Tomorrow begins Women's History Month, an annual undertaking that I will mark by highlighting female orators who helped forge what author Tim Goeglein (featured below) likes to call "the great American story." Three years ago, RCP ran a month-long series of such speeches. "A Woman Spoke Today" was envisioned, edited, and curated by Dana Rubin, who launched (and still maintains) the largest online repository of women's speeches.
Dana, a former colleague of mine from our California newspapering days, has produced a new book of momentous speeches by American women. RealClearPublishing is proud to be associated with the project, which I have cited before -- and will be touting all week.
Today, incidentally, is considered the 169th anniversary of the Republican Party's founding. It was a political movement formed around the idea of eradicating slavery and also fueled by the aspirations of American citizens who could not themselves even vote. Half the country, I'm talking about: women.
Like all lasting political movements, the Republican Party didn't spring full-blown from the brow of one individual or emerge at a single meeting. On this date in 1854, a crusading lawyer named Alvan Bovay convened a political gathering of like-minded souls at the First Congregational Church in the small Wisconsin town of Ripon.
But a week earlier, a group of similarly motivated abolitionists met in Jackson, Michigan. Four months before that, at an October 12, 1853, meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, former congressman Amos Tuck led a meeting of slavery opponents at the Blake Hotel, where the name "Republican" was proffered for a new party. A year earlier, in 1852, according to Bovay, New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley had suggested that name. Its appeal was that Thomas Jefferson's political party had been the Democratic-Republican Party. "Republicans," who would soon supplant Whigs as the nation's rival political party, would be using the half that moniker as a historical counterweight to pro-slavery Democrats.
Passions were roiling the country over slavery, particularly in the Upper Midwest. On the night of March 11, 1854, a captured slave named Joshua Glover was rescued from the Milwaukee jail by an abolitionist mob. As anti-slavery passions roiled across the North, Ripon's citizens met again, this time at a place known to this day as the "Little White Schoolhouse." That meeting was held on March 20, 1854. "We went into the little meeting held in a school house Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats," Bovay recalled later. "We came out of it Republicans and we were the first Republicans in the Union."
By 1856, the Republican Party had a presidential nominee, John C. Frémont. Four years later, it produced a president, Abraham Lincoln, in an election that directly led to the Civil War and Emancipation. That is the way the story is usually abbreviated, and it isn't wrong. But it gives short shrift to what John Lennon called "the other half of the sky."
John C. Frémont was a dashing military man and an explorer, but he was a political naïf who would never have been chosen as the party's first standard-bearer if he hadn't been married to
Jessie Benton Frémont. The daughter of Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie had grown up among Washington's elite and had always gravitated toward politics. She admired her father and emulated him. Although Sen. Benton had once owned slaves, he came to detest the institution, partly because of the influence of his wife, who freed slaves she had inherited. Parents like that were likely to produce a political firebrand, and they did. Today, Jessie Benton Frémont would be the candidate instead of John. In 1856, she had to settle for advising her husband, writing his speeches, recruiting young political talent to serve him, writing letters to newspapers, and similar activities.
The funny thing is that people weren't really fooled. At torchlight political rallies, crowds of young Republicans would routinely insist on seeing the candidate's wife -- and hearing a few words from her. The unofficial 1856 Republican campaign slogan became "Give 'Em Jessie!" It's a line that evokes in modern ears two later campaign battle cries: Harry Truman's "Give 'Em Hell" and Bill and Hillary Clinton's "Two for the Price of One."
As in Hillary's case, there was a backlash against Jessie Frémont in some quarters. But those antediluvian naysayers were overwhelmed by the crusading young Americans, male and female, who realized that the great crusade before them -- wiping the scourge of slavery from this continent -- would take both halves of the sky.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
