It is a story leading up to the civil war when the nation was very clearly divided into two political camps. We live in a politically divided time, although i dont want to imply we are headed for civil war. I dont know what we are headed toward, but there is resonance in the way we have red and blue states today. There were northern and Southern States then that were fundamentally divided over this giant issue of slavery. There are other things. The 1840s and 1850s was a time of enormous technological and economic change. The development of the temoak inof the telegraph came 1834. Within a few years of the invention of the telegraph, cities east of the mississippi were connected and there was National Conversation which becomes part of the story i tell. It turns out these communication devices that were designed to bring people closer together drove them farther apart. They were horrified by what people on the others were saying. There is that. There is also just the fact that it is a story of america. It takes place in the same cities we know today. Sometimes even in the same buildings. It is really inspiring for me to go into the library of congress and learn about things that happened in the United States capitol where i sometimes walk around as a reporter today. The building has expanded and changed, but it is fundamentally the same. Susan we are going to spend an hour talking about these characters, but i wanted at the outset to do a brief snapshot of each. Let us start with the protagonist, John Charles Fremont. You write that in 1850, a magazine claimed he was the most important person to walk the earth since jesus. A pretty big claim. Who was he . Steve put him up there with Christopher Columbus and George Washington as the most important figures since jesus christ. That is a reflection of fremonts genius with his wifes assistance in tying himself to the national story. The idea of the magazine writer was columbus discovered america as they would have phrased it then, contacted europe with the americas, George Washington was the founder of the United States, the greatest result of that discovery, and John Charles Fremont brought the Pacific Coast into the United States. At the beginning of the story, the United States did not have a Pacific Coast. There was territory in oregon that was disputed with britain and there was california which , belonged to mexico. Fremont encouraged of the american settlement of oregon and took part in the american conquest of california just in time for the gold rush. He did play a real role in changing the map of the United States. But he was also brilliant at publicizing himself. In a way publicity was the , point. He was sent out by his fatherinlaw, a powerful senator, to explore the west. He did not necessarily find that much that was not already known, that he would come back and write bestselling accounts of his adventures and that was the purpose to entice americans to come west and settle and help make it part of the United States. Through this publicity, showing how the trip could be made and how exciting it could be and how practical it really was. Publicity was the point. But in the process of making the west more famous, John Charles Fremont made himself more famous. Making himself not the first famous person in history, but the First American celebrity to create his fame, even if he was doing the things he intended to be famous for. He was doing this in a very original way. It was an original way to approach publicity. It had not really been possible before. Susan he went on to become the first california senator for a brief period of time, then a president ial candidate for the new Republican Party. You list the many places named after him. When did he fall out of the public consciousness . Steve not until sometime after the civil war. He had this media rourke this meteoric career. 1842, he is an unknown Army Lieutenant and he goes to command his first great expedition, publicizes it, very quickly becomes famous. By 1850s, hugely famous. Hugely admired. His fame and his narrative, his story, was his primary qualification for being the republican nominee, the very first ever Republican Party nominee in 1856. He did not win, but remained very famous and also very rich. He managed to get rich in the gold rush. Then when the civil war broke out, Abraham Lincoln, the republican candidate who followed him, was president , named him a civil war general. He got in a fight with lincoln. Fremont was in charge in missouri. It was 1861 and the war was going very badly. There was a lot of chaos. There were a lot of rebels in missouri even though it stayed in the union. General fremont, as he was then, ordered freedom for the slaves of rebels in missouri. No one to that point had freed slaves. Lincoln had not yet freed a slave. He was not ready and he was fearful of doing it because there were several slave states still in the union and freeing a bunch of slaves at that moment might have caused them to go to the other side. He asked John Charles Fremont to reverse his order or modify it. Fremont refused. He was not a guy who was good with authority or following authority. Instead of following orders, he sent his wife, his very politically active wife, back to washington, d. C. To tell Abraham Lincoln what was what. I tell you this now because i dont think there is anybody in history who has come off well in later life or history after having a quarrel with Abraham Lincoln. Its not a thing anyone has ever done and come off well in the end. President