Imperfect Union Read online

  One of the earliest stories of her childhood illustrated Jessie’s bond with her father. When Jessie was three, she received a new dress—purple, with chinchilla trim that she could run her fingers through. Her five-year-old sister, Elizabeth, received a matching outfit, which so excited the girls that they put on their finery and raced through the house to show their father. Finding him absent from the home library where he usually worked, they noticed piles of paper there. Jessie seized some of the pages and began scribbling with a red pencil and scattering them about the room. Elizabeth followed her example, though Jessie thought she was “timid and nervous” about it. Not until their father returned did they discover that they were defacing one of Senator Benton’s speeches. “Who did this?” he demanded when he returned.

  Jessie stalled for time. “Do you really want to know?”

  He said he did, and she came up with an answer that melted his anger: “It’s a little girl who cries, ‘Hurrah for Jackson!’” Andrew Jackson was the candidate her father was supporting in the next presidential election. The ploy worked: her father embraced her.

  This family story, as Jessie wrote it down much later, suggested the way she viewed herself. She was assertive and self-confident, leading her older sister rather than being led. She made her own rules and sometimes got away with it, even though men ruled her world. She was politically astute—knowing Senator Benton’s candidate preference and sensing that she could disarm him by endorsing it. Above all, she was devoted to her father, and he to her. “Catching me up in his strong arms he held me close,” Jessie wrote. “By what flash of instinct did I go straight to the hidden spot in my Father’s armor? Did he even then feel the germ of that instinctive sympathy which made us one?”

  Part of their connection involved her name. She felt as if he had assigned her a different gender. “My father gave me early the place a son would have had,” she said, and when a third daughter arrived without a son, Jessie embraced the role of his boyish sidekick. When he went hunting at the McDowell estate, she followed him through sloping wheat fields covered in stubble after the harvest. “Especially he liked autumn shooting,” she said. “I stuck to him like a pet doggie, and trotted everywhere with him. . . . It tried my young feet but I trudged on, proud to carry the game bag, and presently when my Father shot a quail I had the honor of carrying the limp warm thing.” At midday, resting under a tree, he produced biscuits and a book from his shooting jacket, and she leaned against him while he read aloud in French, challenging her to follow along.

  She remained beside him as he moved about Washington, and this assured her a special view of the world. Their house, at 334 C Street Northwest, was just off Pennsylvania Avenue, the city’s main street and the center of life. Although Pennsylvania was an unattractive ribbon of dirt, it offered amenities to the elite of an aspiring nation: the Foreign Book Store was selling works in French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, while a few doors down one could visit a carriage dealership or even buy a used chariot, “very little worn.” Many kinds of people appeared on the street—lawmakers from every state, diplomats from European countries, visiting chiefs of Indian nations, free black servants, and slaves. The Capitol rose just a few blocks from the Benton house, topped by a green copper dome; Jessie sometimes trailed her father to work in the Senate, and he would deposit her at the Library of Congress for safekeeping.

  Sometimes she even followed when he called on the president. Andrew Jackson, the candidate for whom Jessie had strategically cheered as a toddler, won election in 1828 and was inaugurated shortly before Jessie’s fifth birthday, in 1829. Her father was a leading figure in Jackson’s political movement, which came to be called the Democracy and then the Democratic Party, and Jessie was in tow when Senator Benton climbed the stairs inside the white presidential mansion. They found Jackson in an upper room, “where the tall south windows sent in long breadths of sunshine; but his big rocking-chair was always drawn close to the large wood-fire.” Jackson needed the warmth. He suffered constant digestive attacks and was shockingly thin, with a hatchet face and a mass of gray hair. His wrecked body was the consequence of a life of exertion and moments of rage. He had once been shot during a pointless gunfight with Thomas Hart Benton when both were living in Tennessee, though they later reconciled. More recently Jackson had survived the first assassination attempt on a president, which suggested the passions he stirred as he destroyed the national bank and painted political rivals as aristocrats and elitists. Jessie, of course, did not yet know his politics, only that he was an old man whose wife was dead. She thought she perceived “sadness and loneliness” in his haggard face.

