Authors: H.W. Brands
I feel, Mr. President, that the cause in which we are engaged is one of the greatest in which any one can labor. It is the cause of the white man—the cause of free labor, of justice and of equal rights. I am in favor of free white American citizens. I prefer white citizens to any other class or race. I prefer the white man to the negro as an inhabitant of our country. I believe its greatest good has been derived by having all of the country settled by free white men.
(Whether Stanford had read the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, who took much the same line in his debates with Stephen Douglas in Illinois the previous year, is uncertain.) Stanford disavowed, for himself and the California party, any desire to infringe upon the legitimate rights of slaveholders. “But we do ask that the Federal Government shall be administered equally for all portions of the Confederation alike.” Here the convention burst into applause. “We say the Government shall not be administered so as to subserve any one particular interest which shall be considered paramount. We stand up for equal justice for all.” More applause. Saying he was “not much of a talker” (“a fact patent to all who heard him,” chimed a critic), Stanford briefly reiterated what he and his Republican fellows still saw as their strongest issue. “We are in favor of the Railroad by that natural route which the emigrant in coming to this country has pointed out to us.” More applause. “I am in favor of a Railroad, and it is the policy of this State to favor that party which is likely to advance their interests.”
The general campaign was an uphill fight, and a lonely one. A rally at Downieville turned out a single Republican, who urged the candidate to cancel the meeting lest it provoke trouble. “There are only two other Republicans here besides myself,” he said, “and we hardly dare to show ourselves.” The Democrats, nationally and in California, had split over Kansas statehood: one wing (which included Buchanan) backed the admission of Kansas with slavery, under a constitution formulated at the town of
Lecompton; the other wing (including Stephen Douglas) supported a free Kansas. Some of the anti-Lecompton Democrats in California bruited a strategy of fusion with Stanford’s Republicans, with the Democrat to head the ticket. Stanford rejected the notion out of hand. “Resistance to the aggressions of slavery is not the only idea of the Republican party,” he asserted, rebutting a standard complaint against the Republicans. The railroad was no less central—at least for California Republicans. Besides, for Stanford in 1859, as for Frémont in 1856, the realistic goal was a Republican victory not in the current election but in the presidential race of 1860. For this the party must hold together, rejecting all distractions. “Let them unite with us,” Stanford told the fusionists scornfully.
The Republicans remained pure, and heavily outnumbered. Stanford received only 10 percent of the vote. If he had any second thoughts about fusion, he could derive consolation from the fact that the sum of the vote for him and the vote for the anti-Lecompton Democratic candidate fell short of the Lecompton Democrat’s total. Stanford took the defeat so placidly that he mentioned the result in a letter to his parents only after reporting that the California state fair had featured pumpkins that weighed over 200 pounds and a single peach (“white clingstone”) that tipped the scales at 27 ounces.
Y
ET STANFORD’S
1859 defeat, like Frémont’s in 1856, served the purpose of the party, and when the national Republicans gathered in 1860 to choose a presidential candidate, they did so united—in stark contrast to the Democrats. Kansas still split the Democrats, although the violence in that troubled territory had fallen off after the appointment of Governor John Geary, formerly sheriff of San Francisco from the early days of the Gold Rush. To all intents and purposes, the Democrats had become two parties, one of the North and the other of the South. The northerners decried the 1857 Dred Scott decision; the southerners shuddered at John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, which sought to spark a slave rebellion, and shuddered still more at the respect, even reverence, many in the North accorded Brown on his way to the gallows.
Under the circumstances, the Republicans had every hope of picking a winner when their convention met in Chicago. John Frémont had served his purpose, and now was set aside in favor of the professional politicians. William Seward seemed to many the obvious choice after a decade on the front lines of the sectional debate. Yet to many others, that was precisely why Seward
should not
receive the nomination. The Democrats were self-destructing; what the Republicans needed was a figure with a bit more political experience and weight than Frémont, but not much more record. A westerner might do (albeit perhaps not one so western as California’s Frémont), for although any Republican could probably carry New England and the upper Great Lakes states, a man of the West would have particular pull in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, where the contest would be won or lost.
