I

Jessie, the last stanza of “The Retrospect” suggests, stands for the act of defiance in the present moment that keeps alive hope for the kind of future the poem devotes most of its time to projecting. Only because of the spirit Jessie inspires in both the harassed Kansan settlers and the North as a whole (these two groups are deliberately conflated in “The Retrospect”) can the poem celebrate the eventual triumph over the slave-driving scheme to gain new territory. This association of Jessie with energizing defiance is, in fact, the most immediately apparent feature of those poems in which she appears, thanks in part to two fortuitous puns built into her name. Because of her famous father, Thomas Benton,Footnote ¹⁰ Fremont's unmarried name was well known. In the poems, therefore, Jessie is described as “bent on” freedom, “bent on” a free Kansas, “bent on” a Republican victory, and so forth. An even more common pun came from the expression “give 'em jessie,” roughly equivalent in meaning to “give them hell.” As the New York Evening Mirror accurately predicted, “this felicitous double entendre only needs to be published to become the watchword of the campaign.”Footnote ¹¹ Several poems that made no further reference to the candidate's wife employed the refrain “We'll give 'em Jessie” or “Fremont will give 'em Jessie.” So pervasive was this pun that one Democratic editor complained that Fremont's only “qualification for the office is admitted by his friends to be the senseless cry, ‘Give 'em Jessie’,”Footnote ¹² a clear indication that the features of the poetry had seeped into the public consciousness of the campaign discourse in general. Jessie's life story helps to explain the resonance of both the “give 'em Jessie” refrain and the variations on “bent on.”

These two puns were in keeping with the historical figure's contemporary reputation: that of a stylish southern lady who had resisted the tug of her own background and status to stand up to other fashionable women who wished to make California a slave state. While her husband was depicted as making California free by an act of adventure and conquest, Jessie was seen to have aided this effort by standing her ground so as to make good on her husband's completed mission. While the prose reports on this matter emphasized her adherence to a principle, the poetry emphasized her defiance of oligarchic pressures: she “said she'd rather work by far,/Than yield to the slave-power's sway.”Footnote ¹³ Here Jessie gives an implicit directive to freemen by illustrating the interdependence of free labor and defiance. That contribution was to continue into the campaign as she became the guiding spirit to the resisting North: “For Virtue and Valor she takes a brave stand.”Footnote ¹⁴ The “give 'em Jessie” pun fused together these associations with the literal fact that, in becoming President, Fremont would present his wife to the nation as a representative of the values his victory would safeguard. A last step for the couple, this arrival at the White House will allow the people to claim the Fremonts' earlier struggles as their own. Tracing the lovers' paradigmatic love story, reduced and tailored in the poetry to the needs of the campaign, reveals why Jessie could serve as a defiant people's rallying cry.

The first of these steps is the liberation of Jessie from the home of her father, “Old Bullion.” Because of her father's opposition to their marriage, the historical John and Jessie had eloped when she was a very young woman, and the Republican campaign, as Pierson has recently shown in detail, made much of this stage in Fremont's career.Footnote ¹⁵ Taking advantage of the occasional Democrat charge that Fremont “stole an old man's daughter,” Republican poetry played up not so much the passion as the defiance and youthful freedom involved in this adventure. In one poem, “Fremont Song,” the boldness of the escape anticipates the determination of the lovers both to resist the temptation of bondage (“Slave I ne'er will buy or sell”) and to cut out a new path for the nation:

The pairing “love and liberty” runs throughout the “Jessie” poetry, for the consensual liberation of Jessie prefigures Fremont's freeing of the country from the forces of decrepit but paralyzing power that Jessie's father represents in the original story:

