Major-General John Charles Frémont (January 21, 1813 – July 13, 1890) was a United States Army officer, explorer, and politician. He was a United States senator from California and was the first Republican nominee for president of the U.S. and founder of the California Republican Party upon being nominated. Frémont lost the 1856 United States presidential election to Democrat James Buchanan.
A native of Georgia, he attended the College of Charleston for two years until he was expelled after irregular attendance. In the 1840s, Frémont led five expeditions into the western states, for which he was called The Pathfinder. During this time, he directed several massacres of the indigenous peoples in California as part of the California genocide. During the Mexican–American War, he was a major in the United States Army and took control of a portion of California north of San Francisco from the short-lived California Republic in 1846. Frémont was court-martialed and convicted of mutiny and insubordination after a conflict over who was the rightful military governor of California. His sentence was commuted, and he was reinstated by President James K. Polk, but Frémont resigned from the Army. Afterwards, he settled in California at Monterey while buying cheap land in the Sierra foothills. Gold was found on his Mariposa ranch, and Frémont became a wealthy man during the California Gold Rush. He became one of the first two U.S. senators elected from the new state of California in 1850.
At the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861, he was given command of the Department of the West by President Abraham Lincoln. Frémont had successes during his brief tenure there, though he ran his department autocratically and made hasty decisions without consulting President Lincoln or Army headquarters. He opposed slavery and issued an unauthorized emancipation edict, which led to him being relieved of his command for insubordination by Lincoln. After a brief service tenure in the Mountain Department in 1862, Frémont resided in New York, retiring from the army in 1864. He was nominated for president in 1864 by the Radical Democratic Party, a breakaway faction of abolitionist Republicans, but he withdrew before the election. After the Civil War, he lost much of his wealth in the unsuccessful Pacific Railroad in 1866, and he lost more in the Panic of 1873. Frémont served as Governor of the Arizona Territory from 1878 to 1881. After his resignation as governor, he retired from politics and died destitute in New York City in 1890.
Historians portray Frémont as controversial, impetuous, and contradictory. Some scholars regard him as a military hero of significant accomplishment, while others view him as a failure who repeatedly defeated his own best interests. The keys to Frémont's character and personality, several historians argue, lie in his having been born "illegitimate" (to unwed parents) and in his drive for success, need for self-justification, and passive-aggressive behavior. His biographer Allan Nevins wrote that Frémont lived a dramatic life of remarkable successes and dismal failures.
Early life, education, and early career
John Charles Frémont was born on January 21, 1813, the son of Charles Frémon, a French-Canadian immigrant, and Anne Beverley Whiting, the youngest daughter of socially prominent Virginia planter Col. Thomas Whiting. At age 17, Anne married Major John Pryor, a wealthy resident of Richmond in his early 60s. In 1810, Pryor hired Frémon to teach his young wife French. The two began an affair, and Pryor, on discovering this, turned them out of the house. The couple fled first to Norfolk and then to Williamsburg, taking with them several household slaves Anne had inherited. They later settled in Savannah, Georgia, where Anne gave birth to their first son. In Savannah, Anne took in boarders while Frémon taught French and dancing. Their domestic slave, Black Hannah, helped raise young John. The couple, still unmarried, had three more children.
On December 8, 1818, Frémont's father died in Norfolk, Virginia, leaving Anne to take care of their young children alone on a limited inherited income. The family moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Frémont, knowing his origins and coming from relatively modest means, grew up a proud, reserved, restless loner who although self-disciplined, was ready to prove himself and unwilling to play by the rules. He was considered to be "precocious, handsome, and daring", having the ability of obtaining protectors. A lawyer, John W. Mitchell, provided for Frémont's early education. He entered Charleston College in May 1829, teaching at intervals in the countryside, but was expelled for irregular attendance in 1831. Frémont, however, had been grounded in mathematics and natural sciences.
Frémont attracted the attention of eminent South Carolina politician Joel R. Poinsett, an Andrew Jackson supporter, who in 1833 secured him an appointment as a teacher of mathematics aboard the sloop USS Natchez, sailing the South American seas. Frémont later resigned from the navy and was appointed second lieutenant in the U.S. Topographical Corps, surveying a route for the Charleston, Louisville, and Cincinnati railroad. Working in the Carolina mountains, Frémont desired to become an explorer. Between 1837 and 1838, Frémont's desire for exploration increased while in Georgia on reconnaissance to prepare for the removal of Cherokee Indians. When Poinsett became Secretary of War, he arranged for Frémont to assist French explorer and scientist Joseph Nicollet in exploring the lands between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Frémont became a first rate topographer, trained in astronomy, and geology, describing fauna, flora, soil, and water resources. Gaining valuable western frontier experience Frémont met Henry Sibley, Joseph Renville, J.B. Faribault, Étienne Provost, and the Sioux nation.
Marriage and senatorial patronage
Frémont's exploration work with Nicollet brought him in contact with Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. Benton invited Frémont to his Washington home where he met Benton's 16-year-old daughter Jessie Benton. A romance blossomed between the two; however, Benton was initially against it because Frémont was not considered upper society. In 1841, Frémont (age 28) and Jessie eloped and were married by a Catholic priest. Initially Benton was furious at their marriage, but in time, because he loved his daughter, he accepted their marriage and became Frémont's patron. Benton, Democratic Party leader for more than 30 years in the Senate, championed the expansionist movement, a political cause that became known as Manifest Destiny. The expansionists believed that the North American continent, from one end to the other, north and south, east and west, should belong to the citizens of the U.S. They believed it was the nation's destiny to control the continent. This movement became a crusade for politicians such as Benton and his new son-in-law. Benton pushed appropriations through Congress for national surveys of the Oregon Trail, the Oregon Country, the Great Basin, and Sierra Nevada Mountains to California. Through his power and influence, Senator Benton obtained for Frémont the leadership, funding, and patronage of three expeditions.
Frémont's first three expeditions
The opening of the American West began in 1804, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition (led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) started exploration of the new Louisiana Purchase territory to find a northwest passage up the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. President Thomas Jefferson had envisioned a Western empire, and also sent the Pike Expedition under Zebulon Pike to explore the southwest. American and European fur trappers, including Peter Skene Ogden and Jedediah Smith, explored much of the American West in the 1820s. Frémont, who would later be known as The Pathfinder, carried on this tradition of Western overland exploration, building on and adding to the work of earlier pathfinders to expand knowledge of the American West. Frémont's talent lay in his scientific documentation, publications, and maps made based on his expeditions, making the American West accessible for many Americans. Beginning in 1842, Frémont led five western expeditions; however, between the third and fourth expeditions, Frémont's career took a fateful turn because of the Mexican–American War. Frémont's initial explorations – specifically, his timely scientific reports (co-authored by his wife Jessie) and their romantic writing style – encouraged Americans to travel West. A series of seven maps produced from his findings, published by the Senate in 1846, served as a guide for thousands of American emigrants, depicting the entire length of the Oregon Trail.