Month: June 2020

Jessie Fremont–Daughter and Wife

Adele Fasick2 Comments

Daughter of a Senator and wife of a famous explorer and presidential candidate, Jessie Benton Fremont spent much of her life in the public eye. She was clever, well-educated and energetic, but she lived under the 19th century rule that women never interfere in the important schemes of their menfolk. Because of this, her life became a delicate dance between her interests and talents and the rules that limited women’s lives.  

Jessie Benton Fremont

Jessie’s father, Thomas Hart Benton, always longed for a son, so when Jessie, his second daughter was born in 1824, he didn’t let her gender stop him from giving her a male name and educating her as though she were a boy.  And Jessie enjoyed the role. She was quick to learn, loved reading, and picked up languages quickly. As a young teen she began following her father around to serious adult meetings soaking up the political atmosphere of Washington D.C.

Jessie was only sixteen when she met John Fremont, a handsome Army officer who, like Senator Benton, was eager to see America expand. Although he was eleven years older than Jessie, John Fremont fell in love with her. Jessie’s parents strongly opposed their marriage, because of Jessie’s youth, and perhaps also because John was the illegitimate son of an obscure French immigrant. However, Jessie and John would not be stopped. Eventually they eloped and found a Catholic priest who would marry them.

Senator Benton and his wife finally accepted the marriage and the young couple moved into the Benton household. Having learned to serve as her father’s unofficial assistant, Jessie soon found a way to transfer her skills to serving her husband’s career. Senator Benton arranged for John to be appointed as leader of an expedition to explore territory west of the Missouri River.

Both Senator Benton and the Fremonts accepted the idea of Manifest Destiny—the belief that the United States would eventually expand its territory to the Pacific Coast.

John Fremont

John Fremont led three exploratory expeditions to the West. His adventures caught the imagination of many Americans. Newspapers were eager to write about his exploits and Jessie saw to it that his letters were turned into exciting articles for readers. His picture became familiar across the country and several cities were named for him.

While John continued his explorations throughout the western territories, Jessie remained in Washington D.C. maintaining her ties with her father’s government friends and strengthening John’s fame. When John reached California in 1846, he found it a paradise and agreed with his father-in-law and many others in determining that it should be part of the United State. Jessie joined him for a while in California, one of the few times in their married life that the couple lived together.

The rest of John Fremont’s life was dominated by the struggle to make California a part of the Union, but somehow things always seemed to go wrong for him. He often acted impulsively without waiting for orders from Washington, which, of course, were slow in arriving from the East Coast. He was court martialed in 1848 for exceeding his authority, but nonetheless remained popular enough so that when California finally became a state in 1850, he was elected a senator. He returned to Washington to serve his term but stayed only one year before returning to California to campaign for re-election. By that time, of course, gold had been discovered in California and the state’s population had exploded.

The 1856 presidential election was one of the most bitter in American history as divisions grew between slave states and free states. Both John and Jessie Fremont opposed slavery and John was finally chosen as the first candidate of the new Republican Party. His campaign was disastrous and John Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, became the new president.

We will never know what Jessie Fremont thought of her role in her husband’s exploits. One commentator wrote of the couple “I thought as many others did, that Jessie Benton Fremont was the better man of the two, far more intelligent and comprehensive.” Jessie herself supported her husband throughout his life and never indicated that she could have handled his role better than he did. She remained in the background trying to correct his mistakes and keep the family going. When he finally lost the fortune he had gained in California, she managed to support him by writing stories and articles. Reading about her now in the 21st century, I can’t help but wonder what Jessie Fremont would have become if she had been born in our times.

 A new book by Steve Inskeep Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War tells the exciting story of this tumultuous period. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about the people who built America. 

America’s First Poet–Phillis Wheatley

Adele Fasick4 Comments

What can we say about a woman who was welcomed as America’s first poet, published in both England and America, but who nonetheless died in poverty and obscurity before she reached the age of 40? Phillis Wheatley inspired some of America’s most honored leaders and demonstrated how much African Americans had to offer in the arts and culture. But despite her triumphs, she was finally defeated by the economic force of the slave trade.

Born in Africa about 1753, Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston by slave ship at age 7 or 8. She was bought by the Wheatley family who recognized that she was too frail (not to mention too young) for hard labor, so she was kept as a house slave. Mrs. Wheatley taught her English and how to read and write. The girl’s talents soon became apparent and she was encouraged to read widely and to write poetry.

Phyillis Wheatley

As a woman of her time, she read and admired the poems of John Milton and Alexander Pope and wrote in the fashionable heroic couplet style. Some of her poems were published as broadsides and circulated widely, but she had to go to England to find a publisher for her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral–the first book of poems published by an African American.

Some of Wheatley’s poems present a surprisingly benign view of the effects of slavery, which she appears to welcome as a way of discovering Christianity.

On Being Brought from Africa to America

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Taught my benighted soul to understand

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

As a devout Christian, Wheatley expressed her gratitude for having been introduced to the Christian religion in America. Some commentators have criticized her work because of this, but there is no reason to think that Wheatley approved of slavery or accepted her status. She was writing only about her own life in this poem. Because of her unusual experiences, she never observed the worst cruelty of the plantation culture nor suffered the hardships of most enslaved Africans, but she was aware of them.

Soon after her book was published, the Wheatley family emancipated Phillis. In 1778, or thereabouts, Phillis Wheatley married a free Black grocer and started a family. By this time, both Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley had died, so Phillis has no one left to help further her work. She and her husband struggled with poverty, while he tried to establish himself as a businessman. Although Wheatley did not give up writing poetry, she found it difficult to secure a publisher. She was never able to publish a second book of poems she had planned, and many of her later poems have been lost. She did, however, correspond with some well-known people, including George Washington, about ways of securing freedom for African Americans. Her death at the age of 31, ended her all-too-short career.   

Phillis Wheatley’s life leaves us with far more questions than answers. If she had lived into the nineteenth century and continued her work, would her early promise have been fulfilled? Perhaps her example would have convinced more people of the talents and possibilities of African Americans. Might Phillis Wheatley have become the poet laureate of the abolition movement?

We will never know the answers to those questions, but there is much to celebrate about the life and work of Phillis Wheatley. She was a pioneer whose work should not be forgotten.