Authors: H.W. Brands
A specific proposal in 1852 to prevent Chinese immigration prompted a response from the association leaders. In an open letter to Governor John Bigler, a loud advocate of the measure, the leaders began by noting that in
China “all great men are learned men, and a man’s rank is according to his education.” (Thomas Cary, no fan of Bigler’s, was moved to comment, “There is a delicate sarcasm in these remarks, for his Excellency John Bigler was as good a specimen of an illiterate pot-house politician as could be found in the ranks of Democracy anywhere between New York and San Francisco.”) The governor and others stereotyped the Chinese as “coolies”: contract laborers who worked for a pittance and thereby undermined the wages of honest Americans. The Chinese leaders answered the charge: “If you mean by ‘coolies,’ laborers, many of our countrymen in the mines are coolies, and many again are not. There are among them tradesmen, mechanics, gentry (being persons of respectability, and who enjoy a certain rank and privilege) and schoolmasters, who are reckoned with the gentry, and with us considered a respectable class of people. Some are coolies, if by that word you mean bound men or contract slaves.” But even the bound men came of their own free will. “The poor China man does not come here as a slave. He comes because of his desire for independence, and he is assisted by the charity of his countrymen, which they bestow on him safely because he is industrious and honestly repays them.”
The association leaders granted that Chinese ways weren’t the same as American ways. “But in the important matters we are good men. We honor our parents; we take care of our children; we are industrious and peaceable; we trade much; we are trusted for small and large sums; we pay our debts, and are honest, and of course must tell the truth.” Some Chinese intended to go back to China after making money in the goldfields; others would stay in California—if given the chance. “If the privileges of your laws are open to us, some of us will doubtless acquire your habits, your language, your ideas, your feelings, your morals, your forms, and become citizens of your country—many have already adopted your religion as their own—and we will be good citizens. There are very good China men now in the country, and better will, if allowed, come here after—men of learning, and of wealth, bringing their families with them.” The Americans shouldn’t pass laws against the Chinese. “Let us stay here—the Americans are doing good to us, and we will do good to them.”
When Daniel Webster declared, after passage of the Compromise of 1850, that the Union stood firm, the great orator was engaging in exhortation rather than description. The California compromise, far from soothing sectional passions, inflamed them. Many northerners were incensed by the opening of Utah and New Mexico to slavery, and were even more outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act, which compelled free-state complicity in the return of escaped slaves. “The consummation of the iniquities of the most disgraceful session of Congress,” Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts called the compromise. Southerners were no less angry. Governor Whitemarsh Seabrook of South Carolina castigated the California compromise as “another triumph of the fell spirit of abolitionism.” Robert Rhett eulogized his and Seabrook’s fellow South Carolinian, John Calhoun—who died while the debate over the California compromise still raged—as the finest friend the Union ever had, which made it the more fitting that Calhoun died when he did, just after that final brilliant speech against the Clay package. “It was the last flash of the sun, to show the ship of State her only port of safety, as darkness and the howling tempest closed around her.” Had Calhoun lived long enough to see the compromise pass, Rhett asserted, he would have been forced to admit defeat in his defense of the South, and thereby defeat of the Union.
Clay and Webster followed Calhoun to the grave in 1852. The former succumbed to consumption, the latter to liver disease. Yet in a political sense, and certainly in a symbolic one, Clay and Webster were felled by the demons of sectionalism the fight over California unleashed. Their Whig party splintered, and the whole idea of compromise—the idea on which Webster and especially Clay had built their political careers—acquired an evil name. From the wreckage of the Whigs arose a new party, the Republicans, pledged to no more truckling to slavery—a pledge that in turn provoked southern vows to secede if the Republicans ever came to power.
