She argued with Lincoln
“You are quite a female politician,” he told Jessie Benton Frémont.
Two passages from Differ We Must follow—both about Jessie Benton Frémont. She’s one of my favorite historical characters; this is my second book to feature her.
Differ We Must tells Lincoln’s life story through his face to face meetings with people of different races, genders, backgrounds and beliefs.
Sometimes they had things in common, too. Frederick Douglass was more radical than Lincoln, though they shared a preference for pragmatic thinking. Thurlow Weed shared a hardscrabble upbringing with Lincoln, even if they didn’t have the same ethics.
With Jessie Benton Frémont, the contrast was across the board—not only in gender but in background, education, social class, experience of the world, and even her sense of entitlement. If they were at all alike, it was that both were great talkers, and could command attention in a crowded room. Both had confidence, too; Jessie needed it to confront a president in an era when women were never expected to play such a role.
Born into wealth and privilege, she married John Charles Frémont, a U.S. Army mapmaker whose exploits on the trails of the West made him a national hero in the 1840’s and 1850’s. As Differ We Must puts it:
She was part of a small elite of women who influenced national events through their proximity to powerful men in Washington. Even in that formidable group she was an elite of one, widely traveled and well educated, able to speak with diplomats in their languages and political wire-pullers in theirs. Her square face, framed by bob-length hair, came alive when she talked in a sitting room or over dinner. [William Henry] Seward called on her from time to time and found her “a noble-spirited woman” who had “much character” and was “very outspoken.” Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, seeing the Frémonts together, said John was “quite earnest industrious, imperious,” and Jessie “very much like him, though talking more and louder.” Men weren’t accustomed to women talking politics, so Hay may have felt she was louder than she was. But many men found her more forceful than her husband, who was more comfortable amid snow-capped mountains than human beings.
Once during an argument she wrote “Jessie Benton Frémont” on a paper and showed it to a man: “Do you know who I am?” Her late father, Thomas Hart Benton, had been a senator from Missouri for thirty years. As a girl she followed him to the Senate and the White House, where Andrew Jackson was the first of many presidents she knew. In her early twenties she acted as her husband’s representative, meeting James K. Polk on his behalf while he was away fighting Mexicans.
She never quite managed to move into the White House—John lost his bid for the presidency in 1856—but she knew the house well enough to travel there as her husband’s emissary in 1861.
Lincoln was president; the Civil War had begun. He had made John a general and sent him to command troops around St. Louis. John began freeing the slaves of Missouri rebels, an emancipation Lincoln wasn’t ready to endorse. The commander in chief wrote to General Frémont, suggesting that he modify his order. Instead Frémont wrote a letter of protest and sent Jessie to deliver it. She traveled from Saint Louis to Washington.
“I left by the night train with only my English maid,” she said. “We had only common cars and I had to sit up two nights in the overcrowded train.” When she’d been a girl a journey from Saint Louis to Washington took weeks by steamboat and stage, and her family was among the few who could afford to travel in style, reserving a whole stagecoach for themselves. Now rail travel was swift and available to the masses, which she experienced as a disappointment.
By the time she disembarked at the capital on the evening of September 10, two advisers were waiting for her at the Willard on Pennsylvania Avenue; she’d telegraphed for them to come. While conferring with them she sent a message to the executive mansion, asking when she could discuss important business with the president. The messenger returned with a card on which Lincoln had written: “Now.”
It was nearly nine o’clock. Her advisers said she should go after a night’s rest, but she started for the door. “I thought it best to make no delay, and though my baggage had not been delivered and I was still in the dusty dress in which I was two days and nights, I walked across to the White House.” One of her advisers escorted her, a Judge Edward Cowles. A porter showed them down the high-ceilinged hallway, and they turned left into the Red Room to wait.
A fire blazed in the hearth, and chairs were scattered about. She’d been visiting the Red Room long enough to recall when it wasn’t red; the high walls had been yellow until Polk’s time. “All my life I had been at home in the President’s House,” she said, “as well received there as in the family circle.” This time, however, they waited long enough for Jessie to become annoyed.
At last, “a side door swung open from the state dining room, and the bearded president appeared, at least a foot taller than his visitor.”
Differ We Must reconstructs the full meeting, which the president and his visitor recalled a bit differently. Jessie stood up to the president, and paid a price. Lincoln felt he was standing up for the presidency, and dismissed her arguments, saying, “You are quite a female politician.”
The Frémonts were on the right side of history: freeing the enslaved would be key to winning the war. For Lincoln, two other questions were more immediate: when to order emancipation and who was empowered to order it.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my book of the same name. It’s not necessarily a book about learning to agree! Lincoln and the Frémonts never did. It’s about managing our differences in a democratic society. Which is why it’s on my mind in this election year.
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