Susan steve inskeep, your book is titled, imperfect union how john and Jesse Fremont helped cause the civil war. Why did you believe the story of a 19thcentury power couple would have resonance today . Steve there are so many ways it did. 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. Particularly in the news media. The development of the telegraph came in 1834. Within a few years of the invention of the telegraph, cities east of the mississippi were connected and there was an instantaneous 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 the other side 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. [laughter] 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. Two approach publicity when the media was expanding. 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 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 fired him again. Fremont in later years after the war lost his fortune in bad railroad investments, was near poverty. Even though he was still very famous. 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 not a boy, gave her a boys 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 Andrew Jackson, 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 explicitly 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 logo 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. By the time of my story, it is getting over 20 million. By the time of the civil war 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 john ross, 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 frenchmen, 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 so many people were slaughtered in the process or were shoved aside or lost their land. But a great nation was being built, and every kind of person was participating. Susan john fremont, you described him as something of a selfcreated character, even the accent over his name. What is important to know about the early fremont and how he created the fremont he would become . Steve lets begin with his birth. He was the illegitimate son of an immigrant. His father spelled his name slightly differently. Not fremont but fremon. He was a frenchman. He fell in love with a virginia aristocrat, who left her husband to go away with him. She never received a divorce and so their first child, john, was born out of wedlock. He tinkered with his name as best i can determine throughout his early years and into early adulthood. His father was charles fremon, sometimes John Charles Fremont would go as charles. Sometimes he would be j. C. Sometimes the initials would be reversed and he would be cj. He changed the spelling of his last name. Added an accent mark so it was not fremont, which would sound very french, but fremont, which turned out to be a great name to have years later when he was the president ial nominee of the party of freedom against slavery. But that gets at what a self invented character he was, coming from these very difficult, modest and i think it is fair to say humiliating circumstances. Being born out of wedlock was considered far more of a disgrace then than it would be considered today. It was something he and his wife attempted to hide. He was not from money. He was a penniless Army Lieutenant. He was a lieutenant even though he was not trained. He had not gone to west point, but he had attached himself to a series of powerful men, including a South Carolina politician who became the secretary of war. The equivalent of todays secretary of defense. And got him a u. S. Army lieutenants commission. He was a guy who scrambled up from the bottom although not always in the most admirable or appealing ways. Susan how did he and jessie meet and when did they marry . Steve they met through the father, thomas hart benton. Benton, as a senator, who thought of himself not just as a senator from missouri, but the senator of the west, was interested in John C Fremonts work as an apprentice mapmaker for another explorer. Senator benton went by this office where they were drawing up maps and met the young lieutenant, who was embarrassed because the map was not very far along. It was a largely blank map. But he attached himself to a powerful person, again, and got to know senator benton and ultimately got to know senator bentons daughter. Senator benton did not approve of the marriage, but they eloped when jessie was just 17 and John C Fremont was 28. Senator benton was said to be enraged. There are different versions of the story. Ultimately had to accept his daughter had not married some powerful official, which would have been quite common in washington, but this penniless lieutenant. He went and placed a notice in a washington newspaper. You would expect the notice to say John Charles Fremont was jessie benton, but benton put the names in the opposite order. Jessie benton married John C Fremont. Susan how did he get his first charge to lead an expedition and how was it funded . Steve it was through senator benton shortly after this elopement. It is a remarkable story that senator benton was enraged this young man had taken away his daughter, his most precious daughter of his children, and yet within a few weeks, he had reconciled himself to that. This was a senator who had fought gunfights against people and reconciled himself to them later. Senator benton, as a powerful senator in charge of the committee that oversaw the military, was able to use his influence to get john assigned to lead his first expedition. He was qualified. He had been the apprentice or second in command on other expeditions. But it was senator bentons connections that made it possible, and it was his vision that John C Fremont followed. His early