and others, he became involved in a maze of land speculations. Gwin soon had several plantations, plus three that he rented out, and almost two hundred slaves. By 1840, in Warren County alone, he owned a mansion worth $50,000, two lots in the city of Vicksburg valued at $20,000, and two thousand acres on the Mississippi River assessed at $14,000. He also temporarily went back to his old profession, the law, and represented the Chickasaw tribe in a lawsuit against the federal government. He won over $112,000 and charged the tribe half for his services. Over the next several years, some of his land deals went sour and cost him dearly. But in 1849, he was still a rich man, one of the richest in Mississippi.
⁷

Politically, however, William Gwin was stymied. Elected to Congress in 1840, he had become a confidant of John C. Calhoun’s. Initially, as a good Jackson man, he had deemed the eminent South Carolinian a pariah. But in Washington, he lived in the same boardinghouse as Calhoun and soon fell under Calhoun’s “personal magnetism.” He even tried to get Jackson to support Calhoun for president in 1844.
⁸
Meanwhile, he decided not to run again for Congress. He yearned for a higher office. He returned to Mississippi and from there teamed up with Robert Walker to stop Martin Van Buren from getting the Democratic presidential nomination. Successful in that effort, he enthusiastically supported James K. Polk for president in 1844. When Polk won by an eyelash, he lobbied Polk to make Walker his treasury secretary. That, too, came to pass.

With Walker’s appointment, the office that Gwin had long coveted, U.S. senator, became vacant. Walker left no doubt whom he wanted as his replacement. He campaigned hard in Gwin’s behalf. But Poindexter’s followers and the supporters of rival candidates rallied their troops and got the governor to oppose the appointment on the grounds that Gwin was associated with “broke speculators.” The Senate seat, to Gwin’s disgust, thus went to another Democrat, a less controversial one, Joseph Chalmers. Gwin then reluctantly offered himself for another term in the House. Again, however, he lost out, this time to Jefferson Davis, an up-and-coming Mississippi Democrat.

Thanks to his friend Walker, Gwin in 1846 received an appointment from the Treasury Department to oversee construction of the New Orleans Custom House. Although the post paid only $8 per day, a far cry from the fees he had received as a federal marshal, it gave Gwin valuable political contacts. But it was a patronage position, dependent totally on Democratic control of the White House. And in 1848, the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, lost the presidency to Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready,” one of the Whig generals who had gained fame in the rout of Mexico. Gwin was thus certain to soon be out of a job.

A few months later, on March 5, 1849, to be exact, Gwin was in Washington. He watched the inauguration procession of Zachary Taylor as it passed by Willard’s Hotel. Next to him stood a short but imposing man, Stephen A. Douglas, “the Little Giant” of Illinois. Like Gwin, the Illinois senator was a lifelong Democrat. He also had a vested interest in Mississippi and Mississippi slavery. The previous June his wife had inherited a Mississippi plantation of some twenty-five hundred acres and over one hundred slaves. In accordance with her father’s will, Douglas himself managed the property, kept in touch with the overseers who directed the slaves and the New Orleans merchants who sold the cotton crop, and received 20 percent of the annual income.
⁹

The two men spoke of the future. Douglas still had a job to do as senator from Illinois. Gwin was going to be out of political work at the end of the month. What, then, did he intend to do? Gwin allegedly told Douglas that he was going to go to California, make California into a state, and be back in a year as the new senator from California. At that time, he would ask Douglas to present “his credentials as a senator from the State of California.”
¹⁰

So, anyway, recalled Gwin many years later. It sounds apocryphal. But there is no doubt that Gwin’s desire for a U.S. Senate seat prompted him to take off for California in April 1849. He went by way of Panama. He traveled the same route as Broderick, but at a faster pace, leaving later, arriving earlier. He didn’t have to wait as long in Panama City. He had more clout. He gained passage on one of Aspinwall’s steamers, the
Panama,
which left Panama City on May 18 and arrived in San Francisco on June 4, nine days before Broderick.

Built for mail, the
Panama
initially had accommodations for about eighty passengers. On its maiden voyage it carried four hundred. The few women on board shared a tent on the quarterdeck. Around them slept several hundred men, their places on deck marked by chalk. The passenger list included two future governors, three future senators, two future congressmen, two future state supreme court justices, seven future generals and an admiral, two future ambassadors, and one potential First Lady.

The potential First Lady was Jessie Benton Frémont. She was also the best known of the passengers. No one as yet had heard of “Fighting Joe” Hooker, destined to gain fame as a Civil War general. No one as yet had heard of Major George Derby, later known as the comic writer John Phoenix, who entertained his shipmates with nightly spoofs, skits, and plays. And only a few had heard of Gwin. Nearly everyone on board, however, had heard of Jessie Benton Frémont. Most found her charm, her wit, and especially her poise to be exceptional for a woman who was only twenty-five years old. Others took note of her dark brown eyes, dark auburn hair, and still-girlish figure.
¹¹
Her fame rested partly on her father, partly on her husband, and partly on her pen.

Jessie Benton Frémont. Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:376.

