The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War
Read The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War Online
Authors: Leonard L. Richards
Contents
For Samuel, Eliza, and Hadleigh
Preface
The roots of this book go back to my childhood. Although I was raised in Berkeley, my father grew up in Grass Valley, the heart of the California gold country. The youngest of four sons, he was the first male in the family to get out of the mines. Before he left home, however, my grandfather had insisted that he learn the family trade. So Dad knew a lot about quartz mining, including how to blow up a rock wall so that all the pieces fell neatly into one pile. I always hoped to see a demonstration, but never did. Instead, I had to settle for a diagram of a standard twenty-two-hole blasting pattern. Four or five times a year, we journeyed back to Dad’s old hometown, to “Grandma’s house,” and there I was literally surrounded by hard-rock miners. From these experiences, I picked up bits and pieces about gold rush California. I also learned that hard-rock mining was a skill that had to be honed to near perfection and not something that could be mastered in a weekend.
These childhood experiences, however, didn’t trigger the writing of this book. That decision came much later and more or less through a back door. In the 1980s, while doing research for a book on John Quincy Adams’s congressional career, I dipped into pamphlets, letters, and reminiscences written by his slaveholding adversaries. As expected, I learned that most of them regarded the former president as an able but nasty old man. To my surprise, however, I also discovered that shortly after his death in 1848, many of them fantasized about taking their slaves to California and getting rich mining gold. None of them, as far as I could tell, knew the first thing about mining, much less hard-rock mining. They all seemed to think it was easy, something any slave could do. And nearly all of them deemed the slaveholding South’s “loss” of California a major turning point in North-South relations. Had they gained control of the gold fields, they contended, their lives and the lives of their fellow slaveholders would have been golden.
A few years later, while studying free-state politicians who sided with the South in North-South struggles, I discovered that some of the more noteworthy came from my home state. Somehow I had missed learning that fact. Somehow I had gone through the California schools from kindergarten through graduate school and never realized that many of the state’s early leaders had been “Northern men with Southern principles,” that several might as well have been representing Mississippi or Alabama in national affairs, and that the state’s entire congressional delegation on the eve of the Civil War had supported John C. Breckinridge, the pro-slavery candidate for president. Either such details had been omitted from the curriculum, or I simply had not been paying attention. In any event, one reason for writing this book has been to bring myself up to speed—to learn material that I should have learned forty or fifty years ago.
In the process, I’ve had plenty of help. The Bancroft and Huntington libraries were central. They are literally gold mines for California scholars, and the staff at both institutions alerted me to documents that I would probably never have found on my own. Also helpful were archivists at the state library, the California Historical Society, the Nevada County Historical Society, the Placer County Historical Society, the Empire Mine, and other depositories I visited over the years. As in the past, the librarians at my home institution, the University of Massachusetts, have been diligent in getting me the microfilm and obscure books that I needed. And, as in the past, I have relied heavily on my colleagues in the history department for advice and direction, especially Bruce Laurie and Barry Levy, who on more occasions than I can count listened patiently to my ramblings. I have also taught four writing seminars on the gold rush and the coming of the Civil War, and some of the students in those classes have been computer whizzes, finding facts and figures on the Internet that I never knew existed. Finally, I owe a big thanks to Jennifer Bonin for creating the maps and to Jane Garrett, Emily Molanphy, Leslie Levine, and the staff at Alfred A. Knopf for shepherding the manuscript through publication.
Prologue
TODAY THE LAKE IS SURROUNDED BY GOLF COURSES—ONE PUBLIC,
three private—all scrambling to get their share of its water. To conservationists the courses are a nuisance, a curse on the environment and a danger to the waterfowl, but the fairways and clubhouses have been San Francisco landmarks since the 1920s and have too many patrons to be uprooted. One of the private clubs—the famous Olympic Club—has hosted four U.S. Opens. Ben Hogan played and lost there to an unknown golfer named Jack Fleck. Thousands of lesser golfers, meanwhile, have taken their clubs to the nearby public course at Harding Park.
Of the men and women who trudge the fairways of these four courses, eat and drink in the clubhouses, tell stories and lie about their handicaps, many are well aware of the Hogan-Fleck match. A few even saw it happen. Only a handful, however, are aware that just to the east of the southern tip of the lake is the place where a U.S. senator was shot to death, the last U.S. senator to be killed in California before Bobby Kennedy. Scarcely one in a thousand knows that story.
One can’t blame them. It happened long ago, sixty years before any of the courses were built, before the Civil War, actually, September 13, 1859, to be precise.
At that time Lake Merced was a very popular dueling ground. Dueling was illegal in San Francisco, but the area just behind the barn at Lake House Ranch was remote enough that a duel could still be carried out in relative privacy and isolation from the law. Also, there were certain to be some technical difficulties determining jurisdiction, had the authorities tried to interfere. For the lake is not in San Francisco proper, but south of the city, on the border between San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
The duel was between David S. Terry, the chief judge of the state supreme court, and Senator David Broderick.
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They were both Democrats, but from hostile ends of their party. Broderick, the senator, opposed the expansion of slavery, and Terry, the judge, was part of what was then called the Chivalry wing of the California Democratic Party. The Chivs were pro-South and pro-slavery. They were also determined to eliminate Broderick and other California free-soilers from positions of power. At the time of the duel the Chivs had the upper hand and seemed to be just on the edge of victory.