The marriage of Fremont and free territory that will save Young America has its origins in the delivery from ancient power of John and Jessie. In both cases Fremont becomes the hero of the romantic quest, as described by Northrop Frye: “The reward of the quest usually is or includes a bride … often rescued from the unwelcome embraces of another unwelcome and generally older male.”Footnote ¹⁸ The poetry does not hesitate to place Fremont's experience within this traditional pattern: “And when he runs, he wins the prize, a golden land or bride.” Here the final end of disenthralling the nation recalls not only the original liberation of Jessie but also the events that followed the marriage: in the poetry's history, Fremont continues his quest, beginning with an exploration of America's future domain and continuing with his role in California's entrance into the union. The transference of romance structures into contemporary rhetoric about gender roles within a marriage and within the development of the nation bolstered the sense that Jessie governs this continuity. Thus one prose piece on her role describes this process in impersonal gender terms: “Under the influence of her love, precept and example, man virtuously strives for the civic crown, explores the wilderness, and braves the perils of battle in defence of his country's honor and freedom.”Footnote ¹⁹ Even when Jessie herself was not invoked, Republican discourse cross-pollinated the rhetoric of Fremont's wife-inspired accomplishments with the story of the heroic elopement. Thus H. L. Dawes lauded Fremont for having “rescued from the grasp of the British Lion the golden daughter of the Pacific [i.e. California] and led her, a Free State, … to the marriage altar of the Union.”Footnote ²⁰ In this prose piece, the parallel with the personal marriage is implicit; in the poetry, that marriage is the linchpin of all his accomplishments. Indeed, Fremont's victories are founded on that initial commitment to Jessie which gave the final stamp to his character: once he had met Jessie, “incense purified his life/And honor crowned his brow.” More than a moderately inspiring love story, the elopement of the Fremonts comes to define the possibilities built into Fremont's career.

Since he is under the care of and inspired by Jessie throughout his trials, the poetry looks to her to reflect back to the people the continuity between her original emancipation, her husband's bravery on the frontier, and the spirit he will bring to redeeming the nation. The phrase “love and liberty” again links these discrete phases in his career:

Heroism and fulfillment in love here run parallel. Both, moreover, have political corollaries. Just as Fremont's charting the unexplored regions of the continent anticipates his presidential act of “break[ing] from slavery's desert land/A path to freedom's plains,”Footnote ²² so too his elopement with Jessie presupposes his eventual occupation of the national home. As in traditional romance, where the exaltation of the hero follows the preliminary trials and the main battle,Footnote ²³ Fremont's conquest for love and liberty will be fulfilled the moment he and Jessie step into the White House. Indeed, Jessie's presence in the White House marks the continuity between Fremont's achievements that the nation will need if Fremont's powers are to seep into the realm of political redemption. When his wife enters the White House, Fremont will receive the final reward for his patient rejection of immediate gratification: “He wooed her and he won her, and will make her by the fates/The lady of the President of these United States.”Footnote ²⁴ As this couplet implies, Fremont's adventure unfolds in tandem with his unconscious desire to put Jessie in her rightful position: while he develops his heroic credentials with her aid, he also nurtures her own development. Phoebe Carey, the best-known poet to contribute to the Jessie canon, emphasizes such a parallel between Fremont's different contributions to national flourishing: “She has grown in the sunshine of kindness and duty … Give praise to the Hero, and love to the blossom –/Our beautiful Jessie, the pride of the West.”Footnote ²⁵ The people will sanction the final blossoming of Jessie as a token of Fremont's determination to save the West from slavery. Through Jessie, Fremont carries the forces exemplified in his life history over to his new role as the nation's savior.

In relation to Fremont's propelling desire, as in relation to the people in “The Retrospect,” Jessie serves at once as impetus, object, support, and, with the voters' help, final reward. The celebratory side of the poetry, examined thus far, seems to take for granted that through Jessie Washington can be infused with the same interdependence among virtues that shines through when the various stages and preconditions in Fremont's heroic track are seen as a whole. The White House, however, has already been occupied by a very different relationship between desire, effort, and reward, a relationship modeled not on exploration and elopement but on the territorial encroachments of “a free-to-roam” slavery. Only in the context of this alternate anti-quest can the nation's need to have Jessie in the White House be understood.

