the wife of Archibald Morgan Harrison, of Fluvanna County, a most
distinguished agriculturist, at a time when it was worth being a
Virginia farmer and a country gentleman. They lived at "Carysbrook,"
Mr. Harrison's estate on the Rivanna River, in the royal style
easily possible to the South in her days of prosperity. She was a
great-granddaughter of Benjamin Harrison, a signer of the Declaration
of Independence, and her husband was a great-grandson of Benjamin
Harrison, the father of Benjamin the signer. Their life of pastoral
beauty closed with Mr. Harrison's death. His widow was at the height of
her loveliness, and when she went once more into the world she evoked
the most unstinted and genuine admiration. Mrs. Nellie Custis Lewis,
who was expending on her motherless grandchildren all the solicitude
that her grandmother, Martha Washington, had lavished upon her when
she was similarly bereaved, expressed the desire that her son-in-law
should woo Mrs. Harrison. So truly did she admire the qualities of
her character, as well as her great personal beauty, that she was the
only woman she had ever seen, she said, whom she would welcome as her
daughter's successor, and willingly see placed over her grandchildren.
She never had an opportunity to extend that magnanimous, however
cordial, greeting, for the youthful Mrs. Harrison, after six years of
widowhood, bestowed her hand upon Colonel Thomas Harding Ellis, of
Richmond. He had been secretary of the American legation at Mexico, and
was subsequently for nearly fourteen years president of the James River
and Kanawha Canal Company, his administration covering the period of
the war, when the canal was the most important line of improvement in
the State for supplying with agricultural produce the city of Richmond
and the army of Northern Virginia.
They visited Washington shortly after their marriage, where they were
guests of Mr. John Y. Mason. Mr. Mason presented them to President and
Mrs. Polk, whose courtesies to them added much to the pleasure of the
Washington chapter of their honeymoon days.
Mrs. Ellis's mother had stood at the bedside of her uncle William
Henry Harrison when, in the presence of his cabinet, he uttered those
memorable last words, "I desire the principles of the Constitution to
be maintained."
The union of Colonel and Mrs. Ellis terminated with the death of Mrs.
Ellis in July, 1897, followed, in a few months, by that of her husband.
For nearly fifty years had they traversed life's highlands and lowlands
together, closest companions, tenderest of lovers, she possessing all
the strength not incompatible with the finest and gentlest traits of
female character, and retaining to the last all the delicacy of her
wonderful beauty, and he the embodiment of chivalry, the highest type
of a Virginia gentleman of the old _régime_.
[Illustration: Sally Chevalier
(Mrs. Abram Warwick)
By Thomas Sully]
JESSIE BENTON
(MRS. JOHN C. FRÉMONT)
In the year 1868 the city of St. Louis erected a monument to the memory
of one of her most distinguished citizens, Thomas Hart Benton. Of the
forty thousand people who thronged the park on that May afternoon
set aside for its unveiling, but one was of the great man's blood,
the daughter most closely associated with the accomplishment of his
loftiest conception, that dream of Western empire for his country.
Accompanied by her husband, General John C. Frémont, she had accepted
the invitation to unveil the statue. As she pulled the cord that
loosened its wrappings, and the school children of the city threw their
offerings of roses at the feet of him who had befriended their fathers,
the huzzas of the vast multitude filled the fragrant air. The outgoing
train to San Francisco halted to salute with flags and whistles as the
bronze hand, pointing to the west, came into view, and the words graven
on the pedestal: "There is the East. There lies the road to India." To
General Frémont, quietly and reverently occupying a place of honor on
the platform, it was one of those supreme moments when the landmarks
of memory, those events that give color to our lives, stand forth to
the exclusion even of that which is at the moment passing before the
eye. Neither the vivas of the people nor the flowers of their children
thrilled him as did the salute of that outbound train, that thing of
strength and power and speed, bearing its message of progress and
civilization.