The judge pushed matters to a head. He probably couldn’t help it. Even his friends described him as “truculent.” He was young for a judge, just thirty-six, but had been on the state supreme court for four years, chief judge for two years. He was a big man, six feet three and over 220 pounds, with a noticeably flat face and a large bulbous nose. He was clean shaven except for chin whiskers. He wore his hair long, in the “Southern” style.
David S. Terry, chief justice of the California Supreme Court. Reprinted from Jeremiah Lynch,
A Senator of the Fifties: David C. Broderick of California
(San Francisco, 1911), 130.
The judge was a Southern man and proud of it. He had been born in Kentucky and lived in Texas before migrating to Stockton in December 1849. In 1852 he had returned briefly to the South and married Cornelia Runnels, the niece of the Mississippi governor. He had assured her that he would never accept California’s decision to outlaw slavery. As a supporter of “the doctrine of the ultra states’ rights men of the South,” he was determined “to change the Constitution of the state by striking out that clause prohibiting slavery…or, failing in that, to divide the state and thus open a portion of California to Southerners and their property.”
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The judge was also a well-known knife fighter. Three years earlier, during his second year on the bench, he had tried to stop Sterling Hopkins, a member of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, from making an arrest. He hated vigilantes and vigilante justice. In the fracas he had pulled out a bowie knife, his favorite weapon, and severely wounded Hopkins. The Vigilance Committee then had him arrested. Ironically, to his defense had come David Broderick, whose followers had been the committee’s chief targets. Broderick paid three newspapers to put the judge’s behavior in the best possible light.
In June 1859, however, the help of Broderick was history. The Vigilance Committee was all but dead, and the judge now saved his sharpest barbs for the free-soil wing of the Democratic Party. He called them “black Republicans” and “negro lovers.” At one point he also said that they were an unprincipled “remnant of a faction” owned “heart and soul” by Broderick, whose only guidance came from “the banner of the black Douglass, whose name is Frederick.” Those were code words. Everyone at the time understood that the judge was referring to Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, and essentially saying that Broderick took his cues from a black man.
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David Broderick, senator from California. Reprinted from Elijah R. Kennedy,
The Contest for California in 1861
(Boston, 1912), 64.
On June 26 Broderick learned of the judge’s remarks in the morning newspaper while having breakfast at the International Hotel in San Francisco. He, too, was a warrior. He had made his reputation in New York City taking on the city’s toughest prizefighters—Eli Hazleton, Seth Douglas, Abe Bogart, John Williamson, Mose Cutter, Sam Baisely, and Johnny Baum. Victory had never been his, but he had gained fame for never backing down. He had also gained fame as a bouncer at his New York saloon. He had a powerful build and gnarled hands, thanks partly to his years as a stonemason, and thus usually had little trouble keeping order. He also bore a knife scar that ran down his cheek into his beard. That, along with his piercing dark blue eyes and dark eyebrows, made him even more menacing.
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True to form, Broderick responded to Judge Terry with nasty remarks of his own. He proclaimed Terry to be a “damned miserable wretch” who was as corrupt as President James Buchanan and William Gwin, California’s other senator. “I have hitherto spoken of him as an honest man—as the only honest man on the bench of a miserable, corrupt Supreme Court—but now I find I was mistaken. I take it all back. He is just as bad as the others.”
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That was all it took. The judge challenged the senator to a duel. Both men then chose seconds to handle the details, and the seconds made arrangements for the duel to take place one week after the September election, September 13, 1859, behind the barn of the Lake House Ranch on Lake Merced.
On learning about the time and location, James J. Ayers drove a horse-drawn carriage most of the night to get there. The place was mobbed. He counted seventy-three spectators.
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Two sets of weapons had been brought to the dueling grounds. Terry won the toss and selected the ones his side had provided: Belgian-made eight-inch barrels, with hair triggers. Terry had practiced with these pistols, Broderick had not.
The hair trigger proved deadly to Broderick. He was a skilled marksman, practiced regularly, and could handle any pistol that necessitated a quick, firm pull. But a pistol that necessitated a light touch was beyond him. He thus fired too quickly, and his shot went wildly into the ground. The judge’s pistol worked perfectly. He took careful aim and shot Broderick in the lung.
Broderick died three days later. His followers never regarded the duel as just a duel. To them it amounted to an assassination. The Chivs, as they saw it, were out to get Broderick, and if Judge Terry hadn’t pulled the trigger, someone else would have. Declared the Republican Edward Dickinson Baker, at Broderick’s funeral service: “His death was a political necessity, poorly veiled beneath the guise of a private quarrel…What was his public crime? The answer is in his own words: ‘I die because I was opposed to a corrupt administration and the extension of slavery.’”
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Echoing this sentiment was Elisha Crosby, a New Yorker who had represented Sacramento at the state constitutional convention and knew both men well. The problem, wrote Crosby, was that Broderick was as “brave as a lion” and thus a menace to Senator William Gwin and his followers. These men wanted to put California in Southern hands, colonize the southern portion of the state with Southern people, and get the state legislature to divide the state, making the southern part of it slave. Surmised Crosby: “Broderick’s denunciation of this scheme, I have no doubt brought on the conflict which led to his assassination. It was pretty well understood that he was to be assassinated anyway. If Terry failed, somebody else was to kill him.”
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