II

The political anti-slavery movement had long used the metaphor of a debased sexuality to represent the fall of the West to the “brutal lusts of slavery.”Footnote ²⁶ The states that grow out of this desecration can only be blighted, leaving wasted the original energy that went into their, and the nation's, making: “Shall we allow the expansive energies of our free institutions … to be circumscribed by an institution that drags desolation, and decay, and fruitlessness in its track?”Footnote ²⁷ Succumbing to the slave interest thus involved a sacrifice of future blossoming to the moment-by-moment, unending desires of an oligarchy. In one poem future immigrants wishing to make a new home in the West are sheepishly denied by a nation that has recognized too late how shortsighted its submission to those desires in 1856 truly was:

Like the land, then, the future will be handed over. What is sacrificed is not just an empire in a physical sense but, more importantly, the use of the nation's “expansive energies” to cultivate a fertile future. Making free homes impossible, the oligarchy's non-procreative craving will freeze history in its place and turn America into a spatial version of its present interests rather than, as in Fremont's life journey, the stage for national and personal development. Every moment is sacrificed to immediate satisfaction and hence unable to accumulate over time or to build up through stages of growth. This kind of future looms over the nation, however, only because a secondary desire, equally self-interested but even more feeble, clears the oligarchy's path.

Because the northern instinct to pander to the Slave Power for short-term financial and political gain posed an even more serious threat to republicanism than an external southern foe, the new party devoted more rhetorical energy to transcoding that pliancy into a metaphorical form that ultimately sheds light on the cult of Jessie. Tapping the long-standing American tradition of condemning the modern day's “reigning spirit of selfishness”Footnote ²⁹ as a threat to essential republican virtue, Republicans represented the politician's “clamoring want” as a pathetic shadow of the at least vibrant slave-owner's lust: northern Democrats, according to Timothy Day,

In sharp contrast to this sacrifice of the past and future to the immediate is, of course, the delayed gratification required by the various stages of Fremont's quest, each linked to Jessie. As Day's warning suggests, both models are open to the people. Luckily, the Democrats provided the nation with a presidential candidate peculiarly well suited to bringing out this contrast.

The role of Jessie in the campaign's literature cannot be separated from the representation of her husband's aged bachelor opponent, James Buchanan. That Buchanan was a bachelor was particularly fortuitous for a new party calling upon long-standing rhetorical traditions within the political anti-slavery movement: one of those identified compromising northern politicians, i.e. doughfaces, with decrepitude and impotence. Hence, in 1850, Thaddeus Stevens described the “race of doughfaces” as “an unmanly, unvirile race, incapable, according to the laws of nature, of reproduction.”Footnote ³¹ When combined with the parallel denunciation of doughface lust, such rhetoric produced a full picture of that political figure – a lecherous but weak old man indifferent to all but the satisfaction of masturbatory desires that serve no broader purpose and produce nothing to perpetuate the republic. The Jessie poems, with their emphasis on fertility of various kinds, gained power from the sudden prominence, thanks to the nomination of Buchanan, of this motif. The romance motifs that inform the story of the Fremonts' elopement also enter into the denunciation of the sterile future embodied in the career of James Buchanan.

The poetry uses Buchanan's personal life to highlight the political decadence of his party, a decadence only Jessie's life course can reverse. Republicans represented Buchanan's failure to marry as a reflection of a deeper failure to step outside of his own selfish ambition in order to form a human bond that would give him a true stake in the republic's future. Buchanan's, or “Buck's”, “celibacy” stood for an infertility at odds with the “union” or “fusion” (both political puns)Footnote ³² of Jessie with John. As one Republican put it, the old man still has his “ruling passion,” namely the lust for power to which he had earlier sacrificed any hope for “the comforts of a wife and family.”Footnote ³³ In the same way that in his personal life Buchanan's bachelorhood prevents him from embracing goals that transcend his baser lusts, what he will offer to the nation, should he become President, will lack that blending of defiance with reward whose dynamics Fremont's victory will pass on to the nation:

Here the common “give 'em Jessie” pun pulls its weight. It is only fitting that, as this same poem suggests, “freedom stands defiant” precisely in the act of promoting Jessie to the role of national representative. Buchanan, on the other hand, having channeled all his energies into his own satisfaction and having produced no other product but that satisfaction, can offer the nation merely its own transformation into a broader field for his unanchored lust.

The lesson to be learned, then, from the figure of the aged, worn-out Buchanan was clear: whereas the slaveholder's lust is sterile in its consequences, the doughface's is impotent at its source. And such impotence threatens to encircle the nation with its decrepit energies, binding it together on a basis very different from John and Jessie's “union.” To see this contrast, one need only compare the representation either of the Fremonts' emancipatory elopement or of John's marriage to youthful Kansas with the following picture of Buchanan as a dirty old man ravishing Kansas:

Buchanan is backed by nothing but lewd desire in that he sees in the historic possibilities of the territories only the prospect of the immediate gratification that can come from pandering. His lifeless lust prefigures the enfeebled nation his victory would create, a nation unable to call upon its deeper passions and thus multiply the republic: “Old Bachelors are low in rate/They'd never populate a state.”Footnote ³⁶ History dies in the death grasp of doughface selfishness.

