[Thomas Fitch, Recollections and Reflections No. 27, San Francisco Call, 20 March 1904]

 

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL.                                                               15

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RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS OF THOMAS FITCH.

JOHN C. FREMONT.

Copyright 1903, by Thomas Fitch.

            History consists of grouped biographies. It is possible to so stage facts as to construct them into an edifice of falsehood. The camera may be so adjusted as to distort its object. The writer of biography should, in the performance of his task, be uninfluenced by love or hatred, fear or favor. I have known the persons and to some small extent participated in the events herein reviewed, yet as a narrator I hope to be able to divest myself of all personal and partisan likes and dislikes, for time wears out prejudices, tranquillizes passions and induces men to respect the integrity of motives of those from whom they have radically differed.  If Wendell Phillips were alive today he would incur no risk of personal assault in addressing an audience in New Orleans. If Jefferson Davis were still in the flesh he would be accorded a patient hearing in Boston. Such was not the case in 1860. The men of this generation can scarcely realize that less than half a century ago slavery was not only powerful but popular in the North as well as the South, while those who proclaimed themselves in favor of its abolition incurred the risk of social, political, and business ostracism in the North and assault and expulsion in the South.

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            Few postmasters south of Mason and Dixon's line would have delivered a copy of the New York Tribune to a subscriber, and few subscribers in that section would have ventured to receive a copy of it except in a sealed envelope. The Northern man who journeyed southward padlocked his lips when he crossed the Potomac or the Ohio. In the streets of Southern cities slaves marched to the auction block with the clank of their manacles unmuffled, but the voice of freedom was hushed to silence, her dramas were unrepresented and her songs unsung. A despotism more drastic than that of Russia ruled in fifteen states. The vast amount of capital invested in slave property was apparently safely intrenched behind barriers of judge-made law, bastions of commercial power and batteries of social prestige. In all of the Southern and in many of the Northern states the great forces of society were enlisted in the interests of the slaveholders. The conservative influence of the churches — always exercised in favor of existing authority — was allied to the prejudices of the slums against the Negro. The power of the banks — millions of whose money were loaned upon the security of human chattels — was linked to the ambition of politicians, whose nomination and election depended upon the favor of the slaveholders.

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            For the existence of these conditions impartial history will not hold the people of the South responsible. Slavery in some form existed somewhere in the world up to the very dawn of the present century. The fortunes of battle, the accident of birth, or the color of the epidermis was each in its time a potent factor in determining which man was a slave and which was a free man. The Hebrew with the awl mark of bondage in his ear was of the same race as his master. The iron-collared thrall of Cedric was of pure Saxon blood and the white Goth was the slave of the dusk-browed Roman. The early emigrants to the New World, whether they landed at Plymouth or on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, were craftsmen or traders, or soldiers, or farm proprietors, and tenants, or men of gentle blood, who came to America in pursuit of freedom or fortune, and among them was not included any great number of unskilled laborers. The need of hewers of wood and drawers of water was supplied by white convicts and by kidnapped Africans, and in the early part of the eighteenth century the lash was applied to the back of labor as freely and as frequently in Connecticut as in Carolina.

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            Cotton culture and not conscience swept slavery out of New England and the middle states into the country south of the Potomac, and it remained there long after England and France had banished it from their West Indian colonies, and even after the half-barbarian Russian had emancipated every serf from the White Sea to the Black Sea, from the Baltic to the Pacific.

            At the close of the Revolutionary War the existence of slavery was defended in the South on economic rather than on moral grounds. Slaveholding abolitionists were not uncommon, and Washington and Jefferson left on record as strong denunciations of slavery as were ever penned by Garrison. But as the area and the profits of cotton culture and the facilities of intercommunication increased, so did the necessity for the protection of slave property, and slavery became aggressive by that very necessity of its nature which demanded expansion as a condition precedent of continued existence. Where it ceased to grow it began to die. It refused to believe that the world was weary of it. It refused to appreciate the fact that the moral sense of the North, no longer deadened by the opiate of profit, was intolerant of further alliance with it. It refused to understand that agitation for its present restriction and ultimate abolition could no more be suppressed than could the waves be stopped from dashing when the storm king rides the seas, or the earth be stopped from quivering when internal fires throb in her furnaces. Unmindful, or disregardful, of the fact that the dormant and drowsy hostility of the North to slavery was sleeping but not dead, the slaveholders rudely awakened it by repealing the Missouri Compromise which they themselves had enacted thirty-four years before.

