The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (27 page)

Two years later the battle lines became clearer. In some districts, the Democratic Party’s fortunes revived, and fifty-three Northern Democrats won seats in the House. Meanwhile, the Know-Nothing Party, whose program had skyrocketed in popularity at the Democrats’ expense in 1854, collapsed almost as fast as it had risen in late 1856. More viable was the new Anti-Nebraska party, which now settled on the name “Republican.” After rising in the unstable atmosphere of the 1854 elections, the new Republican Party had stumbled for a year or so, and then soared in the 1856 elections. Even New Hampshire, once the banner state of the Democracy, turned Republican. In 1853, the Democrats had won every district in the state by at least twelve hundred votes. Now the Republicans won every district by at least a thousand votes.
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In New Hampshire, as everywhere else, Republicans hammered on the theme that the party of Douglas had betrayed white Northerners to the great slave masters of the South. The new party, moreover, had an obvious advantage over the old Whig Party. Northern Whigs, even though they repeatedly voted against the South, had to cooperate with their Southern colleagues to win national elections.

The new Republican Party had no such restraints. Based entirely in the North, the party had no need, much less desire, to maintain a working arrangement with the planter-politicians of the South. On the contrary, the stock-in-trade of the Republicans was to attack the political influence of the plantation aristocracy at every opportunity. The Slave Power, contended one Republican after another, had long ruled the nation, and now it was conspiring to expand its power by annexing Cuba, capturing the West, and extending slavery onto “free soil.”

Having brought havoc to his party, Douglas tried at the next session of Congress to regain the upper hand and resolve the perplexing railroad problem. On January 9, 1855, he introduced a Pacific railroad bill in the Senate. It called for three roads: one west from Texas, another west from Missouri or Iowa, and a third west from Minnesota. The middle one would be linked to Chicago. But many cities—and many states—would benefit. He and his followers saw it as a major piece of statesmanship.

At the time another bill was pending in the House. For it, Representative William Dunbar of Louisiana moved to substitute Douglas’s proposal. Two days later John G. Davis of Indiana moved to amend the substitute bill by having only a single road west, from Missouri or Iowa. Thomas Hart Benton, still hoping for a road from St. Louis straight west, rallied the opposition in the House and blocked approval by one vote. Douglas, meanwhile, got the measure through the Senate on February 19, but it was not taken up again in the House. Thus in the end, as one historian put it, Douglas’s intention behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act was foiled “by a single vote in the House.”
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7

THE NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY QUICKLY SOARED TO DIZZYING HEIGHTS
in many of the free states. By 1856, it had captured 78 percent of the vote in Vermont, 64 percent in Massachusetts, 61 percent in Maine, 58 percent in Rhode Island, 57 percent in Michigan, 55 percent in Wisconsin, and 54 percent in New Hampshire. That was not the case in California, however. In the gold country, the Republican Party struggled. It barely polled 19 percent of the vote.

The poor showing was especially glaring because the state’s onetime hero John C. Frémont had headed the Republican ticket. At the party’s nominating convention in Philadelphia on June 17, 1856, the delegates had been united in their opposition to the Pierce administration and their determination to keep slavery out of the West. They had differed, however, over which of the party’s luminaries should be the presidential nominee.

Most thought the party’s best choice was Senator William H. Seward, a proven winner in New York politics and a firm antislavery man. But he had been persuaded by his longtime political sidekick, Thurlow Weed, that 1856 was not a Republican year and had decided to wait until 1860 before making a presidential bid. In Seward’s absence, some delegates touted former Senator Salmon Chase of Ohio, the author of the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats,” while Abraham Lincoln and many former Whigs championed Supreme Court Justice John McLean, a perennial favorite in Whig circles. Others, however, regarded Chase as too extreme and the seventy-one-year-old McLean as too old and too unreliable.

