Fre-Fus: Frelinghuysen through Fussell

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


FRELINGHUYSEN, Theodore, 1787-1862, lawyer, senator, college president,  Newark, New Jersey, American Colonization Society, Vice-President, 1833-41

FRELINGHUYSEN, THEODORE (March 28, 1787-April 12, 1862), lawyer, senator, college president, was born in Franklin Township, Somerset County, New Jersey, the second son of Gen. Frederick Frelinghuysen [q.v.] and Gertrude (Schenck) Frelinghuysen. At thirteen, with his father's consent, he left the grammar school connected with Queen's College (later Rutgers), to pursue farming rather than a liberal education. Soon afterward, however, his stepmother, during his father's absence, packed him off to Dr. Finley's academy at Basking Ridge where he received an excellent primary education, and from there he went to Princeton, graduating second in his class in 1804. He then read law with Richard Stockton of Princeton, was admitted to the bar in 1808 as an attorney, in 1811 as a counselor, and in 1817 received the title of sergeant at law. He began his practise of the law in Newark where, in 1809, he married Charlotte, daughter of Archibald Mercer. Having no children of their own, they adopted a nephew, Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen [q.v.]. The young lawyer's rise at the bar was rapid. Four years after his admittance he had an extensive and lucrative practise and in 1817 his abilities and personal character were so well recognized that he was made attorney-general of New Jersey. He received this appointment by the votes of a legislature, the majority of whose members were opposed to him in politics, a mark of the esteem in which he was held by his fellow citizens. Reelected in 1822 and 1827, he served until his election to the United States Senate in 1829. In 1826 the legislature had appointed him justice of the state supreme court which he declined, preferring to continue his practise at the bar. The best evidence of his ability to plead a cause is found in his argument made in the case of Hendrickson vs. Decow (I  N. J. Equity, 577), in which he successfully defended the claims of the Orthodox Quakers.

Although serving but a single term as United States senator (1829-35), Frelinghuysen became a national figure. The influence which he exerted at Washington can be explained only by the universal respect in which he was held by members of both parties. His six-hour speech (April 7, 8, and 9, 1830, Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Congress, 1 Session, pp. 309-20) in opposition to the bill for the removal of the Cherokee and other southern Indians to territory west of the Mississippi, though unsuccessful in defeating the measure, brought him prominently before the nation. He became known as the "Christian statesman," probably as a result of a poem by William Lloyd Garrison praising Frelinghuysen for his stand on the Indian question, and designating him "Patriot and Christian." Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and other well-known me paid tribute to the deep religious conviction of Frelinghuysen, and never did they resent in any way the solicitude with which he regarded their own personal religious lives (Chambers, post, pp. 178, 183). It was said of him that no American layman of his time was associated with so many great national organizations of religion and charity. For sixteen years he served as president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; from 1846 till his death he was president of the American Bible Society; president of the American Tract Society from 1842 to 1848; vice~ president of the American Sunday School Union for fifty years; and for many years an officer of the American Colonization Society and of the American Temperance Union. Giving so much of his time and money, for he was a generous contributor to all these causes, it is not surprising that in 1835 Frelinghuysen seriously contemplated leaving the bar and entering the ministry (Chambers, post, p. 170). In 1839 he retired from his law practise and resigned as mayor of Newark, to which office he had been first elected in 1836 and reelected in 1838, to accept the chancellorship of the University of the City of New York. In 1844 he made his last appearance in a political role, as the Whig candidate for vice-president. The defeat of the Whig ticket was a surprise and bitter disappointment to him, especially because of his great admiration and affection for his running mate, Henry Clay. Ironically the votes of the New York Abolitionists for Birney gave the state and the presidency to Polk.

Frelinghuysen's success as an academic administrator did not rival his success as a lawyer. It was in the legal forum that his peculiar gifts of quick insight, sharp discrimination, and impetuous eloquence were best displayed. His abandonment of the profession of the law in favor of an academic career was always regarded as a mistake by his friends of the New Jersey bar. After eleven years as chancellor of the University in New York he resigned to assume the presidency of Rutgers College. Since an acute illness had impaired his accustomed good health, he welcomed this change, believing that the work at Rutgers would not be so exacting as that in New York, where he was under the continual burden of raising funds. His connection with Rutgers was far from being nominal, however, and he engaged actively in the work of enlisting the aid of old friends of the college who renewed their support under the leadership of their distinguished president. The results were evidenced by the increase in the enrolment and endowment as well as in a greatly enlarged course of study. It was while serving at Rutgers that Frelinghuysen's active life came to a close. He contracted a severe cold while attending_ church on Washington's birthday, 1862, and died after a few weeks' illness. His first wife having died in 1854, on October 14, 1857, he was married to Harriet Pumpelly of Owego, New York.

[Cortlandt Parker, A Sketch of the Life an d Pub. Services of Theo. Frelinghuysen (1844), and The Essex: Bar (1874); Talbot W. Chambers, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Late Hon. Theo. Frelinghuysen (1 8 63); J. F. Folsom, The Municipalities of Essex County, New Jersey (1925), III, 4-5; J. L. Chamberlain, New York University (1901); W. H. S. Demarest, A History of Rutgers College, 1766-1924 (1924); W. L. Garrison, Sonnets and Other Poems (1843), pp. 69-71; State Gazette and Republican (Trenton, New Jersey), April 15, 1862; New York Tribune, April 14, 1862.]

C.R.E., Jr.


FRÉMONT, John Charles, 1813-1890, California, Army officer, explorer.  In 1856, was first candidate for President from the anti-slavery Republican Party.  Lost to James Buchanan.  Early in his career, he was opposed to slavery and its expansion into new territories and states.  Third military governor of California, 1847. First U.S. Senator from the State of California, 1850-1851.  He was elected as a Free Soil Democrat, and was defeated for reelection principally because of his adamant opposition to slavery.  Frémont supported a free Kansas and was against the provisions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.  On August 30, 1861, Frémont issued an unauthorized proclamation to free slaves owned by secessionists in his Department in Missouri.  Lincoln revoked the proclamation and relieved Frémont of command.  In March 1862, Frémont was given commands in Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.  (Blue, 2005, pp. 8, 10, 12-13, 58, 77, 78, 105, 131, 153, 173, 178, 206, 225, 239, 245, 252, 261-263, 268-269; Chaffin, 2002; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 89, 93, 94-95, 97-98, 138, 139, 145, 149, 159, 161, 172, 215, 219-225, 228-230, 243; Nevins, 1939; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 59, 65, 140, 242-243, 275, 369, 385, 687; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 545-548; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 19; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 8, p. 459; Chaffin, Tom, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire, New York: Hill and Wang, 2002; Eyre, Alice, The Famous Fremonts and Their America, Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1948; Nevins, Allan, Fremont: Pathmarker of the West, Volume 1: Fremont the Explorer; Volume 2: Fremont in the Civil War, 1939, rev ed. 1955)


FRÉMONT, Jessie Benton, 1824-1902, writer, political activist, opponent of slavery.  Wife of John Charles Frémont.  (Denton, 2007)


FREMONT, JOHN CHARLES (January 21, 1813-July 13, 1890), explorer, politician, soldier, was the son of a French emigre school-teacher of Richmond, Virginia, Jean Charles Fremon, who eloped with Mrs. Anne Whiting Pryor of that city in 1811. They fled from Mrs. Pryor's aged husband to Savannah, Georgia, where Fremont was born. While the father taught French and dancing in various parts of the South, the mother sometimes took boarders. The family spent some years in Norfolk, Virginia, and after the death of Fremon in 1818 his widow (if we may so call her in the absence of any marriage) removed to Charleston, South Carolina, where she supported several children on a meager inherited income. Fremont was precocious, handsome, and daring, and quickly showed an aptitude for obtaining protectors. A lawyer, John W. Mitchell, saw that he was givein sufficient schooling to enter Charleston College in May 1829, and he remained there, with intervals of teaching in the country, till expelled for irregular attendance in 1831. Fortunately the college had grounded him in mathematics and the natural sciences. Fortunately also he had attracted the attention of Joel R. Poinsett, Jacksonian leader in the state, and shortly obtained through him an appointment as teacher of mathematics on the sloop of war Natchez. On this ship he cruised in South American waters in 1833.

