Thanks, everyone. Good day. Im delighted to be here in San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Particularly to talk about jesse and John Freemont who had so much to do with the creation of california as we know it and so much to do with the creation of San Francisco as we know it. I got in to San Francisco about 2 30 a. M. On a delayed flight from los angeles, got a couple of hours of sleep at an Airport Hotel and then woke up again because i was to be picked up by a car and driven up the highway into San Francisco to do alive radio thing on to do a live radio thing on kqed. The thing about live radio is it begins at an exact time. The thing about going through San Francisco traffic is that youre really not going to make your exact time. And so i was supposed to be 8 00 a. M. Pacific time that i would be there for this National Radio hit, and at 8 00 a. M. , im still on the road, in the back of this car, creeping up the freeway at, i dont know, 7, 9 milesanhour, whatever it was, but i am looking out the right side of the car and San Francisco bay is out there, and the city of San Francisco, the Southern Suburbs is spreading out in the hills in front of me, and im missing my deadline, which is a horrifying thing for a journalist to do, but im just thinking to myself yeah this is the world the freemonts made. For better, sometimes for worse. But it is one of the most wonderful cities. I seize any opportunity to get here. I was delighted to be researching this book in part because i knew it would give me an excuse to do some research in and around San Francisco. It is the story of two people. Its the story of a marriage and their ambitions and adventures at a time when the United States was deeply divided and seemed to be in danger of coming apart. Imperfect union refers to the union of american states at a time when some had outlawed slavery and others embraced it. It also refers to the marriage of a very unusual couple who strove to accomplish and achieve thaul they could in that very divisive time achieve all they could in a very divisive time. John fremont was an explorer, a man who in the 1840s and 50s, in a series of expeditions started in st. Louis missouri which was then the western most city of any consequence in the United States and went out as a u. S. Army officer, hired skilled civilians to go along with him and mapped the oregon trail, mapped other routes, went out west again and again, ultimately ended up by chance in california, was intrigued as people are when they come to california and then returned a couple of years later, a year later to this mexican controlled territory with a party of 60 gunmen and began the process of taking over california from mexico and making it part of the United States. As an explorer, he did not actually discover that much that was new. He was traveling across a land that had been traversed by native nations for centuries, that had been explored by spaniards, that had been explored by fir trappers. He didnt find all that was actually new, but he made it accessible, making good maps and he was coming back to east where he was based, washington, d. C. , and writing accounts of his adventures. His job was not really to explore the west, but to promote the west, to entice american settlers to move to the west because that was part of the process of taking over that territory and ensuring that it would become part of the United States. In the process of promoting the American West in the 1840s and 50s, he also promoted himself. He would write these accounts of his adventures that were just official u. S. Army reports, but he would write them like a novel, and he would describe the landscape of the Rocky Mountains and of the oregon trail and of the great basin which he named the vast area ringed in by mountains that encompasses most of nevada and utah and parts of several other states. He would also describe california very beautifully, and he became such an extraordinarily famous and admired individual through his writings and his apparent achievements, that in 1850, there was a magazine that named john c. Fremont as one of the three most important world historical figures since jesus christ. It was kind of an american centric list. The first of the three figures was christopher columbus, who discovered america as they would have said then, established european contact with america, would be a better way to phrase it, i guess. The second was george washington, the founder of this country, and then the third was john c. Fremont, whose greatest achievement who got him on the list was his role, his reputation as the conquerer of california, adding eldorado as the magazine described it to the union, to the United States. He had real talent, real courage, real fortitude, and real accomplishments. But as i write here, the most important factor in fremonts fame may have been the person who made it possible for him to take full advantage of both his talent and the times, Jesse Benton Fremont, his wife. Born when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, jesse found a way to chart her own course. The daughter of a senator who was deeply involved in the west, she provided her previously unknown husband with entree to the highest levels of the government and media. It was no coincidence that his career began to soar a few months after they eloped, when he was 28 and she was 17. I thought as many others did, said one of their critics, that Jesse Benton Fremont was the better man of the two. She helped to write his famous reports and some of his letters, serving as secretary, editor, writing partner and occasional ghost