Consequently, true fruitfulness, associated with Jessie, meets its parodic inversion in many of the poems in which she and Buchanan appear together. In “Buck's Song,” for instance, Fremont is named only as “Jessie's man” or “him that has the Jessie,” as if to emphasize, among other things, the poem's explanation for no woman's being willing to marry Buchanan: he would “want to sell the babies.” In the chorus, this venal procreation becomes a ludicrous political breeding of “squatter sovereignty,” a derisive term (derived from Stephen Douglas's program for the territories – “popular sovereignty”) implying that the fate of the nation rested on the passing interests of a few random “squatters”:

The bachelor candidate (or, colloquially, the “batch,” in a pun typical of the poetry) gladly takes on the role of surrogate mother for an illegitimate attempt to enshrine the present moment into the constitution of the territories and thus forestall with premature sovereigns more natural paths of development. The candidate who can never populate a state can still foster the proliferation of political shams whose ultimate aim is to surrender potential reproduction to slaveholding sterility. And the very act of sitting still on an egg that will hatch only squatters points to what the doughfaces gain from their pandering: prolonging their easeful “place” by serving the nation's dominant class and thereby inhibiting the free movement of the people. Hence, as in the grotesque hatching image, Buchanan is constantly represented in the poetry as immobile, claiming as his right the presidential chair to which a deferential people will carry him. The Fremonts, conversely, travel through the poetry on their own steam: should northern men falter, Jessie will “dash through the ranks with her bright glowing crest.”Footnote ³⁸ More specifically, the Fremonts' victory will sweep away the stifling ambitions blocking the people's path to the White House: “We want no old fogies their yoke to lay on/So clear out the way for our Jessie and John.”Footnote ³⁹ In the bachelor candidate, then, sterility and immobility join forces to paralyze the fledgling nation. It falls on the settlers in Kansas to turn on its head the cluster of doughface incapacities by fusing movement with fertility: they must reproduce the nation both by doing what the bachelor cannot do – populate a state – and by creating anew the threatened values of the revolution. And their projected success depends on and assumes the final stage in Jessie's service to the nation.

III

As the first stanza of “The Retrospect” makes clear, to Republicans the future hinged on Kansas. Hence here, too, the language of procreation permeates Republican representations. At once virgin soil and the “capacious womb” of the future, Kansas, as in Charles Sumner's famous speech, was being raped by the slavocracy to produce the “hideous offspring” of a new slave state. As Parke Godwin put it, “from Kansas shall spring the seats of future empire … and become the source of beneficent fertility or a remediless blight.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In this context, the occasional identification of Jessie with Kansas (both referred to as “the Queen of the West,” for instance) is of less importance than the parallel between the settlers' postponed victory and Jessie's arrival at the White House. As the agents of national fertility, the settlers reinvigorate the past to ensure the future through the stabilizing medium of a present home. The role of Fremont's victory in this process is most vividly represented in a piece of campaign fiction serialized on the brink of the election, Lydia Maria Child's “The Kansas Emigrants.”

In this story of New Englanders who move to Kansas only to be brutalized by Missourian border ruffians, two women approach the emigration with contrasting emotions: bold Kate Bradford is full of hope, home-loving Alice full of anxiety. Only the encouraging prediction that, once the settlers make a “beautiful home,” Kansas will become “like our dear New England” soothes Alice's fears. Despite initial success, however, this hope is frustrated by the ruffians. Kate, who easily withstands ruffian attacks, weakens at a heavier blow: the news that whereas Texas will devote resources to making Kansas a slave state, Massachusetts will do nothing to make it free. This report subverts the group's original mission. No longer can they assume that Kansas will simply reenact modern New England's own realization of the pilgrims' dreams. With New England as a political entity no longer a conduit between the settlers' rightful inheritance and the original pilgrims, it is, paradoxically, left to a semiconscious Alice, sent to her deathbed by the murder of her fiancé William, to bring hope back to the group at the end of the story. Waking from deliriums in which she had called out for her mother and her original home, she joyously describes her vision of a redeemed Kansas: “When I told William it seemed just like dear New England, he smiled, and said, ‘This is Free Kansas! … Little Johnny is President, and the Blue Mound is called Free Mont.’”

