(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."