Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

A little Eastern bride, whom San Francisco society, consisting of sixteen ladies, turned out in a body to welcome, set up her first household belongings in a modest frame structure two stories in height, that had been put up at a cost, out of all proportion to its intrinsic value, of ninety thousand dollars.

Yet nothing was so valuable as time, and though it was estimated to be worth fifty dollars a minute, there were busy men who paid Mrs. Frémont the compliment of frequent day-time visits.

With every personal inducement to favor slave labor in the new territory, both Frémont and his wife were among its most strenuous opposers. Not only did they pay their first house-maid two hundred and forty dollars a month with perquisites, which included the housing of her husband and children, yet even with a disposition to retain her at that neat figure, they found themselves obliged to do without her truly valuable assistance when Mrs. Frémont refused the loan of her gowns as patterns for the wardrobe she was having constructed at the hands of a Chinese modiste. There were, moreover, on the lands that Frémont owned, rich gold deposits, which could be most profitably operated by slave labor.

When the convention to draft the constitution under which California should come into the Union met at Monterey, where Frémont had established himself, his home became the head-quarters for the anti-slavery party. Its neatness, the smoothness of its internal workings, and the evident contentment of his wife formed a text for the friends of free soil, and many an incredulous opponent was brought to behold, and, seeing, went away believing in the possibility of domestic happiness without slaves. Mrs. Frémont had, to be sure, a preference for underclothing that had been ironed, and she might have wished also that the two Indian men who presided in her kitchen and pantry had not been gifted with such facilities for terminating both the ornamental and useful career of her china and glassware. Yet these small clouds in no way overshadowed her domestic horizon. Her prejudice to slavery she inherited from both parents, belonging, as she said, "to the aristocracy of emancipation," or to that class of people who, owning slaves, quietly gave them their freedom at infinite sacrifice to themselves, as opposed to the abolitionists of the North, who, with nothing to lose and much to gain, clamored noisily for that freedom.

Frémont was the hero of the hour, and could have been governor of the new State or one of its first Senators. He chose the latter, however, though it took him away from those material interests which California then held for him. Going into the Union as a free State, it would need in Congress a defence such as no man could give it with greater loyalty than Frémont.

There is an anecdote told and applied indiscriminately to various political heroes, most frequently, perhaps, to Lincoln, to whom, therefore, it may possibly appertain, demonstrating delicately his deference for the marital tie. On the night of his election to some office, and while he was being inundated with the congratulations of the friends who had assisted in the achievement of his triumph, he further captivated their fancy by remembering his wife. "Well, gentlemen," he said, quietly, "this is very nice, but there is a little woman around the corner who will be interested in hearing this news, and if you will just excuse me, I think I'll step around and tell her."

One woman interested in the balloting of the delegates at San José for California's first Senators was not so conveniently situated. She was at Monterey, and as a season of heavy rains was on, there was but little prospect that her keen desire to know the result would find immediate gratification. Before just such a merry blazing fire as his imagination had once conjured up as a central feature of their library sat Frémont's wife, her fingers for the first time fashioning a dress for herself on the trustworthy outlines of one that had been ripped up for the purpose. Her little daughter had been put to bed, and her companions for the evening were the Australian woman who had replaced her two Indian servitors, and whose accustomed fingers plied the needle with a more rapid stroke than her own, and the woman's baby, playing on the bear-skin rug near the fire. Besides the voice of the woman and an occasional chirrup from the baby, she heard nothing but the storm without, till the door opened and a man, dripping with rain, stood on the threshold and asked, in consideration of his sorry plight, if he might enter.

It was Frémont. He had torn himself away from his idolizing followers and ridden out into the darkness and storm to tell his wife, seventy miles away, that he had been elected to the United States Senate. Though it was late in the night when he reached Monterey, he was in the saddle again before dawn and on his way back to San José, making in all a ride of one hundred and forty miles.

The home-bound steamer, sailing from San Francisco on the 1st of January, 1850, carried, among others, the first two Senators from the new State, Frémont and Givin. At Mazatlan a British man-of-war fired a salute in honor of these two distinguished passengers.

They landed in New York the last of March, and from the long mirror into which she looked, in her hotel bedroom, there gazed back at Mrs. Frémont a comely young woman clad in a riding habit that had been abbreviated to a convenient walking length, a pair of black satin slippers, a leghorn hat tied down with a China crêpe scarf, and a Scotch plaid shawl that had borne the brunt of her year's outing,—in a word, the wife of a United States Senator from the golden West.