Stephen Douglas thought he could tame the demons of sectionalism, or at least make them work to his benefit. California was rending the nation; California therefore should help bind the nation together—by ribbons of steel. Douglas sponsored a Pacific railroad, a line linking the East to California. The idea, of course, had tremendous appeal in California, where travelers to the East dearly desired to trim the monthlong journey via the isthmus—the route of choice by now—to a week or less by train. Yet the other states would benefit almost as much as California, in Douglas’s view at any rate. Both North and South would profit from easy access to California and its vast treasure, and in the joint benefit the two sections would rediscover the larger interests they held in common. A side effect of a transcontinental railroad would be the populating of the plains beyond the Missouri River; and when had the opening of new lands to settlement ever been bad for America? The fact that a railroad to California from Chicago, the obvious eastern terminus, would particularly benefit Illinois, including a certain Illinois senator with property in Chicago, was a happy accident. And if that statesman, who was now taking the lead in bestowing all these boons on his fellow Americans, were subsequently spoken of as a candidate for president, who was he to gainsay the wisdom of the American people?
Yet getting the railroad going was no small matter, even for one as shrewd as Douglas. Investors shrank from putting money into a political no-man’s-land; a precondition of construction was the political organization of the territory between the Missouri River and the Rockies. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, this territory should have been off
limits to slavery, as it lay above the line of 36° 30′. But the Compromise of 1850 had gone far toward erasing that line, by allowing that Utah might one day enter the Union as a slave state. (Strictly speaking, the Missouri Compromise dealt only with the region east of the Rockies, but many had come to expect that the underlying principle would apply beyond the mountains.) Moreover, southerners were calling for the wholesale abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, which with hindsight they interpreted as a bad bargain. Douglas, who chaired the Senate committee on territories, lacked the votes to organize Nebraska, as the trans-Missouri region was called, without some southern support. That support might be won, but at a price: repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and hence the opening of the new territory to slavery. David Atchison of Missouri spoke for many southerners when he said he’d see Nebraska “sink in hell” before he’d vote to organize it as a free territory.
The southerners had additional leverage against Douglas. Employing the reports of John (and Jessie) Frémont against the Pathfinder, they argued that a northern railroad route to California was impractical. Hadn’t Frémont himself nearly perished in the snow? A California railroad, they said, should traverse the southern portion of the Mexican cession, where the mountains were lower and the winters less severe. (The deserts were harsher, but this was chiefly a problem for livestock of flesh and blood, not iron horses.) To bolster their position they persuaded the administration of Franklin Pierce to purchase a parcel of land from Mexico—the Gadsden Purchase—which held the key to the southern route.
They may have been bluffing, for the southern route entered California far from the goldfields and the important cities of the state. Yet if they were bluffing, the bluff worked. Douglas introduced a bill organizing Nebraska into two territories—Nebraska in the north and Kansas in the south—without regard to slavery. The measure also repealed the Missouri Compromise.
Douglas guessed that his bill would “raise a hell of a storm,” but even he had no idea of the tempest he was loosing. Northern editors savaged the Douglas bill; from several northern states “anti-Nebraska” meetings sent petitions and resolutions to Congress. “This crime shall not be consummated,”
said one, characteristic of most. “Despite corruption, bribery, and treachery, Nebraska, the heart of our continent, shall forever continue free.” A Whig senator from Maine, William Fessenden, called the Douglas bill “a terrible outrage,” and added, “The more I look at it the more outraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.”
But the Whigs were a dying breed, as the canny Douglas knew. And the Kansas-Nebraska bill finished them off. On the vote, in the spring of 1854, northern Whigs unanimously rejected the bill while southern Whigs voted strongly in favor. Douglas and the Democratic leadership meanwhile enforced something much closer to party discipline (a majority of northern Democrats joined nearly all southern Democrats in favor), and the bill became law.
This made matters only worse. By leaving the future of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska in the hands of settlers in those territories, Congress guaranteed a bitter contest between free-soilers and slavery men there. The battle centered in Kansas, whose eastern districts looked much like Missouri in terms of climate and terrain that might support slavery. (Douglas’s decision to divide Kansas from Nebraska seemed to many an implicit offer of Kansas to the South, with Nebraska reserved to the North.) The contest quickly turned bloody. “Since there is no escaping your challenge,” William Seward of New York told his southern colleagues in the Senate, “I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” The slavery men in turn accepted Seward’s challenge, supporting hundreds of pro-slavery settlers who streamed into Kansas from Missouri. For some of the southerners, the campaign against the free-soilers elicited memories of an earlier crusade. “We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over,” Missouri senator Atchison told Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. “We intend to ‘Mormonize’ the abolitionists.”
