There was a torchlight parade up New York’s Broadway in June 1856 to greet John C. Fremont, newly nominated as the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate. But as he acknowledged the cheers from his balcony, his words were drowned out by calls for his wife: “Jessie! Jessie! Give us Jessie!”
“Never before,” writes Sally Denton in her glowing biography of the couple, “Passion and Principle,” “had a candidate’s wife been called to appear in public,” and her appearance “drove (the crowd) wild.” And while ultimately unsuccessful – in a three-way race, Fremont lost to James Buchanan – the campaign “exuded celebrity status from the start.”
What Denton has done is to explore, with skill and style, the source of that celebrity that surrounded the Fremonts. She is a sure-footed guide through an adventure that stretches across a still-unexplored continent, onto Civil War battlefields and into the major moral and political conflict of the time.
Jessie Benton was a high-spirited and accomplished 15-year-old when she first met the 27-year-old Fremont. “They were irresistibly drawn to each other from the moment they met,” writes Denton. They eloped the following year and shared a life on the frontier and in politics until his death, in 1890.
Jessie Fremont was “widely seen as a full-fledged partner in her husband’s pursuits.” Fremont himself called her his “second mind.” And Jessie Fremont played key roles in the two major political controversies of her husband’s career – both involving the principal moral and political issue of the day, slavery.
In 1856, she counseled him to reject the offer of the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, which almost certainly would have led to victory and the presidency, rather than compromise his strong anti-slavery principles.
And when, as commander of embattled Union forces in Missouri in 1861, Fremont determined to issue a proclamation seizing the property of Confederate sympathizers – which in effect meant freeing their slaves – she traveled to Washington from Missouri in an unsuccessful effort to win approval from a strongly opposed President Lincoln.
The book is a grand story of “passion and principle,” and it is not for nothing that Denton draws parallels between the Fremonts and both George and Elizabeth Custer and, more significantly, Bill and Hillary Clinton – like the Fremonts, “a political couple (who) fascinated and baffled the public.”
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NONFICTION
Passion and Principle
John and Jessie Fremont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth Century America
Sally Denton
$32.95