lincoln ultimately fired general fremont, gave him a new assignment, then fire him then fired him again. Fremont in later years after the war lost his fortune in battery in bad railroad investments, was near poverty. He and his wife had to support themselves through his wifes writing in part. She had to help support him in their later lives. They were scraping by. His reputation had completely cratered by the end of his life. To the point where even though he was very popular, even though he had helped to create the Republican Party there were , republicans who supported him in 1856 who said, well, he was a good nominee, but thank god he was never president. He turned out to have a terrible character. Thats what they would say of him. Susan who was Jesse Fremont . Steve she was the daughter of a powerful United States senator from missouri. Senator thomas hart benton. Benton was a founder of the Democratic Party, a lawyer, also a ruthless and brutal man who owned slaves throughout his life and also fought duels and on one occasion killed a man. They dueled once. They wounded each other after trading insults. That is what caused the dual. Then benton felt the man was still insulting him, so challenged him again at 10 paces and shot and killed him. A brutal man and yet also a kind of visionary who foresaw an American West that included the Pacific Coast, who wanted the Pacific Coast for a specific reason. He wanted there to be an american seaport pointing toward india and pointing toward china and creating a direct trade route from the United States to asia. He in effect foresaw the Global Economy we live in now, where the worlds most important trading relationship in recent times has been across the pacific. Between the United States and china. Benton at least dimly foresaw that and fought for the expansion of the American West. His daughter, jesse benton fremont, was a kind of son to him. He took a long time as a husband and father before he got a son. He was disappointed jessie was boysboy, gave her a name. She is named after his father. She writes in a memoir, my father gave me the place a son would have had. He took her hunting, he took her to the United States senate when he was going to work. He took her to what we now call the white house to meet a variety of president s starting with Andrew Jackson, who took office in 1829 when jessie was not quite five. She grew up amid power and grew up in washington and had ambitions i dont want to say to be a man or to be a boy. But had ambitions to do things only men were allowed to do. She had a moment as a teenager when she cut off her hair and went to her father and said, i want to check out of washington society. I have just attended this fancy Society Wedding of one of my teenage classmates married off to a much older man. The whole thing is gross. I do not want any part of it. I want to live my life as your assistant. This is the moment when her father was no longer comfortable with her acting like a boy. It was time for her to act like a woman in his opinion. She had to grow her hair out and she did end up leading in many ways a traditional life as a wife and mother with the traditional assigned rules, but in a way that i think is very familiar to many women today. Fulfilled those assigned roles while also reaching out and finding ways to be involved in politics and to make a mark in the world, largely through assisting and guiding and being the brains of her ever more famous husband. She was in a way his best publicist and absolutely his political advisor. Susan our third character was thomas hart benton. His life seems so big you could almost do a biography on him. He was a jacksonian democrat. What does that mean . Steve a jacksonian democrat, the simple thing is a supporter of interjection but there were , things they believed in. Some of them seem kind of archaic today. Democrats in those days opposed the national bank. The bank of the United States, which is the closest thing there was then to the Federal Reserve bank we have today. President jackson, with the support of senator benton, ultimately destroyed it. The Democratic Party of that time was for small d democracy , for mass participation in elections, but we have to be utterly clear. They meant mass participation of white men. All white men should be voting, all white men should be voting for the democrats. But this was a proslavery party. On its best days, it was silent about slavery and often it was exclusively for slavery even though it was a National Party and appealed for votes, working farmers and immigrants, by the way in northern states. It was essentially a proslavery party and senator benton was part of that. Susan probably the most important character was the United States itself. Give us a snapshot of what the country was like. Steve if we can imagine what one historian has called the shape of the United States, the map was not all drawn yet. It did not belong to the United States. The westernmost city in the United States of any consequence was st. Louis, missouri. There were a few towns west of that, but nothing very important. Other than st. Louis and bits of louisiana, at the very beginning, all the states were east of the mississippi river. Susan what was the population . Steve the population was gaining rapidly. It was only two or three million at the time of the revolution. Story, it isf my getting over 20 million. Warhe time of the civil just after my story, it is 31 million people. It is seen as almost doubling in a generation. The median age is very