Fremont's real career began when he resigned from the navy to become a second lieutenant in the United States Topographical Corps and to assist in surveying the route of a projected railway between Charleston and Cincinnati. In his work in the Carolina mountains he formed a strong taste for wilderness exploration. This was deepened when in 1837-38 he acted with another detachment of the Topographical Corps in a reconnaissance of the Cherokee country in Georgia, instituted by the government preparatory to the removal of the Indians. Ordered thence to Washington, Fremont obtained from Poinsett a place with the expedition of J. N. Nicollet [q.v.] for exploring the plateau between the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Nicollet; a scientist of high reputation in Paris and Washington, gave him an expert training in astronomical, topographical, and geological observation, for which Fremont's quick mind had a natural taste. He also received a thorough initiation into western frontier life, becoming intimate with such men as Henry Sibley of the American Fur Company, Joseph Renville, J. B. Faribault, and Etienne Provot, meeting large bodies of Sioux, and traversing much of the country between Fort Pierre on the Missouri and Fort Snelling on the Mississippi. Returning to Washington, he took bachelor quarters with Nicollet and collaborated with him upon a map and an elaborate scientific report.

The second turning-point in Fremont's life was his meeting with Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who was greatly interested in Nicollet's work, brought Fremont to his house, and gave him a new vision of the possibilities of western exploration and expansion to the Pacific. Fremont later wrote that his interviews with Benton were "pregnant with results and decisive of my life" (Memoirs of My Life, 1887, I, 65). He fell in love with the sixteen-year-old Jessie Benton. Alarmed by their obvious attachment, her father persuaded Poinsett, now secretary of war, to send the penniless lieutenant to explore the Des Moines River. Fremont, elated by his first independent commission, equipped an expedition in St. Louis, hired the botanist Charles Geyer, and during the spring and summer of 1841 creditably mapped much of Iowa Territory. Neither he nor the strong-willed Jessie Benton had swerved, however, from what was to prove a lifelong devotion, and when the Benton family remained obdurate, they were secretly married in Washington, on October 19, 1841, by a Catholic priest. When Benton learned the fact in November he angrily ordered Fremont from his door, but relented when Jessie quoted the words of Ruth, "Whither thou goest, I will go." Thereafter Fremont found an invaluable adviser, patron, and protector in his father-in-law.

Fremont's first important exploration, a summer expedition in 1842 to the Wind River chain of the Rockies, was planned by Benton, Senator Lewis Linn, and other Westerners interested in the acquisition of Oregon, and marked him definitely as the successor of the now dying Nicollet. Its main object was to give a scientific examination to the Oregon Trail through South Pass and to report on the rivers, the fertility of the country, the best positions for forts; and the nature of the mountains beyond in Wyoming. Equipping a party of twenty-five in St. Louis with the aid of Cyprian Chouteau and obtaining by a lucky chance the services of Kit Carson as guide; Fremont left the Kansas River on June 15, 1842; followed the Platte toward the Rockies, crossed South Pass, and from the headwaters of the Green River explored the Wind River range, where he climbed what he mistakenly thought to be the highest peak of the Rockies, Fremont's Peak (13,730 feet). On his return he recklessly shot the rapids of the swollen Platte in a rubber boat and lost much of his equipment (F. S. Dellenbaugh, Fremont and '49, 1914, p. 65 ff.). He was back in Washington in October, and with Jessie Fremont's expert help, for she possessed high literary gifts, he composed a report which gave him a wide popular reputation (Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1843). Modeled on Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville, it showed a zest for adventure and a descriptive sparkle which appealed to the fast-growing interest in Oregon settlement. It furnished a scientific map of much of the Oregon Trail prepared by the topographer Charles Preuss, emphasized the fertility of the plains, and offered much practical advice to emigrants. Government publication was followed by numerous reprints. Congress, prompted by Benton, at once authorized a second expedition under Fremont which was to reach the South Pass by a different route, push to the Columbia, and examine the Oregon country, connecting on the Pacific with the coastal surveys by Commander Wilkes.

Fremont's second expedition of almost forty well-equipped men left the Missouri River in May 1843, with Thomas Fitzpatrick as guide, Preuss as topographer, and a twelve-pound howitzer cannon which he rashly obtained from Colonel S. W. Kearny in St. Louis. Its departure was hastened by an urgent message from Jessie Fremont, who suppressed a War Department order requiring Fremont to return to Washington to explain his howitzer; the government objected to giving the expedition the appearance of a military reconnaissance. Benton later successfully defended his daughter's action. On the Arkansas River Fremont was joined by Kit Carson. After an unavailing effort to blaze a new trail through northern Colorado, he struck the regular Oregon Trail, on which he passed the main body of the great emigration of 1843; stopped to explore the Great Salt Lake; and pushed on by way of Fort Hall and Fort Boise to Marcus Whitman's mission on the Columbia. His endurance, energy, and resourcefulness were remarkable. Reaching the Dalles on November 5, Fremont left the main body of his expedition while he went down stream to Fort Vancouver for supplies. He might then have retraced his steps to St. Louis. But under the spell of Benton's dream of acquiring the whole West, he resolved to turn south and explore the Great Basin between the Rockies and Sierras. Moving through Oregon to Pyramid Lake, which he named, and into Nevada, he reached the Carson River on January 18, 1844. From a point near the site of Virginia City he resolved to cross the Sierra into California, a feat daring to the point of foolhardiness, yet despite the perils of cold and snow he accomplished it. Early in March he reached the Sacramento Valley and was hospitably received by Captain August Sutter at his fort, where he refitted his party. While here he talked with the American settlers, now growing numerous, and formed a clear impress ion of the feeble Mexican hold upon California. Moving south till he struck the "Spanish Trail" from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, he followed this for some distance, crossed parts of the present states of Nevada and Utah, explored Utah Lake, and by way of Pueblo reached Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. Not until August 1844 did he arrive in St. Louis. His return was one of the sensations of the day. Accompanied by Jessie, he traveled to Washington and devoted the winter with her aid to his second report. It appeared at a fortunate moment, when Polk's victory had given impetus to policies of expansion. As detailed, vivid, and readable as the first report, with much careful scientific observation, it showed that the Oregon Trail was not difficult and that the Northwest was fertile and desirable. Senator Buchanan moved the printing of 10,000 copies.