Abraham Lincoln’s friends thought the former Illinois congressman fit the description perfectly. And after they recast the railroad lawyer as a rail- splitter, they convinced the convention. Seward led on the first ballot, but Lincoln closed the gap on the second and overtook the New Yorker on the third. Bowing to the inevitable, the Seward forces made the nomination unanimous.
Stanford had intended to represent California at the Republican convention. As the titular leader of the California Republicans, he was chosen by acclamation to be a delegate. And as a New York native, he intended to vote for Seward. But at the last minute, business—to wit, his brothers’ sagging end of the fraternal business—prevented his going. “Every dollar I can spare from this business goes to aid them,” he told his mother and father. “It would not have been prudent for me to leave.” There was an additional business-related reason, which Stanford mentioned only in passing because its importance had yet to be gauged. Various miners from California, frustrated at the diminishing prospects for individuals on the Sierra’s western slope, had crossed the mountains into the region that would become Nevada, and made some promising finds. “We are having a good deal of excitement about gold and silver discoveries on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains,” Stanford related. “It will probably prove a rich mineral country. I shall probably make a trip
over there about the first of June. I want to see for myself how much of a disturbing element in the business affairs of this state it is likely to be. I may start a store over there.”
Like so many others in the Republican party, Stanford didn’t know Lincoln personally, but as a loyal Republican he swung into line behind the nominee. He stumped California, starting in Siskiyou County on October 1 and finishing in Amador County on November 3. He spoke every day of the week but Sunday, praising Lincoln and pushing the Pacific railroad— again a part of the Republican platform.
California remained a heavily Democratic state, and the Democrats polled nearly twice as many votes in the presidential election as the Republicans. But the Democratic votes were split, almost evenly, between northerner Douglas and southerner John Breckinridge. As a result, Lincoln narrowly won California’s electors. Repeated in key states across the country, this pattern of voting awarded the presidency to Lincoln and the Republicans.
U
PON LINCOLN’S VICTORY
, the South made good the threat its spokesman had leveled against Frémont in 1856: to leave the Union in the event of a Republican victory. Jessie Frémont had wanted her husband (and herself) to have the opportunity to deal with a rebellious South; instead the task fell to Lincoln, who procrastinated more than the Frémonts likely would have. One can imagine John Frémont saddling up directly after inauguration and leading an army over the Potomac into the rebel states. Lincoln, by contrast, acted deliberately, insisting that the South fire the first shot, at Fort Sumter. Whether Frémont’s boldness would have succeeded better than Lincoln’s caution is impossible to know. (Lincoln’s strategy
did
succeed, of course, which counts in its favor; but it required a long and bloody war, which counts against it.)
Leland Stanford observed Lincoln’s strategy at close range. Following the presidential election, Stanford, in his capacity as leader of the California Republicans, sailed east to ensure that his friends and associates receive their share of the offices awarded by the new Republican administration
(“having the Federal patronage worthily distributed in California,” was how Stanford explained his goal to one of his brothers). He met with Lincoln personally, and developed considerable respect for the new president. Writing home, he expressed “great confidence” that the country had “an Administration equal to the occasion, great as it is.” He added, “I look forward through these troublous times with the confident hope that the end will be a broad spirit of Nationality, and Democratic Institutions more firmly than ever planted.”
Stanford, accompanied on this trip by his wife, Jane, had hoped to tour the East at leisure, but the outbreak of war forced a return to California. Although Lincoln had carried the state, this was no guarantee the state would support Lincoln against the South. Southern sympathies remained strong in California, and many Californians advocated measures to assist the South, if only indirectly.
Stanford arrived in Sacramento in time to receive a second nomination for governor. He spent the summer of 1861 stumping the state once more; a supporter who saw him at Santa Rosa described the man in his prime:
His personal appearance was impressive. He was then thirty-seven years of age, large in frame, with a swarthy complexion and something of the plain, rugged features of the frontiersman. He was dignified in manner, with a peculiarly attractive composure. His voice was melodious and pleasant; his language clear and expressive. He was listened to by a large audience with respectful interest.
