The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (36 page)

The seceding delegations then met at nearby Market Hall on June 23. In the California delegation were five new men. They were even more pro-slavery than the men they replaced. Among the newcomers was Congressman Charles L. Scott. Also on board was Calhoun Benham, one of Judge Terry’s seconds in the Broderick duel. In short order, the delegation agreed to support John C. Breckinridge for president, Joe Lane for vice president, and a platform that called for federal laws to protect slavery in the territories and the acquisition of slaveholding Cuba.
¹⁴

The Chivs thus stuck by their guns. Always pro-South, they remained so in the 1860 presidential election. Their entire delegation in Congress—Gwin, Latham, Scott, and Burch—campaigned for the Breckinridge-Lane ticket. So did twenty-four of the thirty-six members of the state Democratic committee. Of the party’s leading lights, only the new governor, John G. Downey, campaigned for the Northern Democratic nominee, Stephen A. Douglas.
¹⁵

That November the choice of Gwin and most Chivs did well in the southern reaches of the state. In Los Angeles, Breckinridge got 39 percent of the vote to Lincoln’s 20 percent; in El Monte, 58 percent to Lincoln’s 11 percent.
¹⁶
But in the more heavily populated districts of northern California, Breckinridge trailed Douglas by 4,000 votes and Lincoln by 5,000. And overall, in the much-divided state, Lincoln beat Douglas by 614 votes.

On November 14, news that Lincoln had won enough eastern states to be elected president reached California. The Chivs now regarded secession of the South as inevitable. In keeping, several boldly raised the possibility of California also seceding from the Union and creating a Pacific republic. On November 28,
The San Francisco Herald
floated the idea. Then, on January 3, the
Herald
published a letter from Congressman John C. Burch endorsing a Pacific republic “if the fates should
force
us to this last sad resort.” Two weeks later, the
Herald
published a more forceful letter from Congressman Charles L. Scott. He urged Californians to secede and form “a separate republic” if the Union should split in two.

The number of enthusiasts, however, was small, consisting mainly of the “extreme” Breckinridge men. As a result, in the U.S. Senate, Senator Milton Latham retracted his earlier declaration that California would leave the Union, saying that his earlier statement on April 16, 1860, foreshadowing the Pacific republic had been “premature.” Later he would claim that he had always been a good “Union” man.
¹⁷

California election returns, 1860

When the Civil War began in April 1861, the unionists in California quickly gained the upper hand. Making much of the fact that the South, in bombarding Fort Sumter, had fired the first shot, they pushed through the legislature a resolution pledging California’s loyalty to the United States. All but five senators and twelve assemblymen supported the resolution. The legislature also agreed to raise two regiments of cavalry and five regiments of infantry for the Union.

The two belligerents, however, were far more interested in California gold than in California regiments. Transporting thousands of raw recruits to the East Coast was deemed too expensive, while transporting gold paid handsome dividends. On each steamer sailing out of the Golden Gate, an average of over $1 million in gold went east. Usually, two or three steamers left per month during the four years of the war. Several times the gold shipments ran over $2 million per steamer, and on one occasion over $3 million. The high point came in 1864, when over $46 million in gold was sent via Panama to support the North’s credit and help arm, feed, and clothe one million Union fighting men. Noted General Ulysses S. Grant: “I do not know what we would do in this great national emergency were it not for the gold sent from California.”
¹⁸

Of little interest to the belligerents were California’s 258,000 males, even though three out of four were of prime fighting age. The North could be choosy. It had a large population to draw upon—nearly four times as many young white men as the eleven states that had seceded from the Union. The South, as time would soon tell, needed every white man it could get. In 1861, about 6 percent of male Californians hailed from the eleven Confederate states and another 7 percent from the border slave states. Would they fight for the Confederacy? Some undoubtedly would.
¹⁹
But who would pay to transport them back east? Not the Confederacy. And not the eleven states that had seceded from the Union. They were strapped for money. Maybe these “good” Southern men would pay their own way back? A few gung-ho editors urged them to do so.

Particularly outspoken was Lovick P. Hall, a native of Mississippi. Hall had operated a number of pro-slavery newspapers in both Oregon and California before the war. When war broke out, he established a new paper, the
Equal Rights Expositor,
in Visalia, a town two hundred miles south of Sacramento that had the reputation of being a pro-slavery hotbed. In his editorials, Hall repeatedly encouraged Confederate enlistments. At the same time, he belittled all those who volunteered for the Union cause, and on Thanksgiving Day 1862 he expressed thanks for all the blood that these Union men had shed. In March 1863, in response to another scurrilous editorial, a band of Union volunteers stormed Hall’s office, destroyed his press, threw his type out in the street, and put the
Expositor
out of business.
²⁰

While still operative, the
Expositor
also encouraged “good” Southern men to take California out of the Union and turn it into a Confederate ally. Although Hall undoubtedly exaggerated the number of participants, talk of such plots was commonplace. Most were in sparsely populated southern California, several hundred miles away from the major gold fields.
²¹
The most famous, however, involved two young northern Californians, Asbury Harpending and Ridgeley Greathouse. Both came from wealthy Kentucky families. And both had visions of glory.

