San Francisco doesn’t have a public school named after John C. Fremont, who was court-martialed for mutiny on January 31, 1849. But if it did, it probably would have been on the list of more than 40 schools that the city’s board of education wants to rename.
However, San Francisco – and many other places—have other things named after Fremont, a famous explorer, a military officer, and a politician who ran for President in 1856. There’s a Fremont Street in San Francisco. And Fremont is the person who named the entrance to San Francisco Bay “the Golden Gate” (after one of the Walls of Constantinople). Outside of San Francisco, 4 counties, 14 cities and towns, a fort, three mountains and one mountain pass, an island, a canyon, a reservoir, a river, a National Forest, at least three bridges, two hospitals, two libraries, and at least 16 public schools all bear his name.
This reflects the fact that at one point Fremont was quite famous and popular. It doesn’t show that troops he commanded carried out several massacres of Native Americans and also was court martialed for mutiny on January 31, 1849.
To explore his complex legacy, and in honor of the court martial anniversary, today’s #stampoftheday is a 5-cent stamp, issued in 1898 as part of the Post Office’s second-ever series of commemorative stamps, which were released in conjunction with the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition held in Omaha.
The stamp pictures the young Fremont, who was then an Army officer, planting the American flag on top of a peak in the Rockies in the early 1840s. This occurred on the first of five expeditions he made exploring the west. Fremont, who was known “The Pathfinder,” documented his journeys with scientific and narrative reports, as well maps used by thousands of people heading west on the Oregon Trail.
But Fremont the hero is also the man whose troops massacred many Native Americans. And while he helped Americans get control of Mexican-controlled California, near the end of that conflict he was convicted in court-martial for mutiny and insubordination after a conflict with a senior officer over who was the rightful military governor of California. Fremont resigned and settled in California, where he became rich after gold was found on cheap land he had bought in the Sierra foothills. But he was also embroiled in controversy about his ownership of the land and the rights of those who had been working on it.
These patterns continued for the rest of his life. Fremont was one of the first two U.S. senators from the new state of California but was not reelected in part because he had antagonized so many people.
Running on an anti-slavery platform, in 1856, he was the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party. He carried much of the North but lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan. At the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861, he was given command of Department of the West by President Abraham Lincoln. Although Fremont had successes during his brief tenure there, he ran his department autocratically, and made hasty decisions, most notably issuing an unauthorized emancipation edict. As a result, he was relieved of his command for insubordination by Lincoln. Fremont who later lost much of his wealth in a failed business deal and then the Panic of 1873, died destitute in New York City in 1890.
The “unfailing drama of [Fremont’s] life” was one of “the fiercest tempests and most radiant bursts of sunshine,” wrote noted Fremont biographer Allan Nevins who added, Fremont’s life made people wonder “how could the man who sometimes succeeded so dazzlingly at other times fail so abysmally?” For his part, Lincoln thought the while Fremont was personally honest, his “cardinal mistake” was that “he isolates himself, and allows nobody to see him” which means “he does not know what is going on in the very matter he is dealing with.”
In addition to being an extraordinarily complex figure, Fremont also was a harbinger of two important and timely phenomena, argues NPR host Tom Inskeep in “Imperfect Union: How Jessie And John Fremont Mapped The West, Invented Celebrity, And Helped Cause The Civil War,” which came out earlier this month. The first was that Fremont, apparently guided by his extraordinarily talented wife Jessie, was one of the first people to make use of new communications technologies to enhance his reputation. In an interview with NPR, Inskeep noted, that while many others had gone into the wilderness before him, Fremont came back “with good maps and…dramatic tales of his adventures” which were used to “promote the West to entice Americans to settle it. It was a PR game as much as it was exploration.”
Second, Fremont’s presidential run showed the political power of and dangers related to demographic change. In particular, Fremont showed it might be possible to win the presidency by winning only Northern states, a premise that Abraham Lincoln confirmed four years later. The Republicans, Inskeep noted, were taking “advantage of the demographic change in America, to make what was seen then as a very progressive change: meaningfully oppos[ing] the extension of slavery. This was something the South found very threatening. They threatened to blow up the Union, in effect, if the Republicans ever won power.”
That situation has some parallels with today, he added because many Democrats and progressives are “confident that demographics will bring them to victory” which means “they don’t need to compromise…with conservatives.” And of course, many more conservative, old whites “don’t merely fear losing an election, but fear permanently being in the minority, permanently being defeated. And that is something that Americans of whatever political stripe have difficulty tolerating” even if it means challenging the nation’s very foundations, as southern Democrats did when Lincoln was elected and as some Republicans are doing today.
If Fremont’s name were on a school in San Francisco today, it almost certainly would be removed for his role in the massacres of Native Americans. But, that arguably would be ironic, given his role as a harbinger of changes supported by many of his progressive critics
Stay safe, be well, seek to have more “radiant bursts of sunshine,” fight for justice, and work for peace.