Born in Savannah, Georgia on January 21, 1813, John C. Fremont was the illegitimate child of the run-away wife of an older Revolutionary War veteran and a tutor who had fought with the Royalist in the French Revolution. In 1841 he married Jessie Benton, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, a powerful Mississippi senator and ardent proponent of Manifest Destiny, the philosophy that said America should control the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. As a Lieutenant in the Corps of … [Read more...]