Author: Marguerite Higgins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781893103337
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183
Get Book Here
Book Description
Any history of California is incomplete without the story of this dynamic woman who was one of the state's first notable pioneer figures. Along with her husband, John C. Fremont, Jessie was passionate about abolition, and together their efforts assured California's admission to the Union as a free state.
Author: Jessie Benton Frémont
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252019425
Category : Pioneers
Languages : en
Pages : 664
Get Book Here
Book Description
Bold, talented, and ambitious, Jessie Benton Fremont was one of Victorian America's most controversial women. As the daughter of powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and the wife of John Charles Fremont - western explorer, presidential candidate, and Civil War general - she not only witnessed but struggled to influence many of the major events of her time. Despite the restrictions she faced as a woman, she managed to carve out a vital role for herself as a writer, dedicated abolitionist, and secretary and other self to her mercurial husband. She collaborated on his best-selling exploration reports, served as his behind-the-scenes political advisor and chief Civil War aide, and worked as a lobbyist for Arizona mining interests. In The Letters of Jessie Benton Fremont, Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence create a compelling portrait of this remarkable woman. They supplement their collection of 271 fully annotated letters, selected from 800 they uncovered, with an elegant introduction and seven authoritative chapter essays that elucidate the significant periods of her life. The correspondents range from intimate friends like Elizabeth Blair Lee to public figures like Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothea Dix, John Greenleaf Whittier, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, William T. Sherman, and Theodore Roosevelt. Readers interested in women's studies, the westward movement, the Civil War, and the Gilded Age will find a rich source in The Letters of Jessie Benton Fremont.
Author: Judy Alter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493052667
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Get Book Here
Book Description
Jessie is the story of Jessie Benton Fremont, wife of explorer and politician John C. Fremont—who was instrumental in opening the west. Jessie helped demonstrate that by joining her husband in California to build a home at the time of the Bear Flag rebellion. Judy Alter’s storytelling and impeccable historical research bring the era of the old west to life while highlighting the life of Jessie Benton Fremont.
Author: Steve Inskeep
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 490
Get Book Here
Book Description
Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple John C. Frémont, one of the United States’s leading explorers of the nineteenth century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he was one of the most acclaimed people of the age – known as a wilderness explorer, bestselling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States’s takeover of California from Mexico. He was not even 40 years old when Americans began naming mountains and towns after him. He had perfect timing, exploring the West just as it captured the nation’s attention. But the most important factor in his fame may have been the person who made it all possible: his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont. Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator who was deeply involved in the West, provided her husband with entrée to the highest levels of government and media, and his career reached new heights only a few months after their elopement. During a time when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, Jessie – who herself aspired to roles in exploration and politics – threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. She worked to carefully edit and publicize his accounts of his travels, attracted talented young men to his circle, and lashed out at his enemies. She became her husband’s political adviser, as well as a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party. With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time—westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America. Theirs is a surprisingly modern tale of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of social and technological disruption and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. In Imperfect Union, as Inskeep navigates these deeply transformative years through Jessie and John’s own union, he reveals how the Frémonts’ adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.
Author: Irving Stone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Jessie Benton Frémont
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Get Book Here
Book Description
Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902), the daughter of a Missouri Senator and wife of explorer John Charles Frémont, first came to California in 1849, when she and her young daughter spent six months at her husband's newly-acquired ranch at Mariposas, 140 miles east of San Francisco. The Frémonts also spent the years 1851-1852 and 1857-1861 at the Mariposas ranch before moving to St. Louis during the Civil War. They returned to California in 1887 and made Los Angeles their home for the rest of their lives. A year of American travel (1878) was written by Mrs. Frémont to earn badly-needed money for her family after her husband went bankrupt in 1873. Here she describes her first trip to California in 1849: the voyage and crossing at Chagres, life on the Mariposas ranch, visits to San José and Monterey, the life of women in California, the plight of the Mission Indians, the slavery controversy in the territory, and the Monterey Constitutional Convention of 1849. The book closes with the Frémonts' return to the East when Frémont assumed his seat in the U.S. Senate.
