The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (6 page)

Broderick also began considering opportunities outside New York. His mother had died in 1843. His brother, Richard, had died in 1845, thanks to a freak accident. His ties to the city were thus slight. He then received a letter from Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson, the commander of the New York Volunteers in California. Stevenson, although a Tammany man and a party regular, had befriended Broderick many times over the years. He had put Broderick in touch with Townsend Harris. He now urged Broderick to come to California.
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Short of funds, Broderick borrowed travel money from George Wilkes, his fellow “radical,” and joined the Republic Company, an association of eleven New Yorkers who pooled their resources for the trip. Securing passage on the steamer
Crescent City,
they left New York on April 17. In Panama City, they had trouble finding a steamer for the last leg of the journey. Finally, gaining berths on the
Stella,
they made their way north and passed through the Golden Gate in mid-June, thus completing a two-month journey.
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Their first glimpse of San Francisco stunned them. Before them were hundreds of abandoned ships, from Sydney and Singapore and Bremen and Baltimore, from literally all over the world, rotting on the tidal flats of Yerba Buena Cove. On entering the city, they encountered even more strange sights—Peruvian gold seekers in chocolate brown ponchos, Malayans with krises in their belts, Tasmanian sheepherders in cabbage tree hats and moleskin trousers, and, strangest of all, pigtailed Chinese in knee-length breeches and quilted jackets. The weather was also peculiar. In New York, June was always a warm month; in San Francisco, it was cold and foggy.

Barroom in California. Reprinted from Frank Marryat,
Mountains and Molehills; or, Recollections of a Burnt Journal
(New York, 1855), 43. Marryat, like all travelers, was struck by the fact that men from all over the world had come to California.

Once they got their bearings, nine members of the Republic Company headed for the gold country. Broderick and Kohler remained in the city.

Broderick quickly found a place to board, the house of Emma and Tom McGuire, a couple he knew from his days in New York. The two men had much in common. Back in New York, Tom McGuire had been a saloon keeper, hack driver, fight promoter, volunteer fireman, and Tammany stalwart. Abandoning the New York Bowery for San Francisco, the couple had opened the Jenny Lind Theater, which provided a wide variety of entertainment ranging from opera to blackface minstrelsy. Broderick stayed with the McGuires until 1854. Thereafter, he lived in the better local hotels.
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Broderick and Kohler also got a helping hand from Colonel Stevenson. The former head of the New York Volunteers had heard numerous complaints from San Francisco businessmen who disliked dealing in gold dust. It took too much time. It led to too much squabbling. They wanted to deal in coins. But who was to mint the coins? The nearest mint was thousands of miles away. Here, Stevenson decided, was an opportunity for his fellow New Yorkers. Kohler, the jeweler, could do the assaying, and Broderick could do the hard manual labor. To get them started, Stevenson lent them $3,500.

The two men then formed F. D. Kohler & Company. They began striking coins with face values of $5 and $10, but with an actual gold content of $4 and $8. They made huge profits. Other private mints sprang up, and within the year Kohler and Broderick decided to sell out to Baldwin & Company. Kohler became the state assayer and the chief engineer of the San Francisco Fire Department. Meanwhile, with his profits, Broderick began speculating in San Francisco waterfront properties. He made a fortune.
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Simultaneously, and more important to Broderick, he became a force in San Francisco politics. Money never mattered much to him. He was a bachelor with no kin. His personal expenses were modest. He just wanted enough money so that he didn’t have to worry about it. But political power was a different matter. The more he had, the better. Here again he had the help of Stevenson, along with some of Stevenson’s disbanded New York Volunteers. Together, they introduced a modification of the Tammany system into San Francisco.

The system, as they fashioned it, depended heavily on volunteer fire companies. Fires were common in San Francisco, far more so than in New York, and they were far more dangerous, as they wiped out not just a building or two but buildings, shacks, and tents in all directions. So firemen in San Francisco were heroes with plenty of work to do. Broderick did more than his share and in one fire, in particular, distinguished himself by his bravery. But he never regarded his company and others as just firefighters. He made sure that they functioned also as political clubs, getting out the vote on Election Day and providing a training ground for up-and-coming politicians.

Even more important to building a political machine was having a steady source of revenue. Never doubting the proposition that money was the “mother’s milk of politics,” Broderick contributed much of his own income to his fledgling organization. He also tapped the earnings of elected officeholders. Some elected offices, such as sheriff, tax collector, and assessor, were lucrative. Indeed, they were worth a lot of money. Instead of receiving salaries, the men who held these offices got to keep all or a portion of the fees they collected. The totals sometimes were staggering, more than $50,000 per year, more than most Americans made in a lifetime. To a would-be candidate, Broderick offered a deal: the backing of the local Democratic machine for half the fees. His half then went to pay for election banners, to rent meeting halls, to hire musicians and other entertainers, to aid the sick and needy, and to support less affluent party operatives.
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By December 1849, only six months after Broderick arrived in San Francisco, the nucleus of the system was in place. Not only had he become a rich man. He was also well on his way to controlling San Francisco politics. That January the incumbent state senator, Nathaniel Bennett, quit to become a justice on the state supreme court. In the election that followed, Broderick ran as Bennett’s replacement. It was no contest. He polled 2,508 votes, ninety-nine times as many as his closest competitor, winning all but 101 of the votes that were cast.
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2

AT THE SAME TIME THAT DAVID BRODERICK DECIDED TO LEAVE
New York for California, a maverick Virginia politician, Henry Wise, began fantasizing about California. Now in his forty-second year and razor-thin, Wise had two “children” who planned to take off for the gold country. They weren’t his children exactly. They were actually his sister Margaret’s children, but she was a widow, and he deemed them his responsibility.