He knew every mile of its route. He, the pathfinder, by his indomitable
energy had traversed the virgin snows of its mountain ways, had
penetrated the mysteries of its wild valleys, and by his valor had
given to his country its golden terminus. And there, between the effigy
of the one in the radiance of the spring sunshine and the living man,
stood the woman still radiant with that high type of beauty that
emanates from the soul, the link, she has said of herself, between
the conception and the execution of the great scheme of Western
aggrandizement. Cradled among great ideas, she had grown up to be an
inspiration to the man with the prowess and daring necessary to give
them life and form. Some men, such as Abraham Lincoln, have been great
in spite of their wives, while to others, as to Frémont, through their
wives have come not only the opportunity for greatness, but with them
that identity of purpose that in itself is a fortification against all
adverse circumstances.
The story of Jessie Benton Frémont's life is closely allied with that
of the acquisition and development of the vast territory west of St.
Louis, which even in her young womanhood was the outpost of habitation.
Beyond its confines stretched that wonderland of her childhood, whence
came the trappers and hunters with their wild tales of adventure, and
whither she was destined to follow one day the princely pied piper of
her girlhood. The seed of the thought which bore its first fruit when
Frémont raised our flag on Wind River Mountain, thirteen thousand feet
above the Gulf of Mexico, was sown in the mind of her father when,
in 1812, he followed Andrew Jackson from Nashville to New Orleans
to defend the Mississippi. In the stirring life on its broad bosom,
together with a first realization of the extent of our domain, he
recognized the possibilities of our future expansion and greatness.
He had already been admitted to the bar of Tennessee and was a member
of the Legislature of that State. With the idea, however, that the
government of the United States should extend its protecting arm over
the great western wilderness, in which it evinced no interest and
whence it anticipated no benefit, he moved, in his thirtieth year, to
its border-land.
Its people recognized his friendly attitude, and when Missouri rose
to the dignity of a representation on the floor of the United States
Senate, Benton was the first man to whom she delegated that honor.
There, for over thirty years, with a limited following, he fought
aggressively foot by foot for the development of the West. He often
wearied his hearers, who had but little sympathy with projects that to
the remote Eastern mind seemed preposterous. It was not infrequently a
signal, when Benton mounted his hobby, for his fellow-Senators to take
up their letter-writing and for the galleries to be deserted. It made
little difference to them if England's hand were outstretched and her
fingers daily tightening their clutch upon our northwestern territory.
The mouth of the Columbia River was about of as much consequence to the
welfare of the United States, in the estimation of the people on the
Atlantic seaboard, as are the canals on the planet Mars.
Commercial relations with Asia and ports on the Pacific, however
Utopian they may have seemed to others with less of a grasp on the
world's history than his scholarly mind possessed, were to Benton
vital questions, for which he fought with that vigor of utterance that
provoked John Randolph into saying that his family motto, "Factus non
verbis," should be "Factus et verbis."
He was a powerful man, with a forcible way of speaking, which he
retained to the end of his life. When he was stumping his State in
the summer of 1856, being already in his seventieth year, he was
cautiously viewed one morning through the crack of an open door by
two anti-Bentonites. He was standing at the moment and speaking in a
vigorous way that appalled his surreptitious visitors. "Good God,"
ejaculated one, "we shall have to fight him these twenty years!"
He was a striking figure, with heavy black hair and side whiskers,
and during all the years that he was in the Senate, like some of his
illustrious successors, he never changed the style of his dress. His
vehemence was expended in public. In his family life he was as gentle
as he was devoted.
Jessie, the second of his four daughters, and the subject of this
sketch, was born at the home of her maternal grandfather, Colonel
James McDowell, near Lexington, Virginia. She grew up partly in the
picturesque atmosphere of St. Louis, then almost wholly a French
settlement, and partly in Washington, where Benton's home was
considered one of the most interesting in the city, owing to the
cultivated wife and daughters who gave it character and individuality.
