The New York Times has a review of the new book on the Fremont marriage. John Frémont was the Pathfinder of the West and his wife Jessie made sure everyone knew it. The first Republican presidential nominee and a less-than-stellar Union general, the Fremonts were a celebrity power couple who would be at home today with their own reality TV show.
Last week the New York Times reviewed IMPERFECT UNION: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped The West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War by Steve Inskeep, the NPR newsman. According to the review:
For a man who shows up in most biographies of Abraham Lincoln, histories of California, Civil War chronicles and accounts of pioneering the American West, John Frémont has remained a relatively minor player. There are a few biographies of him, but there hasn’t been anything like Steve Inskeep’s revelatory “Imperfect Union,” a fresh look that brings 21st-century vision to bear on the 19th-century story. In writing about both Frémont and his wife, Jessie, the aggressive promoter of his career, Inskeep does two important things. He shines an unsparing light on his subjects, and he finds unnerving similarities between the Frémonts’ America and our own…“Imperfect Union” finds a big, resonant, star-studded subject that has been hiding in plain sight. To Inskeep’s credit, it’s an open question whether the book’s true hero is Frémont or his wife — the privileged daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton (great-uncle to the painter who was his namesake), who decided her life’s work would be serving as a stealth political adviser, fighting for abolition though she was born a wealthy Southerner, trumpeting her mostly absent husband’s achievements and being famous.
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