The party platform again endorsed the Pacific railroad; Stanford again explained how this would benefit California. But the current national crisis elevated another issue—the Union—above the railroad. Privately Stanford was characterizing the contest as pitting opposing visions of government against each other. “Everything confirms the view I long since took that the struggle is one between the Democratic and Aristocratic element of the country,” he wrote his brother Philip. “I have ever held that
the true end of the Republican party was to maintain the Democratic character of our institutions.” In public he simply spoke (and spoke simply, “with the eloquence of an honest conviction,” the Santa Rosa admirer explained) of the need to rally to Lincoln and the Union.
As in the recent presidential election, the California Democrats were divided. The Breckinridge wing of the party, headed by gubernatorial candidate John McConnell, openly sympathized with secession; the Douglas wing stood for the Union. Once more calls arose for fusion between the Republicans and the Union Democrats, but this time—with a Republican in the White House—Stanford seemed the more promising bearer of alliance hopes. The heretofore Democratic
San Francisco Bulletin
explained, “The naked truth is that the success of the McConnell ticket next Wednesday week would be tantamount to a declaration of war by California against the general government. Nothing could prevent its being followed by open hostilities in our borders. No man can be so blind to inevitable consequences as not to see it.” A group of San Francisco businessmen—including, by their own testimony, several individuals “politically opposed to the Republican party”—circulated a letter decrying “the dreadful consequences that must arise from the division of the Union men of the State, and the possible election of the Secession-McConnell ticket.” Dire circumstances compelled distasteful action, the erstwhile Democrats declared. “We have carefully collected the best advices that we could obtain of the relative strength of the Douglas and Republican tickets, and feeling convinced that the latter is the stronger, have unhesitatingly determined to vote for Mr. Stanford, the Republican candidate for Governor—believing that thereby we shall save ourselves from the result of foolish political divisions which now threaten us with ruin and disaster.”
Such crossover support carried Stanford to victory in the September 1861 election. He understood the meaning of his victory: that he had been elected as a Unionist rather than a Republican. But that was good enough. As things happened, the first overland telegraph line was completed just weeks after the balloting, and Stanford cabled Lincoln: “Today California is but a second’s distance from the national capital. Her patriotism with
electric current throbs responsive to that of her sister states and holds civil liberty and union above all price.”
T
HIS WAS AN EXAGGERATION
. Notwithstanding Stanford’s victory, support for the South persisted in California. Only two years earlier the state legislature had taken the extraordinary step of authorizing secession within the state—that is, of allowing the portion of California lying below the Missouri Compromise line to separate from the rest of the state, with the understanding that this southern region, to be named Colorado, would institute slavery. And in 1860, just months before Lincoln’s election, California Democrat Gwin declared, “I believe that the slave-holding states of this confederacy can establish a separate and independent government that will be impregnable to the assaults of all foreign enemies.” The senator made clear that he classed the North under the category of “foreign enemies” of a southern confederacy. He went on to predict that in the event of secession, “California would be found with the South.”
Yet California stuck with the Union. For some Californians, this decision connoted a genuine attachment to the handiwork of the Founders, and a corresponding reluctance to participate in its undoing. For many others, including a large portion of those with connections to the South, devotion to the Union was more mercenary. After the Republicans took power in Washington, the new congressional leaders made clear that if California remained loyal, it could count on a Pacific railroad, which would do more than anything since the gold discovery itself to enhance the prospects of the state. On the other hand, if California seceded—either to join the Confederacy outright or to establish an independent but effectively pro-South “Pacific republic”—it could forget about the railroad. California collectively required no time at all to make the calculation and affirm its attachment to the Union. The state legislature asserted, “California is ready to maintain the rights and honor of the national government at home and abroad, and at all times to respond to any requisition that may be made upon her to defend the republic against foreign or domestic foes.”