The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (10 page)

Among those who added to the danger was John Joel Glanton. Now thirty years old, Glanton was a native of South Carolina. He had spent his boyhood in Tennessee working with outlaws, then migrated to Texas in 1835, where he rose quickly, becoming a captain of the Texas Rangers at age sixteen. Then, after his girlfriend was scalped by Lipan Apaches, he became a notorious scalp hunter. Yet despite his notoriety, he remained a Ranger, rubbed shoulders with “respectable” people, and in 1846 married into a prominent Mexican family.

Thanks to his father-in-law, Glanton then became the commander of a Mexican military company that hunted down “hostile” Indians. Operating out of Chihuahua, Glanton and eighteen fellow Texans went after Chief Gómez. After several failed attempts, they somehow managed to penetrate Gómez’s camp, hack off his head, and scalp many of his followers. With their trophies, they then beat a hasty retreat to Chihuahua, fighting Apache warriors all the way. After collecting their reward, they became indiscriminate butchers, scalping friendly Indians as well as hostile ones. They then turned to scalping Mexican peons for a profit. With that, the Mexican government declared them outlaws.

No longer welcome in Chihuahua, Glanton and a larger gang of thirty men moved farther west. At the juncture of the Gila River and the Colorado, they spotted a moneymaker, a ferry run by Yuma Indians. Overpowering the Yumas, they took over the ferry, lured gold seekers aboard, and then killed them for their money and possessions. Finally, in 1850, the Yumas got revenge. They attacked the ferry, “brained” Glanton and most of his men, and took Glanton’s scalp.
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Thanks to Glanton, Chief Gómez, and hundreds like them, “the land of little rain” was a war zone. To get through it, wagon trains on the Gila River route tended to convoy. Thus, they typically were much longer than those on the northern route. Nothing fewer than a hundred wagons was considered safe. Each convoy was usually made up of three to five separate wagon trains plus a few individual stragglers. During the day the convoy usually had outlying guards to make sure the livestock did not graze too far away from the wagon train and fall into Indian hands. At night the convoy circled the wagons and herded the cattle into the “corral” for protection against Indians.

Among the Texans who took the Gila trail to California in 1849 were many slaveholders. Nearly all left their wives and children behind. Most also left their slaves behind, given the unknown circumstances that lay ahead. A few were less cautious and brought some of their slaves with them. How many? No one knows for certain, but definitely more than a handful.

Perhaps the least cautious was Colonel Thomas Thorn. He had moved many times in his forty-three years. Born in New Jersey, he had migrated to the Deep South in the 1820s, first to Mississippi, then to Tennessee, where he married Mary Sherman, the daughter of a prominent North Carolina slaveholder. The couple then moved on to Arkansas, where the oldest of their five children was born, and then on to Texas. Thorn was an organizer, and during the war with Mexico he raised and commanded troops. In 1849 he got gold fever and organized two hundred wagons to take the Gila trail to California. Unlike most gold seekers, Thorn brought along his wife and children. He also brought thirty slaves.

Not all thirty reached the gold fields. In southern California, several of Thorn’s slaves bolted. He caught two and had them severely beaten. But the local sheriff refused to help and even protected some of the runaways. Most got away. Then, upon reaching Mariposa, Thorn encountered more trouble. The miners didn’t want to compete with slave labor. They encouraged more slaves to flee. By 1850, Thorn had only ten slaves left. Among the remaining slaves were Diana and Lewis Caruthers and their three children. Diana Caruthers and two of her daughters helped Mary Thorn run a boardinghouse, which soon gained fame locally as one of the few places a miner could get a decent meal. Also among the remaining slaves was Peter Green, who for $1,000 would buy his freedom from Thorn in 1855.
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Thorn’s impact on California history was minimal. Far more important was another Texas slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson Green. Born in North Carolina in 1802, the second year of Jefferson’s presidency, Green grew up in a slaveholding family. As a young man, he went to West Point and served in the North Carolina legislature. Then, in the mid-1820s, he moved to Florida, became a plantation owner, and served in the Florida legislature. After his wife, Sarah, died in 1835, Green organized the Texas Land Company, a land colonization project, and moved to Texas. On reaching Texas, he abandoned the colonization project to serve in the Texas revolutionary army. Commissioned brigadier general, he returned to the United States to raise volunteers, money, and ammunition for the Texas cause. Simultaneously, he won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, where he became a strong opponent of General Sam Houston.

