Almost President (44 page)

JOHN C. FREMONT

1856

Celebrity is always a valued commodity in politics. The explorer John C. Frémont was one of the most famous men in the world in his time, revered for his exploration of the West. Frémont was so celebrated that he was offered the nominations of
both
the Democratic and Republican Parties. Because he opposed the expansion of slavery, he took the Republican offer and campaigned under the stirring slogan “Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont!” In choosing Frémont, the Republicans passed over more experienced politicians such as William Seward or Charles Sumner for fear that their images as radicals would limit their appeal, while Frémont's renown would broaden the young party's prospects.

The dashing forty-three-year-old Frémont lost to James Buchanan in 1856 but ran a more than credible campaign, carrying eleven Northern states and ensuring that the Republican Party would not quickly disappear as had so many other minor parties during the antebellum period. Instead, the Republicans succeeded the Whigs as the second major party, and Frémont, “The Pathfinder,” led the political way for the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, four years later.

Presaging their reaction to Lincoln's election, Southern politicians had warned that Frémont's election would have meant “the end of the Union.” That threat badly damaged Frémont's chances for victory, as did gossip about the circumstances of his birth. Frémont was the illegitimate child of a French expatriate and the young wife of an elderly cuckolded Virginia planter. In a remarkable coincidence, while still an infant living with his family in Tennessee, Frémont was nearly struck in his crib by gunfire from a nearby duel between Andrew Jackson and Frémont's future father-in-law, Thomas Hart Benton.

A gifted mathematician, Frémont caught the eye of several benefactors and won civilian appointment to the military as an officer and aide to the French-born Joseph Nicollet, then the world's leading geographer, who was working on the first comprehensive map of the United States. Frémont joined Nicollet on several expeditions to map the West before leading expeditions of his own. His descriptive and meticulous reports fired the imagination of the American public and opened the way for settlement in the West.

One of those intrigued by Frémont's work was Benton, a powerful senator from Missouri since 1821 and the nation's foremost exponent of Manifest Destiny. On a visit to the Benton home, the handsome Frémont, then twenty-seven, met the senator's beautiful and brilliant daughter, Jessie, then fifteen. The two fell in love and eloped two years later, creating a lifelong estrangement with the senator. Her father's favorite, Jessie had been educated far beyond the norm for women of her day. With beauty and charm coupled with fiery ambition and great political acumen, today political observers might label her a cross between Jacqueline Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. Women had become politically active in the anti-slavery movement, which in turn inspired the suffragette movement. The 1856 election was the first to capture the wide attention of women. Aware of Jessie's role in her husband's career, the public loudly cheered her name during the campaign.

Few have led a life so adventurous and odds-defying as Frémont. In mapping much of the Oregon Trail, he cheated death a dozen times. Frémont led an expedition that prematurely annexed California before the Mexican-American War was declared, though he was later cleared of misconduct charges. Frémont resigned his commission and returned to California. He had given money and instructions to purchase property near San Francisco, but his agent swindled him and instead purchased a remote property at the foot of the Sierras—which turned out to possess a fabulous gold mine. But Frémont lost most of his wealth in bad investments.

During the Civil War, while military commander of Missouri, Frémont issued an unauthorized order freeing slaves in his district—the first emancipation proclamation—and was reprimanded by Lincoln. Late in life, Frémont was appointed governor of the Arizona Territory as a sinecure for his many services to the nation, while Jessie, to help the family finances, wrote books that often chronicled one of the most fascinating political couples in American history.

H. W. Brands,
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream
(Doubleday, New York and London, 2002).

Sally Denton,
Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America
(Bloomsbury, New York, 2007).

Eric Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War
(Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1995).

Allan Nevins,
Frémont: Pathmarker of the West
(University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1992).

GEORGE B. McCLELLAN

1864

General George B. McClellan is primarily remembered for his insubordination toward President Lincoln and his failure to use the Army of the Potomac, which he had trained into a magnificent fighting force, to win a decisive victory for the Union in the Civil War. While lacking in some aspects of generalship, McClellan should be more fondly remembered for his role in demonstrating that American democracy is strong enough to hold a national election even in the midst of civil war.

McClellan, the precocious son of a Philadelphia doctor, received special permission to enter West Point at the age of fifteen. A brilliant engineer, he rose quickly through the ranks with his successes in the Mexican-American War and later as a surveyor for railroad routes to the West. McClellan left the Army to become vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad, but when the Civil War broke out, he was called back into service and was soon asked to command the dispirited Army of the Potomac, which had suffered a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run.