  Jessie said afterward, “I was to keep still and not fidget, or show pain, even if General Jackson twisted his fingers a little too tightly in my curls.” The near-skeletal president “would keep me by him, his hand on my head—forgetting me of course in the interest of discussion—so that sometimes, his long, bony fingers took an unconscious grip.”

  * * *

  JESSIE’S FATHER IMPOSED HARD ROUTINES ON HIMSELF, and his family had to follow them too. Having been stricken with tuberculosis as a youth, he believed it was better for the lungs if he slept with the windows open even in winter, so everyone else had to burrow as deeply as they could under their covers. He dictated a simple diet for himself, and thus for everyone at his table. Above all he was a nomad, who moved back and forth between several homes and often brought his family. In addition to the house in Washington, he had a house at his political base in St. Louis. He spent long periods with his wife’s family in Virginia, owned a farm in Kentucky, and sometimes made business trips to New Orleans. Rotating between homes every few months depending on the work of the Senate, he left behind a trail of notes asking newspapers to forward subscriptions to his next address. The Bentons moved so much—when travel was so difficult—that Jessie said her life was seen “almost as a reproach and a matter of sympathy among the stay-at-home friends and relations.” Of course, constant travel also gave her a more expansive view of the nation than her “stay-at-home friends and relations,” who, when a crisis came many years later, felt less attached to the nation than to their state.

  In 1832, when Jessie was eight, the family made one of its journeys from Washington to St. Louis. The trip was eight hundred miles, so far beyond the Appalachians that the family did not get there every year, although the pace of travel was growing faster. In 1800 the journey had required up to six weeks, but now steamboats and better roads made it possible to arrive in well under three. The first leg of the journey led over the National Road, a smooth ribbon of crushed stone called macadam, which the Bentons traveled in style, hiring a “reserved” stagecoach that the family had to itself. Senator Benton liked to sit outside with the driver, and even took the reins. Elizabeth Benton sat inside with the children—there were five now: Elizabeth and Jessie; another sister, Sarah; and two boys at last, an infant named James and his older brother, Randolph. Randolph was about two years old, meaning that in the jolting vehicle Mrs. Benton faced the eternal struggle between a toddler’s desire to stand and the parent’s desire that the child should sit. Stables operated every ten miles or so, and the Bentons used them to change horses. Sometimes when they stopped, Jessie asked to sit up with her father for the next ten miles, and when they started off she saw “the four eager horses dash away as the black stable-men jumped back when they loosed their heads and cheered them off.”

  At the Ohio River the family transferred to the first of the steamboats that would relay them downriver to its junction with the Mississippi. There the boat would swing northward, churning against the current toward St. Louis. On its final approach the craft angled toward the west bank, making a left turn just before Bloody Island, a fabled spot where men fought duels; then the crew tied up at the waterfront. Looking up the slope from the gangplank, Jessie saw the tightly packed houses of the city, topped by the rising facade of a cathedral under construction—a Catholic cathedral.
It served the population left over from French colonial days, who could be heard speaking their ancestral language as they moved about the town. The Benton family had a short walk along streets lined by locust trees to reach their house, which occupied its own city block amid more locusts. Here Jessie’s father liked to sit on an upholstered sofa on a long covered porch, drinking his coffee outdoors even on a rainy day. When Jessie came to the porch and looked out at the street, she saw a “kaleidoscopic variety of figures” passing by, including “long files of Indians,” Catholic priests, “hunters and trappers in fringed deer-skins; army officers in worn uniforms going by on horseback,” and poor residents in French “peasant dress.” Her time in the West, she wrote later, “rubbed out many little prejudices, and fitted [me] better than any reading could have done to comprehend the necessary differences and equal merits of differing peoples, and that although different, each could be right.”