Wise took special pride in being the family patriarch. It was not a unique characteristic. It was one that many Virginia gentlemen shared. But in his case, suggests one of his biographers, it was writ large because Wise himself had never had a caring father. His father, a wealthy planter-politician on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, had died when Wise was five. Moreover, in a long and carefully written will, his father had purposely discriminated against Wise and Wise’s younger siblings, leaving the lion’s share of the estate to Wise’s older brothers and the “least productive portion” to Wise. Raised largely by relatives, Wise had subsequently done well. He had gone to Washington College in Pennsylvania, studied law in Virginia under Henry St. George Tucker, and become a prominent lawyer, briefly in Tennessee, then on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. But he never forgot his father’s will.
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Wise’s family in 1849 was extensive. He had fathered thirteen children, four by his first wife, nine by his second. Only seven had survived infancy. One of his sons was now away at college; the other six were at home. Unable to afford a tutor, Wise himself taught them mathematics and English composition, and his wife, Sarah (who would soon die giving birth to still another child), taught them Greek, Latin, Spanish, and French. In addition to his own children, Wise also supervised the education of two of his invalid brother John’s sons as well as his sister Margaret’s offspring. Wise also owned nineteen slaves whom he regarded as his “responsibility,” if not as his “children.” To all, he gave advice and expected obedience.

As a family man, Wise was dependable, but the same could not be said about his politics. He had switched parties—and seemingly his principles—more than once. He had been a supporter of Andrew Jackson in his youth and had even honeymooned at the Hermitage, Jackson’s Tennessee mansion. In 1833, the Jacksonians had backed him for a seat in the House of Representatives. Over the next decade, he gained fame nationally as a powerful defender of slavery and Virginia against Northern criticism. He was also a powerful advocate for the annexation of slaveholding Texas. In an age of oratory, he was a star performer, often deemed one of the Old South’s best, capable of even matching wits with the wily John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts.

Henry Wise, Virginia. Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:279.

But when Jackson in 1836 chose Martin Van Buren of New York to be his successor, Wise had refused to go along. Saying that he preferred “any decent
white
man in the nation” to Van Buren, he threw his support to Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, one of three Whigs to run against Jackson’s choice for president.
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Then, after the death of his first wife, Ann, in 1837, Wise married Sarah Sergeant, the daughter of a wealthy Whig congressman from Philadelphia. By 1840, all observers thought Wise was firmly entrenched in the Whig camp.

That, however, was short-lived. In 1841, upon the death of William Henry Harrison, the Whig Party faced a crisis. The presidency went to John Tyler, who vetoed one Whig bank bill after another. Whom would Wise support? His party or the president? Wise chose to side with Tyler, his fellow Virginian, over his party. He became the leader of “the corporal’s guard,” a handful of House members who backed the president. For his loyalty, Tyler made Wise minister to Brazil in 1844.

Over the next three years, Wise then made a new name for himself, not as a spokesman for slavery but as a vehement opponent of American involvement in the slave trade between Africa and Brazil. The trade, he said, was barbarous and cruel. It was bad for the future of Brazil. It was the work mainly of “hypocritical Yankees.” And it was against American law. His harsh words eventually destroyed his usefulness in Brazil, and in 1847 he was virtually kicked out of the country.

Wise’s harsh words also raised some concern among his fellow slaveholders. In saying that the slave trade was bad for Brazil, he often came close to saying that black bondage was a curse rather than a blessing. That had been said many times in old Virginia. It was commonplace when Wise was a youth. His legal mentor, Henry St. George Tucker, had never bothered to conceal his disdain for slavery. But those days had long passed. Most informed Virginians now believed that such talk was dangerous, and many echoed the remarks of South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun and spoke of slavery as a “positive good.” The Old Dominion still had more blacks in bondage than any other state. Moreover, many Virginians were busy selling their surplus slaves to slave traders.