expeditions were to map the oregon trail, to entice americans to settle the oregon country, which was disputed with great britain, and the idea was lots of american settlers there would make it part of the United States inevitably. The senator was in a way pursuing his own foreign policy, which is a little different than the president at the time, john tyler. Senator benton did it anyway. Susan we visited bend, oregon, which is part of the area he explored and met a photographer, historian, who has done some of what of you have done. I want to show a video of what the topography looks like today. [video clip] i dont think it has changed since he was here. There is not much erosion of this lava. I think it is pretty cool. He writes about it in his journal. We can stand here and be in a place where fremont was 170 some years ago. Susan you are able to recreate a lot of his journey. It was tough going. Steve looking at that video, my first thought is at some point, they had to cross that river. There was not going to be a bridge. I might go look for a ford where the water was calmer, but every thing could be brutal. Fremont was traveling in the mountains, very high mountains, in winter. It could be devastating. It could be deadly. They would be trying to pass through snow that was many feet deep. The horses legs would sink into the snow. The only way the men could see was by themselves making a road by taking what is called a mall and pounding down the snow for days to make a path the animals could walk on. The animals would be dying. The men would eat the animals because they were running out of food. Sometimes they would starve to death. Fremont made it more difficult in search of new discoveries or in search of fame. He climbed mountains. He had no need to climb. He tried to strike out to find new paths through difficult mountains, which sounds like a great thing to do except he would do it in the middle of winter. It is remarkable he himself did not die. Instead, it seems that he thrived off this difficulty. As a very young man, he recited in school a speech by a South Carolina politician who talked about the american landscape as creating a new kind of person who would show their character wrestling with that difficult landscape. You read that speech and realize Frederick Jackson turners famous frontier thesis was a very old idea in america. John c fremont thought he was doing that. Proving himself against the landscape. He would sometimes gain weight while others of his men were falling apart and dying. Susan what do you think of his leadership skills . Steve he was persistent, which was great, except when it became stubbornness. He could be decisive, except when he failed to be. He would pursue a course much longer than he should have. He needed to be in charge himself, which is why he generally did well and survived when he was in the wilderness away from his commanders, but he was not good at following orders, whether it was an army officer who was overseeing his early expeditions or whether it was president lincoln later in his life. He would defy his superior officers almost all the time. Once, he was courtmartialed for getting into a dispute with his superior officer in the army in california. Susan he went south from oregon to california. You have described his conquest of california as one of the consequential acts in the history of the United States. Why . Steve lets start with trade routes. The capture of the Pacific Coast turned the United States into a Pacific Power with direct trade routes to asia and made possible in a much more direct way the Economic Activity that dominates our economy up to this day and that we argue about up to this day. In a more immediate sense, the conquest of california made the United States rich. It was captured in the late 1840s just in time for the gold rush of 1848 to 1849. The conquest of california and what became several other states as well also made the United States in a very real way part of latin america. The United States captured the northern portion of it along with all the people who lived there. This european power that had been founded on land taken from indians on the coast that faced europe, became a nation that faced another direction and became a much more diverse place with a greater variety of traditions and cultures that were part of the country. It made the United States the nation of the world, which is how we think of america even today. It was becoming possible at that moment of conquest with all of its downsides. Susan how many total expeditions did he make . Steve there were five. Susan one of those was a scouting of california. It read like he was doing real estate speculation. Steve that was the most amazing thing. He went into california in the winter of 1845 and 1846. The president , james k polk, definitely knew he was going. It was not entirely clear what polk wanted him to do there. It was mexican territory. He was going in technically as an illegal immigrant. He told the mexican authorities he was just scouting a route to oregon that would go through california. He just lingered in california. He irritated the mexican authorities more and more by going near their settled areas which he said he would stay away from, and yes, according to his own memoir, he gave a variety of explanations, but according to his memoir, he was looking for land by santa cruz, someplace on the shore where he could live with his mother. He was looking for beachfront property. As so many people who have moved to california since have, that is what he wanted to do and his activities provoked the mexican authorities and started a chain