The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (35 page)

Yet patronage was never the central issue in Broderick’s stump speeches. He accused both James Buchanan and William Gwin of “dripping in corruption,” not because they had denied him and his followers federal patronage, but because of their pro-slavery bias. The “real issue,” he said repeatedly, was their backing of slave labor over free labor. “Can you support,” he asked one audience after another, “an administration that would bring slave labor into the West to compete with free labor?” That, he claimed, was the goal of Gwin and his kind. “You, fellow citizens, who are laborers and have white faces, must have black competitors.”
⁴⁴

Broderick eventually spoke to 22,850 people, Gwin, 2,500. Yet in the end, this fact made little difference. With Free-Soilers divided into two camps, some following Broderick, others the Republicans, winning was out of the question. And with the Gwin forces having far more workers to hand out ballots on Election Day, Broderick and his men never had a chance “in remote little places like Fresno, Tulare, and San Bernardino.”
⁴⁵
In 1858, the Chivs beat them by eight thousand votes; in 1859, the margin swelled to twenty thousand. Thus Milton S. Latham, who had been born in Ohio but politicized in Alabama, easily won the governorship.

Yet even though the election ended as Philip Roach had predicted, the Chivs soon found themselves in deep trouble. At the Chiv nominating convention, one speaker after another had gone after Broderick. Ripping him apart, coming up with the nastiest invective, had been the order of the day.

Especially effective had been the state’s chief justice, David S. Terry. In his speech, the chief justice had denounced California’s anti-Lecompton Democrats as “a miserable remnant of a faction sailing under false colors.” Far from being free men, said Terry, they were “the personal chattels of a single individual, whom they are ashamed of. They belong, heart and soul, body and breeches, to David C. Broderick.” But because they were “ashamed to acknowledge their master,” they called themselves “Douglas Democrats.” Perhaps they did “sail under the flag of Douglas.” But it was “the banner of the black Douglass,” Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, and not the banner of Stephen A. Douglas, the loyal Democrat.
⁴⁶

When Broderick learned of this speech over breakfast at the International Hotel in San Francisco, he was seated next to a large group that included a wealthy lawyer friend of Terry’s, Duncan W. Perley. He had little respect for Perley. He regarded the thirty-three-year-old New Brunswick native as an effeminate shill for the rich and wellborn. After reading the newspaper account, he tossed the newspaper at Perley. “I see your friend Terry has been abusing me at Sacramento,” said Broderick.

Perley played dumb and pretended he didn’t know what Broderick was talking about. Broderick then exploded: “The damned miserable wretch, after being kicked out of the convention, went down there and made a speech abusing me. I have defended him at times when all others deserted him. I paid and supported three newspapers to defend him during the Vigilance Committee days, and this is all the gratitude I get from the damned miserable wretch for the favors I have conferred on him.”

Perley continued to play dumb. “Mr. Broderick, who is it you speak of as a ‘wretch’?” “Terry,” snapped Broderick. “I will inform the Judge of the language you have used concerning him,” threatened Perley. “Do so,” said Broderick. “You would not dare to use this language to him,” snarled Perley. “Would not dare,” said Broderick. “No, sir!” exclaimed Perley. “You would not dare to do it, and you know you would not dare to do it; and you shall not use it to me concerning him. I shall hold you personally responsible for the language and the menace you have used.”

Subsequently, Perley challenged Broderick to a duel. Broderick rejected it. He had no interest in getting into a duel with an upper-class Chiv lawyer, especially one he regarded as a fop, and especially during an election campaign. He just wanted “to kill old man Gwin.” And on the stump, he invited Gwin to challenge him. “If Dr. Gwin felt aggrieved at my conduct,” he said repeatedly, “he knew his remedy.” And even more pointedly: “If I have insulted Dr. Gwin sufficient to induce him to go about the State and make a blackguard of himself, he should seek the remedy left to every gentleman who feels offense.”

But Gwin never challenged him. The challenge instead came from David S. Terry. On September 8, one day after the election, the judge sent Broderick a note demanding a retraction. Broderick refused, and on September 13 the two men met at Lake Merced. The hair trigger on Broderick’s pistol caused him to misfire. Three days later he was dead.