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            For that which followed let no man unduly and unjustly censure the Southern people. They were and are brave, sacrificing, generous, hospitable, chivalric people, of the best types of American manhood and womanhood, and that is the best type of manhood and womanhood in the world. From causes beyond their comprehension slavery had woven its cancerous fibers into the social and commercial life of their body politic, and they were as helpless slaves to the institution of slavery as the black people were slaves to them. Slavery could not, as the advocates of compensated emancipation proposed, be bought out of existence—it had to be fought out.

            When the Missouri Compromise line was destroyed the freemen of the North arose with the spring and roar of lions aroused from slumber. Out of the farms and factories, out of the forests and mines, out of the shops and counting-houses they came. They formed the grandest organization of freemen that the world has ever known, and they named it the Republican party. For it and its beneficent purposes the tongue of the orator has been kindled with fire from the altar. For it the strain of the poet has swelled to the sweetness of song. For it the sword of the soldier has flashed along the line of victorious armies, and whatever the future may have in store for it, its glorious past will live as long as the English tongue.

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            The Republican party may not always have been infallible in its selection of measures, and it may not always have been wise in its choice of representatives, but its purposes have ever been high and patriotic. It was officered at its inception by captains whose names now stand high upon the roll call of fame. Sumner and Wilson and Fessenden and John P. Hale in New England; Seward in New York; Winter Davis and Cassius M. Clay and the Blairs in the border states; Chase and Wade and Giddings and Trumbull and Chandler and Doolittle in the Northwest; Baker and Tracy and the Shafters on the Pacific—"there were giants in the land in those days"—intellectual caryatides who upheld their age.

            Small men with large bank accounts had not then excluded large men with small bank accounts from the high places of state. The Pretorian guards of politics had not then inaugurated the practice of shamelessly selling senatorial togas to metallic accidents whose dense and unsensitive egotism made them unaware that a seat in the United States Senate is not of itself distinction but only an opportunity to achieve it. The man who had no claims to high place, and no qualifications for it, but who had a talent for caucus manipulation and a fortune that he was willing to expend to gratify his absurd ambition, would never have aspired to a senatorial seat. No Kentucky distiller would have attempted to supersede John C. Breckinridge. No Massachusetts cotton-spinner could have bought Charles Sumner's seat from under him, and a syndicate of state legislators organized to sell the votes of its members on all bills in a job lot for a round sum for the session would have expected to leave the state immediately after adjournment.

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            The history of the organization of the Republican party is a history of patriotism and of unselfish devotion to principle. It has often been aptly described as a party of high ideals. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill made no longer available the honeyed glue of compromise with which Henry Clay had so often linked repellant atoms in harmonious alliance, and in 1856, for the first time in our history, the forces of freedom and slavery were aligned for battle. Candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency were numerous, but the chief contest was between Douglas and Buchanan. Douglas was comparatively young. His fidelity to slavery had not been tested; the slaveholders needed the Keystone State, and they selected the morally cartilaginous and mentally unossified Pennsylvanian as an affable availability.

            Out of the ultimate West came Fremont to lead the forces of freedom. Pathfinder was he, seeking untrodden ways in politics, as in the exploration of mountain and desert. With the light of freedom in his loyal eyes and the bronze of Western suns on the face that never feared a foe or shirked a contest, he led the Republican party in a battle which, though lost, yet proved the Bunker Hill of a new revolution. The contest of 1856 was the midnight sun of an emancipated North, for its setting rays glowed with the prestige of a victory that was to bring the illumination of freedom to a nation.

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            Thirty-four years after his nomination for president, at the ripe age of 77, after a life of more than ordinary vicissitudes, John C. Fremont journeyed on. It was my privilege to know him intimately in his latter years. He combined the tireless energy and the adventurous spirit of the frontiersman, and the close application and analytical mind of the scholar, with the suave and cultured courtesy of the diplomat. Whether hunting grizzlies, fighting Apaches, exploring the secrets of the mountains, or presiding with exquisite grace at social gatherings, he was equally at home, and was ever the same brave, unsuspicious, generous, manly, loyal, gentleman. His dauntless yet unobtrusive courage, his comprehensive grasp of ideas, his painstaking attention to details, his strict performance of all duties, his generous surrender to others when only his own interests were at stake, his tenacious loyalty to principle when the public interest was involved, his sacrificing adherence to purposes and plans when the interests of his friends were concerned, his exquisite manners, and his sweetness of disposition especially endeared him to all who were admitted to the inner circle of his friendship, and these were not many, for he was naturally reserved and retiring.

