A Nation Rising (21 page)

Describing the American forces, Daniel Howe writes in
What Hath God Wrought
, “The Irish alone constituted a quarter and the Germans 10 percent. The Mexicans made strong appeals to U.S. troops to switch sides, targeting immigrants and Catholics in particular. Their broadsides emphasized the injustice of the invaders' cause in the eyes of ‘civilized people' and stressed what North American Catholics had in common with Mexican Catholics. Alluding to well-known riots by U.S. Protestant nativist mobs, a Mexican pamphlet asked, ‘Can you fight by the side of those who put fires to your temples in Boston and Philadelphia?'”
¹⁷

Whether any Catholics serving in the army read those pamphlets or not, many soldiers opted out of the war against America's
southern neighbor. “The desertion rate in the war with Mexico, 8.3 percent, was the highest for any foreign war in United States history—twice as high as that in the Vietnam War,” Howe continues. “And the prejudices of nativist officers all contributed to the desertion problem.”
¹⁸

In 1856, twelve years after the “Bible Riots,” two political parties held their presidential nomination conventions in Philadelphia. The American Party, or Know-Nothings, selected the former president, Millard Fillmore, as its candidate, with Andrew Jackson Donelson, the nephew (and practically the adopted son) of Andrew Jackson, as Fillmore's running mate. The Know-Nothings had enjoyed considerable success at the local and state level, winning a couple of state houses and several seats in Congress. This party's slogan and ideology were simple: “Americans must rule America” no immigrant should get citizenship until he had lived in America for twenty-one years; and only native-born Americans should be entitled to hold office.

A few months later, the newly formed Republican Party also met in Philadelphia. Built around a coalition of former Whigs, Free-Soilers, and abolitionists, this party was dedicated to the “free white working man.” Its slogan was “Free Men, Free Speech, Free Press, Free Labor, Free Territory, and Frémont.” As their first presidential candidate, the Republicans turned to one of America's most famous heroes, John Charles Frémont, known as “the pathfinder.” Coming out of the gate, Frémont had two serious problems, as far as most Americans were concerned: he was for abolition, which few Americans favored, whether or not they owned slaves; and his heritage was “questionable.” Opponents claimed that he wasn't American but had been born in Canada. (These opponents were nineteenth-
century precursors of the “birther movement,” which professed that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya.) In addition to calling the Republican candidate a drunk, a slaveholder, and a crook, the Know-Nothings claimed that Frémont was Catholic and illegitimate. They circulated pamphlets with titles such as
Frémont's Romanism Established
;
The Romish Intrigue
;
Frémont a Catholic
; and
The Authentic Account, Papist or Protestant, Which?
¹⁹

To parry those claims, the Republicans called upon another famous American, Henry Ward Beecher. The son of Lyman Beecher, Henry had rejected his father's Nativism and had also become one of America's most prominent abolitionists. Henry Ward Beecher would stump tirelessly for Frémont, making certain that the Republican candidate's solid Episcopal credentials were well established. He had help from his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the most famous women in America. The author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and her brother, the abolitionist preacher, had eclipsed their Nativist father.

The Nativist Party's claims ultimately did not affect the outcome of the 1856 election, which was won by the Democrat, James Buchanan. But they may have led to some confusion. Frémont's supporters were so adamant in their defense of his Protestant beliefs that some voters actually thought Frémont was the Know-Nothing.

The Nativist Party gradually dissipated after the Civil War, with the emergence of the Republican Party as the dominant counterforce to the Democrats. But Nativism did not dissipate. Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments continued as a dominant political force. By the early twentieth century, Irish and other European immigrants had gradually won greater acceptance in main-
stream America; by contrast, much of the anti-immigrant anger in the post–Civil War years was turning toward the Chinese and other Asians groups. Harsh “anti-coolie” laws and other so-called “yellow laws” aimed at restricting Chinese immigration were passed in the late nineteenth century.

And although the antipathy toward Catholics eventually lost most of its violence, its force remained. After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was formed; besides its fundamental racism, the Klan movement also expressed a strong aversion to foreigners, Catholics, and Jews. In the 1920s, when a Catholic, Al Smith of New York, ran against Herbert Hoover, Smith's faith was still an issue; Republican slogans claimed that he was in favor of “rum, Romanism, and ruin.”