With war with Mexico now clearly imminent and all eyes fixed on the West, it was easy for Benton to carry an appropriation for a third expedition under Fremont. Under the War Department, it was to execute a survey of the central Rockies, the Great Salt Lake region, and part of the Sierra Nevada. In St. Louis Fremont equipped sixty men, fully armed; Kit Carson was again called to be his guide, and two other distinguished frontiersmen, Joseph Walker and Alexander Godey, were enlisted. Fremont in his Memoirs (I, 422 ff.) states that it was secretly intended by Benton and George Bancroft, secretary of the navy, that if he reached California and found war had begun, he should transform his scientific force into a military body. Unquestionably he desired to play a role in conquering California, which had captivated him by its beauty and wealth, and this desire furnishes the key to his very controversial conduct there. Moving west by way of Bent's Fort, the Great Salt Lake, and the "Hastings Cut-Off," he reached the Ogden River, which he renamed the Humboldt, and divided his party in order to double his geographical information. On December 9, 1845, after blazing a useful new trail across Nevada, he was again at Sutter's Fort. Under the pretext of obtaining fuller supplies, he took his men to Monterey and established contact there with the American con~ sul, Thomas Larkin. In February 1846 he united with the other branch of his expedition near San Jose, thus giving the United States a formidable little force in the heart of California. The suspicious Mexican officials ordered him from the country but with headstrong audacity he promptly hoisted the American flag, defying them. Then, obviously playing for time, he moved north to Klamath Lake, where on May 8 he was overtaken by Lieutenant A. H. Gillespie from Washington. Gillespie had brought dispatches to Larkin, of which he carried copies to Fremont, and according to the latter he also brought verbal instructions from Benton and Buchanan which justified aggressive action. There can be no question that he brought news that both Larkin and the commander of the American warship Portsmouth in San Francisco Bay expected war to begin in a few days (Larkin Manuscripts, State Department, letters of April 17, 23, 1846). Fremont felt that his course was clear and turned back.

The result was that he played a prominent if at first hesitating role in the conquest of California. Hastening to Sutter's Fort, he made a display of force there which inspired the discontented American settlers in the Sacramento Valley to begin the Bear Flag revolt, and then (June 23) took up arms in their support. When news of actual war reached him on July 10 he actively cooperated with Sloat and Stockton in the conquest of California. His "California Battalion" of expedition- members and settlers marched to Monterey, took ship to San Diego, and with Stockton's force captured Los Angeles on August 13. Fremont then went north to muster a larger force, was busy recruiting when a revolt wrested Los Angeles from the Americans, and returned only in time to assist Stockton and General S. W. Kearny in the final capture of that town in January 1847. He accepted the Mexican surrender in the Capitulation of Couenga. Almost immediately he was involved in the bitter quarrel of Stockton and Kearny [qq.v.] over their respective authorities, caused by conflicting instructions from Washington. Taking Stockton's side, he was appointed by him civil governor of California, and exercised that authority for two months, until final orders from Washington established Kearny's supremacy. Kearny humiliated Fremont, detained him in defiance of Polk's orders that he was allowed to proceed to Mexico, and, taking him to Fort Leavenworth as a virtual prisoner, there arrested him upon charges of mutiny and insubordination. The quarrel was taken up with indiscreet energy by Benton. It resulted in a famous court martial in Washington (November 1847-January 1848) in which a panel of regular officers found Fremont guilty of mutiny, disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to order. Though President Polk remitted the penalty, Fremont, who found public sentiment on his side, indignantly resigned from the service.

This resignation was followed by a midwinter expedition (1848-49), at the expense of Benton and certain wealthy St. Louisans interested in a Pacific railroad, to find passes for such a line westward from the upper waters of the Rio Grande. It proved a disastrous venture. Eager to show that passage of the mountains was practicable in midwinter, Fremont ignored frontiersmen who warned him that the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan ranges were impassable. He was led astray by his guide "Old Bill" Williams, but he unwisely failed to turn back from the San Juan Mountains in time, and after intense suffering from cold, storms, and starvation, lost eleven men. Succored by Kit Carson and others in Taos, he proceeded to California, meeting on the Gila a troop of Sonora Mexicans who told him that gold had been discovered. Consul Larkin had recently purchased for him a tract of seventy square miles in the Sierra foothills, the Mariposa estate, and he hired the Mexicans to work there on shares. Within a few weeks his income from the diggings reached enormous sums-Jessie Fremont speaks of hundred-pound bags of gold dust-and he was able to acquire large realty interests in San Francisco, live on a generous scale in Monterey, and develop his Mariposa property. His election as United States senator in December 1850 gave him only the short term from September 9, 1850, to March 4, 1851.

Fremont remained essentially a Californian till the Civil War, but with restless energy spent much time outside the state. He served six weeks as senator in Washington, made a prolonged stay with his family in London and Paris (1852-53), gathering capital to work the quartz deposits at Mariposa, and conducted another winter exploration in search of a southern railway route to the Pacific (1853-54). In this expedition he reached central Utah with a small body of men after a journey of great hardship, demonstrating that practicable passes through the mountains existed between north latitude 37° and 38°. But the most important event of these years was his nomination for the presidency. His explorations and court martial had made him a national hero, while his aloofness from the slavery contest rendered him available. First approached by Democratic leaders, including Ex-Governor John B. Floyd of Virginia and members of the influential Preston family, he pronounce d himself vigorously for a free-soil Kansas and against enforcement of the Fugitive-Slave Law (Jessie Benton Fremont Manuscripts). Organizers of the new national Republican party, led by N. P. Banks, Henry Wilson, and John Bigelow, then took him up, and he was nominated at Philadelphia in June 1856. He had hoped that Simon Cameron would be named for vice-president, and always regarded the nomination of W. L. Dayton as one of the causes of his defeat. Possessing no taste or aptitude for politics, he played as passive a role as his opponent, Buchanan. In a campaign notable for abusiveness, much being made of his illegitimate birth and a mendacious report that he was a Catholic, he remained quietly at his Ninth St. home in New York. His defeat by Buchanan by an electoral vote of 174 to 114, and a popular vote of 1,838, 169 to 1,341,264, was clue partly to fear of Southern secession and partly to lack of campaign funds. Fremont shortly returned to California and devoted himself to his mining business, his title to Mariposa, then valued by some at ten million dollars, being confirmed by the federal Supreme Court in 1855.

The outbreak of the Civil War found Fremont in Europe raising more capital for Mariposa, and he attempted a bold service by hastening to England and on his own responsibility purchasing arms for the Federal cause (J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, During Lincoln's Administration, 1927, p. 190). Lincoln wished to appoint him minister to France, but when Secretary Seward protested, appointed him major-general in charge of the department of the West, with headquarters at St. Louis, where he arrived July 25, 1861. The task before him was of tremendous difficulty; he had to organize an army in a slave state, largely disloyal, with few arms, few supplies, and limited numbers of raw volunteers for material, and with political and military enemies ready to make the most of every misstep. When he took charge guerrilla warfare was breaking out in Missouri, while his forces at Cairo, Illinois, and Spring field, Missouri, were menaced by superior armies. He accomplished much, reinforcing Cairo, fortifying St. Louis, organizing a squadron of river gunboats, arousing the enthusiasm of the German population, and training large bodies of men; but the defeats at Wilson's Creek, and Lexington were unfairly blamed upon him, he was justly accused of ostentation and reckless expenditures, and the attacks of Frank Blair cost him Lincoln's confidence. He blundered when on August 30, 1861, he issued a rash proclamation declaring the property of Missourians in rebellion confiscated and their slaves emancipated; this act aroused the applause of radical Northerners, but Lincoln rightly regarded it as premature and when Fremont refused to retract issued an order modifying it. In response to growing complaints Lincoln sent first Montgomery Blair, and later Secretary Cameron and Lorenzo Thomas, to Missouri to investigate, and on the basis of their reports removed Fremont as he was leading an army in futile pursuit of Price's Confederate force (November 2, 1861). The antagonisms aroused in the West by Fremont would alone have justified such action, but the removal was bitterly resented by radical anti-slavery men, and was indirectly censured by the congressional committee on the conduct of the war. Out of regard for this radical opinion, Lincoln in March 1862 appointed Fremont to command the mountain department in western Virginia. But he was given inadequate forces, his command was improperly divided by the government, Lincoln plainly distrusted him, and in May and June 1862 he was completely out generalled by "Stonewall" Jackson in the latter's brilliant Valley campaign. Lincoln then placed Fremont and his corps under the command of Pope, whom Fremont detested for. his alleged insubordination in Missouri, and Fremont asked to be relieved.