That had left the door open for Frémont. The party, said his backers, needed a fresh face. None of the other aspirants had even half his appeal. Not only was he a well-known folk hero; he was young and dashing and a nominal Democrat. On the second day, during the sultry afternoon session, the party leaders orchestrated an informal ballot. Frémont outpolled McLean, 359 to 190, with 4 scattering. The delegates then made the Frémont vote unanimous. Then, as a sop to conservatives, they picked William L. Dayton of New Jersey for vice president.
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The Pathfinder undoubtedly had voter appeal in much of the North. Yet he was more a symbol of the new Republican Party than an active participant in it. In the election campaign, he stayed at home, mainly at 56 West Ninth Street, in New York City, while his wife, Jessie, along with John Bigelow and Isaac Sherman, ran his campaign. Jessie’s role got extensive coverage. All the major politicians knew that she had been raised in Washington politics, and they soon realized that she understood it far better than her husband. Accordingly, many treated her as a professional, her husband as an amateur. She also got far more public attention than potential First Ladies normally received. Republican publications constantly celebrated her presence. References to “Our Jessie” became commonplace, as did this lyric: “We go for our country and Union, and for brave little Jessie forever.”
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Jessie and the Republican propaganda machine ran an astute campaign. Yet they couldn’t get her father, Thomas Hart Benton, to back the ticket. He supported the party of his youth and gave twenty-one speeches endorsing his son-in-law’s opponent. Even more crippling was their lack of money and their newness as a party organization. So they didn’t bother to put Frémont’s name on the ballot in most of the slave states. Running on “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Frémont, and Victory,” they concentrated solely on the sixteen free states.

“Frémont and Our Jessie.” Republican campaign poster, 1856. Library of Congress.

From the outset, they knew that they could count all of New England, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa as safe for Frémont. To win the presidency, they needed just two of the four swing states—Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois. To these four states they dispatched the party’s luminaries to keep attention focused on the Democratic Party’s attachment to the “Slave Power” and its repeal of the “sacred” Missouri Compromise. But their Democratic rivals, with more money and a better organization, poured cash into these four states, ran rough media campaigns, and in Pennsylvania illegally naturalized thousands of alien immigrants. As a result, the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, emerged victorious.

The election, however, undoubtedly gave Buchanan—and the South—a scare. For in the free states, a whopping 83 percent of the eligible voters went to the polls, and the vast majority voted for someone other than the Pennsylvania Democrat. Among lifelong Democrats in the northern tier of free states, probably one in five voted against the party’s nominee, in the lower tier, maybe one in ten. The new Republican Party won eleven of the sixteen free states, 114 electoral votes, and roughly one-third of the total popular vote. Had they carried Pennsylvania and Indiana, or Pennsylvania and Illinois, they would have won the election.

Of the five free states that Frémont lost, the one he lost by the biggest margin was California. Not only did he lose the state to Buchanan by a five-to-two ratio, but he also ran far behind the Know-Nothing candidate, ex-president Millard Fillmore. He barely got 19 percent of the California vote.

Why did Frémont do so poorly in California? At the time, much was made of his “Mariposa problem.”

Frémont, along with other officers stationed in California during the Mexican War, had participated in the mad scramble to buy a Mexican land grant. Spanish and Mexican officials had bestowed 813 such grants on their favorites. One was Las Mariposas, a “floating grant” of ten leagues that belonged to a heavily indebted Californio, Juan Bautista Alvarado, and his wife, Martina Caston de Alvarado. On February 10, 1847, Frémont purchased Las Mariposas through an intermediary, Thomas Larkin, for $3,000. He had no idea where the property was located but hoped it was near San Francisco or Monterey. To his disappointment, the seventy-square-mile grant was farther inland, near the Yosemite valley, within the hunting and gathering grounds of the Sierra Miwoks. Also, there was a legal problem, as Alvarado had never taken possession of the property as required by Mexican law.

Nonetheless, after his court-martial in 1848, Frémont decided to move to Las Mariposas and become a cattle rancher. He borrowed money from Thomas Hart Benton and Senator John Dix to build a house, corral, and barn. He also shipped to Las Mariposas farm implements and an entire sawmill via the Aspinwall steamer
Fredonia.
Then he got lucky. Gold was discovered on Las Mariposas, a quartz vein of over five miles in length. In addition, Sonoran miners on his property were washing out hundreds of pounds of placer each month. Overnight he became a rich man.
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But what did Las Mariposas include? Where, precisely, was its southern border? Its northern border? Since Las Mariposas was a “floating grant,” and the Mexican government had been anything but precise in defining its borders, there was plenty of room for argument. Did the grant include three prosperous mining districts that some thought to be public domain? Land being mined by the Merced Mining Company? By various squatters? And was the grant even valid, as Alvarado had failed to fulfill its terms by living on the property? The lawyers had plenty to fight about, and the matter remained in court for years. Finally, in 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Frémont’s favor. That added to Frémont’s wealth but hardly made him popular with his neighbors.
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In the 1856 election, the Chivs made the most of it. Their Stockton newspaper, the
San Joaquin Republican,
continually trashed Frémont as a “nigger-loving” absentee owner with “no friends in the mines,” as a man who was so obnoxious that it would be “perfect madness” for any miner to support him.
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And on Election Day he did poorly, not getting a single vote in some mining-county precincts, and only 165 votes to Buchanan’s 1,254 in Mariposa County.
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Yet the “Mariposa problem” only partly explains the troubles the Republicans had in California. For Frémont was not the only Republican candidate who did badly on Election Day. Statewide, the Republicans showed strength in only a few districts.

