The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (29 page)

Was there, then, no free-soil movement in California? There definitely was, and it took place largely within the Broderick wing of the California Democratic Party.

Why the Broderick wing? That is a tough question to answer. For when Broderick ran for Congress in New York, his ties to the free-soil movement were at best “minimal.” On the one hand, he had the backing of George Henry Evans, the radical editor of
The Working Man’s Advocate,
whose proposal to distribute public lands for free to settlers as homesteads became a key component of the free-soil movement. Also, Evans, in his extensive writings, left no doubt that the slaveholding elite posed a serious threat to the well-being of the American Republic and that the goals and aspirations of the white working class were incompatible with slavery. At the same time, however, Broderick clearly rejected the free-soil movement at the time of the Barnburner revolt in New York.
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He also had the backing of Mike Walsh’s
Subterranean,
which was anything but supportive of the free-soil movement. Not only was Walsh pro-slavery; he was blatantly pro-slavery and a staunch admirer of John C. Calhoun.

Nonetheless, once Broderick reached San Francisco, he moved quickly into the free-soil column. By then, as historians have frequently pointed out, the free-soil movement had a diverse following. Some joined the movement because they opposed slavery or opposed its expansion. Others became free-soilers largely because they wanted free homesteads or because they detested plantation society and the oligarchs who dominated it. Still others joined the movement because they wanted to keep all blacks, free as well as slave, out of the West. For them “free soil” meant “white only.”
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In Broderick’s case, only the last motive clearly did not apply. Elected to the state senate in January 1850, he quickly made his presence known. He was astute and tenacious. He was also often on the losing side. He fought against a tax on foreign miners and lost. He expressed concern for the rights of Californios, Mexicans, French, and Germans, and again found himself in the minority. He also led the fight against a bill—a very popular bill—to prevent “Free Negroes and Persons of Color” from entering the state.

The bill was the brainchild of the state’s first governor, Peter H. Burnett. A forty-three-year-old Tennessee native who had spent many years in Mississippi before moving west to Oregon in 1843, Burnett had authored a similar bill in Oregon. He contended that “the colored races” were “inferior by nature to the white” and, given the circumstances in California, could never hope to advance “a single step in knowledge or virtue.” He also insisted that slaves had “been manumitted in the slave states by their owners and brought to California bound to service for a limited period as hirelings” and that the state would soon be overrun with “inferior” black men. He wanted the California legislature to put a stop to black increase by passing a law much like the Oregon law. The bill easily passed the assembly and had ample support in the senate.

Broderick initially lacked the votes to kill the measure outright. So he took full advantage of the parliamentary rules and used one delaying tactic after another to keep the senate from voting on the bill. Weeks dragged by, and soon other legislators realized that their pet bills would never be acted upon as long as the governor’s bill was before the senate. Worried about the fate of such legislation, several senators thus decided to join Broderick’s effort to kill the governor’s proposal. So in the end, his motion to postpone the measure indefinitely passed, 8 to 5.
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Broderick also used his parliamentary expertise to destroy a Chiv resolution that censured the free-soil movement. Although poorly worded, the resolution clearly characterized David Wilmot and other free-soil congressmen as “unholy, unpatriotic, and partisan.” It also asserted that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the territories and endorsed popular sovereignty as the best way of settling the slavery question in the West. Again lacking the votes to defeat the resolution outright, Broderick first tried to get the resolution sent to a select committee, where it would hopefully die. When that parliamentary gambit failed, he then called for cleaning up the language of the resolution. In the process, he managed to amend the resolution in such a way that it also endorsed the free-soil cause. Once that was accomplished, the resolution’s original supporters wanted no part of it. Some thus supported a second motion to send the resolution to a select committee, and there it died.
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Broderick also took up the cause of squatters. The previous summer, on land granted to Johann Sutter by the Mexican governor, Juan Bautista Alvarado, several thousand settlers had ignored Sutter’s claim of ownership. They had feasted on his New Helvetia orchards and butchered his cattle. They also squatted on the Sacramento lots he had sold to Sam Brannan and other entrepreneurs. Trouble then followed, as sheriff’s deputies destroyed the squatters’ houses and fences and jailed James McClatchy, one of their leaders. In an attempt to free McClatchy, an armed band of squatters encountered a posse assembled by Mayor Hardin Bigelow on Fourth and J streets. The city assessor and three squatters were killed, and the mayor was badly wounded, eventually having to have his thumb amputated, then his arm. The next day another battle led to the death of Sheriff Joseph McKinney and several others. The authorities then tried the leaders of the squatters, McClatchy and Dr. Charles Robinson, who later became the governor of Kansas, for the deaths emerging from the riot.
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In the legislature, Broderick joined forces with Senator Thomas B. Van Buren in defending the squatters. Contending that no murder had been committed because there was no “premeditation or malice aforethought,” he denounced the judge for allowing this trial to take place. Only a twisted interpretation of the law by an unscrupulous judge could have led to such a trial, contended Broderick. The legislature thus had a duty to stop this miscarriage of justice. And if the legislature did not act, said Broderick, he would raise five thousand men and free the defendants.
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In championing the squatters, Broderick made it clear that his primary concern was his kind of people—the free white laborer. Like George Henry Evans, he wanted poor and landless whites to reap the benefits of western expansion. For Broderick “free soil” thus included free land for settlers as well as land free from slavery.

