They have him cornered on a state park sign.
They have him cornered on a state park sign.
I t took 170 years, but California Democrats may finally have John C. Frémont surrounded.
They tried elections. They tried newspapers. They accused him of everything from military adventurism to Catholicism, cannibalism, and maintaining a “public harem.” They defeated him when he ran for president in 1856. Still, the man kept turning up on maps.
Now Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration has found the weapon that James Buchanan lacked: the California State Park and Recreation Commission.
The state’s parks department announced last week that it wants to strip Frémont’s name from Fremont Peak State Park in San Benito County and rename it tooyohtak State Park, after a Mutsun word translated as “place of the bumblebee.” The proposal is part of Sacramento’s “Reexamining Our Past” initiative and follows a request from the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. There will be public comment before the commission acts.
One admires the persistence. Frémont has been causing Democrats trouble since there were barely Democrats — or Republicans — in California.
Born in Georgia in 1813, Frémont became one of the great explorers of the American West. His expeditions mapped routes, mountains, rivers, and passes and produced information used by thousands of emigrants heading west. The Library of Congress credits those expeditions with substantially expanding American knowledge of Western geography.
Then he got involved in California, arriving during the upheavals that produced the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846. He encouraged the American settlers to overthrow their Mexican overlords, joined their short-lived California Republic and, on July 5, took command of its military forces. Hours later, the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron sailed into Monterey Bay and the Stars and Stripes replaced the Bear Flag as word arrived that the United States and Mexico were formally at war. Frémont and his men became part of the American military effort that ended with California in U.S. hands.
When California entered the union in 1850, it did so — thanks in part to Frémont — as a free state. Frémont became one of California’s first two U.S. senators. Then he helped shape the anti-slavery movement that was breaking apart the old national party system. In 1856, the new Republican Party made him its first presidential nominee on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery.
Democrats responded with their usual restraint and civility. California’s Democratic press denounced Frémont’s followers as “Black Republicans.” One San Francisco Democratic paper warned that Republicans were “moving heaven and earth to carry California” and had “paid agents and hireling spies all over the state.”
Other attacks were livelier. As John Bicknell recounts in his history of the 1856 campaign, the Los Angeles Star entertained its mostly Democratic Party readers with allegations involving executions during the Bear Flag Revolt, cannibalism, Frémont’s alleged “public harem,” and, perhaps most damning in the politics of the period, rumors that he was Catholic.
Democrats did defeat Frémont. James Buchanan won nationally and carried California, where Frémont finished third behind Buchanan and Millard Fillmore, so let us stipulate that the Democratic Party has beaten John C. Frémont before.
The trouble was what happened afterward. Buchanan presided over the country’s descent toward secession, and Frémont went off to fight for the Union.
In Missouri in August 1861, as a Union general, he issued an emancipation order freeing slaves belonging to Confederates. Abraham Lincoln thought Frémont had moved too far, too fast. Frémont refused Lincoln’s request to modify the order, so Lincoln revoked it and eventually removed him from command. The episode was militarily and politically messy. It was also nearly a year before Lincoln announced his own Emancipation Proclamation.
Frémont thus managed the improbable feat of being too aggressively anti-slavery for Abraham Lincoln.
None of this makes him a saint. Frémont participated in terrible violence against Native Californians, most notoriously the 1846 Sacramento River massacre. He could be reckless, ambitious, and insubordinate. He was court-martialed after the conquest of California and later lost Lincoln’s confidence. His record deserves the unvarnished treatment that serious history requires.
But that is precisely what makes Sacramento’s latest exercise so dreary.
The old textbooks sometimes turned historical figures into marble heroes. The fashionable correction is to turn them into cardboard villains. Frémont is particularly inconvenient because he refuses to cooperate with either treatment. He was an explorer and conqueror, an anti-slavery politician and military adventurer, a Union general and an insubordinate subordinate, a participant in violence against Indians, and a man who tried to abolish slavery before the president who became synonymous with emancipation was ready to do it.
Nor does the pre-European history support the state’s implicit replacement of a fallen American hero with an immaculate indigenous alternative. These earlier communities were human societies, not inhabitants of a prelapsarian California. They fought over territory and resources, raided rival communities, took captives, and practiced forms of slavery. Anthropologists have described what they like to call “wife-stealing” as one recurring cause of warfare: put into the same moral vocabulary now routinely applied to Frémont and other 19th-century Americans, armed raids in which women were seized and compelled into sexual unions involved kidnapping, slavery, and sexual assault. We should not soften those acts merely because the perpetrators were Indigenous and the victims lived before European contact.
None of that excuses what came afterward. Native Californians suffered coercion, disease, and cultural destruction under the missions, dispossession after Mexican secularization, and killing, forced labor, and displacement under American rule. But if California is going to “reexamine” history, the same standard ought to run in both directions. Frémont deserves the whole record. So do the people whose name the state proposes to put in his place. “Reexamining our past” ought to involve more examining and less erasing.
California Democrats prefer to ignore the nuance required in this situation. Frémont was the first presidential nominee of the party created principally to stop the expansion of slavery. California Democrats campaigned against him. More than 150 years later, their political descendants have finally found terrain on which Frémont cannot maneuver, explore, fight, issue an emancipation order, or talk back to headquarters.
They have him cornered on a state park sign. Congratulations on the rematch, Governor Newsom.