The state party got off to a late start, much later than its eastern counterparts. It was not organized until March 8, 1856, when seven friends got together in Sacramento. All seven were from New England or upstate New York. Several were destined to become railroad tycoons: Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Edwin B. and Charles Crocker. The chief organizer was Cornelius Cole, a former New Yorker and a Wesleyan College graduate who had studied law in the office of William H. Seward.

The thirty-four-year-old Cole served as secretary and agreed to write the party’s manifesto. Article 3 stated: “The principles we advocate are the complete withdrawal of all support to slavery by the federal government, without disturbing that institution as it now exists in the present slave states; firm and uncompromising opposition to the extension of slavery, and the admission of any more slave states.” On March 29, the members met again and ratified the manifesto and “entered into a written pledge to oppose the aggressions of slavery.”
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A month later, on April 30, the seven organizers rounded up enough like-minded men to hold a “state” convention. Meeting at the Congregational church in Sacramento, 125 men attended. Nearly all were from just two towns, Sacramento and San Francisco. Twenty-seven of the state’s forty counties were not represented. For president, the delegates favored Cole’s mentor, William H. Seward, but when the national party chose Frémont, they enthusiastically threw their support behind the Pathfinder. Unlike Pennsylvania and Indiana, where the party sent out dozens of luminaries touting “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Frémont, and Victory,” the California party relied largely on just two stump speakers, Frederick P. Tracy, a Connecticut Yankee, and Edward Dickinson Baker, an English-born Mexican War veteran who had once whipped Abraham Lincoln in an 1844 Illinois congressional race. Meanwhile, out of his small office on K Street in Sacramento, Cole founded a newspaper, the
Daily California Times.
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Shorthanded, the fledgling party won three of the thirty-two state senate races and eleven of the seventy-nine assembly races. Otherwise, the entire ticket did poorly. In the contest for one of the two seats in the House of Representatives, L. P. Rankin won 20.3 percent of the vote. In the battle for the other seat, J. D. Turner polled 19.5 percent.
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That was better than Frémont’s 18.8 percent, but not by much.

After 1856, the Republicans continued to struggle. In July 1857, the party nominated for governor Edward Stanly. A forty-seven-year-old North Carolinian, Stanly had one notable characteristic. He hated Democrats. He had been taught by his father, a Federalist congressman and accomplished orator, to hate Democrats and had learned his lessons well. Elected to Congress as a Whig by his North Carolina neighbors, he had repeatedly blistered House Democrats and became widely known for his fiery temper and sarcastic tongue. He had also been one of the few Southern Whigs to recognize the constitutionality of the Wilmot Proviso and to follow Zachary Taylor’s lead in calling for immediate admission of California as a free state. In 1853, he had not sought reelection to the House. Instead, he had moved to San Francisco and established a successful law practice. He supported Frémont in 1856, but as late as 1857 he still owned slaves in North Carolina.
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For a party that was against the expansion of slavery, Stanly was a strange choice for governor. In July, soon after he was nominated, he declared that he could never support “a declaration by Congress that the South should never have any more slave States.” He also made it clear that he disagreed with all those who said “that slavery was contrary to the teachings of the Bible.” The next day he lambasted his Democratic rival for once defending an abolitionist. A month later, in another speech, he denounced all abolitionists and contended that slavery in his home state of North Carolina was so benevolent that slaves there regarded their condition as “paradise.” And, in recognizing Congress’s right to prohibit slavery in a territory, he also endorsed the right of the settlers to choose to become a slave state.
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