writer. She amplified his talent for selfpromotion, working with news editors to publicize his journeys. She became his political advisor. She attracted talented young men to his circle, promoted friends and lashed out at enemies. She carried on conversations with senators twice her age, offered her opinions to president s even when they didnt agree with her and was gradually recognized as a Political Force in her own right. Her timing was as perfect as her husbands. She was pushing the boundaries of women assigned roles just as women were beginning to demand a larger place in national life. In the 1840s and 50s, women were holding conventions to call for Voting Rights and also campaigning against slavery. The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s to fight the expansion of slavery and it captured some of their energy. In 1856, the republicans for the first time nominated a president ial candidate, and in seeking someone heroic and famous and also with a short political record, too bind their party together, they nominated John Charles Fremont. He was the first nominee ever to run for president on the Republican Party ticket, an antislavery candidate. And when john was nominated for president , jesse became part of the campaign in ways that no woman ever had. Her husbands Campaign Literature featured songs of praise for jesse. It nearly seemed like they were running for president. Women attended Campaign Rallies even though they couldnt vote. Thousands of republicans flocked to the Fremont House for a glimpse of john at the balcony and refused to leave until they saw jesse too. Madame fremont, they cried, jesse, jesse, give us jesse. A newspaper said she could have been elected queen. She achieved celebrity much like her husbands with fame out of proportion to her accomplishments, unless we count her husbands fame among those accomplishments. This is to me a very modern story because it is a story about rugged wilderness challenges, but also a story about fame, about what you make of the work that you do, about reputation. It was a time when the news media were expanding, when democracy was flourishing, when great issues were being debated, and the premonth fremonts put themselves at the center of it all. The first thing that had to happen was the exploration, the map making of the west. John c. Fremont had a reputation, built a reputation as an utterly fearless adventurer who surmounted one difficulty after another. Although he was also in reality a rather erratic leader. He would hire groups of civilians, maybe a couple dozen, sometimes more, in st. Louis and head out into the wilderness. In 1842, in the First Expedition that he commanded, he went up the oregon trail as far as what is now wyoming, went to the Continental Divide there which was supposed to be his end point, and at that point, his mission was effectively done, and he was supposed to go back home by some other route doing some more map making along the way. But reaching the Continental Divide for him turned out to be kind of anticlimactic, it was a little boring. He was in a pass where it was hard to even figure out where the Continental Divide was, and he decided the thing he ought to do was climb the tallest mountain he could see. He took some of his men and went up the highest mountain he could see, and they decided partway up to abandon the mules they had been taking because the ground was getting rough and the peak seemed like it was just right there, and so they left behind with the mules, their food, most of their other supplies and even their coats. It was summer, but they are getting at some altitude. It didnt take long to understand that they had misread the ground ahead of them. What looked like a direct ascent concealed more valleys that they needed to navigate. They were reaching altitudes where snow covered the ground, even in august, and one of the men nearly slid off a snowy slope and over a precipice to his death. He saved himself only by dropping flat on the surface to gain traction. Exhausted in the thin air, the party stopped for the night, just below the tree line, around 10,000 feet above sea level. They tried to hunt a Mountain Goat for dinner. And failed. They tried to sleep without their blankets on a slab of granite. Lieutenant fremont began to experience severe headaches and to vomit. His leadership grew erratic the next day. He let his party lose cohesion as they clamored uphill across broken ground. They were taking divergence into the rocks and snow which meant they couldnt help one another. The map maker on the expedition, a german immigrant was walking alone at the top of a snowy slope when he lost his footing and began sliding. There was no way to stop. He continued some 200 feet before he crashed into rocks at the bottom and was lucky to somersault over the first rock in a way that broke no bones. After ward, he was found by a black man who was a member of the expedition, who brought word that lieutenant fremont was vomiting again as were others. There was a message that he should try to reach the summit. A barometer was used to measure the altitude of the mountain. He refused to go on, went back to camp. He assumed that this meant that the effort to reach the summit was done. In camp, some men managed to go down and bring up a little bit of food, so they had their first meal in nearly two days. Then they had a night sleep. And he woke up in the morning expecting everyone would descend the mountain but discovered otherwise. John reminded him that they had brought along a bottle of brandy. Well, mr. Proyce i hope we shall have a glass on top of the mountain, which was his way of saying he intended to keep climbing. Fremont took extraordinary risks well beyond what seemed necessary for the mission at hand and gained certain rewards. They did reach the top of the mountain, planted an American Flag and john in a brilliant bit of Public Relations looking around at the mountains around him, decided without any evidence whatsoever that he had just climbed the highest peak in all of north america. [laughter] later exploration revealed that it was not among the top 100 peaks in the Rocky Mountains, but it took a long time to realize that. This was 1842. 