It would take more than 100 years after the first Nativist presidential candidate for Americans to elect a Roman Catholic president. In 1960, John F. Kennedy surmounted what was still a powerful suspicion of Roman Catholics. The anti-Catholic bias ran into the black community as well. During Kennedy's presidential campaign, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., father of the civil rights leader, expressed reservations about Kennedy's faith, prompting Kennedy to quip, “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father. Well, we all have fathers, don't we?”
²⁰

Religion has, of course, occupied a central place in American history. But its influence has not always been benign or positive. The deep divisions along some fundamental religious fault lines still run through the country. In many ways, those divisions were exposed and even created during this stormy moment in the history of a so-called Christian nation.

1811
Russian settlers land at Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, in February and establish Fort Ross, an agricultural colony, to supply their settlements in Alaska.

 

1821
With the permission of Mexico, Moses Austin settles 300 American families in Texas, then Mexican territory. After his death in July, his son Stephen takes over the grant.

 

1829
Mexico rejects President Jackson's offer to purchase Texas.

 

1835
Mexico's military dictator Santa Anna includes Texas in the laws against slavery; American settlers announce plans to secede from Mexico.

 

1836
Following the attack by Mexican troops on the Alamo in February, Texans defeat Santa Anna, ratify a constitution, and elect Sam Houston president of the Republic of Texas in April.

 

1837
On his last day in office, President Andrew Jackson recognizes Texas as an independent republic.

 

1841
Swiss-born John Augustus Sutter purchases Fort Ross from the Russians.

 

1845
Texas is admitted to the Union as a slave state (the twenty-eighth state).

1846
War is declared on Mexico in May.

1847
Promoted to general, Kearney captures Los Angeles, ending hostilities in California; Mexican forces sign a treaty with Frémont.

 

1848
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends the Mexican War. The United States receives more than 500,000 square miles of territory—including the future states of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona; most of New Mexico; and parts of Wyoming and Colorado, along with Texas.

1849
The California gold rush. By the end of the year, the population of California swells to more than 100,000.

 

1850
President Zachary Taylor dies of cholera in July; Millard Fillmore becomes the thirteenth president.

1851
Serial publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
begins. The novel goes on to sell 500,000 copies in one year and more than 1 million copies after a few years.

 

1852
The Democrat Franklin Pierce defeats the Mexican War hero Winfield Scott, a Whig, to become the fourteenth president.

March 1849

S
HADED FROM THE
blistering sun by a few palm leaves, the American woman and her seven-year-old daughter sat in a rough whaleboat on a river in Panama. With the sounds of screeching monkeys and the high-pitched screams of parrots filling the air around them, mother and child clung to each other as they were poled upriver by “crews of naked, barbarous negroes and Indians.” Lying prostrate in the heat beside them was the woman's brother-in-law, who had been sent on the journey as an escort, but who now seemed deathly ill—a victim of the tropical climate, strange food, and difficult days of traveling through the rain forest.

Their whaleboat, although larger than the mahogany dugout canoes used by others in their party, moved slowly upstream, barely covering a mile per hour as the small flotilla labored against the current of the Río Chagres. From the city of Chagres, a port on
Panama's Caribbean coast, these travelers were heading south to Panama City on the Pacific coast. From there, they and thousands of other argonauts or “forty-niners” hoped to make their way to the new American paradise of California, where men just dipped pans into clear mountain streams and came away wealthy beyond their dreams. It was 1849. This was gold fever.

Like thousands of others, this sick, frightened threesome would have to survive the crossing of Panama, traveling in the footsteps of the conquistador Balboa.

In 1513, the Spanish soldier Vasco Núñez de Balboa had been the first European to cross this narrow thread of land that connects South and North America. Among the earliest in the wave of Spanish adventurers who arrived in the New World opened by Christopher Columbus's discoveries, he had helped plant the first permanent European settlement on mainland American soil on the isthmus in 1510—Santa María la Antigua del Darién.

But Balboa had heard tales of a sea and lands rich in gold. Setting out on September 1, 1513, he led a small company to cross the thick jungles and forbidding mountains of the isthmus. Fending off attacks by natives, Balboa and his men pressed through uncharted rain forests until they reached the top of a mountain range on September 25, and gazed down at the Pacific Ocean. Descending to the shore, Balboa set out in a canoe, becoming the first European known to navigate the waters of the Pacific. He claimed the waters for Spain and then named the ocean Mar del Sur (South Sea), since they had traveled south to reach it.