of events that ended up with the United States conquering california. It is a bizarre tale, but theres not a lot of reason to doubt John C Fremonts motivations. He was that selfinvolved from time to time. Susan we have a u. S. Army officer going against orders doing land speculation, which will ultimately enrich himself. Was this not viewed as corrupt . Steve it was viewed differently, partly because it was out of view and partly because the notions of ethics then were not what they would be later. Andrew jackson, as a military officer, dealt in real estate in a grand way in the american south. Some people would accuse him of corruption, but he could kind of laugh it off and see it otherwise. Some people accuse John C Fremont of corruption. Of supporting his own interests as a politician, which he undeniably did. Some people questioned his right to land he obtained from mexicans during the actual war against mexico by getting land grants of dubious legality and fighting to have them upheld in american court. His activities were questioned, but never prosecuted, never fully seen as absolutely wrong. There were things he could do more or less in the open and people would criticize them, but it did not seem to matter. Susan he would send back the journals, or record these journals. I want to go back to that video because there is one other piece. There is a reading from one of the journals. [video clip] today, the country was all pine forest and beautiful weather made our journey delightful. It was too warm at noon for Winter Clothes and the snow was melting rapidly. After a few hours, we came upon a stream in the middle of the forest, which proved to the Principal Branch of fall river. It was occasionally 200 feet wide. Sometimes narrowed to 50 feet. We ascended along the river, which sometimes presented sheets of foaming cascades. Its banks occasionally blackened with masses of rock. Found a good encampment on the verge of an open bottom, which had been an old camping ground for indians. Susan did he keep those journals in realtime or remember when he came back . Steve i think he remembered. I love how marked up that copy of the book is. Susan they were published into books at the time . Steve they were. He definitely kept a lot of notes. On his journey, but what has come down to us are reports of his expeditions that he wrote after he returned to washington with the aid of his wife, who would be his stenographer, secretary, editor, sometimes ghost writer, coauthor, just depending on which bit of writing we are talking about. That makes them not perhaps 100 reliable. They were edited to be pretty. But where facts are checkable, they often check out. Susan you have a quote from her at the beginning of the book that tells the story of her approach to being completely candid. What is the quote . [laughter] steve she wrote, it would hardly do to tell the whole truth about everything. Susan and that telegraph was sending reports around the country. Steve his reports would be excerpted in newspapers. They would be read everywhere. They would also be printed by multiple publishers as popular books. I think of them as bestsellers. I dont know that i can document they would be a New York Times bestseller. The New York Times did not exist yet. But they were very popular, and it is remarkable to look at the story of, for example, mormons who were living in illinois at that time looking for a place to relocate farther west. They in their own newspaper printed excerpts of a fremonts reports about the Great Salt Lake and then had portions of his report read at a public reading inside a Mormon Temple that Brigham Young attended. It seems very clear fremonts explorations in the part of the world influenced the choice of the mormons to go to the salt lake area and create what ultimately became their own state. Susan you tell the story that as jessie became famous through his exploits excuse me, as john became famous, jessie was becoming better known. This is a time when the Abolition Movement was starting up, when women were starting to begin to push for more rights in society. Did she use her fame for those causes . Steve she totally did. It is fascinating she became a symbol of womens rights and of opposition to slavery, because she did not have a deeper record in either of them. 1848 was the time of the Seneca Falls Convention when people declared all were created equal. Jessie fremont was not a participant in that movement. There is a quote from later in which Elizabeth Cady stanton, the great womens rights advocate, asked fremont for a contribution and Jessie Fremont said, i dont know. I think women in their present condition manage men better. She did come around to supporting the right to vote, but she was not a radical feminist in that way. Nevertheless, she was very ambitious and became more public. When her husband was nominated for president , women seized upon her as a symbol. Women had been politically active not only on behalf of themselves, white women i should say, but on behalf of opposition to slavery. Women of all races were participants in the Antislavery Movement and were politically active in that way. When the Republican Party announced itself as a fundamentally antislavery party, they were favoring at least the limited expansion of slavery. Jessie was taken up as a symbol of their cause. Women became involved with the campaign in a way women never had. They attended Campaign Rallies and worked for the election of john fremont even though they could not vote. Susan you mentioned their speculation of california was very successful, they became rich. Steve they did. At the time of the