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Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War
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About This Book
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 In 1813, John Frémont was born a nobody. His mother conceived him out of wedlock, and at age 13, in Charleston, South Carolina, he was sent to work to support her and his siblings. But, via the assistance of series of mentors, he rose from obscurity, making his way to Washington, before joining the upper echelons of society by marrying the daughter of an influential senator, Thomas Hart Benton, who only reluctantly blessed their union. Jessie Benton Frémont, as she came to be known, had grown up in the mold of her father, knowing personally then President Andrew Jackson, but her ambition was frustrated. She had limited options for own career advancement, at a time when women could not yet vote let alone hold public office. But she threw herself passionately into the promotion of her husband who rose to become one of the most famous men of the era. John travelled thousands of miles on horseback, at times with an almost willful indifference to his safety and that of the other members of his expeditions, many of whom would perish, in an effort to map the uncharted American West. The notes and letters he would send home Jessie skillfully shaped into dramatic reports and bestselling books. She became his political adviser, and was gradually recognized as a political force in her own right. Thus she helped lift John to a seat in the Senate, and ultimately to propel him, in 1856, to become the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican party. With rare detail and in consummate style, Inskeep tells this story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents seemed somehow intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. The Frémonts came to be influential to not one but three great social movements of the times--westward settlement, women's rights and opposition to slavery. Their adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.
Reviews
"And as a journalist, Inskeep recognizes spin when he sees it."
"Inskeep tells the Frémonts' story with razor-sharp insight and a narrative drive that draws in readers and keeps the pages turning ..."
"a pure delight to read, but beneath Inskeep's stylish sentences lurk astute insights, illuminating the outsized role celebrity plays in our culture, the outward triumphs and quiet pain it inflicted on two lives that left an indelible, if neglected, mark on our politics."
"Throughout this volume are vivid descriptions of the American landscape ..."
"Certainly, [John Frémont] presents an awkward, and anticlimactic, subject for a biographer—a failure as a Civil War commander, after contesting Lincoln's 1864 re-election, the balance of his life was a fortune-draining diminuendo of failed business ventures that left him and Jessie destitute."
"Failures and near misses are rife ..."
"Regardless of where your sympathies lie regarding the slippery Frémonts, there's no denying the new importance Inskeep has given them ..."
"But his absorbing tale of the Frémonts and their marriage will fascinate readers, many of whom know John only as the namesake of a local school or street or even their hometown itself ..."
"The irony is that the Frémonts, pioneers of publicity as much as of the American frontier, are now largely forgotten, and in need of salvage operations like Inskeep's good one."
"Grant, and Horace Greeley."
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