Returning by a different route to the Spanish bases on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, Balboa had captured enough gold and
Indian cotton goods to ensure that the king would value his adventure. He also made certain that the king's share of the spoils was returned to Spain. But like so many of the first generation of conquistadors, Balboa did not profit long from his extraordinary discovery. He became embroiled in a fierce contest with the Spanish governor of Peru over this vast potential wealth and who would control it. Arrested by troops commanded by Francisco Pizarro, who would later conquer Peru, Balboa was quickly tried for treason, despite his protest that he should be returned to Spain for a royal hearing. Along with four of his compatriots, Balboa was beheaded on January 15, 1519. Their heads were displayed on poles for several days, but the location of the five conquistadors' bodies was never discovered.

 

N
OW, IN
1849, little had changed in the method of travel or the challenges of traversing the jungle of Panama. Shortly after her arrival in Chagres a few weeks earlier, before setting off for Panama City, the twenty-four-year-old mother had questioned the wisdom of her decision. “If it had not been for pure shame and unwillingness that my father should think badly of me,” she later recounted, “I would have returned to New York on the steamer, as the captain begged, putting before me such a list of dangers to health and discomforts and risks of every kind to kill my courage.”
¹
She was still mourning the loss of a son, her second child, when she had set out on this difficult and dangerous journey.

But Jessie Benton Frémont had grown up not wanting to disappoint the first of the two most important men in her life: her
father, the powerful senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. And, perhaps more significantly, she did not want to fail the second: her husband, Captain John Frémont—the “great pathfinder of the West”—who she believed and hoped awaited her arrival in California.

At night, Jessie and her daughter, Lily, were given a tent, “its canvas floors and walls lit by a great fire outside,” the child would later recall. Less pleasant was the food. On one occasion when they stopped in a small village called Gorgona, Jessie was appalled by the main dish, a baked monkey. She later wrote that it “looked like a little child that had been burned to death.”
²
Her brother-in-law Richard's travails ended at Gorgona. As his condition seemed to be worsening, it was decided that he should return by boat to Chagres. The captain leading the expedition implored Jessie Frémont to give up the journey and join Richard. But after wavering briefly, she decided to press on.

Soon they would have to abandon even the small comforts of the shaded whaleboat to continue the journey across the forbiddingly steep, rugged interior of Panama on mules. The twenty-mile trek over the mountainous spine of the isthmus was another test of courage, since the worn mule track was barely wide enough for a single animal. The mules carried mother and daughter up the breathtaking inclines of the Central American jungle, and down again. Dead mules littered the route. Streams had to be forded—there were no bridges.

A few years after Jessie Frémont made the crossing, Emiline Day, another intrepid women heading for the goldfields of California via Panama, would describe the terrors of the mule path:

After two days on the mule track, Jesse and Lily Frémont found themselves in Panama City, a bustling Pacific Ocean port, hoping for passage on a steamer that would carry them to California and the expected rendezvous with John Frémont. Jessie's husband was making his way west overland on another of the expeditions of discovery and mapping that had made his name synonymous with the opening of the westward routes to California. But Jessie had no way of knowing his whereabouts or condition.

When they arrived, Panama City was bursting with thousands of men and a few women who were moving across the isthmus—begging, borrowing, stealing—to make their way to California's newly discovered goldfields.

In 1849, there were only three ways to get to California from the east coast of the United States. One was the long, guided transcontinental trek, through Indian country and the mountains and deserts of the West that had already claimed travelers like those of
the Donner Party, who had perished notoriously in the winter of 1847. This was a difficult, dangerous, six-month trip, fraught with the combined dangers of attack, weather, and sickness. The second route involved sailing all the way around South America aboard a steamship or the new generation of clipper ships being built for the voyage to California and for the opening of trade with Asia. But the voyage was expensive and also took six months. The third choice was to cross the jungles of Panama. This was a shorter trip, but it was incredibly arduous. And it was the choice that Jessie Benton Frémont had made.

The journey had begun in New York, where her father saw Jessie off on the steamer
Crescent City
bound for Panama, accompanied by her brother-in-law, Richard Taylor Jacob; and her daughter, Lily. A maid had also been hired for the trip—at the last moment, when Jessie's longtime servant Harriet begged not to be forced to go on the long journey. During the sea voyage to Panama, Jessie awoke to find the newly hired maid going through her luggage. As she later recounted, “In the mirror, I saw my new maid take off her wig of plainly dressed dark hair and show herself to be years younger with light hair. She then opened my trunk, took out collars, cuffs, handkerchiefs, a little armful, and went softly out of the room. Instantly I was up…and locked the door.” The woman proved to be a known thief, but Jessie allowed her to continue on.