The home Alice loses in life (twice) is regained in prophecy and is built over the bridge back to a redeemed Washington. The new West can seem “just like New England” only when New England, along with its sister states, becomes itself again, worthy of Kate's temporarily misplaced faith that “Massachusetts will not desert her children in their utmost need.” By reforging the link between the settlers' old home in the original colonies and a new home founded on a revived revolutionary spirit, Fremont's victory reclaims the space to which the combination of slaveholding brutality and northern political apostasy had laid waste. The reassertion of this national role becomes bound up with the emigrants' own reproduction: in the dream, “little Johnny” seems to be not Fremont, but William and Alice's grown son, named after the man who redeemed Kansas and gave them a home in which the child could flourish and emulate his namesake. The White House, then, will assume the duty of parental guardianship that an unredeemed New England had shirked and thereby spur on the blooming of Kansas at several levels. Indeed, in her prophecy Alice reverses the present conditions completely: imprisonment and intimidation give way to free movement; alienation from New England gives way to a re-creation of that world; impoverishment gives way to both commercial and domestic fertility. The future “swarms of children” will thrive under conditions opposite to those suffered by the “emigrant children” Massachusetts has abandoned.Footnote ⁴¹ In general, a wasteland becomes a home, with all the implications of continuity and protection that Alice had longed for up to the point of her death. The representation of the Fremonts' own establishment of a home in Washington depends on this nexus between a political victory that restores the past and a national fertility that guarantees a future.

IV

Why, though, is Jessie, and not simply her husband, needed for the poetry to make good on this association found in Child's story between political restoration and domestic security, between passion for freedom and the affections of the home? Part of the answer lies in what has already been examined: the role of Jessie in defining Fremont's heroism and sacrifice. That context alone, however, does not explain the emphasis that the poetry places on Jessie even apart from her husband's life story. Here the rhetorical role of gender in the party's discourse enters the picture. As Michael Pierson has examined in detail, Republicans claimed to look to women to consolidate in men those psycho-political values that their party's victory would both depend on and strengthen.Footnote ⁴² To escape the bachelor's lust, voters must recognize this need to channel feminine values into male authority. Thus one party editorial rebuked the Buchanan camp for their apparent reluctance to welcome women into their meetings:

The politically charged phrase “free homes” extends the significance of this passage beyond its echoing of typical mid-century sentiments. The men's “holy aspirations” take root in the domestic sphere but then extend to broader ideological purposes that will ultimately produce free territory. This endorsement of women's role in the campaign must be distinguished from the broader, almost universally embraced, position that women shape the young and thereby in the long run shape politics. Democrats were happy to concede that point. Hence, in the following Democratic attack on female participation in the Republican cause, women's relegation to the home paradoxically ensures their ultimate power: “Home is the charmed circle where woman can, and does, hold the destinies of nations. Her influence, which is her strength, is all potent.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Here the home is segregated, its energies cut off from any but long-term political consequences. Republicans typically called for a more direct employment of women's energies and priorities, a more immediate transfer of the values of the home straight into the realm of male politics.Footnote ⁴⁵ Under this process, the mere reproduction of future sovereigns gives way to a new perspective on sovereignty, according to which it loses its force when cut off from the domestic sphere. One of the functions of the campaign poetry was to amalgamate these broad cultural messages with the more explicitly political mission of freeing Kansas: Jessie bridges the distance between the two homes, the northern home of the redeemed male voter and the Kansan home threatened with enslavement. Her position in the reordered Republican universe will ensure the proper flow of energy needed for both to survive.

At the most concrete level, Jessie offers her husband a home before the people do so by ushering him into a political victory. Just as women, in various Republican defenses of their role in the campaign, inject men's political will with the collective and humanized values of the home, so too in the poetry Jessie, having propelled Fremont's ambition, brings it to that stable point where its values can branch outward. From that position, Jessie will be the nation's own beacon:

Jessie as guide and comfort can operate at both the personal and political levels precisely because the home in both realms carries the gains of the quest over to the place where they can be maintained and reproduced. The home protects and establishes what the quest wins. The act of creating, like the Kansan settlers on a smaller scale, a national home will thus give the people confidence that an end to the eroding of principles is in sight.