The question of Terry’s motivation later became important to many scholars. Was he a typical Southern gentleman, a proud man who was quick to respond to insults and felt obliged to defend his honor? Or was he an “assassin,” as the Broderick camp claimed?

At the time, however, such questions hardly mattered. Those who believed that Terry was the chosen instrument of the Gwin cabal to eliminate Broderick from the political scene suddenly gained the upper hand. Declared Edward D. Baker, the great orator of the new Republican Party: “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.’”
⁴⁷
Those words were repeated endlessly, on every political podium in California—and probably in every barroom, brothel, and dance hall as well.

The Chivs now had a problem. They were constantly on the defensive. They were constantly under attack. Was Terry their assassin? Did they intentionally kill Broderick? They said no. But the question just wouldn’t go away.

Free-soilers, in turn, suddenly had an edge, a story that no one would ever forget. A dead senator. A faulty pistol. A pro-slavery assailant. They made the most of it and used it to frame debate for years to come. Chivs fought back, quarreled with one detail after another, and continued to denounce Broderick. Wasn’t he a thug? Didn’t he rely on Tammany Hall methods? But their attacks invariably reinforced the basic story. Thousands heard them, and thousands still went to their graves believing that the Chivs were guilty of a “murder most foul.”
⁴⁸

Years later, even one of Judge Terry’s seconds, Samuel H. Brooks, seemed to endorse that interpretation. On being asked to explain what happened, Brooks told the San Francisco
Examiner:
“It had its origins in politics.”
⁴⁹

Epilogue

THE DEATH OF BRODERICK SENT SHOCK WAVES THROUGH CALIFORNIA
politics, framed all political debate, and kept Chivs constantly on the defensive. Yet its full impact came slowly. For while the Chivs’ popularity plummeted, they had more power than ever before. They had won the September 7 election by some twenty thousand votes. They controlled the statehouse as well as the state’s entire congressional delegation.

Thus few Chivs immediately ran for cover, and only a handful wavered. Most stuck by their guns and hoped to weather the storm.

Among them was their leader, William Gwin. Four days after Broderick’s death, Gwin left San Francisco for Washington. Accompanying him was Charles L. Scott, one of the two House members. The state now had two House members who were much like Gwin, Southern men with strong Southern biases. The tamer of the two was John C. Burch, a native of Missouri who had attended Kemper College. Scott, who prided himself on being a “fire-eater,” was a Virginian and a graduate of the College of William and Mary. Both men were in their early thirties, Burch thirty-three, Scott thirty-two. Both had come to California to mine gold. Both had ended up practicing law and holding one political office after another. And both had benefited from Gwin’s success in getting patronage.

The departure was anything but a joyous occasion. Even the
Alta California,
long Gwin’s supporter in San Francisco politics, was now critical. The paper, in large black letters, now referred to Gwin and his followers as “jackals” whose “lion hunt” had finally ended “after their feast of blood.” It also advised Gwin to look at the empty seat near him in the Senate chamber and then consult his conscience, “if he still had one.” Even worse was the crowd that saw the Chiv contingent off at the dock. Where were Gwin’s supporters? None were in sight. The men on the dock looked like they were there for a hanging. They also bore a sign: “The Will of the People—May the Murderers of David C. Broderick Never Return to California.”
¹

Fortunately, when the two men arrived in Washington, they found that Broderick’s death was old news. The nation’s capital was in a furor, but not over the death of the California senator. In October 1859, John Brown, a fifty-nine-year-old Connecticut Yankee, had led twenty-one men, including five black men, across the Potomac to Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They had seized the federal arsenal and held several local citizens as hostages. Brown’s plan was to instigate a slave insurrection in Virginia, then establish a free state in the southern Appalachians and spread the rebellion southward. The plan never got off the ground. No slaves joined Brown’s men, and after two days of battle, a force of U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee captured Brown and his surviving followers.

Indicted for treason against the state of Virginia, Brown had been sentenced to hang on December 2. Four of his followers were to be hanged two weeks later, and two more the following March. The raid, meanwhile, sent a chill of terror through the white South. And while most Northern newspapers had joined Southerners in denouncing Brown and his raid, some antislavery men and women now treated Brown as a hero and a martyr.

