Candidate as Murderer
Kevin J. Mullen
Compared to at least one election of an earlier time, the charges and counter chares of past misconduct in this year (1992) presidential campaign are kid stuff. How about a supportable charge that on of the candidates was a cold-blooded murderer?
In 1856, John Charles Fremont, the famed Pathfinder who had helped open the West to American conquest, was running for president of the United States as the candidate of the newly organized Republican Party. That year, in the September 27 issue of the Los Angeles Star, Democratic State Senator Philip A. Roach accused Fremont of murder.
Ten years earlier, when California was still a province of Mexico, a group of American settlers in the Sacramento Valley cited abuses by the provincial government and rose up in June 1846 in what became know as the Bear Flag Revolt. (Congress had declared war on Mexico in May, but word didn’t’ get to California for another two months.)
The insurgents marched to Sonoma, seized the town and imprisoned Mexican officials, including Gen. Mariano Vallejo and Jose Berreyesa, the Sonoma Alcalde (a title that combined the duties of mayor and magistrate.) Fremont, than a lieutenant in the U.S. army, was in Northern California at the head of what was ostensibly a surveying party. He became involved in events that led to the eventual conquest of the province by U.S regulars later in the year.
In the meantime, the pickup team of armed American settlers and the equally thin Mexican forces in Northern California maneuvered in a fog of misinformation and rumored atrocities. Then two American, Thomas Cowie and George Fowler, were seized and killed by irregular Mexican forces near what is now Healdsburg. In the words of historian Theodore H. Hittell, they were “lassoed; dragged; tied to trees; mutilated, and literally cut to pieces by their captors.”
A few days later, Lt. Fremont, at the head of a band of 130 men, marched to the hamlet of San Rafael in search of the irregulars responsible for the Cowie and Fowler killings. Their quarry had moved on and the Americans occupied the San Rafael Mission.
.On Sunday, June 28, a small boat put out from the embarcacero of the Rancho San Pablo in what is now Contra Costa County (Point Molate), where regular Mexican troops under General José Castro were known to be assembling.
In the boat were Jose de Los Reyes Berreyesa, father of the imprisoned Sonoma Alcalde, and the 19-year-old de Haro twins, Francisco and Ramon, on their way to Sonoma to visit Berreyesa’s son. The de Haro twins were the sons of Francisco de Haro, former Alcalde of the settlement that would become San Francisco.
What happened next was reported 10 years later by Fremont’s opponent, State Senator Roach, who had solicited a statement from fellow Democrat, the surveyor Jasper O’Farrell. O’Farrell had been present at the San Rafael Mission in 1846. He stated that when the men in the boat were seen to approach San Rafael, Fremont ordered his scout, Kit Carson, and two other men to intercept them.
On receiving the order, Carson is supposed to have said. ”Captain, shall I take these men prisoner?” According to O’Farrell, Fremont waved hi hand and replied:” I don’t have no room for prisoners.”
At the beach, according to many witnesses, Carson executed the unarmed 19-hear-old twins and the elderly Berreyesa. Whatever interpretation is put on the events of that day, there is no doubt but that Carson indeed killed the three men. Fremont’s opponents, like O’Farrell, characterized his action as out-and-out-murder.
His defenders replied that the three were not innocent noncombatants, as portrayed, but in fact were carrying messages as part of a disinformation campaign designed to confuse American forces. Others suggest that the killings were a reprisal for the murders of Cowie and Fowler. The judgment of history—and apparently that of the voters of 1856—was that Fremont went too far.
Democrat James Buchanan defeated the Pathfinder in the election a month after O’Farrell’s’ published revelations, and the honor of being the first Republican president of the United States was denied to him. Four year later it went to Abraham Lincoln.
San Francisco Examiner November 1, 1992