Thereafter Fremont's history was one of adversity. Still popular with the radical Republicans who disliked Lincoln, he was nominated for the presidency on May 31, 1864, in Cleveland, but a convention of radicals, western Germans, and war Democrats. His candidacy disturbed the administration, and by a bargain between it and Fremont's radical supporters, Fremont ungracefully withdrew on September 22, 1864, and Lincoln the next day dismissed the ultra-conservative Montgomery Blair from his cabinet. Fremont played no further part in public life. Turning to business, he proved unable to rescue his Mariposa estate from the embarrassments into which it had fallen during his preoccupation with the war, and by the end of 1864 had lost control of that property. For finance, as for war, he lacked essential qualities of judgment. He became interested in western railroads, and after purchasing the Kansas Pacific franchise and a part-interest in the Memphis & Little Rock, he became president and promoter of the Memphis & El Paso, which he dreamed of extending from Norfolk, Virginia, to San Diego, California. Though his methods were merely those characteristic of promoters in the flush years preceding 1873, the bankruptcy of the line in 1870 not only cost him the remnants of his fortune, but left his reputation under a cloud. Misleading advertisements in French papers, for which he was indirectly responsible, caused his indictment in that country. He never reestablished himself, and was saved from poverty only by Jessie Benton Fremont's activities as an author, his appointment as territorial governor of Arizona (1878-83), and his restoration to the army as major-general, with pay on the retired list, early in 1890. In 1887 he made his home in California, but death came while he was temporarily staying in New York. He and his wife, who survived until 1902, are buried at Piermont on the Hudson. His whole later career had been a tragic anti-climax; but his fame as an explorer, in which his achievements were of very high rank, is commemorated by numerous place-names throughout the United States, and represents services which cannot be forgotten.

[The fullest Work on Fremont's life is Allan Nevins, Fremont, the West's Greatest Adventurer (2 volumes, 1928); it is based in part on family documents, and contains an extensive bibliography. It is supplemented by Fremont's Memoirs of My Life (1887), of which but one volume was ever published; by Mrs. Fremont's Souvenirs of My Time (1887), Far West Sketches (1890), and A Year of American Travel (1878), valuable in the order mentioned; and by F. S. Dellenbaugh's Fremont and '49 (1914). Of less importance are S. N. Carvalho, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West with Fremont's Last Expedition (1857); John R. Howard, Remembrance of Things Past (1925), by a member of Fremont's staff in Missouri; the manuscript "Narrative of John C. Fremont's Expedition in Cal. 1845-46," by Thos. S. Martin, in the Bancroft Library Cal.; and John Fowler's manuscript paper on "The Bear Flag Revolt in Cal." (1846), in the same collection. The Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Fremont (1912), compiled by I. T. Martin, contains materials by his daughter. There is an obituary in the New York Tribune, July 14, 1890. Cardinal Goodwin, John Chas. Fremont: An Explanation of His Career (1930), is an able but excessively hostile treatment which centers attention upon the Bear Flag Revolt, the events of 1861, and the subsequent railroad transactions.

All of Fremont's papers which survive, many having been destroyed in a fire, are in the Bancroft Library.]

A. N.


FREMONT, JESSIE BENTON (May 31, 1824-December 27, 1902), writer, daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton [q. v.] and wife of John Charles Fremont, was the second of five children. Her mother was Elizabeth McDowell, and Jessie was born at her grandfather McDowell's estate near Lexington, Virginia. Here, in Washington, and in St. Louis, she passed her girlhood. She was tutored at home, much of the time by her father himself, in St. Loui s went to an informal French school where she helped the master's wife with her pre serving and acquired an easy familiarity with spoken French; studied Spanish" the neighbor language," as her father called it -and in her earl y teens was sent to the fashionable boarding school kept by Miss English in Georgetown, D. C. At this time, as she later admitted, she was still something of a tomboy, given to climbing trees. At sixteen, a blooming, vigorous girl, full of fun, with a n intellectual capacity beyond her years-the result in part of companionship with h er father-she met young John Charles Fremont [q. v.], a lieutenant in the Topographical Corps, and in spite of the effort of her parents to postpone what seemed inevitable, she married him on October 19, 1841. For the fir st years after h er marriage, during her explorer-husband's long absences, she lived in her father's house-continuing her studies under his supervision, translating confidential State Department papers from the Spanish, serving as his hostess, and becoming increasingly his companion during her mother's long invalidism. Fremont returned from his first important expedition in October 1842; their baby, Elizabeth, was born in November; and during the happy winter that followed, Jessie worked daily with her husband on the first of his vivid reports. When his second expedition (1843) was endangered by a letter recalling him to Washington, she suppressed the order, wrote to him to start at once without waiting for a 1·eason, and when she had received word that he had acted immediately upon her message, wrote to the Department at Washington explaining what she had done. The expedition-a long one-was successful, and in the winter of 1844-45 Fremont and Jessie collaborated on the second report. Anxiety incident to Fremont's court martial in 1848 following his third expedition, told upon Jessie 's health, and in the fall of that year her second baby died. In 1849, with her little girl, she went, by the Panama route, to meet Fremont in San Francisco, suffering a critical illness on the way. The hardships of the voyage and conditions in California on the eve of its admission as a state are described in her little volume, A Year of American Travel (1878). The example of young Mrs. Fremont, reared in a very comfortable home, gallantly doing her own work in the frontier community and refusing to employ slaves, is said to have had an influence on the members of the convention which drafted California's Free-Soil constitution. During the next five years she returned for a short time to Washington society as wife of the first senator from California; bore a son, and when he was but two months old saw her house burn to the ground in the San Francisco fire of 185; visited Europe, 1852-53, being received cordially everywhere as the daughter of Senator Benton and the wife of the brilliant explorer and making lasting friendships in her own right; had another baby, who died; went back to her father's house to wait for Fremont's return from his fifth and most dangerous expedition (1853-54); and in May 1854 gave birth to another son. In her husband's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency (1856) her charm was exploited until "'Fremont and Jessie' seemed to constitute the Republican ticket rather than Fremont and Dayton" (Nevins, post, II, 496-97). After another brief visit to Europe and three years on the California ranch and in San Francisco, where she encouraged and befriended the obscure young reporter, Bret Harte, there came the Civil War. Throughout Fremont's stormy military service she shared his intense anxiety, giving expression to the bitterness which he would not admit and even, on one occasion, attempting to argue with the President in his behalf. Her feeling is partially revealed in The Story of the Guard: A Chronicle of the War (1863). After the war their home in New York City and their country place on the Hudson were centers of hospitality, but in the seventies they lost their entire fortune and for a time · were in actual need. Faced by the problem of a young son whose health required a change of climate, and with no money to send him away, Mrs. Fremont offered Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger a series· of articles at $100 each. He accepted her offer, and she began to contribute regularly to a number of periodicals, writing travel sketches, historical sketches, and stories for boys and girls. Selections from these papers were republished in book form: Souvenirs of My Time (1887); Far West Sketches (1890); The Will and the Way Stories (1891). She helped Fremont with the writing of the first and only published volume of his Memoirs (1887), and wrote for it a sketch of Senator Benton. (Another sketch of her father, which she wrote in 1879, was not published for many years ; see New York Independent, January 29, 1903.) In 1887 the Fremonts returned to California, and after her husband's death in 1890 Mrs. Fremont remained in Los Angeles with her daughter, living in a house given her by the ladies of Southern California. At her death in 1902 she was buried beside Fremont at Piermont on the Hudson.