In December 1842, Green made his mark in Texas history. He was second in command of the Mier expedition, the last of the Lone Star Republic’s raiding expeditions into the area south of the Nueces River. The brainchild of some of Houston’s harshest critics, the campaign was a disaster. The Texans were overwhelmed by superior Mexican forces. Green and his men had to surrender to General Pedro de Ampudia. Held at Perote Prison, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, many of the men subsequently died from malnutrition, wounds, disease, or execution. Green, however, escaped and made his way back to Velasco, Texas, where he was again elected to the legislature.
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And again he attacked Sam Houston, this time for not helping to get the prisoners released. Houston later said Green had all the characteristics of a dog except fidelity.
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When news of gold on the American River reached Texas, Green was among the first to go. Along with several other Texans, he set off for California in the spring of 1849. Determined to make the gold diggings into slave country, they brought fifteen slaves. By July, Green and his fellow Texans had reached the Yuba River. There, at Rose’s Bar along the east bank of the river, they appropriated a large number of claims under both their names and their slaves’ names. Altogether, they staked out about one-third of a mile of the riverbank. The other miners were furious. They objected vehemently. Green and his friends refused to budge. They decided instead to test the mettle of the miners.
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During the same spring that Green and Thorn made their way to California, so did Broderick’s future nemesis David Terry. He was much younger than Green and Thorn, having turned twenty-six that March, but just as determined to bring slavery to the gold country.

While Kentucky-born, Terry was essentially the product of the Texas frontier and the teachings of his mother’s family. Named after his maternal grandfather, David Smith, he had been taken out of his father’s hands when he was a small boy living on a large cotton plantation in Hinds County, Mississippi. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, his mother decided that his father wasn’t a fit father and husband. Leaving her husband behind, she took Terry and his three brothers to Texas to live with her mother, Obedience Fort Smith, first on a plantation that belonged to her brother Benjamin Fort Smith, then on a 4,606-acre plantation that her mother acquired on the southwestern edge of Houston. She herself then obtained a land grant on Oyster Creek, twenty-five miles west of Houston, and began raising cotton on a large scale.
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Three years later, Terry’s mother died. Terry was only thirteen at the time, and his oldest brother, who had been named after Benjamin Franklin, had just turned sixteen. Technically, the sixteen-year-old was now head of the family. In reality, his grandmother and his mother’s siblings were in charge. By 1841, all of the grandmother’s offspring had moved to the Houston area, and all seemingly took orders from her. With their input, Terry came of age and absorbed the customs prevalent among the wealthy planters of south Texas. Becoming a Texas Ranger, treating women with respect, following the “code of honor”—all became important to him. He developed only one peculiarity that was not widely shared in his family. With respect to weapons, he came to prefer the bowie knife, because unlike a revolver it never misfired.

As for slavery, Terry never doubted the wisdom of it. Not only did he become “a strong believer in African slavery,” noted one acquaintance, he “had little patience with anyone who was not.”
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His family, for several generations past, had owned slaves. His grandmother owned slaves. His uncles and aunts owned slaves. His uncle Benjamin not only owned slaves but illegally imported slaves from Africa. His older brother, also named Benjamin but called Frank, soon became one of the biggest slaveholders in Texas, owning 105 slaves on the eve of the Civil War.
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Terry spent a decade on the family plantation. Then, in 1843, he went to Houston to work in the law office of his uncle Colonel T. B. J. Hadley. Admitted to the bar in November 1845, Terry practiced law in both Houston and Galveston. In 1846, when war with Mexico broke out, he enlisted for three months in the Texas Rangers, thus fulfilling one of his boyhood dreams, and fought in the Battle of Monterey. After the battle, he sought an appointment as district attorney of Galveston. He didn’t get it. Shortly thereafter, he became convinced that the love of his life, a distant cousin, had lost interest in him.

So in 1849, when the opportunity arose to go to the gold fields, Terry took it. His brother Frank made arrangements to be part of a mining company. But apparently Frank was needed at home. Terry persuaded his brother to let him go instead. The company consisted of twenty or thirty “substantial citizens,” mainly from the Houston area, and “five able bodied negro men.”
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When the men passed through Austin in mid-April, Colonel W. J. Kyle appeared to be in charge. By the time they reached El Paso, in late June, Terry was in command.

Getting through Apache country proved difficult. First, Apache warriors stole several animals. Terry’s men pursued them, recaptured the stolen property, and took some Apache horses in revenge. The warriors, to no avail, demanded their horses back. Then, a day or two later, on approaching a rocky pass, John A. Alexander, the former state auditor of Texas, was sent ahead. Two Apaches came toward him, making peace signs, asking for tobacco. As he reached in his pouch for tobacco, they shot him. Terry’s men then chased the two killers, only to discover that they had been led into an ambush. The battle lasted several hours. Terry didn’t lose any more men. But the braves had the upper hand. They were well entrenched in the rocky pass. And in the end, Terry had to retreat.
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After this incident, Terry’s party made their way to California with no further trouble. Arriving on September 3, they broke up and went their separate ways. Terry tried his hand at gold mining in Calaveras County. He had little luck. By December, he had decided to leave “shovel and rocker” behind. He moved to Stockton, the principal distributing center for the southern mines, and opened a law office.