The rhetoric of the campaign insisted on identifying this domestically based national confidence not simply with a political victory but also with the Fremonts' marriage. A political banner celebrating Jessie recently gave historian Michael Pierson the title for his book: he takes the slogan “Free Hearts and Free Homes” to illustrate the liberating domestic ideology that, he argues, underlay the Republicans' cultural appeal. The motto can also, however, be seen as the sign that the couple's elopement served as a nexus between the strengths of free labor and the securing of free soil. Supporting this myth of origin, the political phraseology of the period underlines one implication of the term “free hearts.” In a typical patriotic tribute, for instance, one Republican paired that phrase with a more explicit reference to free labor: “to free hearts and free hands is owing the greatness which our country has reached.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus the motto “Free Hearts and Free Homes” binds together the liberty of the Fremonts' love with the power of free action to express itself in the nation's expansion and development. In the poetry, all the promise Republicans saw in free labor begins to depend on a particular kind of momentum: the free hearts of the couple sending the nation on the track toward free homes and through the same process winning themselves occupation of the White House. Yet that occupation does not represent merely a final destination, nor does Jessie in her new role serve merely as beacon or end-point. Once in the White House, Jessie will continue to put free labor to the service of national redemption, clearing out the symptoms of the very neglect of liberty that her model marriage has symbolically rebuked.

As one would expect, given the period's gender roles and glorification of women's domestic function, in the poetry Jessie fulfills her national mission by tidying, managing, and “ruling the roost” in the White House. These actions will return the nation to the order destroyed by the lazy, venal politicians who had displaced the energetic fathers of the nation:

This betrayal of a trust held for future generations dooms the territories to their fate. To reverse this trend, Jessie will clean out the traces of ideological shifltlessness:

The enduring American trope of generational rededication to founding but endangered principles here fuses with the lighter tradition of the White House as the nation's representative home. Reactivation of the revolutionary heritage is, paradoxically, the only way to keep faith with the original intent of the fathers. The Jessie poem goes further in bringing to the surface the domestic resonance of the analogy. The promise that John Fremont will “preserve in all its fair proportions the splendid political edifice left us by the Fathers of the Republic”Footnote ⁴⁹ becomes the promise that this preservation will employ the domestic values that at a different level ensure an order based on liberty. As she brings to a new arena her earlier strategy of using work to counter the Slave Power's ambitions in California, Jessie joins her husband in the labor of renovating Washington. Another poem emphasizes the domestic nature of this effort even as it gathers that effort into the broader category of Fremont's political work:

In this poem also the ultimate aim is to restore the White House to the one the founders knew and thereby “subvert the ‘law and order’/Of the Ruffians of the border.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By making a home, then, Jessie restores what “The Retrospect” calls “the order [of] freedom” and forestalls the ruffian “order [of] the grave” that political apostasy threatens to carry over from the West and institutionalize in Washington. Jessie's victory over entropy reconnects the current of desire from the fathers and thus secures a base from which the settlers specifically, and the people generally, can reproduce the nation, free from the danger of that reproduction serving the aims of the dominant class interest and as a result declining into a vicious but tyrannical disorder. Her home, in that sense, makes possible a Kansan home. A Washington restored to its ideological purity, which “The Kansas Emigrants” identifies as the precondition for the proliferation of Puritan energy in the territories, is the promise of a Jessie whose sacrifice and defiance have won her a home.

