Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

NPR host Inskeep (Jacksonland) charts John Frémont’s rise from an impoverished, peripatetic childhood in the American South to become a celebrated Western explorer and the Republican Party’s first-ever presidential nominee in this scrupulously researched history. Frémont’s five mid-19th-century expeditions—including treks from the Great Plains to Oregon, and into California on the eve of the Mexican-American War—earned him nationwide acclaim as an embodiment of the country’s “manifest destiny,” according to Inskeep, who examines the era’s emerging political fissures over slavery and westward expansion with nuance. He reveals how Frémont’s wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, helped to write her husband’s reports on his explorations, “amplified his talent for self-promotion,” and guided his sometimes naive political instincts. Quoting a contemporary rival’s assessment that Jessie was “the better man of the two,” Inskeep discusses how her prominent role in Frémont’s 1856 presidential campaign provided inspiration for the women’s suffrage movement. This sweeping yet fine-grained account contextualizes the issues facing pre–Civil War America without losing sight of the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of the narrative. History buffs will savor Inskeep’s fluid, multifaceted approach to the subject. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency. (Jan.)