Her father, Thomas Hart Benton, had been one of the nation’s most prominent senators for nearly thirty years. Elected to the Senate by the Missouri legislature in 1820, he was now in his fifth term. He was a bull of a man, five feet eleven, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, heavily muscled. He was well known nationally both for his intellect and for his belligerent ways. His ego was enormous. Once, upon being introduced to a young man who had walked two hundred miles to hear him, he replied: “Young man, you did right.” Equally enormous was his troubled past. He had been kicked out of the University of North Carolina for stealing. He had killed a man in St. Louis for calling him a puppy.
¹²

Benton’s senatorial career had gone through two distinct phases. In his first years in the Senate, he had savaged paper-money banks. He had blamed them for the Panic of 1819 and the hard times that followed. He had been the champion of hard money, cheap land, and a frugal government that spent money only on the military and westward expansion. He had also been “decidedly pro-slavery” and in 1829 advocated the purchase of Texas so that several more slave states might be added to the Union. At one point, he had even talked about adding nine more slave states.

Then, beginning in 1836, he shifted his focus. He began criticizing John C. Calhoun and other pro-slavery agitators, increasingly portraying them as “firebrands” and “disunionists” whose extremism endangered the South and the Union. Most Northerners, he contended, were no threat to the South. They hated blacks and loved the Union. Only a few adhered to the teachings of William Lloyd Garrison and other Northern abolitionists. In reality, Garrison and other abolitionists were just bogeymen that Calhoun and his followers used to alarm Southerners. Moreover, the Calhounites, in recklessly promoting slavery and touting it as a “positive good,” were the underlying cause of one national crisis after another. Not only were they giving antislavery “fanatics” like Garrison a national forum and causing thousands of well-meaning Northerners to rethink their position on slavery; they were also making demands on the national government that could only lead to disunion.

By the late 1840s, Benton’s war against the Calhounites had gotten him into trouble. No longer was he seen as promoting the interests of slaveholders. Instead, he was repeatedly identified with a number of Missouri Democrats who opposed the expansion of slavery. He also stood out as one of only two Southern senators to vote for the admission of Oregon to the Union with no slavery.

Thomas Hart Benton, senator from Missouri. Library of Congress.

Alarmed by his behavior, Claiborne F. Jackson, a powerful force in the Missouri assembly, rallied Benton’s statehouse critics. Meeting in January 1849 in a small room adjoining the Missouri Supreme Court chambers, they hammered out a series of resolutions that essentially affirmed Calhoun’s position and instructed Missouri senators to act in “hearty cooperation with the slaveholding States…for our mutual protection against the encroachments of Northern fanaticism.” In March, Jackson presented the resolutions to the Missouri assembly. The assembly endorsed them. In May, at the capitol in Jefferson City, Benton denounced the resolutions and called on the people of Missouri to join him in the battle against Claiborne F. Jackson, Calhoun, and other “disunionists.”
¹³

Thus, at the time that Jessie Benton Frémont made her trip west, her father was in deep political trouble. He was barely hanging on to his Senate seat. He would lose it the following year.

Also in trouble was Jessie’s husband, John C. Frémont. That, too, was partly her father’s doing. Among her father’s beliefs was that the best route to the Pacific was straight west from St. Louis, overland through the Rockies, following roughly the 38th parallel. To prove that the 38th parallel route was workable even in bad weather, he had dispatched his son-in-law to map a trail late in the year, just before the snows fell, on October 21, 1848.

By this time, Frémont had become the nation’s most famous explorer, rated by the popular press far above Lewis and Clark, almost on the same level as Columbus. Much had already been written about the first thirty-six years of his life, his slender wiry frame, his dashing good looks, his daring, and his resourcefulness. While much of it was hyperbole, Frémont undoubtedly had come a long way since his Savannah boyhood. The illegitimate son of a Virginia patrician woman who had run away from her elderly husband and taken up with a French émigré teacher, he had been raised in genteel poverty by his mother. Well aware of his origins, he grew up to be a restless loner, a proud and reserved man who was austere in his personal habits, rigorously self-disciplined, eager to prove himself, and unwilling to always play by the rules imposed from above.
¹⁴

Frémont’s disdain for authority got him into serious trouble more than once. At the same time, however, he owed much of his success to men of power. A prominent lawyer, John W. Mitchell, sponsored his early education. He got into the College of Charleston but was thrown out for poor attendance. Then an eminent South Carolina politician, Joel R. Poinsett, came to his aid. Poinsett secured a position for Frémont as a math instructor on the USS
Natchez
and then a commission in the U.S. Topographical Corps surveying a route for the Charleston, Louisville, and Cincinnati railroad. Later, as secretary of state, Poinsett arranged for Frémont to assist the eminent French explorer Joseph N. Nicollet in surveying the region between the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Several months later, Frémont was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. Two successive expeditions with Nicollet provided Frémont with wilderness experience and helped him become a first-rate topographer, skilled in describing fauna, flora, soil, and water resources.

Working with Nicollet also brought Frémont in contact with Thomas Hart Benton. Not only was Benton a staunch advocate of western expansion; he was also the chair of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs and thus in a position to help the two topographical engineers. Thanks to his interest in their work, the senator repeatedly invited the young lieutenant to his C Street home. One evening he gave Frémont the task of escorting his oldest daughter, Eliza, to a concert at Miss English’s boarding school in Georgetown. That evening Frémont became entranced with the second of Benton’s four daughters, sixteen-year-old Jessie, who attended the same school.