Returning to Virginia, Wise thus had fences to mend. He again switched parties. He formally rejoined the Democratic Party, hoping that Democrats in the Virginia legislature would choose him to represent the state in the U.S. Senate. At the same time, he also tried to refurbish his family fortune. He now had nineteen slaves, one shy of the magic number twenty, the number that one needed to officially qualify as a “planter.” But they were not earning him much money. He made far more from his law practice than he made from his nineteen slaves. And that was not just his problem. It was indicative of a problem that bedeviled every farmer on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Slavery, as Wise viewed the institution, was just not profitable on the worn-out fields of Virginia. His farm consisted of some four hundred acres. About half was productive. On his best soil he grew corn and oats. On less fertile land he grew sweet potatoes, raised livestock, and maintained peach and pear orchards. All told, he probably grossed no more than $500 per year. He was better off, however, than all but a handful of his Accomac County neighbors. Their forefathers had done well with tobacco, but that was in the distant past. Most farms had abandoned tobacco for cereal grains even before the American Revolution.
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Throughout Accomac County, farms and slaveholdings were stagnant. In 1830, slaves made up about 28 percent of the population, the lowest of any Tidewater county. By 1849, the percentage hadn’t changed any, but the total population hadn’t changed, either. The growth rate was near zero.
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To make money, Wise’s neighbors had to take their slaves elsewhere—to the cotton states of Alabama and Mississippi, to the sugar belt of Louisiana, or to the new virgin lands of Texas. Another alternative was to rent their slaves to Richmond manufacturers, or to sell them to slave traders who roamed the county, buying up the surplus, and then shipped them off to New Orleans.

And California? No place, in Wise’s judgment, came close to matching California. It was the solution to his—and every Virginia slaveholder’s—problem. A slave worth $1,000 in Virginia would be worth $3,000 to $5,000 in the gold mines of California. Indeed, if California ended up in Southern hands, the future for him and his neighbors would be golden. Every cornfield on the Eastern Shore, he predicted, would soon be empty of black laborers. They would all be off in California, digging gold. Indeed, every cornfield in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri would soon be empty of black laborers. The demand for slave labor would be so great that even the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South would be depleted of black laborers. Masters would make so much money that in just five years they could afford to colonize their slaves in “Polynesia.” Yes, if they wanted, he and his neighbors could get out of slavery—and at a huge profit.
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If Wise had an active fantasy life in 1849, so, too, did William McKendree Gwin. He, too, had high hopes about California. He, too, saw the gold rush as the answer to his dreams.

William McKendree Gwin, Mississippi. Reprinted from Frank Soulé et al.,
The Annals of San Francisco
(New York, 1854), 790.

Physically, the two men were exact opposites. Wise was thin, wiry, emaciated. Gwin looked much like the Hollywood version of an Old South senator. He was a large man, about six feet two, stately yet muscular, with a massive head, a strong chin, a large straight nose, sharp blue eyes, and heavy brows, all topped by a stunning head of hair, once flaxen but now at age forty-three streaked with gray, long and full, reaching the nape of his neck. Not only did Gwin look the part of a Southern senator; he wanted to be one. Unfortunately, if he remained in Mississippi, it was not likely to happen. He had too many rivals and too many enemies.

Like his Mississippi rivals, Gwin was a major slaveholder but not a native of the state. He had grown up in Tennessee, the son of a Methodist minister. At age twenty-one, he became a lawyer, but after seeing Tennessee’s established lawyers wax eloquent in court, he doubted if he could compete with them. So, after consulting his father, he sought a medical degree, graduated from Transylvania University in 1828, and moved to Clinton, Mississippi, in 1830. For the next four years, he practiced medicine. Then, in 1834, he quit to become a full-time planter-politician.

Gwin’s decision to pursue politics full-time grew out of his family’s ties with Andrew Jackson. Gwin’s father had been one of Jackson’s subordinates during the War of 1812 and had commanded fourteen hundred sharpshooters at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1831 Jackson invited his old comrade’s son to live in the White House for six months and serve as his private secretary. He later looked to young Gwin and his brother Samuel to build the Jackson party in Mississippi.

The brothers, however, needed a power base in Mississippi. To facilitate that, Jackson decided to make William the U.S. marshal for southern Mississippi and Samuel head of the federal land office. But Jackson couldn’t get these appointments through the Senate. His problem was Senator George Poindexter of Mississippi, who regarded Jackson as a tyrant and had no desire to share political power with Jackson’s cronies. William met secretly with Poindexter and somehow got his blessing. But Poindexter continued to block Samuel’s appointment, making much of the fact that he wasn’t a native Mississippian and accusing him of conniving with land speculators at the expense of the federal government and “honest God-fearing settlers.” Jackson then urged the two brothers to destroy Poindexter by orchestrating his defeat in the state legislature when he came up for reelection in 1836.

As a rival candidate, the brothers settled on Robert J. Walker and helped him take Poindexter’s Senate seat. In the process, they infuriated Poindexter and his backers. The two sides subsequently came together at a banquet honoring the governor. Poindexter launched into a tirade against Jackson. Samuel hissed as Poindexter spoke. Shortly thereafter, Poindexter’s law partner, Judge Isaac Caldwell, challenged Samuel to a duel. The duel took place in Clinton before four hundred witnesses. It was deadly. Samuel’s bullet killed Caldwell immediately. Samuel left the field with a shattered lung and, two and a half years later, died from his wound.
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