Intermingled with her school-days she had her little day of belleship,
during which the two most notable events were a dinner at the White
House, given by President Van Buren for his young son, and the wedding
of Baron Bodisco, the Russian minister, at which she appeared as first
bridesmaid. The bride, Miss Williams, was one of her school-mates, and
a girl of sixteen, while the bridegroom was over sixty. The details
of the ceremony, however, were all harmoniously arranged by him, and
included eight bridesmaids between the ages of thirteen and sixteen,
and eight groomsmen of his own period of life. With one of the most
distinguished, James Buchanan,--then in the United States Senate, and
but recently returned from the Russian mission,--walked Jessie Benton,
fourteen years of age, and in her first long dress. Judged by his last
will, this Russian January seems to have been an unselfish husband, for
he therein expressed the wish that his still young wife should marry
again and be as happy herself as she had made him.
The Van Buren dinner was a more or less memorable event, though the
White House was familiar ground to Jessie Benton. During Jackson's
administration she used frequently to go there with her father, for the
old soldier-President was notably a lover of children. He liked to run
his long fingers through her soft curls, while he talked with his old
friend Benton, unwittingly giving the curls many a twist as he warmed
to his subject, all of which the little girl bore heroically, finding
ample recompense in her father's praise, which was sure to follow the
ordeal.
She went to school both in St. Louis and Washington, in the former
city principally for the sake of learning French by association with
children to whom it was the mother-tongue. She spent two years at Miss
English's boarding-school, in Georgetown, where she was not regarded as
a diligent student. Many hours stolen from the class-rooms were not,
perhaps, altogether unprofitably spent up a mulberry-tree listening to
the fascinating accounts of a midshipman's life, as told by one of his
cousins, and hanging hungrily upon every word, as if it in a measure
foretold her own eventful career.
At home her mental training was continuous, and without conscious, or
at least arduous, effort on her part. Each of Benton's daughters had
her place at his library table, and there, stimulated by his studious
habits, she acquired readily her portion of that vast fund of knowledge
which he had gleaned first from his father's library of unusual
excellence and later from his contact with men and measures of his day.
Of the measures there were many afoot when Benton's daughters were
young, whose stupendous proportions we are scarcely able to gauge,
knowing them only in the perfection of their full realization. Benton
was the sympathetic friend of all progress, and beneath the steady glow
of his astral lamp or the soft flicker of their mother's candles, in
the nights before the advent of gas, his daughters, sewing each her
fine seam, listened to the unfolding of the minds of the men who have
developed America. They learned also those lessons of inexhaustible
patience that must go hand in hand with every great undertaking and of
the frequent subordination of the individual to the things his own mind
has conceived.
Thither came Morse with that sublime faith in his conception of
telegraphy that made him insensible or at least indifferent to the
ridicule of Congress, where a member suggested, when he at length
obtained his twenty-five thousand dollars for an experimental line
to Baltimore, that a second appropriation should be made for an
experimental line to the moon.
An overland emigrant route, the surveys for a railroad to the Pacific,
and the Panama Railroad, Stevens coming to them directly from Central
America and going later to the Isthmus, were some of the vast projects
with whose details they were early familiarized. Later, when Jessie
Benton, as Mrs. Frémont, crossed the Isthmus herself and was detained
there by the fever, she saw Stevens every day, he coming, as he said,
"to take his chill with her." He died in Panama, as he predicted that
he would, one of the heroes in the vanguard of progress.
Into Benton's home quite naturally there drifted, in the year 1840, a
young lieutenant of the corps of topographical engineers, fresh from
the survey of the upper Mississippi. The son of a French father and a
Virginia mother, John C. Frémont was born in South Carolina, in the
year 1813. He was graduated, when he was seventeen years old, from
Charleston College, where he remained to study civil engineering and
teach mathematics. He was so unusually talented that Poinsett, the
Secretary of War, recommended his services to Nicollet when the latter
was about to undertake the survey of the Upper Mississippi. The two
years in the field were followed by two years spent in Washington
in preparing the scientific result of the expedition, during which
period Benton became interested more perhaps in the work than in the
individuality of the young officer, whose genius was later to open to
us the western gates of our republic.