What became of the five slaves? No one knows for certain. They didn’t accompany Terry to Calaveras County. Maybe they went with one of the other Texans. Or maybe they learned, as Terry did to his disgust, that California had just outlawed slavery.

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THE DECISION TO OUTLAW SLAVERY CAME TO A HEAD WHEN DAVID
Terry’s fellow Texans Thomas Jefferson Green and his friends staked out claims on the Yuba River under the names of their slaves. Until that time there had been rumblings against slavery throughout the gold country, but no decisive action had been taken.

No action, in fact, had been needed if Mexican law was still in effect. Unlike the Louisiana Territory, where slavery had been legal before it became U.S. property, slavery had been banned in California for nearly twenty years. It had been abolished in all of Mexico in 1829. Was that ban still in effect? Thousands of gold seekers seemed to think so.

Men like Terry thus looked to Congress to override Mexican law. To their chagrin, however, there was now a concerted effort in Congress to make sure that didn’t happen. It began before gold was discovered, in August 1846, when President Polk sprang on the House of Representatives a last-minute request for $2 million to facilitate peace negotiations with Mexico and to buy California and New Mexico.

The request came at the end of the congressional session, just hours before Congress was to adjourn. The members, wilting from the August heat, had been in session since December. They were anxious to get home. At the time, nearly every Northern Whig thought the president was a scoundrel who had led the country into war on false pretenses. And many believed that Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder, was part of a Slave Power conspiracy to extend slavery. At the same time, some Northern Democrats, especially those who took their cues from the ex-president Martin Van Buren, worried about being identified with a war that appeared to have been “waged for the extension of slavery.” That, said their mentor, was tantamount to committing “political suicide with their eyes open.”
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They were also upset by the way Polk handled patronage. Too many choice appointments had gone to Southerners and not enough to men they supported.

Now faced with the president’s last-minute request, nine Van Buren Democrats decided to take a stand. They got together during a House recess and worked out an amendment to the Two Million Bill that would prohibit slavery in any territory obtained by virtue of the appropriation. To present this amendment, they looked to David Wilmot, an obscure thirty-two-year-old Pennsylvania Democrat who was known mainly as a good-natured man who cussed a lot, dressed sloppily, and always had a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth. Wilmot had backed all the key party measures—the annexation of Texas in 1845, Polk’s decision to split the vast Oregon country with Great Britain, and Polk’s tariff reduction program—when some of the others had not. As a good party man who was friendly with the House’s Southern leadership, they thought he had the best chance to gain the floor.

They expected fireworks once Wilmot presented the amendment. That didn’t happen. Instead, half of the House members seemingly had their minds elsewhere, on catching a train home and getting away from Washington’s unbearable heat. Debate was perfunctory. The proviso then passed the House, 85 to 79, but neither the proviso nor the Two Million Bill got through the Senate in the few hours before adjournment.
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Debate heated up in the next session of Congress. Again Polk requested money, this time $3 million. To this request, Preston King, a New York Democrat, added a tougher version of the proviso, one that prohibited slavery in “any” territory “hereafter” acquired by the United States. In debate, Wilmot called on Congress to join him in bettering the lives of white settlers. “I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery,” he declared, “nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
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Wilmot’s “white only” appeal was potent. It had wide support, especially among Northern Democrats. Hence, more than ever, the proviso was a threat to the South. The Polk administration worked frantically to defeat it and succeeded in getting eighteen Northern Democrats to join the South in opposition. Nonetheless, on February 15, the measure passed the House, 115 to 106. Four days later, in the Senate, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina lambasted the proviso. Its passage, he declared, would give the North overwhelming power in the future, and such a destruction of sectional balance would mean “political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.” As a Southern man, a cotton planter, a slaveholder, he would never acknowledge inferiority. “The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledged inferiority.”
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Shortly thereafter, the Senate rejected the proviso and passed its own Three Million Bill without a word about slavery. This bill came before the House on March 3, the last day of the session. Again, antislavery forces tried to attach the proviso. This time the Polk administration stepped up its efforts to kill the proviso and succeeded in getting twenty-two Northern Democrats to vote with the South and six more to miss the crucial vote. The proviso thus went down to defeat, 97 to 102, and Polk got his $3 million with no strings attached.

Yet even though the proviso failed to become law, the idea didn’t die. It was added to one bill after another, and David Wilmot, once an unknown congressman, became a celebrity in antislavery circles. Southern hotspurs, meanwhile, realized that they had a problem. No longer could they sit idly by and hope that the concept of “free soil” would fade away like the setting sun. They had to do something. They especially had to rally all Southerners in opposition. Accordingly, John C. Calhoun and several close associates perfected a counterargument. They insisted that the Wilmot Proviso was not just wrong. It was also unconstitutional.