            The paths which the pioneer hewed through the passes and over the summits of the mountains are now resonant with the rush of iron feet, and about the ashes of his campfires cities have grown, yet not for many generations will his name and fame be forgotten in the land he served and loved so well.

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            Jessie Benton Fremont was not only an inheritor of the genius of her father, but she was the inspiring spirit of her husband's undertakings.  They were not merely husband and wife—they were close companions, coworkers, friends, and the admiration of each for the other seemed fresh and untarnished to the last.

            From some letters of Mrs. Fremont to Mrs. Fitch I select a few extracts which in some small degree illustrate the home life and thought of this remarkable woman:

"Prescott, March 13, 1879.

            I would give 2 cents not to be such a coward about horses, for this is weather in which driving is indispensable. I used to think no one (meaning myself) could be unhappy who can command the sea, plenty of music and flowers and an open carriage. Behold me destitute of all these props of the mind, and not even lonesome."

"Washington, Jan. 30, 1887.

            I fancy if Noah had sent a telegram from Ararat he would have simply said, "The rain has ceased to fall." Other words would have been below the fact. Into my life the rain has ceased to fall, for my sons are with me again. Is there anything so dear as the "talks", when years drop into the background and the home is again complete? I am more busy than is reasonable. I go nowhere and see only my near friends, and they in the evening, for this right hand of mine is too useful to the general for me to waste any nerve power. You will get by mail some collected papers written for a young people's magazine. You will please remember nursery puddings cannot have any flavor but nutmeg or cinnamon, so they are harmless (my papers and the puddings): but I know you will find bits to please you, and it pleases me to send it to you. Breathe up some soft sea air for me—flowers, fruits, sunshine and sea air — why must I live inland so much?"

"Los Angeles, May 6, 1893.

            We are in that part of Nirvana that has but little foreground and a lovely background, so we rest on what has been, more than content in the soft ease of climate and flowers and true friends who keep us well reminded that we are pleasant to them."

"Los Angeles, May 20, 1893.

            Your husband has Cleopatra's charm, for there is no wither or stale to his continued power to put things common into fresh, most conclusive convincing light. I have been reading with more than usual pleasure his lucid, compact, common-sense view of possible results between us and England, if there should come actual war out of the Venezuelan question.

            "You spoke the beautiful true appreciation of the General's delightful simplicity of courtesy — the courtesy of the heart as well as of training. You will feel what it was to him to write his resignation from the army and send it to my father before he raised the flag in case the Government wished to disavow the act.

            "I am not so dark as I am depicted in the inclosed photograph. I see you shudder, but when one has outlived oneself and the past is forever past, what matters the picture?

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            And now the Jessie, for whom in the campaign of 1856 I held a blazing brand aloft, and whom it was our good fortune to welcome with the general to our Arizona home in the little world of our own, "in the brave days of old," when Prescott was 200 miles from a railroad, has journeyed on to meet her husband on the other bank of the ultimate river, whose roar deadens all sound to mortal ears. For years she waited, neither weary of this life nor fearful of the next, tranquilly and cheerfully recalling all that was sweetest in the past and waiting for all that is best in the future. For her, as for all who comprehend the true philosophy of life and death, old age does not exist for that part of us which alone lives. Time may plow furrows in the face and make the joints rickety and dull the senses, but one Ego is beyond his puny malice.

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            Both General and Mrs. Fremont were keenly appreciative of the humorous side of life, and incidents were not left unrelated because the joke was upon the narrator. Mrs. Fremont was fond of gardening and the general had employed a French gardener who understood his trade, but who was exceedingly averse to receiving orders from a woman. His peculiarities were overlooked as much as possible, but on one occasion Antoine flatly and insolently refused to execute an order given by Mrs. Fremont. It was impossible to condone such deliberate insubordination, and the man was discharged on the spot and directed to go to the general's office for his pay. Arrived at his destination Antoine's wrath had cooled and he attempted an explanation. "General," said he, "I am sorry for this. I like you, general, I could live viz you forevare. But your wife, general, mon Dieu, you wife is a terrare." "There," said General Fremont, "that will do, my man; there are your wages, you can go." Antoine pocketed the money, shrugged his shoulders and exclaimed: "General, I am sorry for you. As for me, as you say, I can go—but you? Ah, you must stay!"