Imperfect Union Quotes

“Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the capital and called upon Mrs. Frémont. She was “excellent company,” he said, showing “good sense and good humour,” but also expressing “musical indignation” as she was “incessantly accusing the Government of the vast wrong that had been done to the General.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Jessie emphasized that slavery corrupted “the temper of children,” meaning the white children of slave owners. “I would as soon place my children in the midst of small pox, as rear them under the influences of slavery.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“As a private individual in 1849, he saw his interests clearly, acted sensibly, and employed people with the skills he needed. As a legislator in 1850, he was part of a system, joining a group of men who were thinking in the abstract about categories of people who were not like them.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Each of the eastern lawmakers dreamed of returning to Congress as one of California’s first United States senators. The Post correspondent sarcastically marveled that the men could “understand the wants and necessities of California after only a few weeks’ residence in the Territory! . . . It is to be regretted, however, that they could not have found some Territory nearer home worthy of their patriotism and sacrifices.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“As an officer who neither attended West Point nor even served much around other soldiers, he failed to grasp the depth of the military’s tribalism. The army and navy served the same country but had separate chains of command, rivaled each other for funding and glory, and viewed each other’s cultures as alien.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Their walks would have been a chance to get to know each other, because for all they had been through, they had not been through much together.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“he learned to read through a flaw in the slave system: it was run by people susceptible to human feelings.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“There was a gap between Captain Frémont and his men, which was reflected in the differing stories they told. His men talked with brutal frankness; either they did not know that people outside their world might judge their acts to be wrong, or they did not care. John Frémont knew and cared. The life his men led was not quite his; it was a life he visited, knowing he would go home to his world of books and newspapers, cities and civilization.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“but having shamed another man, he could no longer take counsel of his own fears.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Newspapers,” he declared, “are the school of public instruction.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War