Yet despite his free-soil sympathies and his parliamentary expertise, Broderick in the early years lost more battles than he won. Not only was he in the minority in the state senate; he was definitely in the minority wing in his party.

In all the free states, Democrats tended to be soft on the slavery question. That had been true in the 1830s and 1840s as well as the 1850s. Between 1836 and 1844, the key votes to stop antislavery petitions from being read in Congress had come mainly from free-state Democrats. They had also provided the key votes that enabled Southern planters to obtain the lands of the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, and the Seminoles in the 1830s, and that enabled Texas to come into the Union in 1845 as a slave state with the right to divide into as many as five states. They had also provided the votes needed to defeat the Wilmot Proviso in 1847 and to enact the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
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California Democrats were no different. In 1852, on Henry Crabb’s bill to establish a retroactive fugitive slave law in California, assembly Democrats provided Crabb with far more support than members of his own Whig Party. On the final roll call, thirty of thirty-three assembly Democrats cast aye votes as compared with eleven of eighteen Whigs. When the measure reached the senate, Broderick again had to use parliamentary tricks to keep it from getting through. He offered one amendment after another, raised points of order, even called for adjournment. His Chiv opponents, however, had the votes, waited him out, and eventually surmounted each obstacle. Similarly, in 1854, on a resolution supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sixteen assembly Democrats endorsed the measure and not a single Whig.
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By the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, Broderick’s base in California politics was expanding. He still had scores of enemies within the party, men who detested him and his Tammany Hall methods, men who regarded him as a threat to the South and Southern ways, men who even referred to themselves as “Anti-Broderick Democrats.” But he also had a growing core of solid supporters, men who owed him dearly. Similarly, his main rival, William Gwin, had a growing list of enemies, men who never trusted him, men who found his loyalty to the South and Southern ways aggravating.

Much of the distrust centered on patronage. Gwin and his Chiv associates had a near monopoly on federal patronage, and they refused to share it with other California Democrats. Thanks to Gwin, the most powerful federal post—San Francisco collector of customs—went to a Chiv stalwart, Richard P. Hammond, the 1852 assembly Speaker from San Joaquin County who allegedly tried to split the state in two and open the southern half to slavery. Similarly, the job of U.S. marshal for northern California went to another Chiv mainstay, William H. Richardson, who held the post until he got killed in a shoot-out with a well-known gambler, Charles Cora.
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Hammond and Richardson, in turn, staffed their offices with Gwin’s followers. So, too, did every other federal officeholder. And soon virtually every postmaster, marshal, customs service employee, mint appointee, Indian agent, and land office official in California was beholden to Gwin.

