(Writer, wife of famed explorer John C. Frémont, and polit...)
Writer, wife of famed explorer John C. Frémont, and political activist Jessie Benton Frémont was one of the most remarkable women of the 19th century. Closest aide and confidant to her ambitious husband, she penned this tale of her family's western migration.
(Wife of the famed "Pathfinder to the West," John C. Frémo...)
Wife of the famed "Pathfinder to the West," John C. Frémont, daughter of powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie Frémont was a force to be reckoned with and ahead of her time. A close adviser to her husband and very politically active, she helped support her family with her writing after they lost everything in the 1873 financial crash. Her non-fiction stories included travel writing and this marvelous set of essays written and published in 1891. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.
Jessie Benton Fremont was an American writer. Her literary career arose largely from her writings in connection with her husband’s career and adventures and from the eventful life she led with him.
Background
Jessie Benton Frémont was born on May 31, 1824, near Lexington, Virginia, and was the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton. She was the second of five children.
Her mother was Elizabeth McDowell, and Jessie was born at her grandfather McDowell’s estate near Lexington, Virginia. She grew up traveling between her three homes, Cherry Grove, a home in St. Louis, and a home in Washington, D.C. While living in St. Louis at age eight, Jessie experienced the horrific cholera outbreak that struck the city.
Education
Jessie Benton was tutored at home, much of the time by her father himself, in St. Louis went to an informal French school where she helped the master’s wife with her preserving and acquired an easy familiarity with spoken French; studied Spanish “the neighbor language,” as her father called it and in her early teens was sent to the fashionable boarding school kept by Miss English in Georgetown, D. C. At this time, as she later admitted, she was still something of a tomboy, given to climbing trees.
Career
For the first years after her marriage, during her explorer-husband’s long absences, Jessie Benton Fremont lived in her father’s house continuing her studies under his supervision, translating confidential State Department papers from the Spanish, serving as his hostess, and becoming increasingly his companion during her mother’s long invalidism.
Fremont returned from his first important expedition in October 1842; and during the happy winter that followed, Jessie worked daily with her husband on the first of his vivid reports. When his second expedition (1843) was endangered by a letter recalling him to Washington, she suppressed the order, wrote to him to start at once without waiting for a reason, and when she had received word that he had acted immediately upon her message, wrote to the Department at Washington explaining what she had done.
The expedition a long one was successful, and in the winter of 1844-1845, Fremont and Jessie collaborated on the second report. Anxiety incident to Fremont’s court-martial in 1848, following his third expedition, told upon Jessie’s health, and in the fall of that year, her second baby died.
In 1849, with her little girl, she went, by the Panama route, to meet Fremont in San Francisco, suffering a critical illness on the way. The hardships of the voyage and conditions in California on the eve of its admission as a state are described in her little volume, "A Year of American Travel."
The example of young Mrs. Fremont, reared in a very comfortable home, gallantly doing her own work in the frontier community and refusing to employ slaves, is said to have had an influence on the members of the convention which drafted California’s Free-Soil constitution.
During the next five years, she returned for a short time to Washington society as wife of the first senator from California; bore a son, and when he was but two months old saw her house burn to the ground in the San Francisco fire of 1851; visited Europe, 1852-1853, being received cordially everywhere as the daughter of Senator Benton and the wife of the brilliant explorer and making lasting friendships in her own right; had another baby, who died; went back to her father’s house to wait for Fremont’s return from his fifth and most dangerous expedition (1853 - 1854); and in May 1854 gave birth to another son.
In her husband’s unsuccessful campaign for the presidency (1856) her charm was exploited until “‘Fremont and Jessie’ seemed to constitute the Republican ticket rather than Fremont and Dayton”. After another brief visit to Europe and three years on the California ranch and in San Francisco, where she encouraged and befriended the obscure young reporter, Bret Harte, there came the Civil War.
Throughout Fremont’s stormy military service she shared his intense anxiety, giving expression to the bitterness which he would not admit and even, on one occasion, attempting to argue with the President on his behalf. Her feeling is partially revealed in "The Story of the Guard: A Chronicle of the War" (1863).
After the war, their home in New York City and their country place on the Hudson were centers of hospitality, but in the seventies, they lost their entire fortune and for a time were in actual need.
Faced by the problem of a young son whose health required a change of climate, and with no money to send him away, Mrs. Fremont offered Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger a series of articles at $100 each. He accepted her offer, and she began to contribute regularly to a number of periodicals, writing travel sketches, historical sketches, and stories for boys and girls.
She helped Fremont with the writing of the first and only published volume of his Memoirs (1887) and wrote for it a sketch of Senator Benton.
In 1887, the Frémonts returned to California, and after her husband’s death in 1890, Mrs. Frémont remained in Los Angeles with her daughter, living in a house given her by the ladies of Southern California.
At her death in 1902, she was buried beside Fremont at Piermont on the Hudson.