  The most recent census showed only 4,977 inhabitants, who, according to the map drawn by Robert E. Lee, were packed into a street grid covering less than a square mile. The town seemed larger than it was because it was an imperial outpost, the main portal to all that lay beyond. It was near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, which were the main highways through the West. It was an army headquarters and a crossroads for global trade. Trappers and traders shipped beaver pelts from all over the West to St. Louis, and they were shipped onward to become top hats in New York, London, and Paris. (Jessie’s father was close to the fur traders, having borrowed money for his house in Washington from the fur magnate Pierre Chouteau Jr.) Almost anyone who traveled the West might pass through St. Louis, and during Jessie’s stay in 1832 a famous visitor appeared: Washington Irving, author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He was researching a nonfiction book called A Tour on the Prairies, intended to satisfy public fascination with the West, and in his notebook he made descriptions of the town: “St. Louis—old rackety gambling house—noise of the cue and the billiard ball from morning till night—old French women accosting each other in the street.” He also rode just outside town to visit the farm of St. Louis’s most famous denizen, William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The gray-haired explorer treated his visitor to a fried chicken dinner, and Irving inquired what it was like to own the slaves who prepared their meal. Clark replied a bit defensively that he had freed several slaves, including York, a man who had accompanied his expedition to the Pacific.

  Clark now served as federal superintendent of Indian affairs, a kind of ambassador to native nations. Likely as not some of the “long files of Indians” Jessie saw from her porch were in St. Louis to see Clark, who regularly hosted them at a building near the Benton house. It was known as his “Indian museum,” a long, low brick structure filled with pipes, arrows, and other artifacts from tribes he oversaw. He used the building for tribal councils and treaty negotiations, sitting with native leaders, who, according to one observer, wore a “profuse and almost gorgeous display of ornamented and painted buffalo robes,” along with “porcupine quills, skins, claws, horns, and bird skins.” According to Jessie, Washington Irving was invited to watch one of Clark’s Indian councils—and eight-year-old Jessie also appeared, doubtless trailing her father. As Jessie recounted it, the Indians were persuaded to perform “a war dance” in the yard outside for Irving’s benefit. Jessie became disturbed. “I was very young,” she said, “and the whole horrible thing, as they grew excited, threw me into a panic.” Fortunately someone noticed the terrified girl—a soldier who was on hand. “A tall strong kind-faced young officer, married to a favorite cousin of my mother, carried me off and comforted me.” The kindly relative was Albert Sidney Johnston, a rising star in the army.

  Jessie would have been too young to fully understand that the natives she saw were slowly being displaced. Some of Clark’s treaty negotiations were aimed at securing rights to their land for the United States. Their removal triggered sporadic resistance—Albert Sidney Johnston was just back from an Indian war. He had been part of a force that chased down and captured Black Hawk, a Sauk leader. The old chief had led his people eastward across the Mississippi into land that had once been theirs, causing panic among white settlers. United States troops killed many of his followers before the survivors surrendered. Black Hawk was now in semidignified captivity, allowed to stroll the grounds of the nearby army post with two sons. Washington Irving saw him there, carrying the iron ball that was chained to him, and clutching the tail feathers of a black hawk.

  * * *

  IF HER VISITS TO ST. LOUIS let Jessie learn the diversity of the West, they also helped her grasp her father’s ambitions for it. Senator Benton was a western visionary, who had moved there enamored of its possibilities. He had grown up in North Carolina and then Tennessee, studying law and volunteering for the War of 1812 as an aide to General Andrew Jackson. But after his quarrel and gunfight with Jackson (“the most outrageous affray ever witnessed in a civilized country,” Benton declared with characteristic bombast), Benton was repeatedly transferred away from combat assignments, giving him no chance for distinction. He left Tennessee after the war, crossing the Mississippi to start anew in the Louisiana Purchase. Practicing law in St. Louis, he advertised that he would take any case in “any part of the Territory of Missouri,” which had been formed from part of the Purchase land. He also ran for political office and lost, but found a different sort of political perch, hired in 1818 as editor of the St. Louis Enquirer. “Newspapers,” he declared, “are the school of public instruction. They are in America what the Forum was in Greece and Rome.” His move to journalism was well timed. Voting rights were expanding to include virtually all white men, and the way to reach the newly empowered masses was through the media. Jackson shrewdly surrounded himself with talented newspapermen who became advisers in his famous kitchen cabinet; Benton, self-reliant to the point of arrogance, became a newsman himself.