McClellan was exceptionally talented at training and equipping his soldiers. His troops loved him and McClellan loved his troops—perhaps too much. Lincoln accused him of having a bad case of the “slows” because McClellan, always imagining he was outnumbered by Confederate forces, was reluctant to fully commit his beloved army to a battle or campaign that might win the war. Worse, McClellan, just thirty-four years old when given command of the army, took to heart his nickname, “The Young Napoleon,” and treated his superior officers, including Lincoln, with open disdain. After McClellan failed to exploit an opening for an offensive following the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln relieved McClellan of command in November 1862. Some urged McClellan to disobey the order, but McClellan rebuked them, a sign that his disloyalty to the administration did not extend to disloyalty to country.

Remaining in the army but with no real duties, McClellan became the rallying point for those opposed to Lincoln's policies and became the Democrats' presidential nominee in 1864. Lincoln was certain, with the North weary of war, that he would lose to McClellan. But then, as the highlight of a series of Union victories that suddenly made Union victory seem within reach, General William T. Sherman took Atlanta. Meanwhile, Democrats saddled McClellan with a “Copper-head” running mate and platform that urged peace with the Confederacy at any price.

McClellan repudiated his party's platform, stating that while emancipation of the slaves should not be a precondition for peace, reunion had to be. Otherwise, he said, “I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades . . . and tell them that their labors, and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain.” The troops, however they may have admired their former chief, could not bring themselves to cast a vote that might be interpreted as a vote for the Democratic platform. Amid some controversy over the fairness of balloting, Lincoln ended up winning three-quarters of the soldier vote and McClellan carried just three states. He had run a dignified but passive campaign, making only two public speeches and refraining from personal attacks on the president.

The new commander of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant, told Lincoln the election result was a “double victory” because the election had been conducted without “bloodshed or riot”—to the dismay of the Confederacy. McClellan accepted the result without public complaint, but private disappointment led him to Europe, where he lived for three years before he returned to later serve as governor of New Jersey. While overseas, he expressed “horror” at Lincoln's assassination and joy at the Union victory, while urging a “magnanimous” peace toward the South. McClellan proclaimed that the Union victory “completely vindicated our national strength.” So, too, did holding a free and peaceful election in the midst of civil war.

Charles Bracelen Flood,
1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History
(Simon and Schuster, New York, 2010).

Stephen W. Sears,
George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon
(Ticknor and Fields, New York, 1988).

John C. Waugh,
Lincoln and McClellan: The Troubled Partnership between a President and His General
(Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010).

John C. Waugh,
Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency
(Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

HORATIO SEYMOUR

1868

Horatio Seymour is supposedly the only person truly compelled to run for president against his will, when he was drafted to be the Democratic nominee against Republican Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. Of course, Seymour
always
claimed reluctance to being the nominee for any office, yet he still served two separate terms as governor of New York and was nominated for governor four other times.

Seymour, whose real passions were farming and promoting improvements to the Erie Canal, professed to be “annoyed” that his unwillingness to seek public office was “looked upon as a strategic movement.” While his sincerity was questioned but never disproved, the regular efforts to draft him for public office do indicate that Seymour, once called “a gentleman disguised as a Democrat,” was one of the most highly regarded public servants of his day.

Seymour had refused to allow his name to be placed in nomination in 1868, but he was the chair of the Democratic convention. After eighteen ballots, when no other candidate seemed capable of securing the nomination, Seymour began receiving votes. He stopped the balloting and reminded the delegates that under no circumstances could he be their nominee. Flustered, he turned over the gavel and stepped outside for some air. If sincere in his desire not to run, it was foolish; if a ploy to win the nomination, it was genius. While absent, he was nominated by acclamation.

His strong showing against Grant astonished many. Running as a Democrat three years after the Civil War against the greatest Union military hero, Seymour won 47 percent of the vote. It is likely he won a majority of the white vote nationally as Grant carried five states of the Confederacy on the votes of freed black men. Four Southern states not yet “redeemed” could not participate in the election. Seymour benefited from the Ku Klux Klan's use of violence to suppress black voter turnout in the two Southern states he carried: Georgia and Louisiana. In eleven Georgia counties where blacks were in the majority, Grant received not a single vote.

Seymour's showing is remarkable given that Republican newspapers had questioned his wartime loyalty. A War Democrat who opposed secession, Seymour also opposed emancipation and was critical of how Lincoln's administration prosecuted the war, particularly its infringement of civil liberties in stifling Northern dissent. Seymour was governor in 1863 when riots broke out in New York City to protest military conscription. Mobs lynched African Americans and burned down a black orphanage. More than one hundred people were killed, most of them rioters shot by troops called in to quell the disturbance. Seymour had rushed to New York City to give a speech at City Hall where he reportedly addressed the crowd as “my friends.” Most newspapers reported that the crowd in attendance was peaceful—and not the rioters—but Horace Greeley's Republican
New York Tribune
insisted then and during the 1868 campaign that Seymour had been addressing a violent mob.