The free-soilers weren’t without resources and sanguinary zeal of their own. Emigrant-aid societies sprang up in New England and elsewhere, organized for the purpose of transporting antislavery men to Kansas. Amos Lawrence, of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile family, sponsored one
such emigrant-aid group, and for his money had Lawrence, Kansas, named for him. This appeared a doubtful distinction when a small army of Missourians sacked the town in the spring of 1856. In response a squadron of free-soilers led by John Brown abducted five pro-slavery men near Pottawatomie Creek and split their skulls with broadswords.
L
ELAND STANFORD WAS
no friend of Stephen Douglas, but what Douglas started, Stanford, with the help of many others, would finish. Stanford was part of the second generation of emigrants to Gold Rush California: those who went west looking not for gold but for the collateral opportunities the precious metal created. A New Yorker transplanted to Wisconsin, Stanford resisted the lure of gold in 1849; he was engaged to be married and, having just established a law practice, he—and presumably his fiancée, Jane Lathrop—preferred its steady income to his chances in the goldfields. But an 1852 fire burned up his law books and burned down the businesses of his best clients, and caused him to recalculate life’s risks. Several of his brothers had gone to California, and they wrote him regularly. “Mining is not so good now as formerly,” Thomas Stanford explained. “Gold is not found in so large quantities as in times gone by. Miners have to work hard to get from three to five dollars per day.” But Dewitt Stanford offered an alternative, saying that a general store established at Mormon Island by Josiah Stanford, the eldest brother, and operated by Josiah, Dewitt, Charles Stanford, and a fourth partner named Peck, was doing a thriving business. “Our trade amounts from $1500–$2300 per week,” Dewitt said. “I wish we had more of our friends here to start stores through the mines and carry on business all in one company—for I think there are places within five miles of here where there can be three stores that would pay $10,000 clear of all expenses in one year. That would be making money pretty fast.”
Leland agreed and, leaving Jane, now his wife, with her family, went west via Nicaragua, landing at San Francisco in July 1852. He opened just such a branch of the brothers’ business as Dewitt described, at Cold Springs, between Coloma and Placerville. The store turned its stock
quickly and profitably, although the work was less genteel than lawyer Leland was used to. Thomas recounted a visit to Leland’s store:
When the time came to retire for the night, blankets were brought from under the counters and spread on top of them, with additional blankets elevated by our boots for pillows. These being twin beds to those in my own store, I felt quite at home and soon slept the sleep of a tired man.
In the middle of the night all were awakened by a terrific downpour of rain, and ere long the water came rushing down the valley in which the town was located and began to find its way under the doors and through the cracks in the weather boarding. This was the signal for phenomenal activity. Boots were withdrawn from the blanket pillows, and in record time all were at work elevating the more perishable articles. Leland Stanford, a man of great strength, rendered special service in getting barrels of sugar and other heavy articles upon the counters. When the storm abated the water was knee deep in the store.
Cold Springs proved a false start for Stanford’s commercial career, for the gold petered out and the people left. In the spring of 1853 he moved to Michigan Bluff, above the Middle Fork of the American River. The town bestrode some ancient placers; as they were worked, the inhabitants prospered. “There are two banking houses, three express offices, five lawyers, four physicians, one watch maker, ten carpenters, three blacksmith shops, five restaurants, six hotels, four bakeries, ten grocery and provision stores, eleven clothing stores, one drug store, one bookstore, besides four of those unnecessary evils, gambling saloons,” reported the
Placer Herald
. Stanford’s was one of the grocery and provision stores, and despite the competition, he made good money. He also made good friends, who, learning of his legal background, elected him justice of the peace. As the town lacked a regular courthouse, he delivered his verdicts at the Empire Saloon.