The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (28 page)

Edward Stanly. Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:293.

Yet even though Stanly was a slaveholding Southerner, that didn’t stop the opposition from calling him a “nigger-loving” abolitionist. That had been the standard Chiv refrain from the day the new Republican Party was founded. In August 1856, after the Republican’s chief spokesman, Edward Dickinson Baker, addressed a big audience at the Orleans Hotel in Sacramento, the
Sacramento Journal
reported: “The convention of Nigger worshippers assembled yesterday in this city! This is the first time this dangerous fanaticism has dared bare its breast before the people of California…. It is high time that all national men should unite in saving California from the stain of abolitionism.” In 1857, the Chiv press played the same tune, repeatedly describing Stanly and his Republican followers as “black Republicans,” “abolitionists,” “darkey sympathizers,” “devotees of the dark faith,” and “nigger-worshippers.” And in the 1857 election, the Chivs beat Stanly almost as badly as they whipped Frémont. He barely polled 22.5 percent of the vote.
¹²

Except for a few local races, no Republican did better than Stanly in the years before the Civil War. In 1858, the party ran L. L. Tracy for a seat in the House of Representatives. He won 14.6 percent of the vote. In 1859, the party chose as their gubernatorial candidate Leland Stanford, a thirty-five-year-old native of New York who later became famous as the president of the Central Pacific Railroad and for naming a university after his son. In his acceptance speech, Stanford declared: “The cause in which we are engaged is one of the greatest in which anyone can labor. It is the cause of the white man—the cause of free labor, of justice, and of equal rights. I am in favor of free white American citizens. I prefer free white citizens to any other class or race. I prefer the white man to the negro as an inhabitant of our country. I believe the greatest good has been derived by having all the country settled by free white men.” In the general election, despite the “white only” appeal, Stanford got clobbered, winning only 9.8 percent of the vote.
¹³

In 1860, with Abraham Lincoln heading the national ticket, the California Republicans finally got past the 30 percent barrier. In a tight race, Lincoln won the state with 32.3 percent of the vote, barely beating the Northern Democratic candidate, Stephen A. Douglas, who had 31.7 percent, and the Southern Democratic candidate, John C. Breckinridge, who had 28.4 percent. In no other free state did so large a proportion of voters cast ballots against the Republican candidate.

Meanwhile, the Know-Nothings, the other party that sprang to life after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, made a better showing in California. The Know-Nothings, whose formal name was the American Party, got off the mark well before the Republicans. In May 1854, two years before the Republicans first met, Lieutenant Sam Roberts founded a Know-Nothing chapter in San Francisco.

Roberts, a former New York Volunteer, had already gained notoriety. Five years earlier, in 1849, he had established the Hounds, a regulator group dedicated to maintaining public order and to hounding Chileans and other foreigners out of California. His followers had been used as deputy policemen by the alcalde of San Francisco, Thaddeus M. Leavenworth. But they had also held drunken parades, shanghaied sailors back to their ships, levied protection money from local merchants, and terrorized Chileans. In response, Sam Brannan and other San Francisco notables decided to crack down on the Hounds. They tried Roberts and eighteen others at Portsmouth Square for rape, murder, arson, and a host of other crimes and banished nine of Roberts’s followers from California, on pain of death should they return.
¹⁴

Now, in May 1854, Roberts again launched a crusade against the “foreign” element, this time mainly against Chinese miners and David Broderick’s “Irish” machine. His new followers initially seemed to be more interested in clean government than in nativism. For mayor, they even briefly endorsed a Roman Catholic, Lucien Hermann, who had already been chosen by the Citizen’s Party to rid the city of corruption. That endorsement, however, lasted only two days. On September 3, at the Metropolitan Theatre, a much larger contingent of Know-Nothings voted 649 to 109 to strip Hermann of the party’s support and give it to a Protestant, Stephen P. Webb. The new ticket, while still campaigning for clean government and election reform, then won seven of San Francisco’s eight wards.
¹⁵

By May 1855, Know-Nothing hostility to the foreign-born had become more pronounced. In one of their publications,
The Political Letters of
“
Caxton,
” William H. Rhodes singled out “poor foreigners and ignorant exiles” for abuse. He accused them of “stuffing the ballot box and violating the right of suffrage” and generally behaving as the “slaves of Broderick.” Instead of becoming “independent” citizens, wrote Rhodes, “they band themselves together in cliques and coteries, and vote in solid phalanx for favourite men. They go up to the ballot boxes as ‘the Irish vote,’ or ‘the German vote,’ and not as Whigs or Democrats, or States’ right men, or nullifiers or abolitionists. They possess no individual opinions. They follow their ringleader, and as he jumps, so precisely do they jump.”
¹⁶

At the same time, the Know-Nothings expanded their base throughout the state. Focusing mainly on the “heathen” Chinese, they soon had enough supporters to hold a statewide convention in Sacramento on August 7 and put forth a slate of candidates. For the state supreme court, the new party endorsed David S. Terry, the pro-slavery Texan who subsequently killed Broderick. For governor, the party backed J. Neely Johnson, who had just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. A native of Indiana, Johnson had practiced law in Iowa before moving to California in 1849. As a Whig, he had been elected Sacramento city attorney in 1850 and 1851 and to the state assembly in 1852. His only political assets, according to observers, were his extremely attractive wife and his pro-Southern sympathies.
¹⁷

By September, the Know-Nothings seemed to be well on their way to becoming a major party. In the gubernatorial race, Johnson beat John Bigler, the incumbent Democratic governor, 50,948 to 45,937. That was no easy task, for Bigler had a staunch nativist record. The fifty-year-old Pennsylvanian had vehemently denounced Chinese immigration and even called for naturalization laws to prohibit Asians from ever becoming American citizens. He had also sided with the settlers against Mexican land grants, refused to translate state documents into Spanish, and strongly endorsed taxes on all foreign miners.
¹⁸
Nonetheless, Johnson, with virtually no record whatsoever, won by 5,000 votes.