Accompanying Benton's eldest daughter to a concert at Miss English's
school, Frémont for the first time met Jessie Benton. She produced on
his mind at once "the effect that a rose of rare color or a beautiful
picture would have done." She was but sixteen years old at the time,
in the first bloom of girlish beauty, and her bright mind exhilarated
by the pleasure of seeing her sister, poured itself forth in language
as sparkling as it was natural. "Her beauty," he wrote later, in
describing that first impression of her, "had come far enough down
from English ancestry to be now in her that American kind which is
made up largely of mind expressed in the face, but it still showed its
Saxon descent. At that time of awakening mind, the qualities that made
hers could only be seen in flitting shadows across the face or in the
expression of incipient thought or unused and untried feeling."
Coming home for the Easter holidays, she found that the young
lieutenant had become identified with her father's "Oregon work." He
was an almost daily visitor at her home, and in his constant meetings
with her in its unreserved atmosphere he found confirmation of the
first impression he had formed of her. "There are features," he wrote
later, "that convey to us a soul so white that they impress with
instant pleasure, and of this kind were hers. Her qualities were all
womanly, and education had curiously preserved the down of a modesty
which was innate. There had been no experience of life to brush away
the bloom."
Before the holidays were over this impression of her had penetrated
Frémont's entire being, and he loved her no less profoundly than he
admired her, rendering her an absolute devotion that knew no subsequent
diminution. "Insensibly and imperceptibly," he said, "there came a glow
into my heart which changed the current and color of daily life, and
gave a beauty to common things."
That April day in 1841, when, a month after it had witnessed his
inauguration, a mourning nation assembled to pay its last tribute
to William Henry Harrison, a gray and gloomy day without, Frémont
has recorded as the "red letter day" of his life. The government had
leased quarters near the Capitol for the use of Nicollet, where the
work on the map of the Mississippi's sources was going forward. From
the windows of one of the rooms Senator Benton and his family were
invited to view the funeral procession as it wound down Capitol Hill.
Frémont, on leave of absence for the day, was the host of the occasion.
Notwithstanding his best uniform, in which he looked very handsome, he
personally tended the cheery log-fire, that gave a touch of cosiness
to the big office, which he had, moreover, with somewhat reckless
extravagance for a man on a lieutenant's salary, decorated with plants
and cut flowers. From a daintily set table he served, with captivating
grace, coffee and ices. Though the nation mourned, two hearts, at
least, of all who looked upon the solemn pageant of that day were in
gala attire.
The next day, though he discreetly sent Mrs. Benton the plants and
flowers that had done decorative duty in his office, it availed him
nothing in her wise eyes. Jessie was too young, and, besides, she
did not wish her to marry an army man; the life was too unsettled.
Mrs. Poinsett, the wife of the Secretary of War, was taken into her
confidence, and, as a result, Frémont was ordered off to survey the Des
Moines River. Jessie, moreover, as a further diversion, was taken to
the wedding of one of her Virginia cousins, which meant in those days
weeks of festivity.
It was but another case, however, of the best laid plans that "gang
aglee," for in the autumn both Frémont and Jessie Benton were back in
Washington, and on the 19th of October she was courageous enough, in
defiance of both father and mother, whom she not only loved but truly
revered, to become Frémont's wife. She married too young, she says
herself, ever to have been a belle in the usual acceptation of that
term, yet so gifted has she been with those qualities that evoke the
chivalry of man that but few American women have had a better right to
that title. Though her life has been one of much exposure, she herself
has at all times been singularly sheltered.
The year following his marriage, Frémont applied to the Secretary of
War for permission to explore the far West and penetrate the Rockies.
The plan was supported by Benton, who believed that by making surveys
the government would be giving at least a semblance of protection
to its Western possessions. Congress gave its sanction, and in May,
1842, with a handful of venturesome spirits gathered on the Missouri
frontier, Frémont went forth to the exploration of the southern pass.
