|
Early life Frémont was born in Savannah, Georgia. His ancestry is disputed by historians. According to the 1902 genealogy of the Frémont family, he was the son of Anne Beverley Whiting, a prominent Virginia society woman, who remarried to Louis-René Frémont, a French refugee and French teacher from Norfolk on May 14, 1807. Louis-René Frémont was the son of Jean-Louis Frémont, a Québec City merchant, who was the immigrant son of Charles-Louis Frémont from Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris. H.W. Brands, however, in his biography of Andrew Jackson, states that Fremont was the son of Anne and Charles Fremon, and that Fremont added the accented "e" and the "t" to his name later in life. John Charles Frémont later married Jessie Benton, the favorite daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, who was a leading Democrat and a slaveowner. Expeditions to the West Frémont assisted and led multiple surveying expeditions through the western territory of the United States. In 1838 and 1839 he assisted Joseph Nicollet in exploring the lands between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and in 1841, with training from Nicollet, he mapped portions of the Des Moines River. From 1841 to 1846 he and his guide Kit Carson led exploration parties on the Oregon Trail and into the Sierra Nevada. During his expeditions in the Sierra Nevada, it is generally acknowledged that Frémont became the first Caucasian to view Lake Tahoe. He is also credited with determining that the Great Basin had no outlet to the sea. He also mapped volcanoes such as Mount St. Helens. In 1846 he was Lieutenant Colonel of the U.S. Mounted Rifles (a predecessor of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment). In late 1846 Frémont, acting under orders from Commodore Robert F. Stockton, led a military expedition of 300 men to capture Santa Barbara, California, during the Mexican-American War. He led his unit over the Santa Ynez Mountains at San Marcos Pass and captured the Presidio, and the town. General Pico, recognizing that the war was lost, later surrendered to him rather than incur casualties. Politics
Civil War Frémont was a major general in the American Civil War and served a controversial term as commander of the Army's Department of the West from May to November 1861. Frémont replaced William S. Harney who had negotiated the Harney-Price Truce which permitted Missouri to remain neutral in the conflict as long as it did not send men or supplies to either side. Frémont ordered his General Nathaniel Lyon to formally bring Missouri into the Union cause. Lyon had been named the temporary commander of the Department of the West to succeed Harney before Frémont ultimately replaced Lyon. Lyon in a series of battles evicted Governor Claiborne Jackson and installed a pro-Union government. After Lyon was killed in the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August Frémont imposed martial law in the state, confiscating private property of secessionists and emancipating the state's slaves. Abraham Lincoln, fearing the order would tip Missouri (and other slave states in Union control) to the southern cause, asked Frémont to revise the order. Frémont refused and sent his wife to plead the case. Lincoln responded by revoking the proclamation and relieving Frémont of command on November 2, 1861. In March 1862 he was re-appointed to a different post (in West Virginia), but lost several battles to Stonewall Jackson and resigned his post. Historian James Ford Rhodes characterizes Frémont's behavior in the early stages of the war: Later life Frémont was briefly the candidate of the Radical Republicans, a group of hard-line abolitionists upset with Lincoln's position toward slavery. The campaign was abandoned in September 1864. In 1866, Frémont reorganized the assets of the Pacific Railroad as the Southwest Pacific Railroad, which a year later was repossessed by the U.S. state of Missouri.•. Frémont was appointed Governor of the Arizona Territory from 1878 to 1881. He died of peritonitis in a hotel in New York City and is buried in Rockland Cemetery, Piermont-on-Hudson, New York. Legacy Frémont collected a number of plants on his expeditions, including the first recorded discovery of the Single-leaf Pinyon by a Caucasian. The standard botanical author abbreviation Frém. is applied to plants he described. Many places are named for him (See Fremont). Four U.S. states named counties in his honor: Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, and Wyoming. Several cities are also named after him, such as Fremont, California, Fremont, Michigan, Fremont, Nebraska, and Fremont, New Hampshire. Likewise, Fremont Peak in the Wind River Mountains is also named for the explorer. Fremont Street in Las Vegas, Nevada is named in his honor, as are streets in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Kiel, Wisconsin, Manhattan, Kansas, and Portland, Oregon. Portland also has several other locations named after Frémont, such as Fremont Bridge. Other places named for him include John C. Fremont Senior High School and the John C. Fremont Branch Library, located on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California, and John C. Fremont Junior High School in Mesa, Arizona. In James Michener's novel SPACE, much of the action occurs in the fictional state of Frémont, and several of the novel's main characters are natives of this state. The novel's endpapers include a map of the United States which shows the precise borders of Michener's fictional Frémont, but (necessarily) omits the borders of the neighboring states. The fictional Frémont's location is roughly correspondent to our world's Nebraska. Notes | ||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
 |
|
| |