Author: Ilene Stone
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826265073
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 145
Get Book Here
Book Description
When Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, one of Missouri’s first two senators and the great-uncle of the famous regionalist painter of the same name, was expecting his second child in 1824, he hoped it would be a boy. Although he was graced instead with a second girl, he named her Jessie (in honor of his father, Jesse) and raised her more like a son than a nineteenth-century daughter, introducing her to the leading politicians of the day and making sure she received an education that emphasized history, literature, and languages. Jessie and her father were close; Senator Benton was the main influence in her life until 1841, when, at the age of seventeen, she married army explorer John Charles Frémont against her parents’ wishes. Some degree of reconciliation occurred when Benton promoted Frémont’s famous explorations of the Great West. Jessie remained in Missouri with the couple’s young daughter, Lily, but she later helped to write and edit reports of her husband’s adventures, and these narratives spread the lure of the West to nineteenth-century America. In 1849 Jessie and Lily made a harrowing and treacherous journey across the Isthmus of Panama to rendezvous with Frémont in San Francisco. With income from their gold mines, the Frémonts established a home in California. In 1856, with the country on the brink of civil war, Frémont’s antislavery position was instrumental in his being chosen as the Republican Party’s first presidential nominee. Jessie was a staunch campaigner for her husband’s unsuccessful presidential bid, which her father, a lifelong Democrat, refused to endorse. When President Lincoln appointed Frémont as the commander of the Department of the West in 1861, Jessie served as his unofficial aide and closest adviser. In a particularly dramatic incident, she rushed to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with Lincoln in which she argued passionately for her husband’s proposal to emancipate the slaves in Missouri. After the Civil War, the Frémonts’ financial situation took a downturn. Undaunted, Jessie supported the family by writing about her adventures in the American West in such works as A Year of American Travel and Souvenirs of My Time. Like many women of her era, Jessie lived her ambitions largely through her husband’s career, but she also made a name for herself as a writer and a firm opponent of slavery.
Author: Tom Chaffin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806146079
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 736
Get Book Here
Book Description
“The most eloquent, understanding, and yet very candid biography of Frémont that has appeared to date”—Howard R. Lamar, Yale University The career of John Charles Frémont (1813–90) ties together the full breadth of American expansionism from its eighteenth-century origins through its culmination in the Gilded Age. Tom Chaffin's biography demonstrates Frémont's vital importance to the history of American empire, and illuminates his role in shattering long-held myths about the ecology and habitability of the American West. As the most celebrated American explorer and mapper of his time, Frémont stood at the center of the vast federal project of western exploration and conquest. His expeditions between 1838 and 1854 captured the public's imagination, inspired Americans to accept their nation's destiny as a vast continental empire, and earned him his enduring sobriquet, the Pathfinder. But Frémont was more than an explorer. Chaffin's dramatic narrative includes Frémont's varied experiences as an entrepreneur, abolitionist, Civil War general, husband to the remarkable Jessie Benton Frémont, two-time Republican presidential candidate, and Gilded Age aristocrat. This new paperback edition of Pathfinder features a new, additional, updated introduction by the author.
Author: Sally Denton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 506
Get Book Here
Book Description
Award-winning historian Denton restores the reputations of John and Jessie Fremont--political advisor, senator, and the first candidate to oppose slavery--and places them where they belong: at the center of this country's history.
Author: John Bicknell
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613738005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book Here
Book Description
The election of 1856 was the most violent peacetime election in American history. Amid all the violence, the campaign of the new Republican Party, headed by famed explorer John C. Frémont, offered a ray of hope that had never before been seen in the politics of the nation—a major party dedicated to limiting the spread of slavery. For the first time, women and African Americans became actively engaged in a presidential contest, and the candidate's wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, played a central role in both planning and executing strategy while being a public face of the campaign. The 1856 campaign was also run against the backdrop of a country on the move, with settlers continuing to spread westward facing unimagined horrors, a terrible natural disaster that took hundreds of lives in the South, and one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history, which set the stage for the Civil War. Frémont lost, but his strong showing in the North proved that a sectional party could win a national election, blazing the trail for Abraham Lincoln's victory four years later.