gold rush, john had obtained an enormous amount of land. He encountered a group of mexican migrants coming from sonora, mexico who had experience mining and he sent them to his land to mine for gold. They would share the profits. They found a ridiculous fortune which took him a good 25 years to completely blow. Although eventually, he blew it all. Susan how did they get from republicanto the nomination . Steve johns fame was part of it. In the 1840s, 1850s, excuse me, after a brief period running around europe and california, they resettled in washington, d. C. And they had ambitions. John had briefly been a u. S. Senator. He wanted to do more. People began reaching out to them. This was a period of extreme political division. There were going to be multiple parties running in 1856. The democrats were the most established party. The whigs were falling apart. There were these antiimmigrant groups and there were republicans. Both the democrats and republicans at different times reached out to this guy to be their potential president ial nominee because he was super famous, he was regarded as a gigantic hero, and he had a relatively short political career and that might be the way to get somebody elected. Anybody who had a strong stance on anything would be hated by a large part of the population. The democrats tried to recruit him first. The republicans ultimately made a better offer or seemed a better fit. Jessie was a huge part of this. There were wisemen of washington, lets call them. Francis blair would be the most famous. Susan blair house . Steve it was one of his houses in washington, d. C. He had an estate called silver spring, now the general location of the city just outside washington, d. C. He had been a counselor to multiple democratic president s, was alienated from the party, and because of jessie, who was a friend of his, because of her request, he began advising John C Fremont and helped to craft his campaign as he maneuvered for the first ever republican nomination. Susan for people who decry our politics today, how was the 1860 1856 campaign . Steve brutal and kind of familiar because of the way the issues were fought. This was an election in which people on both sides felt everything was at stake. That is another way the story of the 1850s feels like now. It was not just the fear of losing an election, but the fear of losing for all time. There was a huge demographic change. The north and south had been somewhat evenly balanced, but the north was becoming much more populous, which meant it was more powerful. For the first time, it was possible, plausible anyway, to elect a president with northern votes alone, which would bypass the south, bypass slave states. That is why it was even possible to have an antislavery party. This is what republicans were trying to do, and the south found that threatening. They said if you are going to cut us out of power, we are going to leave the union. They were making that threat in 1856, years before the civil war. Republicans also had a narrative in which they were threatened forever if the south was allowed to expand slavery into western states and gain more power that way. The stakes felt very high. John c fremont was nominated. Very famous guy, widely admired, and his opponents changed that. First, they revealed a secret he tried to keep with his wifes help that he was the illegitimate son of an immigrant. Then they turned him into an immigrant, saying he was born outside the United States and was ineligible to be president. There were birthers in 1856. Then they declared he was secretly a member of an unamerican religion, catholicism, which was treated then as perhaps we have seen islam treated from time to time in our age. He was not catholic. He had spent time with catholics, but stories were spread, and they became hard to deny. This was a moment when republicans were trying to quietly win the votes of antiimmigrant voters. They wanted to win them on opposition to slavery, but they could not upset them too much on this other issue. It was massively damaging in a prejudiced electorate for fremont to be called a catholic. It was a very bitter campaign. Remarkable to me, fremont never denied the accusation and argued that if he had gotten up and said, im not a catholic, that would be admitting a catholic was not fit to be president. He was not willing to do that. Susan James Buchanan won the election. He is on every survey in the bottom position of the worst candidate in u. S. History. Would the country have been better off if John C Fremont had won . Steve there are various theories. There were by contemporaries at the time, maybe, maybe not. You are right about buchanan. What an embarrassment to lose an election to the worst president in history. He was the guy who presided over the drift toward the civil war. But some of fremonts contemporaries, looking back after the civil war, said if john had won in 1856, the south would have seceded then rather than later when lincoln won, and the president would have been John C Fremont instead of Abraham Lincoln. Some of them shudder to think of that. Susan his father in law. Steve his father in law never lived to see the civil war but never supported his president ial campaign, never seemed to think john had the judgment to be president. It is one of the ironies of history that according even to his contemporaries and supporters, John C Fremont did the nation a Great Service by running for president , establishing the Republican Party, trying out the electoral strategy that Abraham Lincoln would succeed with but also by losing at never being president. Susan in your epilogue, you ask, did