In the walled Panama City, booking passage to California presented new difficulties. The crews that had sailed the ships to San Francisco often decided to stay in California, hoping to make their fortunes in the frenzy of gold fever.

Although she fortunately found lodgings with a respected Span
ish woman in Panama City, Jessie began to fear that her journey would end there. The city was overcrowded with travelers desperately looking for passage to California, and she began to wonder if she would ever leave the crowded, dirty port. Many of the voyagers who had reached Panama City never made it any farther—succumbing to malnutrition, yellow fever, and any number of mysterious tropical ailments.

Her only relief came in a letter, several months old, from John. In it, he described his own difficult winter journey across the southern Colorado Rockies. Blinding snowstorms had almost kept his company from discovering the mountain pass they were seeking. After weeks of blundering through the snow-blanketed mountains, Frémont had sent men back to New Mexico to get help. But he had nearly given up hope, and one of his men had frozen to death. He sent another group back for help, and these men found the first group, freezing and starving, one of their number having died, and perhaps having provided a meal to the others. The rescue party was able to get help and return with mules and provisions, but not before one-third of Frémont's men had died in the Colorado snows.

Grateful to know that her husband was alive, though in poor condition, Jessie herself now fell ill and began to cough blood. A pair of doctors—one an American, the other local—diagnosed her condition as “brain fever.” The two physicians offered opposing courses of treatment. The American doctor called for cold drinks and fresh air. But the Panamanian physician advised bleeding and a closed room. Fortunately, no leeches were available and Jessie was spared the procedure—the loss of blood might have killed her. Finally, on May 6, she heard guns and horns in the harbor. Two
ships had arrived, and she and Lily would be able to continue on to California.

An American naval officer sought her out and described the chaos and debauchery that awaited her in San Francisco—gambling, prostitution, and a lack of decent housing. He also told her he had heard that her husband had injured a leg and was heading back east. Once again, she was advised to return home. But her biographer Pamela Herr describes Jessie's intense resolve: “She had promised to meet John in San Francisco, and she believed he would keep his word. She had endured so much, she wanted to see the journey through.”
⁴
On May 18, Jessie and Lily boarded the crowded steamer
Panama
, which was carrying 400 passengers, though it had been built to accommodate only eighty.

The word “California” had been coined in 1510 by the Spanish writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, in a romance about a mystical land (placed near the Garden of Eden), and its queen, Calafia:

From its very first use, the word “California” connoted a fantastic promise of glory and gold. The novel, too, is a fantasy, in which Queen Calafia and her women warriors go to battle wearing their golden armor, studded with the precious stones found on California Island. From its inception, then, the word was associated with conquest, indigenous people eager to convert to Christianity, and indigenous women willing to give themselves to European men.
⁶

The Spanish had named California in the late 1500s, but thought it was not worth the expense of colonization. A royal order in 1606 actually prohibited exploration of the area. Not until the 1760s, when they were confronted by the threat of competition from Great Britain and Russia, did the Spanish seek to expand more aggressively into this territory north of their established provinces in Mexico. Instead of relying upon the militarism of the conquistador period that had established Spain's hold over South and Central America, the Spanish sent in the Franciscans. Under the leadership of Fra Junípero Serra, the Franciscans established a mission system, similar to the one used in settling Florida, and built the first of their missions in the future state of California at San Diego in 1769.

Serra had been born on the island of Mallorca in 1713, and was sent to a Franciscan school as a boy. Intellectually gifted, he was enrolled in the order by age sixteen and soon became a priest. Landing in Mexico in 1749, he demonstrated what would become one of his most outstanding traits—remarkable physical stamina. He insisted on walking the 200 miles from Veracruz to Mexico City despite being ill. When given the opportunity to open Alta (upper) California—the territory of the future state—he often displayed
extraordinary drive and an extraordinary constitution, though he was frail and asthmatic. Serra also practiced the traditional mortifications of the flesh: heavy shirts with sharp barbs pointed inward to pierce the wearer's flesh, self-flagellation to the point of bleeding, and the application of burning candles to sear the chest. By the time of his death in 1784, he had opened nine missions.