Jessie Benton Frémont was a unique 19th-century woman because she had a powerful influence on public events. She is most commonly known as the wife of explorer and adventurer John Charles Fremont, and the daughter of United States Senator Thomas Hart Benton. She and her husband wrote best-selling stories of Western Explorations that make John C. Fremont and his scout, Kit Carson, famous. In 1856, Jessie became the first presidential candidate's wife to play an active part in a political campaign. Jessie Fremont had, within the framework of her era, demonstrated that women were capable of equal rights of citizenship and full participation with their male counterparts in family life, business and politics. Her role in John Charles Frémont’s emancipation proclamation, as well as her other public endeavors, made her a hero of the emerging women’s movement at the end of her life.
Politics played an important role early on in Jessie’s life. As the second daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie came in contact with people of all walks of life who came to do business with her father. Visitors included General William Clark, heads of the American Fur Company, prominent author Washington Irving, Mexican merchants, soldiers fighting Native Americans on the frontier, Italian and Belgian dignitaries, French voyageurs, and wealthy French, Spanish, and American citizens. As a result, when Jessie publically entered politics, contemporaries observed she “Inherited her father’s talent and many salient points of his character,” and “impressed all who came in contact with her by her great intellectual power.” Thus, Jessie’s father offered the first steps into the political arena.
Her mother also influenced her political views. Elizabeth Preston McDowell came from the influential Preston family of Virginia. While she epitomized the ideal nineteenth-century wife and mother, she did involve herself in the slavery issue. In a letter to writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Jessie credited her own anti-slavery stance to her mother and claimed, “I would as soon place my children in the midst of smallpox, as rear them under the influence of slavery.”
Jessie’s greatest political intervention occurred during Frémont’s second expedition in 1843 when she detained an order from Frémont’s commander in the U.S. Army’s Bureau of Topographical Engineers recalling him to Washington. Seeing in it a scheme by opposing forces in Washington to prevent the expedition, Jessie acted to shield the mission and thus her husband’s career. Jessie made her own executive decision based on her political convictions.
However, it was not until her husband’s 1856 Republican presidential campaign that Jessie came into her own. Founded in 1854 on an anti-slavery platform, the Republican Party grew quickly, gaining enough support by 1856 that its members felt confident enough to put up a candidate in the presidential election. Despite Jessie’s father being a Democrat, Frémont accepted the Republican Party’s offer to be its presidential candidate.
Jessie’s involvement in the campaign demonstrated her abilities as a stateswoman and led supporters to call for her placement in the White House.
Jessie’s career in politics continued after her husband’s defeat in the presidential election by Democrat James Buchanan. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, President Lincoln made Frémont head of the Western Department. In July 1861 the Frémonts moved into the headquarters of the Western Department in St. Louis. As inhabitants of a slave state that stayed in the Union, Missourians’ loyalties were split. Plagued by guerilla warfare, open recruitment by the Confederates, mismanagement, and limited supplies and troops, Frémont got to work pushing the rebels back while Jessie ran headquarters and tried to get Frémont the supplies he needed.
Furthermore, Jessie became increasingly involved in the Sanitary Commission. Jessie took a particularly active role in the organization of the Sanitary Commission’s Fair in 1864. Despite opposing political views, Jessie worked alongside Mary Ellen McClellan, wife of the disposed general and Democratic presidential candidate, on the Arms and Trophies committee. Jessie also headed a committee to collect and publish the memoirs of sanitary commission workers.
Throughout Jessie’s life, she remained in contact with influential abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and influential politicians. Jessie spent the rest of her life traveling with her husband and writing about her experiences.
Views
Quotations:
"I saw back into the time when I had learned to know how painful is the process of founding a new country. What loneliness, what privations, what trials of every kind, went to the first steps of even that rich and lovely country of California."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“Disallowed a public image in her own right, she used her talents to promote her husband’s, all the while trying to fuse her identity with his.” - biographer Andrew Rolle, in "John Charles Fremont: Character as Destiny."
“Impressed all who came in contact with her by her great intellectual powers.”
“Beautiful, graceful, intellectual and enthusiastic, she will make more proselytes to the Rocky Mountain platform in fifteen minutes, than fifty stump orators can win over in a month.”
The Boston Daily Atlas claimed, “If the gallantry of the country demanded a Queen at the head of the nation, the lovely lady of the Republican nominee would command the universal suffrage of the people. She is a woman as eminently fitted to adorn the White House, as she has proved herself worthy to be a hero’s bride.”
Connections
At sixteen Jessie Benton, a blooming, vigorous girl, full of fun, with an intellectual capacity beyond her years the result in part of companionship with her father she met young John Charles Fremont, a lieutenant in the Topographical Corps, and in spite of the effort of her parents to postpone what seemed inevitable, she married him on October 19, 1841. Their baby, Elizabeth, was born in November 1842.