[Mrs. Fremont's writings; Allan Nevins, Fremont: the West's Greatest Adventurer (2 volumes, 1928); Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Fremont (1912), comp. by I. T. Martin; M. C. Kendall, "A Woman who has Lived History," Overland Monthly, January 1, 1901; C. A. Moody, "Here was a Woman," Out West (Los Angeles), February 1903, a good character sketch; Rebecca Harding Davis, "In Remembrance," Independent (New York), January 29, 1903; articles in Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1902, and following issues.]

E. R. D.


FRENEAU, Philip, 1752-1832, poet, editor, abolitionist.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 549)

FRENEAU, PHILIP MORIN (January 2, 1752- December 19, 1832), poet, editor, mariner, came of a Huguenot family whose earliest representative in America, Andre Fresneau, settled in New York in 1707, established himself as an importer of wines from France and the Canaries, and prospered. After the early death of the pioneer, his sons Andrew and Pierre Freneau, as the name became, continued with the business, the younger soon taking the lead. Married to Agnes, daughter of Richard Watson of Freehold, New Jersey, he established a home on Frankford St., which, furnished richly with books_ and works of art and much frequented by cultured visitors, became one of the centers of refinement in New York. Into this home was born Philip Freneau and five years later Peter, who afterward became a conspicuous figure in Charleston, South Carolina. With increasing prosperity, the family acquired for summer use "Mount Pleasant," near Middletown Point, New Jersey, a plantation destined to become in later years the home of the poet. The children were educated privately by tutors and with such care that Philip at the early age of fifteen was able to enter the sophomore class at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), so thoroughly prepared that President Witherspoon wrote his mother a letter of congratulation. Here he was a classmate and perhaps a roommate of James Madison. Collaborating with his classmate, H. H. Brackenridge, he wrote a remarkable poem entitled "The Rising Glory of America" which was read by the latter at the graduating exercises of his class in 1771 and was issued as a pamphlet the next year in Philadelphia.

Even in college Freneau had visions of a poetic career. He had read widely in the English poets, and he had a scholarly acquaintance with the Latin and the Greek. He entered upon no profession; for a time he taught school; but constantly he wrote poetry. When the Revolution broke out he became fiercely active with his pen. Within a few months he published no fewer than eight pamphlet satires aimed at the British, among them General Gage's Soliloquy (1775) and General Gage's Confession (1775), all burning with invective. Poetry, however, was a poor profession for an ambitious man in the early days of the Revolution, and he turned to what seemed a promising and romantic opening, a secretaryship in the home of a prominent planter on the Island of Santa Cruz in the West Indies. The new environment, the romance of the Spanish Main, the tropic splendor of the islands, laid powerful hold upon his imagination, and during the three years that followed he wrote what must be regarded as his most significant poems, "Santa Cruz," "The Jamaica Funeral," and, especially, "The House of Night." Written before the opening of the romantic period in Europe, the latter poem has within it all the elements of the new romanticism. It places Freneau as one of the pioneers in the movement.

Returning to America after his long absence, having been captured by the British but released, he found the Revolution in full career. His mind, however, was upon the ocean. Always the sea called to the deep s within him, fascinated him, held him fast. He voyaged as supercargo of a brig plying between the Azores and New York, was chased more than once by British cruisers, and in the early spring set out again to visit the West Indies. He was scarcely clear of the American coast, however, when the ship was captured by a British man-of-war, and after a farcical trial he was remanded to the prison ship Scorpion in New York Harbor. From starvation and brutal treatment he fell into a decline, was removed to the hospital ship Hunter, where he found still more brutal treatment, but at last more dead than alive was exchanged and enabled to reach his home in New Jersey, where he soon regained his health. His experiences he later described realistically in The British Prison-Ship: A Poem, in Four Cantoes (1781).

During the next three years he was an employee in the Philadelphia Post-Office. He seems to have had much leisure time, for poetry now came in a steady stream from his pen, most of it being published in Francis Bailey's vigorous newspaper, the Freeman's Journal, which unquestionably Freneau helped to edit. Every movement of the "insolent foe," every new plight in which the loyalists found themselves, he satirized with vigor, and he glorified the deeds of his fellow patriots in such lyrics as that commemorating the victory of Jones, and the lament over the dead at Eutaw Springs. It was during this period that he produced the most distinctive of the lyrics which won for him the sobriquet "the poet of the American Revolution." By temperament Freneau was restless and eager. After three yea in the city his soul again was "tossing on the ocean." In 1784 he sailed as master of a brig bound for Jamaica and for several years led a stormy life on the Atlantic and Caribbean. He was shipwrecked, narrowly escaping destruction: he outrode the hurricane that destroyed the greater part of the shipping in West Indian waters; and he wrote a hurricane lyric at the height of the storm. No other American poet has known the ocean as he knew it or has pictured it more graphically.

This third marine period in his life was terminated in 1789 when he was married to Eleanor Forman of Middletown Point, and during the next -seven or eight years he was engaged in newspaper work, editing first the New York Daily Advertiser, a sheet which he at once made important. Following the removal of the government to Philadelphia in 1791 and the resignation of John Pintard, an associate of Freneau's on the Daily Advertiser, as translating clerk of the Department of State, Jefferson offered Freneau the post at a salary of $250 a year. Freneau finally accepted the appointment, which was formally made August 16, 1791, removed to Philadelphia, and there issued on October 31 the first number of the National Gazette. As an antidote to the highly aristocratic Gazette of the United States of John Fenno [q.v.], a financial beneficiary of Hamilton, Freneau's sparkling paper more than fulfilled the hopes of Jefferson and Madison. Soon singling out Hamilton for attack as the chief monarchist, the democratic Freneau so discomfited that statesman that he himself entered the lists anonymously, charging his journalistic foe with being a subservient employee of Jefferson. That the Secretary of State had originally encouraged Freneau to publish his paper and used his influence to advance its interests seems indubitable. Freneau, however, was neither a hireling nor a truckler. He voiced his own convictions and in his continued support of Genet [q.v.] after Jefferson had repudiated that French minister, he showed his independence. A passionate democrat and consistent supporter of the principles of the French Revolution, Freneau more than any other journalist of the day quickened the democratic spirit of the new republic (Forman, post, p. 78). Jefferson said he "saved our Constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy" (P. L. Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, I, 1892, p. 231). Washington, on the other hand, was incensed by the abuse of "that rascal Freneau" and complained of him bitterly to the Secretary of State, who, however, did not remove him. On October 26, 1793, because of shortage of funds and the yellow-fever epidemic, the National Gazette was suspended, and, with the retirement of Jefferson from office soon thereafter, Freneau was compelled to resign his governmental position. He had taken a leading part in the French demonstrations of the period, dedicating to the new era of "the rights of man" a whole sheaf of lyrics, some of them of stirring eloquence.