It was the first of numerous similar expeditions, his scientific
reports of which--going into astronomy, botany, mineralogy, geology,
and geography--were translated into many tongues, and gave their author
world-wide fame.
During his absences, which were always of uncertain duration, his wife
sometimes remained in her parents' home. Her father sent for her one
morning, when she had been married about a year, and, pointing out
her old place at his library table, he said, "I want you to resume
your place there; you are too young to fritter away your life without
some useful pursuit." So she dropped back quite naturally into her old
habits of study, as if her honeymoon days had been but another form of
vacation.
She frequently accompanied Frémont, however, as far as St. Louis,
waiting there for his return, or going out again to meet him after a
fixed time. He was once eight months overdue, during which period of
awful silence and suspense she had a supper-table set for him every
night with all the comforts and luxuries of that civilization to which
he had been so long a stranger. He came at length, in the dead of the
night, and, rather than disturb a household, he went to a hotel, and
for the first time in eighteen months slept in a bed.
With whatever misgivings she may have seen him set out for a field
where he would encounter certainly many dangers, and possibly even
death, she never, even when the opportunity came, of which many a
weaker woman would have availed herself, endeavored to withhold him
from his purpose. He would sometimes, after having covered many miles
of his route, come back to her for another good-by, overtaking his
party again by hard riding or pressing forward while they were resting.
In the summer of 1843, while he was still on the frontier gathering
together men and animals for his second expedition, his recall to
Washington was ordered, to explain there why, making a scientific
expedition under the protection of the government, he had armed his
men with the howitzer. The order, however, never reached him, for he
had already left St. Louis, where it fell into the hands of his wife.
Though she still labored under the depression of their recent parting,
she yet, with all the spirit which the emergency demanded, sent him a
swift messenger, bidding him hurry off and rest and fatten his animals
at Bent's Ford, stating that there was sufficient reason for the haste
which could not then be given.
When he was quite beyond the reach of recall, for it was before the
days of telegraphy, she wrote to the colonel of the Topographical
Bureau, and confessed what she had done, at the same time giving
ample reason for her action. To have obeyed the order, she explained,
would have meant the ruin of the expedition. Together with the time
it would have required to settle the party before he could leave
it, the length of the trip to Washington, and the inevitable delays
there, the early grass would be past its best, and the animals thus
would be thrown underfed into the mountains for the winter. She then
replied to the charge made against Frémont in the order of his recall.
The expedition must cross the country of the Blackfeet and other
unfriendly tribes of Indians, with no reverence whatever for the cause
of science, but with a very wholesome regard for any rights that were
backed up with a howitzer. Her father, who was absent from St. Louis
at the time, endorsed her action, and wrote to Washington, assuming
the responsibility for it, saying he would call for a court-martial
on the point charged against Frémont. Nothing further was heard of
it, however, and the precious time, that meant so much more to the
scientific mind of the explorer than to his government, to which all
seasons are the same, was saved.
From an historical point of view this was the most important of all
Frémont's expeditions. With the French territory which we had acquired
by the Louisiana purchase we inherited also France's old feud with
England, the underlying cause of which was the control of the markets
in the East. When we took up the cudgels, their conflict, so far as
the Western hemisphere was involved, had narrowed down to the ultimate
possession of that portion of Mexico's territory which included the
harbor of San Francisco. England had already made her survey of the
ground, and her eye coveted that matchless port. She was the power we
confronted in California when our war with Mexico ushered in the moment
for decisive action. Two courageous, intensely American men, however,
held the situation in their grasp,--in the Senate, at the climax of
his powers, Benton, who had ever had a jealous eye upon England's
encroachments on our boundary; in the field, Frémont, with all the
gallantry and spirit that final coup demanded.
The British admiral, moving with more deliberation than the American
colonel, with characteristic love of sport and appreciation of success,
gracefully accepted his defeat, and tendered his felicitations to the
intrepid rival, whose flag he found already floating above the coveted
territory.