fremont build a more just and equal nation . Is that the answer to it . Steve i think through their efforts, in some ways in spite of their efforts to the contrary, they did. They were part of a messy, complicated process that ultimately ended with a great leap in human progress, the end of slavery in the United States. It is profoundly ugly how it happened. A lot of the people who were positive actors in that story were racist by any measure we would look at today and even by some measures you would look at then. They are very, very complicated characters. But they had a moment in which they had their hands, john and jessie did, on the tiller of history and helped to move it a little bit, helped give a Pacific Coast to the United States, and made a a statement, however flawed, in 1856, on behalf of freedom. Susan in january of this year, you wrote an opinion piece based on the fremonts for the New York Times. It concluded this way what are the lessons for 2020 . Expect a terrifying year that drives americans to extremes, not losing election but the fear of losing for all time. When politicians exploit such fears, voters can find an antidote by remembering the aftermath of 1856. Whatever the result in 2020 and it is a safe bet close to half of us will consider it a disaster, another election will follow, we hope. What are you saying there . Steve what im saying is that we should try to keep perspective. We are in a time when people fear that an election lost will be a loss for all time. That is something that drove President Trump into office. He told supporters in 2016 and i am quoting, this is your last chance. Your last chance to win an election because if we lose this election, Illegal Immigrants will flood the country and be legalized. Republicans will never win an election again. That was a theory the future president shared with his supporters. There is still that fear on that side. Now you also have democrats who are fearful because of the way the president governs that if he is not defeated soon, the nation will never recover and that they will lose, their side will lose forever. That is something that does push people to extremes. I want to be at least a little bit mindful, at least a little bit hopeful, that there will be, at least there should be, another election after this one and another election after that and always in American History until now, there has. One of the great strengths of democracy is that power of renewal. We can screw up things so much and even maybe not realize in the moment how badly we were screwing them up, but we get another chance and another chance after that as long as we can keep it up. Susan we have about nine minutes left and i want to talk about you. For a lot of people, your voice is so familiar. You have a duty every morning on National Public radio to anchor the morning edition program. How did you find the time . This was an extensively researched book. Which took you on travels around the country. How did you find the time to do both . Steve part of it is my ridiculous work hours. I get to work at 4 00 in the morning. Every day is different. Some days you work 12 hours. 18 hours. The big interview is late or whatever happens. Other days can be shorter. You escape after eight hours. You escape at noon and im in washington, d. C. I can go down the street to a spot not far from where we are now, the library of congress. I might be able to steal two or three hours in the archives. They have amazing collections. You can go in and read, hold in your hand, a letter John C Fremont wrote to one of his political sponsors in 1835. I spent years there for various books. You can hold even older letters Andrew Jackson wrote to his wife in 1814. It is a remarkable collection. It is also possible to search databases of 19th Century Newspapers in ways that were not possible a generation ago. You can access enormous amounts of material. Part of it is i was lucky to be close to where i can do that research and part of it was my day job fed my night job. Given how early i start im not sure which is the day job in day job and which is the night job, but in any case, one fed the other. I am covering the news now, and it feels like it resonates with this news of another time, and the Historical Research absolutely influences what i tell you every day on the radio. What have learned in the process of working for npr absolutely has informed the way i have researched the past. Susan you took your family and recreated some of these trips. What was it like living with these characters . You started in 2016 for these past four years. Did you like them . Steve in some ways yes, in some ways no. I should clarify, its not like i camped out in the woods with my children. You can drive highways on some of the routes fremont took, but i saw the landscape in california and oregon and nevada. It is amazing. I have seen a lot of the other landscape in my previous travels as a journalist. It is aweinspiring. Now, wait a minute. What was your question . Susan it was a double question which is not good in our profession. Your family enjoyed going on these exploits . Steve that was the other thing, did i like these characters . I do not know that i absolutely like them. Jessie is more likable than john. They both have their unpleasant moments. I felt that i related to them in a way, because they were ambitious, because they were trying to have a family at the same time they were being ambitious. I look at john fremont as a cautionary tale. I travel for my work. He would go away for a year. He would go away for a couple of years. Leave his wife at home with the kids. She would try to