After a short service as editor of a rural paper, ....  the Jersey Chronicle, and then a longer period as editor of the distinctive New York journal, the Time-Piece, he retired from journalism and for the rest of his life alternated between the sea and his New Jersey farm. He lived until 1832, long enough to see the new school of Bryant and Irving and Cooper fully established. In December of that year, returning home from the country store through a blizzard, he lost his way and perished.

The first distinctive issue of his writings was The Poems of Philip Freneau (1786), from the press of his friend Bailey. This was followed by The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau Containing His Essays, and Additional Poems (1788); Poems Written between the Years 1768 and 1794, by Philip Freneau of New Jersey (1795), printed by his own press; Poems Written and Published during the American Revolutionary War (2 vols., 1809); and A Collection of Poems, on American Affairs ... Written between the Year 1797 and the Present Time (2 vols., 1815). Without adequate criticism, without an adequate reading public, and totally without literary atmosphere in a crude age, he nevertheless produced lyrics that still live. He wrote with romantic atmosphere and theme in "The House of Night"; he was the first in America to put the Indian distinctively into poetry, "The Indian Burying Ground" being his best effort; and his "The Wild Honeysuckle" has been called the "first stammer of nature poetry in America." Some of his songs of the sea put him even now among the leading American poets of the ocean. Unquestionably he was the most significant poetic figure in America before Bryant.

[V. H. Paltsits, A Bibliog. of the Separate and Collected Works of Philip Freneau (1903); F. L. Pattee, ed., The Poems· of Philip Freneau (3 vols., 1902-07); H. H. Clark, ed., Poems of Freneau (1929); E. F. De Lancey, "Philip Freneau, The Huguenot Patriot Poet of the Revolution," Proc. Huguenot Society of America, vol. II, no. 2 (1891); Mary S. Austin, Philip Freneau, The Poet of the Revolution (1901); S. E. Forman, " The Political Activities of Philip Freneau," Johns Hopkins University Studies in Hist. and Pol. Science, series XX, nos. 9-10 (1902); F. L. Pattee, "The Modernness of Philip Freneau," in Sidelights on American Lit. (1922).]

F. L. P-e.


FROTHINGHAM, Octavius Brooks, 1822-1895, author, clergyman, opponent of slavery.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 556)

FROTHINGHAM, OCTAVIUS BROOKS (November 26, 1822-November 27, 1895), Unitarian and independent clergyman, author, was born in Boston, the second of the five children of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham [q.v.] and Ann Gorham. Brooks. After his graduation from Harvard College in 1843 and from the Divinity School in 1846, he was ordained March IO, 1847, as pastor of the North Church of Salem. Thirteen days later he married Caroline E. Curtis of Boston. In 1853 he sought relief from throat trouble by traveling in Europe. Until after his thirtieth year his inward life was as placid as the outward, but under the influence of his friend Theodore Parker his intellectual life was quickened and deepened and his energies unchained. By conviction a militant radical, temperamentally he remained to the end of his days a conservative and looked back with sympathy and almost with longing on the religion of his childhood. He soon broke with his Salem congregation over the question of slavery and removed to Jersey City in 1855 as pastor of a newly organized Unitarian society. His reputation as a man of extraordinary spiritual power grew rapidly, and in 1859 the Third Congregational Unitarian Society (later the Independent Liberal Church) was organized in New York by admirers who wished to see his influence extended.

This society, to which men and women of the most diverse faiths and aspirations were attracted, met first in Ebbit Hall, then in a church of its own, later in Lyric Hall, and finally in the Masonic Temple. During his: twenty years as its pastor Frothingham was at the height of his powers and was looked upon as the intellectual heir of Theodore Parker. His beliefs, however, were even further removed than Parker's from traditional. Christianity. To many people, even to his cousin Henry Adams (Education of Henry Adams, 1918, p. 35), his faith seemed "scepticism ." His weekly sermons were broadcast in newspapers and pamphlets and aroused widespread attention and discussion. Finding himself outside the bounds of orthodox Unitarianism, Frothingham became one of the founders, in Boston, May 30, 1867, of the Free Religious Association and served until 1878 as its first president. In 1879 his health broke down, and he was compelled to give up active work. After a great public testimonial to its esteem and love for him. his congregation disbanded, and he went to Europe for a year of rest. On his return he took up his residence in Boston, where he lived in semi-retirement for the rest of his life. He never regained his health.

While a student he composed his one generally known hymn, "The Lord of Hosts, Whose guiding hand." Between 1863 and 1891 he wrote copiously, his most substantial books being The Religion of Humanity (1872); The Safest Creed (1874); Theodore Parker: A Biography (1874); Transcendentalism in New England: A History (1876); Gerrit Smith: A Biography (1877); George Ripley (1882); Memoir of William Henry Channing (1886); Boston Unitarianism, 1820-1850: A Study of the Life and Work of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1890); and Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890 (1891). Unfortunately, his earlier works, written during the strenuous years in New York, are marred by serious errors and omissions; his later books, the products of his leisure, are far better. As a biographer he was honest, fair, candid, and sympathetic; He also wrote much for newspapers and periodicals, contributed several memoirs to the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and published some 150 sermons. He died in Boston; his body, at his earnest request, was cremated.

[The chief source of information is his Recollections and Impressions, 1822-90 (1891). The fullest memoir is Josiah P. Quincy's in Proc. Massachusetts Hist. Society, 2 series X (1896), 507-39. For other writings by and about him see the sketch by his nephew, Paul R. Frothingham, in S. A. Eliot's Heralds of a Liberal Faith, III (1910), 120-27.]

G. H. G.


FULLER, Lydia, Boston, Massachusetts, Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS).  (Yellin, 1994, p. 61)


FULLER, Sarah Margaret, 1810-1850, author, journalist, critic, reformer, abolitionist. (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 561-562)

FULLER, SARAH MARGARET (May 23, 1810-July 19, 1850), Marchioness Ossoli, journalist, critic, social reformer, was born in Cambridgeport, near Boston, Massachusetts, of typical Puritan ancestry. Her father, Timothy Fuller, was a lawyer and a graduate of Harvard. A member of the Massachusetts Senate and a representative in Congress, he played a considerable part in the politics of his day. Her mother, Margaret Crane, once a school-teacher, had no intellectual pretensions. Ten years younger than her husband, she left all authority to him. While she brought up the younger children, Mr. Fuller took full charge of the education of his daughter, who  was a precocious child and a model pupil. Proud of her abilities, her father forced her progress. At the age of six she was introduced to Latin and two years later she was reading Ovid. Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere were also read before she had reached her teens. Two years at boarding-school, which were most unhappy, brought out the latent hysteria in the ambitious girl. Margaret afterward blamed her father for her broken health. She said that children should not read too early, as "they should not through books ante-date their actual experiences, but should take them gradually, as sympathy and interpretation are needed" (Memoirs, post, I, 31). When she was twenty-five, Emerson said of her that her reading was at the rate of Gibbon's. Margaret's friendships with the intellectual leaders of her time began at an early age. She discussed philosophy while riding horse-back with James Freeman Clarke; read with Frederic Henry Hedge the German authors whom Carlyle had made the fashion; and confided in William Henry Channing "her secret hope of what Woman might be and do, as an author, in our Republic" (Memoirs, II, 7-8). Often satirized as a blue-stocking, she became along with Emerson the butt of many gibes aimed at Transcendentalism. She was accepted in this circle on a par with men like Alcott and Thoreau and developed in its atmosphere her talents as a talker.