In early 1861, Harpending joined a secret society, the Committee of Thirty, in which each member pledged to recruit one hundred men, take Alcatraz island and other federal strongholds by surprise, and then seize San Francisco. With San Francisco in their clutches, they could then stop all gold shipments to the North. At the same time, they could establish a new gold route “through savage Arizona” into Confederate Texas.

At one point the Committee of Thirty had high hopes that the new military commander of the Department of the Pacific, General Albert Sidney Johnston, would support their cause. Not only was Johnston a secessionist; his native Texas had seceded from the Union. Dispatched to see Johnston were Harpending and two other firebrands. They were much impressed. The general was a “giant of a man with a mass of heavy yellow hair, untouched by age, although he was nearing sixty.” To their dismay, however, he told them that he was aware of their “foolish” plot and had taken steps to make sure it didn’t happen under his command. Johnston subsequently resigned his commission, went south, taking many Chivs with him, and became one of the Confederacy’s leading generals. He was killed at Shiloh in 1862.

After being “squashed” by General Johnston, Harpending traveled across Mexico, caught passage to Charleston, and then made his way to Richmond. There he procured a letter of marque and a captain’s commission in the Confederate navy that authorized him to burn, bond, and capture Union ships bearing California gold. The goal was to stop the flow of millions of dollars in gold from San Francisco to the North and thus cripple the Union war effort.

Upon returning to California, Harpending hired Captain William C. Law, “the most repulsive reptile in appearance I had ever set eyes on,” to lead the privateers to their prey. The thirty-nine-year-old captain had run slaves from Virginia to New Orleans before the war. He had also worked for the Pacific Mail Line and knew the routes that the gold ships would be following. On his advice, Greathouse then purchased for $6,500 the
J. M. Chapman,
a swift ninety-ton schooner that was in the news for making a trip around the Horn from New York to San Francisco in just 138 days. Greathouse then hired a crew of four seamen and a cook, while Harpending recruited fifteen gunmen.

The plan was to set sail on March 15, 1863, to some islands off the Mexican coast, convert the
Chapman
into a privateer, and lay in wait for Pacific Mail steamers bearing California gold for the Union cause. If all went well, the two Kentuckians would then turn the captured steamers into privateers, seize even more gold shipments, and thus disable Lincoln’s war machine. Federal authorities, however, had learned of the plot and were just waiting for the Kentuckians and their men to set sail. So, as soon as the
Chapman
lifted anchor and moved out into San Francisco Bay, two boatloads of seamen from the USS
Cyane
appeared out of nowhere, seized the vessel, and arrested the two Kentuckians and nineteen of their accomplices.
²²

On the Union side, more than sixteen thousand men volunteered to fight for the Northern cause, but only a handful saw action. Since the federal government had deemed the costs of transporting thousands of men through Panama to the East Coast as just too expensive, the vast majority of California volunteers spent the war in local garrison duty, while a minority policed Indians in the Northwest or guarded overland mail routes. The only California units that came close to seeing action were the members of the “California Column,” who were sent to New Mexico in 1862 to ward off an impending Confederate invasion.

In July 1861 a group of Texans led by Colonel John Baylor had seized the southern half of the New Mexico Territory and named the region the Confederate Territory of Arizona. That fall Jefferson Davis, as president of the Confederacy, instructed General Henry Sibley to follow up on Baylor’s handiwork and open a wide corridor to California and then capture the gold fields in the Sierras. Sibley, however, first had to gain control of the Union forts lining the Rio Grande. As fighting raged up and down the river, the “California Column” was sent east to stop the Confederate invasion. By the time they reached the Rio Grande, in August 1862, Sibley’s troops had suffered heavy casualties and withdrawn, and the threat of invasion was effectively over.

None of the California units, in short, saw much blood and gore. Hoping for more action, 500 young Californians turned to Massachusetts. Their leaders, J. Sewall Reed and DeWitt Clinton Thompson, had friends in Boston and managed to get the ear of Governor John Andrew. If Andrew would grant them bounties that they could use for transportation costs, they would recruit able men to fight as Massachusetts volunteers. Andrew agreed, and Reed provided a company of 100 men, and a few months later Thompson provided four companies totaling 400 men. Together, they became members of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry. Known as the California Battalion, they fought in more than fifty engagements, mainly in Virginia. They suffered horrific losses. By war’s end, out of the 500 men who began the adventure, only 182 were left. And these men, to their dismay, had to finance their own way home.