14 years later, when he ran for president , there were still images being published of him surmounting the highest point in the Rocky Mountains. It was part of his campaign biography, part of his fame, part of why he was nominated for president. In spreading word of his accomplishments, jessie was crucial. His editor, the first person who would hear his story when he came back, a person who would sometimes take dictation of the stories that he had to tell, a person who would receive his letters, that he would occasionally manage to send by various means from out west, she would receive them in washington and take them to newspaper editors and have them published, to publicize his various achievements. He seemed to know that this was going to be the case, and some of his letters read like press releases. Her letters read like love letters. His letters read like press releases. Imperfect union. But they took advantage of the fact that there was a quickening national conversation, and the phone that just rang is actually symbolic and very good for this moment. Dont feel embarrassed about that at all because this is a period when weekly newspapers, which had been around in america for a long time, were becoming daily newspapers. There had always been a few of them, but there were more and more daily newspapers, and the information in the papers was being accelerated more and more because of the invention of the telegraph. In 1844, samuel f. B. Morris succeeded in stringing copper wires from washington, d. C. In the United States capital in fact, all the way up to baltimore, where the Democratic National convention was being held, and he had a telegrapher at the baltimore end send word of each development at the convention back to morris himself in washington, and morris was deciphering his own code that bears his name and reading aloud to a crowd of eventually hundreds of people at the capital the latest news developments. It was like he was the first news anchor. There are remarkable accounts of people marvelling at this idea of instant communication. The annihilation of space, as more than one person called it. Who could imagine the possibilities once people could learn about any event anywhere instantly . Professor morses telegraph, a correspondent for the New York Herald said has originated in the mind a new species of consciousness, never before was anyone conscious, and knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city, 40 or 100 or 500 miles off. In reading that paragraph, we realize that were witnessing there in 1844 the dawn of the era that were living in today, that were swamped by today, that were struggling with today, and it is instructive to see how people struggled with it at the very beginning. Because there was this development that seemed as surely as any number of Silicon Valley firms today, to hold out the possibility of bringing the world closer together, of improving our understanding of each other. While it did that in many ways, there are also many ways in which it drove the world apart. This became apparent by the president ial campaign of 1856, the campaign in which John Charles Fremont was nominated by the republicans as an antislavery candidate in the first election where there was a major party that was meaningfully opposed to the spread of human slavery. Always before then, it had been necessary for any National Party to appeal for southern votes to have any chance of winning, so they tried very hard to remain silent about slavery or to be actively pro slavery. This party was different. Northerners had realized that there was a demographic change going on in america, that the northern population had grown much more rapidly than in the south, that that created an opportunity to elect a president with northern votes alone s, which made it a very dangerous because the south viewed that as an effort to cut them out of power, to profoundly threaten the institution around which they had structured their economy and their society, and they said many southerners said that if republicans were ever to win an election, they would leave the union. They would secede from the union. There was a battle going on over the western states, over whether slavery should be allowed to spread in the western states. There was violence in kansas, which was proposed to be a New Territory that antislavery and pro Slavery Forces were fighting over. And the dispute over kansas triggered Political Violence in washington itself. Republican senator Charles Sumner of massachusetts delivered a lengthy talk in may of 1856 on what he called the crime of kansas, and in an especially withering passage, he mocked a South Carolina senator named Andrew Butler for his incoherent phrases and the loose expectoration of his speech while opposing kansas as a free state. There was sumner said no possible deviation from truth, which he did not make. Can you imagine the idea of a politician [laughter] deviating from the truth . Senator butler was not present for this tirade, but butlers nephew learned of