low. It is a very young country. Very rapidly expanding. Lots of immigrants coming from europe, from ireland, and elsewhere. A rapidly changing and evolving country. And a country where distances are shrinking. Heres what i mean by that. In 1800, if you were in new york city and you wanted to travel to st. Louis, it might take you six weeks to get there if you did not have some disaster on the trip. By the 1840s, it was a mere 10 or 11 days to take that trip and it was much safer and more practical. By the mid1840s and into the 1850s, the telegraph was making communication instantaneous and railroads were making travel even faster. Distances were shrinking across this country the size of an empire. It was becoming one country, but this was also revealing the differences between people in a very in your face way that was kind of hard to take and i think does remind me as a 21st century citizen of the way social media sometimes shocks us. We cannot believe what other people who might be across the country or even our neighbors really subscribe to. Susan if you were one of those irish immigrants what was the , United States for you . Steve life could be very hard. I have done a lot of research and there were irish immigrants who prospered, and there were irish immigrants who prospered in horrible ways. They might go to alabama and end up owning a plantation with a lot of slaves. Broadly speaking, irish immigrants were poor. Broadly speaking, irish immigrants were discriminated against. This was a period of a Mass Movement against foreigners, against immigration, in the United States. It began in earnest in the 1840s, became very powerful by 1850. There were secret societies who became known as the know nothings because if you ask a member of this society to tell you something about it, they would say i know nothing. In my research i discovered , sometimes those people would be telling the truth. Societies were so secret, junior members might literally not even know the name of the organization. They just knew it was against foreigners. By the mid1850s, they were becoming more public, more open and provocative and violent. They would go into immigrant neighborhoods and give speeches against immigrants, knowing that would provoke violence. They would come back the next week and do it again. There would be riots in the streets. It became known as a very powerful political force. In the 1850s, as the main Political Parties began to crack apart under the pressure of slavery, some political leaders saw hatred of foreigners as the thing that could unite people. In the 1854 elections, the antiimmigrant parties had overwhelming success, dominated the legislatures and governorships in many states, had a great deal of power in the United States congress, and seemed poised maybe to elect a president in 1856. Susan two other groups that are characters in your story, first is the native americans. We learned about them throughout. They were increasingly being moved westward and encroached upon. What was life like for them . Steve it was a life of terrible pressure. This book is not written from the perspective of native americans. Susan but they appear. Steve they appear and they should. I have an earlier book, which is about Andrew Jackson and the cherokee leader and in that project, i learned an enormous amount i simply did not know of the history of this country and the history of the nations that came before this country and were ultimately incorporated into it. John Charles Fremont was a witness to that and a participant in that from the earliest stages of his career. In the 1830s, as a young man, he got a job as a surveyor and mapmaker in what is now northern georgia in cherokee country. His job was to make maps for the United States army, which was getting ready to remove the cherokee to west of the mississippi. The army wanted the maps in case the cherokee resisted so they would have good maps for the war. That war did not come, but fremont drew the maps and gained experience. He then went west and, i think it is powerful to understand the various ways this white man interacted with indians. He was going among them with the lamps of science and reason. He was not there to massacre them, and yet he periodically did in several horrible instances in california and oregon. At the same time, he depended on them. He would be traveling with small groups of men and would run out of coffee. He was a habitual coffee drinker and could not bear to be without it. He found someone who would sell coffee in the middle of this seeming wasteland. There was an economy. There was trade. That person was native american. He hired indians and was proud of the diversity of his expeditions. He was an army officer. He would hire a bunch of civilians and they would include a german immigrant mapmaker. They would include french men, frenchspeaking people whose families had been in and around st. Louis since it was french territory before the louisiana purchase. He would have africanamericans as part of his expeditions and he would hire indians as well. There would be multiple languages spoken around campfires by multiple men, and he was proud of that, even as he was a representative of the sort of White America sweeping across the country. This is one of the really important things i learned and that i want to emphasize from this book. The variety of people who built the country, for better or worse. The variety of people who were risking their lives to make this a continental nation. It is a difficult story to tell because