Power duo impacts a young America

WE like to think of so-called power couples as a contemporary phenomenon, but they’ve turned up with fair regularity throughout history. Caesar and Cleopatra, Justinian and Theodora, Ferdinand and Isabella come easily to mind, as well as John and Abigail Adams, James and Dolly Madison and, more recently, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Journalist and historical writer Sally Denton’s alternately fascinating and frustrating double biography of John C. Fremont and his wife, Jessie Benton, makes a convincing case that they ought to be added to the list. The fascinating part of her account is summed up well in the title, “Passion and Principle.” Its frustrating aspects are pretty well summed up in the endless, grandiloquent subtitle’s description of them as “The Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America.”

To start with, the Fremonts were interesting and influential people whose role in 19th century American history was more influential than is generally credited, but they didn’t “shape” their turbulent and complex era any more than any other couple did. There are two great perils for a biographer: One is coming to loathe the subject, and the other is falling in love with them.

Denton has fallen into the latter trap, and it’s a mark of how fresh and strong so much of her research is that -- most of the time -- a reader is willing to overlook it for the sake of the story of two truly gripping lives.

John C. Fremont is, of course, remembered as the explorer of the Great Basin and cartographer of the roads West, exploits that would earn him the title “Pathfinder.” Californians recall him as the American military man who covertly scouted what was then a Mexican province, then played a pivotal role in the fighting here that was part of the war with Mexico. He negotiated the Treaty of Cahuenga that ended the fighting. He later served as California’s first U.S. senator, then -- as one of the country’s most prominent abolitionists -- ran for president in 1856 as the Republican Party’s first candidate, losing to James Buchanan.

During the Civil War, Fremont served as a Union general and was relieved of his military governorship in Missouri by Abraham Lincoln after he unilaterally emancipated the state’s slaves. (His actions there, however, served as a kind of model for Lincoln’s more gradualist journey to emancipation.) Fremont came within a hairsbreadth of running against Lincoln as the radical Republicans’ candidate. After the war, Fremont suffered a series of financial reverses after making a fortune in the California gold rush, did a stint as governor of Arizona and, finally, died a financial failure.

Denton sheds much new light on all this and goes a long way toward overturning recent appraisals of Fremont as a poseur and confidence man. Her real contribution, though, is in her portrait of Jessie, who emerges as an altogether remarkable woman: beautiful, accomplished, intelligent and her husband’s muse, partner and conscience through a devoted, if turbulent, 50-year marriage. She was the doted-upon daughter of the great Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, whose promotion of “Manifest Destiny” found its agent in Fremont.

Jessie was sophisticated, spoke five languages and was politically adroit. When, at 15, she fell in love with the older Fremont, an illegitimate son, she scorned a proposal from then-President Martin Van Buren, who was 42 years her senior. Throughout their long marriage, she was John’s emotional and political partner in every sense and, quite often, his conscience. Denton makes a good case that it was Jessie who guided John into the principled opposition to slavery that set him apart among the era’s politicians.

That’s the fascinating part. The frustrating aspect of this book has to do with the author’s recourse to florid prose -- perhaps an ill-considered evocation of her 19th century sources -- and sometimes unsteady grasp of the facts, accompanied by tin-eared characterizations.

Jessie’s father, for instance, is “the most powerful senator in America.” He was a towering figure, but so too were his contemporaries, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. We’re floridly informed that: “In the culture of violence in the backwoods ‘west,’ it was inevitable that the six-foot-tall, hot-headed Benton would partake in his share of the duels that prevailed throughout the country.” Apparently, short guys didn’t duel.

Still, as eager as Denton is to make Benton -- who once shot Andrew Jackson -- into someone suited to contemporary sensibilities, here’s what he once said to a senatorial opponent who accused him of picking a quarrel: “I never quarrel, sir, but I do fight, sir, and when I fight, sir, a funeral follows, sir.”

Denton, so exquisitely and justifiably sensitive to the Fremonts’ deeply felt opposition to slavery, can be alarmingly tin-eared when it comes to other non-Anglo Americans. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 is characterized as “highly unpopular among the Cherokees.”

Ya think?

Maybe that’s why it’s regarded as the prototype of modern “ethnic cleansing” and their descendants still recall their ancestors’ forced exodus from their homeland as the “Trail of Tears.”

Denton is similarly cavalier regarding “the gruesome revenge” Fremont and his men exacted on May 10, 1846, after three of their number were killed by native Americans. The raiders were almost certainly Modocs and not Klamaths, as Denton writes, but Fremont and his party attacked and burned the nearby fishing village of Dokdokwas and murdered every Klamath man, woman and child living there. “Gruesome,” indeed.

Denton’s characterization of Mexico in the 1840s as not really a nation may raise a few eyebrows as will her description of the Californios as fun-loving and, essentially, feckless. That’s particularly true since she passes in silence over Fremont’s reprisal killing later that same year of three innocent prisoners -- Jose Berreyesa and his teenage nephews, Francisco and Ramon De Haro. The boys were the sons of San Francisco’s alcalde, and bad feeling over the executions probably denied Fremont election as California’s first American governor.

Some large measure of Denton’s authorial ebullience turns on the conviction that Jessie Fremont has not simply been forgotten in the way that most 19th century American luminaries have been but that she’s also been slighted. Her husband ended life in material, if not moral, failure, and history -- as we’re so often reminded -- is written by the winners. Thus, “Passion and Principle” seems to present itself not just as an act of recovery but of rehabilitation and justice.

As Denton writes: “Historiography has depicted John as a glory-seeking fraud and Jessie as a manipulative and overly ambitious shrew.... Not since George and Elizabeth Custer -- and evocative of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- has an American political couple so fascinated and baffled the public.”

It’s interesting that, at the time of Jessie’s death, her qualities were, in many quarters, recognized and appreciated. When her husband’s death left her penniless and without his pension, Congress responded to a national newspaper campaign and voted her a yearly stipend.

Though Denton does not quote it, the Bookman, an influential London literary magazine whose contributors included W.B. Yeats, published a long and admiring obituary that began: “In the death of Mrs. Jesse Benton Fremont ... the country has lost a woman who, by virtue of the important part she played in days when history was being made and her prominence through a long career, came to be known as ‘the first lady of the land’.... .As the wife of Fremont, widely known as the ‘Pathfinder,’ she made as well as shared his career. He explored, but she made his exploration possible.... “ That same obituary also praises Jessie for understanding and accepting a woman’s role in a great man’s life, for her willingness to be “the power behind the throne.” One of the real strengths of Denton’s book is her vivid portrayal of how the Fremonts’ marriage stood apart from such conventions and how adroitly husband and wife navigated them. Obviously, though, the passage exacted its costs.

Toward the end of her life, Denton writes, Jessie “wistfully” quoted Tennyson’s line: “For man is man and master of his fate,” then went on to add, “That is poetry. When one is not a man but woman, you follow in the wake of both man and fate, and the prose of life proves one does not so easily be ‘master’ of fate.”

timothy.rutten@latimes.com