The nation’s capital was also bitterly divided. Southern leaders now called for revenge, not only revenge against New England and New York abolitionists who had provided Brown with money, but revenge against all “black Republicans.” Members of Congress were armed to the teeth. In both the House and the Senate, noted Senator James Henry Hammond, “the only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.”
²

In Mississippi, where Gwin still owned several plantations, Jefferson Davis addressed the possibility of a Republican president. Rather than recognize a “black Republican” in the White House, he told the state legislature, the Mississippi star should be ripped out of the American flag and placed “on the perilous ridge of battle as a sign round which Mississippi’s best and bravest should gather to the harvest-home of death.”
³
A month later, in Washington, Senator Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama echoed the same sentiments. If the black Republicans ever got hold of the national government, said Clay, “we of the South will tear the Constitution to pieces and look to our guns for justice.”
⁴

Clay’s harsh words triggered a speech from Gwin, one that he would later reprint in his memoirs. He spoke from a unique position as a senator from the only free state that had never elected a Republican to Congress and the only one that had fully supported the Buchanan administration in the fall election. Aiming his speech mainly at Northern senators, he told them to listen carefully to Senator Clay. For the Alabama senator spoke not just for himself. He spoke for “a vast majority of the people of the slaveholding states.” And he spoke the truth. The Republican Party was undoubtedly a sectional party, strictly a Northern party, one that had “no existence in the Southern States, and never can have any existence there.” Thus, if the Republicans should ever win the White House, disunion was certain. The South would secede, and there would be nothing the North could do about it.
⁵

Meanwhile, to replace Broderick in the Senate, lame-duck governor John B. Weller chose an innocuous pro-slavery man from Marysville, Henry P. Haun. A forty-four-year-old lawyer, Haun was a native of Kentucky and a graduate of Transylvania University, the same school Gwin had attended. Haun had moved to Iowa as a young man and taken part in writing the Iowa Constitution. He had come to California in 1849. He would serve in the Senate for just four months, for in January, the Chiv-dominated legislature chose newly elected governor Milton Latham to replace him.

Why Latham? And why choose a governor who had been in office just five days? Opinions varied. Some said it was because Latham wanted the job, while others said it was to get him out of the governor’s office. The thirty-two-year-old Latham was the boy wonder of Chiv politics. He had supporters for the Senate even when he was still in his twenties. He was a handsome man, and one observer claimed that he had been the beneficiary of all of “the world’s smiles and favors.” His natural instinct, according to this observer, was to be “moderate in politics” and “genial to all.”
⁶

But to others, especially the former Democratic congressman Joseph W. McCorkle, Latham was anything but a “genial” man. Not only had Latham snatched away McCorkle’s congressional seat in 1853; he also snatched away McCorkle’s betrothed, Sophie Birdsall.
⁷
But that, in the view of many Chivs, was history. And McCorkle, moreover, was a Broderick man.

More important was where Latham stood on the issues of the day. Could the Chivalry count on him? Was he trustworthy? Many had their doubts. One moment, he seemed to support Stephen A. Douglas. The next, Douglas’s critics. Again and again, he seemed to waver, to speak out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, to take one step forward and then one step back.

A case in point, so many thought, was the Pico bill. Under the terms of the bill, it had to be ratified in the affected districts in southern California by a two-to-one majority. In the September 1859 election, it had passed handily. About thirty-three hundred voters had turned out in the southern counties, and by nearly three to one they had voted to split California in two, roughly at San Luis Obispo, and create a new territory, the Territory of Colorado.

In January 1860, during his five-day stint as governor, Latham sent the Pico bill to Congress for approval. In a letter to President Buchanan, Latham seemed to justify the bill in one breath and condemn it in another. He claimed that the origin of the act was the southern half of the state’s longtime dissatisfaction with the northern half’s dominance and taxation policies. Dismemberment was thus a matter of justice. Then, to the disappointment of some of his Chiv followers, Latham also pointed out that the people at large were against the Pico bill and “the measure must be deemed, for the present, at least, impolitic.”
⁸

In fact, the bill had no chance in Congress. The Republicans had scored impressive gains in the 1858 election, and John Brown’s raid had exacerbated the loathing Southern leaders had for them. All Washington now worried about the future of the nation. Might those who predicted disunion be right? Might the nation fall apart? In this atmosphere, not even James Buchanan was willing to push for the dismemberment of a state. The Pico bill was thus dead on arrival.