V

The transference of productive energy also moves in the other direction, however. The Fremonts' desires, now rehinged to the founders', must become the people's. The voters, like the men in the editorial on women's attendance at political meetings, must pass the test of wanting Jessie, as much as they want her husband, ensconced in the nation's home. This desire will take them beyond the immediate burst of enthusiasm produced by their recent political disenthrallment:

Voting for Jessie too will ensure that the “hearts yet free” remain so, resisting the degeneracy to which the North has amply demonstrated itself to be susceptible. The commitment to Jessie crystallizes the passing excitement of the campaign into a longer-lasting change. Hence one poem ends with a call for the voters' engagement that stresses the prophetic intensity of the present moment (“Now or Never!”), only to spread that intensity out into a permanent commitment (“aye forever”) involving Jessie:

It is fitting that this poem is one of those which emphasize Jessie's restoration of the White House, for the act of endorsing Jessie's position confirms the people's participation in the process of national redemption through domestic commitment and symbolically purges the constricting selfishness of the doughfaces. Jessie thereby allows for a broader female sanction of the male voter:

In renouncing the bachelor candidate the people renounce their own bachelorhood. They therefore must adopt the role of both lovers in imitating the Fremonts' path to liberation.

From one angle, the people must follow the husband's example. They must desire the White House for Jessie to prove that their own national desire follows the pattern of escape, struggle, and arrival exemplified by Fremont. Once adopted as a model for the North, Fremont's personal and public adventures become in retrospect a deliberately forged path from a redeemed West to a redeemed national home. In securing Jessie's position, the people travel that path on their own:

By giving Jessie a home, the people express their redemption and thus their right to their own home in the West. Free homes will be guaranteed everyone when the people deserve them by wanting them in the fullest sense and go about getting one for Jessie the way her husband had. To do this, however, they must also imitate the wife's choice, so intimately bound as it is with her rejection of all forms of slavery. Thus, in one poem, America, as the allegorical figure Columbia, spurns Buchanan's romantic advances: “JESSIE, BENT on being free,/Showed the proper course to me.” This couplet binds the earliest stage of Jessie's adventure, when she emancipated herself from paternal authority to set on her life journey with John, with the liberating choice her elevation to the White House will represent for the nation. The people's refusal to become the object of political lust in this poem frees them (again as Columbia) to claim the territories as their own, set aside for their best selves: “I have got a large estate/'Tis to Freemen consecrate.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The people truly own the territories once they pattern their lives after one of the two people, Jessie or John, whose story implicitly rebukes slavery's encroachments.

In either case, the individual desires that scattered the North into self-interested panders sacrificing the future congeal once they become a collective political desire for the only kind of freedom that will secure reproduction of the self no less than of the nation. Voters will therefore tap their individual passion in sanctioning the culminated passion of the Fremonts:

The men in this passage hinge their renewed commitment to the revolutionary heritage on their sexual love, which is directed to making the eventual products of that love as free as the founders. The fulcrum of that restored continuity is their sanction of Jessie, who embodies the interdependence between different kinds of passion. The future “blessings of God” will depend on the people's willingness to give their “blessings for Jessie.” As in The Faerie Queene, where admiration for Gloriana as a representative national figure spurs on a reordering of inner faculties that permits spiritual and historical redemption, so in the Jessie canon the people's admiration signals their willingness to gear their resources to a historical mission that is at once individual and collective. The people and the Fremonts join in a network of regulated procreative desire that will forestall the dissipation that would result from shortsighted devotion to mere self-interest.

Thus the promise of “The Retrospect” – an empire blooming on the strength of the present generation's defiance – depends figuratively on the fulfillment of Jessie's career. Her occupation of the White House promises to solidify in political collectivities the people's power to re-create themselves biologically:

Jessie will have earned this tribute because she has, as both a representative and an object of admiration, charged the nation's desires with a reproductive republican power. Just as the prophecy in “The Retrospect” of millions of freemen nursed by a rescued Kansas turns out to depend on Jessie's inspiration, so too here the couple's occupation of the White House betokens a future in which the people's freedom from immediate gratification has rescued their children from deadening political forms and thus ensured the continuation of the revolution's values. And in both poems this triumph of continuity allows the people to look forward to a time when their descendants will revere Jessie as the present generation must revere the fathers in order to achieve Jessie's goals. Memory will bestow these goals on their children and signal that the revolutionary heritage is endlessly reclaimable. Here we have the clearest explanation for the poetry's association of fertility with historical recovery: only if they continue to reproduce them may the people claim as their own the values for which the founders gave of themselves. The price for the memories of the future must be paid at the present moment, and through an investment of the self and its passions. In this context, Jessie promises both reward and sacrifice.

