Read Online The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard L. Richards - Free Book Online

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