The Know-Nothings also swept much of the state, winning fifty-six of the ninety assembly seats and seventeen of the thirty-three senate seats. In the mining districts especially, they were invincible. They carried El Dorado County by nearly 1,000 votes, Placer by 800, Sierra by 800, Trinity by 600, Tuolumne by 400, Yuba by 400, Nevada by 350, Plumas by 350, and Mariposa by 250. Explained Bigler to his brother: “The prejudice in the mineral regions was great against foreigners,” and “the opposition promised to turn them out of the mines and give claims to Americans by birth.” As a result, added Bigler, the Know-Nothings “have carried everything…and will most assuredly elect two U.S. Senators.”
¹⁹

When the legislature convened in January 1856, Bigler’s prophecy seemed more than likely. The Know-Nothings had nearly a three-to-one majority in the assembly and a one-vote edge in the state senate. And if a joint session was called to elect a U.S. senator, they outnumbered the Democrats by a whopping margin, eighty-three to thirty-nine. With a two-to-one majority, they had more than enough votes to get their man elected.

Their first choice was none other than Henry Foote, the feisty Mississippian who had forced Henry Clay to stuff all his compromise proposals into one bill and who later pulled a gun on Thomas Hart Benton. In 1854, Foote had resigned his post as governor of Mississippi and headed west to practice law and get rich. At the time he had vowed to stay out of politics. That lasted but six months. When the Know-Nothing movement blossomed, Foote got into the thick of it and became one of the new party’s top speakers. He also helped many of the party’s candidates win seats in the state legislature. They now owed him, and on the twenty-seventh ballot of the Know-Nothing caucus they got the majority to endorse Foote for the Senate seat.

California thus seemed destined to be represented by yet another Mississippi slaveholder. And it might have happened had it not been for Wilson G. Flint, one of the more ornery of the newly elected Know-Nothing state senators.

Henry Foote. Library of Congress.

In most respects, Flint was a “good” party man. He despised the Catholic Irish. And he thought the Chinese, the “heathen celestials” as he called them, should be sent back to China. But the Chinese and the Irish weren’t the only people Flint hated. A native of New Hampshire, Flint had moved to Texas in 1842. While there, he had developed a deep hatred for the slaveholding elite. He regarded them as deadwood and as a cancer on American society. Under no circumstances, therefore, would he back Foote for the Senate. So, when at Broderick’s urging the Democrats proposed a scheme to block the election, Flint went along.

The scheme was simple. In order to elect a U.S. senator, the two houses of the California legislature had to meet in joint session. All that was necessary, then, was for the senate to turn down the assembly’s request for a joint meeting. With Flint’s support, the schemers had all the votes they needed, and on January 22 they prevailed by a 17-to-16 margin. They didn’t reject the assembly’s request; they just found excuses not to meet. The two houses thus never met, and Foote never got elected. The former Mississippi governor then campaigned for the Know-Nothing ticket in the presidential election of 1856 and left the state the following year.
²⁰

The Flint problem turned out to be the Know-Nothing Party’s Achilles’ heel. The previous June, when the party’s national council had met in Philadelphia, Southern delegates, with the help of eleven Northerners, had rammed through a resolution that essentially endorsed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In protest, the entire delegations of all the free states except New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California had walked out. Then, in February 1856, at another national meeting, Northern delegates tried to reverse the earlier decision. After they failed to get a resolution passed calling for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, fifty delegates from eight Northern states stormed out of the convention and called for a separate Northern party. Within just a few months, most of these men threw their support to Frémont, the Republican candidate for president.
²¹

In 1856, the California Know-Nothing Party, just like the national party, collapsed almost as fast as it had risen. In the fall elections, California Know-Nothings lost six seats in the state senate, forty-eight in the assembly. Their numbers in the assembly thus fell from fifty-six to eight. No longer were they the strongest party in the assembly. They were now the weakest. To their dismay, the Democrats with sixty-three seats were again back in control, and even the Republicans with eleven seats had more than they did.
²²

Meanwhile, their young governor, J. Neely Johnson, had a horrid time trying to govern the state. Unable to solve the state’s financial problems, and unsuccessful in his attempt to suppress the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856, which was composed mainly of his political supporters, he soon looked forward to the day when his two years were up. On leaving the governor’s office, he moved away from the hubbub of Sacramento and took refuge far to the north, in sparsely populated Trinity County. Two years later Johnson left the state for Nevada, where he eventually became a supreme court judge.

California, then, was different. Unlike the other free states, where the Democratic Party generally fell on hard times after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, California Democrats continued to dominate the state. Except for the brief Know-Nothing interlude, they swept every election. Not only did they beat Frémont handily; they trounced virtually every candidate the new Republican Party threw at them.