Like most Republican discourse, the Jessie poems give freedom a history, a history to be taken not as a given but as a gain won over the force of its alternative – a kind of entropic antihistory into which the North was threatening to collapse. Freedom's history depended less on the record of the past than on such investment in the present moment as would produce a future capable of organizing that past into a redemptive pattern. It is in this context that the Jessie poems both exemplify and contribute to the broader canon of Republican discourse. These two histories were figured through the metaphor of reproduction, which by definition hinges future certainties on present expenditures of force, transforming the present generation into the alternate parents of one or the other of two unavoidable futures: America must be either “the nursery of Freedom's heroes” or “the breeding sty of Slaves.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The question then became how the nation's energies could be harnessed to bring about the former future. As one soon-to-be Republican editor put it a year before the new party was formed, “sin is procreative and reproduces itself ever. There must be something extrinsic to slavery to annihilate it.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Clearly, the inherent power of free labor was not enough to achieve this end; for the strengths of that system to be realized the people must realign their internal economies to make themselves equally procreative and thus able to save the nation.

With the dangers facing the nation figured as the satisfaction of slave-driving and doughface lust, the Jessie poems posit a countervailing employment of desire in the designing of the nation. Republicans could proclaim that “Slavery dies where sweet JESSIE's hand waves!”,Footnote ⁶⁰ not out of faith in any specific cause-and-effect chain (certainly Republicans denied that an elected Fremont would interfere with slavery in the states) but as part of a broader prophetic vision which saw the nation husbanding its passions by segmenting them over a redeemed historical trajectory and thus producing future free empires. Within the poetry, the Fremonts first model this economy of liberation and then become both objects and symbols of its rewards. The language of domesticity was the best available tool for transcoding cultural associations into a complete political ideology that looked as much to the powers needed to produce a future as it did to the makeup of the future itself, and, indeed, that saw the former as a prefigurement, not just a cause, of the latter.

Once put in the context of narrative, the domestic model made for a useful parallel with the party's representations of socioeconomic redemption. The key in this context is delayed gratification, the system that, as Eric Foner showed in his seminal study of the party,Footnote ⁶¹ Republicans regarded as the engine that explained why free labor would pave the way to national success. An analogy between the national home and the private home emerged out of the emphasis on rewards deferred through commitment: Republicans defined free labor as a self-perpetuating engine fueling history through the kind of desire whose eye is on the future, whereas slave labor (like its anemic doughfaced instrument in the North) threatened historical retrogression through the death of all but the kind of desire whose aim is merely to “enjoy the present hour.”Footnote ⁶² The contrast between slavish and freedom-loving desire that informs the Jessie poems thus reinforces, by presenting in miniature, this broader macro-narrative. The home that a redeemed people will win in the West, one organizing both their resistance and their passion into a site of reproduction, depends upon their taking a route of desire that adopts Jessie as both model and object. Their willingness to endorse Jessie's life path in effect produces such a West in advance by halting the process which can only end in the relinquishment of its energies to the forces of disordering lust. The selfishness of the undomesticated male became a model for a country whose energies are sacrificed to the immediate satisfactions of political pandering; the voter who wins a free home, as Child's characters in “The Kansas Emigrants” try to do, establishes those energies as a political inheritance.

A decade ago the historian Amy Dru Stanley reminded us that the cult of domesticity was not just a program or a social ideal but a code bound up with “the symbolism of antislavery.”Footnote ⁶³ Like Stowe's novels, the Jessie poems show that such a code could address not only socioeconomic differences between North and South but also the more abstract question of how the North could channel the strengths of a free-labor system into political action. The very fact that in the Jessie poetry the relationship between domesticity and free labor can be drawn almost entirely at the figurative level reaffirms the flexibility of the code in representations of the period. The Jessie poems carry the family model for circulating energy between the home and the marketplace over to the nation as the source of a political subject assigned the task of rescuing republicanism. What was usually a vehicle mostly for individual reform – leading to social change only through the accumulation of individual instances – could also be used as a metaphor for the kind of collective transformation necessary to fashion a successful political agent. The continuity promised by the cult of domesticity, in which, as Mary P. Ryan puts it, “social reproduction” emanates from the “imperial center” of the home,Footnote ⁶⁴ could be invoked to promise a broader historical continuity in which individual energies would be guaranteed a function in historical reproduction.