John C. Fremont was a national hero in the 1840s after he led exploratory expeditions in the West. Dubbed “The Pathfinder of the West,” he was handsome and well-married. His ambitious wife, Jesse Benton, was the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Fremont was the first Senator from the State of California and in 1856 he was the first-ever Republican nominee for president. Firmly anti-slavery, he was the first major candidate to make the restriction of slavery an element of his platform. Fremont’s platform boldly stated that people could not be deprived of liberty and that:
[It is] our duty to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it for the purpose of establishing Slavery in the Territories of the United States by positive legislation, prohibiting its existence or extension therein. That we deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislation, of any individual, or association of individuals, to give legal existence to Slavery in any Territory of the United States, while the present Constitution shall be maintained.
The platform went on to declare that “it is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism–Polygamy, and Slavery.”
The platform was written as the Kansas Territory was descending into a mini-civil war over whether it would be admitted as a slave state or as a free state. According to the platform:
…the dearest Constitutional rights of the people of Kansas have been fraudulently and violently taken from them. Their Territory has been invaded by an armed force…
Fremont ran in opposition to the Democrats, who had shepherded in the conflict in Kansas when they had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowing the settlers in the territories to decide if they wanted to be slave or free. Fremont also opposed the Fugitive Slave Act. That law, backed by many future Confederate leaders, forced Northern states to assist slave owners in capturing escaped slaves. The Republicans adopted the anti-slavery slogan “Free Soil, Free Men, and Frémont” for their campaign.
Unfortunately for Fremont, a third party, the American Party had also entered the race that year.
The American Party was formed by the members of the secretive Know Nothing lodges that sprang up in reaction to large-scale immigration that began in 1848. The Know Nothings were fiercely anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. Know Nothings hoped to derail Fremont’s candidacy through accusations that he was a secret Catholic. A portion of the members of the new Republican Party had been involved in the Know Nothings, so the charge was explosive.
Fremont lost to Buchanan by 12% in the election. Know Nothing candidate finished a strong third with 21%. Fillmore did best in the Slave States, where the Republicans had not campaigned, scoring 55% of the vote in Maryland, 48% in Louisiana and Tennessee, and 43% in North Carolina and Georgia. In one Northern state, Illinois, Fillmore only won 16% of the vote, but with Fremont losing the state by only 4%, that Know Nothing vote may have been decisive there.
Because Fremont’s wife was Catholic, the allegation of Romanism on the part of Fremont gained enough traffic that his supporters felt forced to rebut it. Here is a pamphlet published by Fremont’s supporters in response to the charge.
It may be unseemly that a political party had to deny that its candidate was a Catholic, although there are recent of examples of candidates being “accused” of being members of other religions. Below are pages 2,3, and 4 of the pamphlet.
“Fillmore did best in the Slave States, where the Republicans had not campaigned,…“
No Republicans campaigned in the Deep South because of threats of violence against them. The slave South was a militarized place since before the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
One could argue that due to the presence in the US Constitution of the Fugitive Slave tenet, along with the 3/5 tenet that also gave slavery national and constitutional sanction and protection, all of America was a militarised place with regards this.
What did David Wilmot say? Words to the effect that, though it was a stance he and fellow Northerners set themselves against, he had to concede the argument could be made that slavery was to be found wherever the US flag was flown.