From 1839 to 1844 her famous "conversations" were held in Boston. After several years of teaching and translating, Margaret bit upon this method of adding to her income while she exercised her talent. "Conversation is my natural element," she said. "I need to be called out, and never think alone, without imagining some companion" (Memoirs, I, 107). The purpose of the course, as her prospectus said, was to supply "a point of union to well-educated and thinking women, in a city which, with great pretensions to mental refinement, boasts, at present, nothing of the kind." The first class, composed of twenty-five ladies, came together in Elizabeth Peabody's room in West Street. The conversations were extremely popular and Margaret's reputation was soon made. Her pupils, whom Harriet Martineau once peevishly described as "gorgeous pedants," were drawn from the most intellectual and cultivated circles of Boston society. From her discussions with this group, she derived material and inspiration for her volume, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Though comparable with Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the book did not attract the same degree of popular attention. It touched on all the issues of the future woman's movement, however, and quietly prepared the way in many isolated minds, although its view of woman's rights was too comprehensive and its tone too philosophical to gratify the militants of those early days. When the outcome of the Civil War made suffrage a burning issue, the ideas of Margaret Fuller were allowed to fall into the background. Her book was thus neglected and soon almost forgotten. Her life had more influence.

Margaret began her career as a journalist with the editorship of the Dial, the organ of the Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Ripley were joint editors with her. As editor-in-chief she was to · have received two hundred dollars a year, but Emerson doubts whether even this modest salary was ever paid. She labored strenuously with her unpaid contributors but oftener than she liked she was obliged to fill her columns with her own contributions. The common criticism was that the Dial was too feminine. It ceased to exist when Margaret changed the scene of her activities from Boston to New York. While "far from being an original genius," as she once said of herself, she was one of the best of American critics. It was in this capacity that Horace Greeley invited her to join the staff of the New York Tribune. His wife, who had attended the conversations in Boston, was in favor of the plan, which offered among its terms a home in the Greeley household. Mr. Greeley, who was a great admirer of the Dial, had read the contributions of its hard-worked editor. He had been especially impressed by her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844), the description of a journey to Chicago. Margaret's optimistic view of Western life accorded with the slogan of the Tribune editor: "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." Mr. Greeley's enthusiasm for these papers, aided by the admiration of his wife for the talents of Miss Fuller, led him to offer her a position on his newspaper.

During the two years that she spent in New York-her business life as she called it-Margaret won her reputation as an American critic. The Tribune was famous for the excellence and freedom of its articles and reviews. Before the bar of Margaret's literary judgment came the work of Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning. Like Mr. Greeley, she sometimes made enemies. Lowell, whom she derided as a poet, lampooned her as Miranda in his Fable for Critics (1864), yet she achieved a place as "one of the best-equipped, most sympathetic, and genuinely philosophical critics produced in America prior to 1850" (Cambridge History of American Literature, I, 343). In the summer of 1846 she at last gratified her great desire to go to Europe. Her letters from abroad appeared from time to time on the front page of the Tribune. She visited Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Harriet Martineau, but one of her favorite poets had disappeared from London. "Browning has just married Miss Barrett, and gone to Italy," she wrote to her publisher. "I may meet them there" (Memoirs, II, 190). In Paris she visited George Sand and was profoundly impressed by her personality. In Rome she renewed her acquaintance with Mazzini, begun in London. By a romantic chain of circumstances she became deeply involved in the Roman Revolution.

In October 1847 she parted with her friends, the Springs, with whom she had been traveling in Europe, and returned to Rome for an indefinite sojourn. She took a furnished room in the Corso and prepared, like Goethe, to steep herself in Rome. A chance encounter with an Italian gentleman developed into friendship and still greater intimacy. Angelo Ossoli, ten years younger than Margaret, was handsome, penniless, and devoted. He had nothing to offer but himself and the title of Marquesa. In time the two were married; the exact date was never revealed. The marriage was first announced when their child was one year old. He had been born September 5, 1848, in the ancient village of Rieti. Margaret left him with a nurse while she returned to play her part in the Roman Revolution. She and Ossoli were adherents of Mazzini. The husband, an officer in the republican service, fought courageously in the siege of 1849. Margaret assisted Princess Belgiojoso in the organization of the hospitals. Her occasional letters to the Tribune described the progress of the siege and strove to throw a favorable light on the tottering republic. On July 4, the French troops entered Rome. "In two days of French 'order,' " wrote Margaret, "more acts of violence have been committed than in two months under the Triumvirate." She sat with Ossoli in her chamber and refused to look out of the window. The Roman husband wept. With Ossoli and her child, Margaret fled to Florence, where she took her husband's name and the title of Marquesa. She spent the winter writing a history of the Roman Revolution. Of this book, which was never to be published, Mrs. Browning said, "It would have been more equal to her faculties than anything she had ever yet produced." In the spring the manuscript was finished, and Margaret prepared to return to America to find a publisher. With her family she set sail from Leghorn May 17, 1850; 0n this ill-fated voyage, disasters followed close upon each other. The captain died of smallpox and Margaret's child almost succumbed to it. On the eve of their arrival in New York, the vessel ran into a storm and was shipwrecked off Fire Island. Margaret and Ossoli and little Angelino all perished in the waves. Of the three bodies only that of the child was recovered. The manuscript of Margaret's book on the Roman Revolution was lo st without a trace. "For years afterwards," wrote Rebecca Spring, "if I went to the sea-shore, I would dream of Margaret, and always pleasantly. In my dream, she always seemed happy; it may be that the requiem of the winds and the waves was the best for her. She believed in the higher education of women and in equal rights for them as citizens. She would have rejoiced in the wonderful progress they have made in these things since her time. Let our sex never forget Margaret Fuller."

It was by her personality rather than her writings that Margaret Fuller impressed herself upon her generation. There were strange contradictions in her life which were a great puzzle to her contemporaries. Though always an invalid, she did the work of three women and sometimes "worked better when she was ill." Her eccentricities in early life made many enemies and were deprecated even by her friends, but those who knew her in Italy, as for instance Mrs. Story, testified that she had lost her arrogance and oddity and gained in tolerance and simplicity. A year after her death, a memorial volume was published by her New England friends. As scarcely any records of her foreign life survived, it gave no just account of her last eventful years, Mazzini and the Brownings were invited to contribute, but the papers which they wrote were lo st and never came to light. The portrait which emerged from the two-volume memoirs was therefore chiefly drawn from Margaret's early years. Unfinished though it was, it reveals her as a noble and generous personality, a pathfinder whose brave hopes were realized by others. In 1869 her complete works were published under the direction of Horace Greeley. Besides Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, they included her contributions to the Tribune in three volumes entitled Literature and Art, published in 1846 as Papers on Literature and Art; Life Without and Life Within; and At Home and Abroad.

