The young newlyweds stood before the bride’s father, a senator known for quick flashes of anger and bullheadedness. The two were there to tell him they had eloped. The bride was seventeen. The groom was twenty-eight, a lieutenant in the army with little money and little opportunity for promotion in those times. Her parents had not approved of their courtship. Once they forbade the young officer from seeing her and once arranged for him to be stationed far away for a year in hopes of breaking things up. But it didn’t work. So now the two stood waiting for the bride’s father to explode. She was Jessie Benton Fremont. She and John C. Freemont were married in October. They broke the news to Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the bride’s father, in November. As expected, he was enraged and ordered the lieutenant out of the house. But Jessie defiantly grabbed her husband’s hand and silenced her father with the words of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” The senator knew his daughter was stubborn – after all, she was his daughter. Jessie stayed at home, all right, but John moved in.