  The new editor had hardly taken the job when he gazed out over the Louisiana Purchase and decided it was even larger than it seemed. It did not merely reach west to the Rocky Mountains, but extended beyond to the Pacific, through the distant region called Oregon. Benton was outraged when US diplomats, failing to support his view, agreed in 1818 to a “joint occupancy” of Oregon with Britain, allowing both to exploit the country without annexing it. Benton proposed that the United States should seize full control and establish a Pacific seaport. Trade could then flow from St. Louis to Oregon to Asia and back again.

  Benton’s vision had so much influence over Jessie’s and John’s lives that it is worth noting how grand it was. He was anticipating, by almost two centuries, the central role that trade with Asia would come to play in the United States’s economy. “I looked across the Pacific Ocean,” he said later, “and saw eastern Asia in full sight. I traced an American road to India through our own dominions, and across the sea.” St. Louis, he said, could “find herself as near to Canton,” the international trading port of China, “as she now is to London, with a better and safer route.” His town of a few thousand could grow into a great city fueled by globalized trade.

  He was drawing on a centuries-old idea: the quest for the shortest route to Asia, which had driven European exploration of the New World from its earliest days. It was the very idea that inspired Columbus to sail westward from Spain in 1492: he wanted to improve upon the long and dangerous eastbound routes from Europe. After Columbus found the Americas blocking his way, other sailors tried to go around or through them, exploring American bays and rivers or risking their lives in Arctic ice. Though no one found a northwest passage to the Pacific, its potential value only grew as the British colonies in North America began importing goods from Asia. This trade was significant enough to factor in several famed episodes of early American history: The Boston Tea Party of 1773 protested a tax on tea carried on British ships from Asia. Soon after gaining political independence in 1783, several Founding Fathers confirmed
American trading independence by importing their own tea, sending a ship called Empress of China to bring it back from Canton. Before long, men engaged in the China trade had collected some of the United States’s first great family fortunes. But the round trip to and from China could take more than a year. In 1803, the dream of a faster route to Asia motivated President Thomas Jefferson’s decision to send Lewis and Clark across the Louisiana Purchase. He was hoping they would find that the Missouri River reached so far west that it came near the Columbia River, which emptied into the Pacific. In this respect, Lewis and Clark disappointed him. But Benton was certain in 1818 that some combination of rivers and roads could work well enough. And he held on to this dream even though it won little support at first.

  A Pacific seaport was just one of the schemes for national expansion that Benton embraced. When American gunmen tried to seize the Mexican province of Texas in 1819, he noisily approved (“success will attend” these “adventurers,” his newspaper proclaimed, and “Liberty” would “continue her march to the Pacific”). Here, too, he was ahead of his time; American settlers would not capture Texas until 1836. A vision that became reality more quickly was Benton’s support for the Missouri Territory to become the first state entirely west of the Mississippi. When statehood arrived in 1821, the legislature chose Benton as one of Missouri’s first two senators. He quickly grew into the legislator Jessie would always idolize, a scholar-politician. Representing a state that traded with Mexico, he learned to read Spanish, and when he spoke on the Senate floor about Mexico he translated Mexican newspapers aloud. He conducted his Senate business without the aid of a clerk and wrote out copies of documents himself. He represented values of the West: hard work, frankness, and egalitarianism.