[The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (2 vols., 1852) were edited by R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing; and J. F. Clarke. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was written for the American Men of Letters Series by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1884) ... Julia Ward Howe's Margaret Fuller (1 883) emphasized her struggles as a pioneer. The short life by Andrew Macphail in Essay's in Puritanism (1905) contained the first account of her Italian life which did not gloss over its unconventional aspects. See also Helen N. McMaster, Margaret Fuller as a Literary Critic (1928); Karl Knortz, Brook Farm, and Margaret Fuller (1900); Katharine Anthony, Margaret Fuller (1920); W. H. Fuller, Genealogy of Some Descendants of Thomas Fuller of Woburn (1919).

K.A.


FULLER, Timothy, 1778-1835, U.S. Congressman, Massachusetts, voted against extension of slavery in 1819.  In the Congressional debates, Congressman Fuller said: “All Europe, the whole civilized world, are spectators of the scene.  Our Declaration of Independence, our Revolution, our State institutions, and, above all, the great principles of our Federal Constitution, are arrayed on one side, and our legislative acts and national measures, the practical specification of our real principles and character, on the other.” (Dumond, 1961, p. 104; 16 Congress, 1 Sess., 1819-1920, II, p. 1467; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 561)


FURNESS, William Henry, 1802-1896, Unitarian clergyman, abolitionist, reformer.  Supported rights for African Americans and Jews.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 565-566; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 316)

FURNESS, WILLIAM HENRY (April 20, 1802-January 30, 1896), Unitarian clergyman, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of William and Rebekah (Thwing) Furness. He attended a "dame's school" and the Latin School with his lifelong friend R. W. Emerson. He graduated in 1820 from Harvard and in 1823 from the Divinity School. After several months of preaching, he was called in the summer of 1824 to the Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, where he was ordained and installed January 12, 1825. This church, founded by Dr. Priestley in 1796, had never previously had a pastor. The congregation grew rapidly under Furness's leadership and after three years a commodious house of worship was built which lasted through his ministry. In 1875 he became pastor emeritus, but continued to preach to his own people and elsewhere as long as he lived. It has been said that his life had two major interests. The first was the anti-slavery cause which he championed as early as 1824 until the close of the Civil War, in defiance of violence and social ostracism. His other interest was the study of the life of Jesus. As a student of the Jesus of history rather than the Christ of theology, he was a pioneer in pointing out the distinction between the two. He believed that Jesus represented humanity at its best, that the Gospels were historic documents, and that the New Testament miracles were wholly natural events. Out of this research developed several published works, of which the most important are the following: Remarks on the Four Gospels (1836); Jesus and His Biographers (1838); A History of Jesus (1850); Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus of Nazareth (1859); and The Veil Partly Lifted (1864).

Furness was one of the first American scholars to study and translate German literature, his most important translation being Daniel Schenkel's Character of Jesus Portrayed (1866), to which he added copious annotations. In his work of translation he was associated with his friend Reverend F. H. Hedge [q.v.], whom he assisted in the preparation of Prose Writers of Germany (1849). He also translated much German verse, of which his Schiller's Song of the Bell (1850) is probably the best. He was a hymnwriter of considerable merit, a collection of his best hymns being found in A. P. Putnam's Singers and Songs of the Liberal Faith (1875). He was a lover of art and a great promoter of artistic interests, and appreciated both the classic and the current in literature. Although a partic1pant in the Unitarian and the slavery controversies, he never aroused antagonisms because he criticized ideas rather than persons. His circle of friends embraced those of all sects· and creeds, prominent among whom was the Catholic Bishop of Philadelphia. He was a poor denominationalist and thought in terms of principles rather than of organization. He was married in 1825 to Annis Pulling Jenks of Salem, Massachusetts, who died in 1884. Of their four children, two sons and a daughter survived them. One son, Horace Howard Furness, 1833-1912 [q.v.], attained distinction as a Shakespearian scholar.

[A comprehensive account of the life. and work of Furness, with an extensive bibliography of his writings, is found in S. A. Eliot, ed., Heralds of a Liberal Faith (1910), vol. III. See also Proc. American Philos. Society Memorial Vol., I (1900), 9-18; American Ancestry, IV (1889), 206; J. W. Jordan, ed., A History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (1914); Unit. Rev., February 1875; Atheneum, February 8, 1896; Critic, February 8, 1896; Christian Register, February 6, 1896; Nation, February 6, 1896.]

F. T. P.


FUSSELL, BARTHOLOMEW (Jan 9, 1794-February 15, 1871), physician, reformer, was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the son of Bartholomew and Rebecca (Bond) Fussell. He was of mixed ancestry, with the English strain predominant. His father was a farmer and an approved Quaker minister. Fussell received his earliest instruction in a school erected by his father and taught by his sister Esther, who exercised a far-reaching influence over his intellectual development. While studying in the medical department of the University of Maryland, where he graduated M.D. in 1824, he supported himself by teaching and on Sundays conducted a free school for negro slaves, in which he had as many as sixty pupils at a time. Friendly contact with the negroes soon turned him into a militant Abolitionist, and Elisha Tyson of Baltimore initiated him into the duties of a station-master on the Underground Railroad. Shortly after his marriage to Lydia Morris, Fussell removed to Kennett Square, celebrated in Bayard Taylor's Story of Kennett Square (1866), in his native county, where he soon won renown as a physician of rare skill and devotion and as an Abolitionist who knew no fear. Into the business of sheltering escaped slaves and baffling their pursuers he seems to have entered with the zest of a sportsman, and his portly figure was conspicuous at the Philadelphia convention of 1833 that organized the American Anti-Slavery Society and issued its famous "Declaration of Sentiments." From the beginning he had been a friend of William Lloyd Garrison and had supported the Genius of Universal Emancipation and the Liberator. Though elsewhere in Chester County he had more than one encounter with hostile mobs, at Kennett Square, thanks to his own prestige and to the persuasive eloquence of the peripatetic Charles Calistus Burleigh [q.v.], he was entrenched safely. When Governor David R. Porter denounced the Abolitionists as traitors, John Greenleaf Whittier, in an unrepublished poem, defied him to

Go hunt sedition ! Search for that
In every pedlar's cart of rags;
Pry into every Quaker's hat
And Dr. Fussell's saddle-bags,
Lest treason wrap, with all its ills,
Around his powders and his pills.

Largely through the influence of his sister, Esther Fussell Lewis, he also became an earnest advocate of temperance, of free elementary education, and of greater educational and professional opportunities for women. As early as 1840 he gave medical instruction to a class of women; he succeeded in interesting other doctors in his ideas; and as the result of his efforts the Female Medical College (renamed in 1867 the Woman's Medical College) of Pennsylvania was incorporated March 11, 1850. Henry Gibbons, a son of William Gibbons [q.v.], was the chief incorporator; Fussell, though unable to take any direct part in the work, always remained deeply interested in it. After the death about 1838 of his first wife, he married Rebecca C. Hewes and moved to York, Pennsylvania, where he opened a school and continued to work for the emancipation of negroes. He died at Chester Springs at the home of one of his sons.

[Wm. Still, The Underground Railroad (1872); R. C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 188 3); J. G. Whittier, " The Antislavery Convention of 1833," Atlantic Monthly, February 1874; S. T. Pickard, Life and Letters of J. G. Whittier, I (1894), 229; E. F. Cordell, Medic. Annals of Md. (1903); Clara Marshall, Woman's Medic. College of Pennsylvania (1897). The day of his death is taken from the Public Ledger (Philadelphia), February 18, 1871.

J.G.H.G.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.