fit into that life anyway she could. She might travel partway west with him on one of the expeditions or say, i will meet you in california even though it is pretty hairy to get there by ship. When you are a parent and you read such things about another parent, one thing you hope is, gosh, i hope im not like that. I hope i am able to balance my life better and maybe not be away quite so long. It motivates you even more to cut a trip a day short when i can get away with it and get home quicker. You relate to the challenge they faced as human beings and you relate to the politics because they are participants in the same drama we are sitting here as citizens participating in, not just watching, but participating in as members of a democratic society. Sometimes you do ask, what i do that . Would i do that . In many cases, i hope i would not do that. I also want to say for john, you have to admire the guys persistence. He risked his life again and again. You could say it was just for himself, but he believed it was for a higher cause. Susan when you talk about current politics, cspan viewers are well aware of the fact that npr, your organization, and the Trump Administration have had crossed wires over the past few months. The president s budget has cutbacks for npr. What is your take on all of that and how npr gets caught in the crosscurrents . Steve the incident with secretary pompeo and Mary Louise Kelly is pretty clear. She asked him questions. The documentary record shows, as well as others had reported, he knew what subjects would be covered. He did not want to answer certain questions and that was clear. They had a discussion afterward that the secretary has not in any way denied and then accused her of lying, which is obviously false and disproven by the record. That seems fairly clear and well reported. It is part of a larger push and pull between the news media and this administration or any administration. Our job as reporters is to try to get the facts, to try to be honest, to try to be fair, to listen to all sides and sometimes in the process of that, we are going to make people uncomfortable. And that is ok. We will also own our mistakes. Npr is an organization that has made any number of corrections over the years as well. The debate over public funding, i dont have a lot to say. I dont think i need to say a lot about that except there has been tremendous support for npr over the years. Everyone should be clear that the largest Single Source of support for npr is the people who use the service and that is true with station after station. There are local stations in local communities that are supported by people who live there. They bring in npr as part of their individual stations programming. That is the way it works. It has over the years been supported by republicans, democrats, and i will stay out out of the debate as to where it should go next except to say that it has had bipartisan support. Susan you say you got interested in the fremonts from childhood reading. Is there another set of characters for your next book . Steve i do not quite know. I have been fascinated by Abraham Lincoln for a long time. It is tempting to go after lincoln. But do you need to write the 15,000th book about lincoln . I dont know. I might explore that a little bit. One of my problems is that im interested in everything. I am interested in many different phases of history. Having written a couple of books about the years before the civil war, im tempted to go another direction. I dont know where im going to go yet. Susan what is the title from . Imperfect union . Steve it is just something that occurred to me as having a double meaning. It refers to the imperfect union of the time, the division between north and south, between free and slave, and the effort to make it better. It also refers to the union between john and Jessie Fremont. A sometimes difficult marriage with struggles in it and a degree of failure, also extraordinary success. Susan the full title is imperfect union how jessie and john fremont mapped the west, invented celebrity and helped cause the civil war. Thanks for the hour. Steve glad to be here. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] all q a programs are available at our website or as a podcast at cspan. Org. 61 million americans have some form of disability, yet we are in less than 3 of film and tv shows, and the majority of those roles are portrayed by nondisabled actors. Ultimately, as somebody with a disability, we want to see ourselves represented, because ultimately are we not only not seeing ourselves are we not only sing ourselves represented, it will help destigmatize us. Representation gets society used to everybody and makes the world a more inclusive place. An actor found the easter seal disability film challenge and response to sing disabilities underrepresented in front of behind in front of and behind the camera. He will talk about this years winning films. Youru are watching cspan, unfiltered view of government. Americas created by Cable Television companies in 1979. Today, we are brought to you by these television companies, who provide cspan to viewers as a public service. Coming up tonight on cspan, we talked to retiring members of congress. Senator lamaree alexander and then, new york representative elliott angle. After that, the youth vote in the election, and the georgia runoff. Later, author Cheryl Atkinson on er book, slanted. Senator Lamar Alexander was interviewed about his time as a legislator on capitol hill, reflecting on his 18 years serving in the u. S. Senate, and earlier as a governor of tennessee and the education secretary undees