Yet, in dispensing patronage, Gwin never treated all members of the party equally. Nearly all the top jobs went to Southerners. In 1859, for example, the collector of San Francisco was Benjamin Franklin Washington, a Virginian. The appraiser general was Richard Roman, a Texan. The surveyor of San Francisco was W. B. Dameron, a Mississippian. The navy agent was Austin E. Smith, another Virginian. The state’s two Indian agents, James Y. McDuffie and John T. Eaton, were both Georgians. The superintendent of the mint, Charles Hempstead, was a Missourian. The only non-Southerner to hold a top post was the surveyor general, James W. Mandeville, a New Yorker. He also was a bitter opponent of David Broderick. These men, in turn, hired hundreds of subordinates.
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This blatant bias in favor of Southerners drove other Democrats into Broderick’s hands. Repeatedly denouncing the San Francisco Custom House as the “Virginia Poorhouse,” Broderick convinced many Democrats from the North that they were being discriminated against because of their place of birth. Among the many who responded to his refrain was the state’s third governor, John Bigler.

The Pennsylvania-born Bigler actually liked the South and despised Northern abolitionists. Ideologically, he and Gwin should have been soul mates. But Bigler never trusted Gwin. As a member of the first California legislature, he opposed Gwin’s election to the U.S. Senate. And later, as governor of California, he abhorred Gwin’s appointment policies. As he complained to his brother William, a major force in Pennsylvania politics and also a governor, “the office holders for this state were nearly all taken from the
South,
but few men from the
North
received favors.”
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Largely because of this bias, Bigler ended up in Broderick’s camp. He disagreed with Broderick on some issues. But he never doubted Broderick’s contention that the main battle in California politics was over money and power. Money and power. The Chivs had it. They wanted more of it. And they refused to share it, especially with “plebeans of the North.” In Bigler’s eyes, Broderick was dead right. Steps to thwart Chiv dominance had to be taken. Broderick, in turn, returned the favor and agreed to help Bigler get reelected governor.

First, however, the two men had to gain control of the state Democratic convention. They did so, largely by driving through a rule that representation would be on the basis of one delegate for each two hundred Democratic votes. By this formula, Broderick’s San Francisco had by far the largest delegation. When the delegates convened at Benicia in 1853, Broderick thus was in control. He got the party to adopt a platform that embraced free-soil principles and especially the teachings of George Henry Evans. It called for putting the needs of the settlers first, making sure that the public lands were distributed in “limited quantities to actual settlers,” and avoiding any policy that encouraged the formation of plantations and other landed monopolies. It also denounced “monopolies of privileges” and promised to protect “the laborer from degradation and oppression.” Broderick also backed Bigler for a second term against the Chiv favorite, Richard Roman, the state treasurer and a Texan, and delivered the vote in Bigler’s behalf.
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The Chivs were unhappy with the outcome. Many federal officeholders, all Gwin appointees, sat out the entire election and did nothing to help Bigler get reelected. Others, including Richard P. Hammond, collector of San Francisco, suddenly found themselves overwhelmed with “private business” halfway through the election campaign. And a few Chivs, led by the supreme court justice Solomon Heydenfeldt, actively campaigned for the opposition. In the end, the key was San Francisco, a city that Bigler lost in 1851. This time, with Broderick’s help, he emerged victorious.
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All this had a price, of course. Broderick insisted on having a decisive hand in dispensing state patronage. Together, the two men appointed their cronies—William M. Lent, R. N. Snowden, Charles H. Bryan, Edward McGowan, Moses E. Flannagan—to such positions as commissioner of pilots, state prison inspector, and judge of the supreme court.
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And once Broderick gained a whip hand in dispensing state patronage, men who had been turned down for federal jobs flocked to his side.

Some of the jobs he controlled, moreover, were lucrative. The state printing contract of 1852 was worth $270,000, while the State Marine Hospital in 1855 provided $166,000 in patronage money. In 1856, the sheriff of San Francisco County, the county clerk, recorder, coroner, and clerk of the superior court hauled in $325,000 in fees. Of this amount, $240,000 was profit. The sheriff’s income alone was $100,000—four times as much as the president’s. To would-be candidates, Broderick offered his standard deal: the backing of his machine for half the fees. In essence, then, Broderick sold these jobs—but only to loyal followers. And that, in turn, made him even more of an ogre in Chiv circles.
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