But was Latham’s letter typical of the man? Many apparently thought so and were happy to ship him off to Washington. Once Latham left for Washington, John G. Downey took his place. Born in Ireland, the thirty-two-year-old Downey had lived in Mississippi before migrating to California. Arriving penniless, he had made a fortune in his Los Angeles drugstore, the only one in the southern half of the state, and in ranching and real estate. In the September 1859 election, he had been the Chiv candidate for lieutenant governor. Unlike Latham, he was unwavering in his support of Stephen A. Douglas.

In March, Latham took his seat in the Senate. On April 16, 1860, he gave a major speech on “labor and capital.” It was nothing like Broderick’s defense of free labor. Quite the contrary. In this speech, Latham defended slavery and attacked the capacities of blacks, the economic motives of the North, and the morals of the Republican Party. In it, he also took up the question of the dissolution of the Union. If that were to happen, said Latham, “We in California would have reasons to induce us to become members neither of the southern confederacy nor of the northern confederacy, and would be able to sustain ourselves the relations of a free and independent state.”
⁹

Did that mean that California would become independent if the Union fell apart? A separate nation? Most observers thought it did.

While Latham was on his way to Washington, many of his fellow Chivs met in Sacramento to choose delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Most were pro-South and anti-Douglas.

For president, the majority preferred Daniel S. Dickinson, a New York senator who had supported the South in one showdown vote after another. Also popular was Joe Lane, an Oregonian who was blatantly pro-slavery, and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the current vice president. On March 1, the convention voted to make Dickinson the California Democracy’s first choice. The Douglas men made an effort to delete his name. They failed, 21 to 317. Then some anti-Douglas men moved to make it clear that Douglas was the California Democracy’s “last choice.” They also failed, 65 to 282. Six Chiv stalwarts and two Chiv moderates were then chosen to represent the California Democracy in Charleston.
¹⁰

Arriving in Charleston in mid-April, the eight California delegates found that the city was in an uproar. The leading candidate for the Democratic nomination was Stephen A. Douglas. He had by far the most delegates pledged to him. But he was the least acceptable to the “fire-breathing ultras of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama.” He had come to symbolize Northern duplicity. Partly to stop him, and with the people of Charleston cheering them on, the “ultras” demanded that the platform include a federal slave code for the territories.

The previous year the Chivs had come out foursquare against such a code, deeming it “a desperate trick of unprincipled and renegade politicians.” Now, in April 1860, their man on the platform committee voted for such a code. So, too, did the delegate from Oregon. The platform committee, by a 17 to 16 vote, thus recommended that the party advocate police laws to protect slavery in the territories. The Douglas men on the convention floor battled back, said their man couldn’t run on such a platform and that he was the only Democrat who could win the election. They prevailed, defeating the recommendation of the committee, 165 to 138.
¹¹

Eight Southern states then withdrew from the convention. The remaining delegates then tried to put together a presidential ticket. The California delegation championed Daniel S. Dickinson, “the noblest Roman of them all,” and supported him as a bloc on the first five ballots. On the next fifty-two ballots, the California delegation divided, but significantly not one California delegate cast a single vote for the front-running Douglas. Finally, having failed to agree on a nominee after fifty-seven ballots, the party adjourned on May 3 and agreed to reassemble in Baltimore on June 18.
¹²

At Baltimore, the California delegation again sided with the “fire-breathing ultras.” First the California delegate on the Credentials Committee supported a minority report that called for the admission of the original Southern delegates who had walked out of the Charleston convention. When that report was voted down, the Charleston seceders again stormed out of the convention. So did delegates from Virginia, North Carolina, half of Maryland, and Oregon. At this point, the California delegation had a choice. Would they remain with the other free states and nominate Douglas for president? Or join the exodus? They walked out, joining the seceding delegations, well ahead of delegates from Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas.
¹³