Southern cartoon accusing the “wizard” David Wilmot of trying to “swallow the South at a gulp.” Reprinted from
The John-Donkey,
January 8, 1848.

On January 5, 1847, Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina explained the pro-slavery position to the House of Representatives. The Wilmot Proviso, said Rhett, rested on the false assumption that lands acquired by the United States belonged to the federal government. That was dead wrong. The federal government was a creation of the states. Thus land acquired by the United States belonged to the states, and only as an agent of the states did the federal government have any authority over the territories. And, as an agent of the states, the federal government could not discriminate against the citizens of any state. It therefore must enable citizens of the slaveholding states to enter the territories freely and on equal terms with the citizens of the free states. In short, wherever the American flag went, so did slavery. Six weeks later, on February 19, Calhoun made the same argument in the Senate.
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In doing so, the two South Carolinians introduced into debate what came to be known as the common-property doctrine. It soon had a wide following in the South, especially among Democrats. Northerners, however, generally dismissed it as “just a lawyer’s argument.”

Thanks to the furor over the Wilmot Proviso, Congress in 1848 was incapable of dealing with the California question. Gold had been discovered. Thousands of people from all over the world were on the move to the Sierras. Nine out of ten were young males. Lawlessness was certain. Yet no legal resolution was in sight.

In the 1848 presidential election, the losing Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, offered a solution. Instead of having Congress decide the slavery issue, he proposed leaving it in the hands of the people who settled the territories. Dubbed “squatter sovereignty,” it appealed to Northern Democrats who hoped to sidetrack the slavery issue. On December 11, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who was making a name for himself as “a man who got things done,” introduced a bill in the Senate to bring the entire Mexican Cession into the Union as a single state with Congress not legislating on the slavery question. That delicate matter might be solved someday by the people who settled the territory, but not by Congress.

Two days later, to Douglas’s dismay, the House rejected his proposal. It reaffirmed its adherence to the Wilmot Proviso, 106 to 80. Then, eight days later, the House Committee on Territories reported a bill for the organization of California with all the “conditions, restrictions, and prohibitions” of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That, from Douglas’s perspective, was just more of the same, as the Northwest Ordinance had prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River. Southerners were livid.

Finally, on February 7, 1849, William B. Preston, a Virginia Whig, followed Douglas’s lead. Introducing a bill similar to Douglas’s in the House, he spoke against Congress deciding the slavery question. He likened the process to “a foreign government” making decisions for “a people abroad.” It hadn’t worked in 1776, said Preston, when the British parliament tried to impose restrictions on the thirteen colonies. Instead, it had driven the American people to rebellion. Did Congress want to be in the same position as the British parliament was at the time of the American Revolution? Did Congress not see the parallels between the California situation and that of the thirteen colonies in 1776?

Preston’s proposal went nowhere. Antislavery Northerners attacked it as just another Southern scheme to allow slavery to enter the Mexican Cession. They proposed an amendment that explicitly banned slavery. The amendment passed, 91 to 87. That torpedoed Preston’s bill. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Douglas’s bill was also going nowhere. It lay dead in the water.
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Congress was thus paralyzed. The situation was so bad that outgoing president Polk feared that disgruntled Californians would seize the initiative and establish an independent republic. Then what would the federal government do? Send in troops? He had only a few more weeks to serve. The problem then fell to his successor, General Zachary Taylor, and the next Congress.

Meanwhile, in the gold country, rumblings against slavery were commonplace. Sam Brannan, the Mormon entrepreneur who popularized the slogan “Gold on the American River,” took up the issue as early as March 1848.

In his newspaper,
The Californian,
Brannan called for an all-white California—no slaves, no free blacks—and claimed that 90 percent of the people agreed with him. Ten days later, a rival newspaper,
The California Star,
upped the estimate to 99 percent. Months later, in January 1849, Brannan again called for an all-white California, this time at a public meeting in Sacramento. Backing him was the presiding officer of the meeting, Peter H. Burnett of Missouri. It was essential to keep all blacks, free as well as slave, out of California, said Burnett. Brannan’s resolutions then passed by a unanimous vote. In February, the same resolutions came before a public meeting in San Francisco and again passed easily.
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Then, in July 1849, miners on the Yuba River did more than talk. The year before, gold had been discovered on the river by a thirty-one-year-old Pennsylvanian, Jonas Spect. The news had brought thousands of gold seekers to the Yuba. By April 1849, the miners had decided they needed laws to handle disputed claims. Meeting at Spect’s store at Rose’s Bar, they had drafted a legal code. Among other provisions, it limited the size of a mining claim to what one man could work by himself. They also elected a committee of the oldest miners to enforce it.
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