Authors: H.W. Brands
A collective decision, however, wasn’t the same as a consensus decision, and a substantial part of the state’s population abetted the rebellion. Some did so openly and honorably, traveling east to enlist in the Confederate army. Others remained in the West, plotting silent support of the southern cause and hoping to accomplish covertly what the light of the day wouldn’t allow.
Of the plotters, none was more fervent in his southern feeling or more audacious in his desire to help the Confederate cause than Asbury Harp- ending. Another latecomer to California—in his case from Kentucky— Harpending had hoped to join William Walker’s “immortals” but was prevented from doing so by those pesky federal agents. Harpending resented their interference, and when the South seceded, he did, too, in spirit. “I was young, hot-headed, and filled with the bitter sectional feeling that was more intense in the border states than in the states farther north or south. It would have been hard to find a more reckless secessionist than myself.” Harpending circulated about San Francisco, seeking kindred spirits to join him in opposing the tyrannical Unionism. These weren’t hard to discover, and the group began meeting in secret to plot the overthrow of the government of California and its replacement by a pro-southern regime. According to their scheme, each member of the cabal would recruit a small company of soldiers, for whose training, equipment, and pay he would be responsible. As cover, these soldiers would be told that a Walker-like filibustering expedition to Mexico was afoot. The companies would be unknown to one another, for better security against informers. At the appointed moment, all would rise up and overwhelm the small federal garrisons at Fort Point (on the southern shore of the Golden Gate), at Alcatraz Island, at Mare Island (near the property Mariano Vallejo was about to lose), and at Benicia (where the arsenal General Wool had declined to release to Sherman was located). At the same time, the insurgents would assault the militia arsenals in San Francisco and carry off the weapons there.
At first the conspirators hoped for encouragement, if perhaps only tacit, from the federal commander at San Francisco, General Albert Sidney Johnston. Johnston was a Kentuckian like Harpending and had made
a name and career in Texas, where he served as commander of the army of the Republic of Texas. He was decorated for valor in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, and now had charge of the army’s Department of the Pacific. A devoted southerner, Johnston was thought to be leaning toward secession. The conspirators decided to sound him out, with Harpending and two others being assigned the delicate task.
“I will never forget that meeting,” Harpending wrote. “He was a blond giant of a man with a mass of heavy yellow hair, untouched by age, although he was nearing sixty. He had the nobility of bearing that marks a great leader of men, and it seemed to my youthful imagination that I was looking at some superman of ancient history, like Hannibal or Caesar, come to life again.”
The general bade his visitors sit down. As they did so, he said, almost casually, “Before we go further, there is something I want to mention. I have heard foolish talk about an attempt to seize the strongholds of the government under my charge. Knowing this, I have prepared for emergencies, and will defend the property of the United States with every resource at my command, and with the last drop of blood in my body. Tell that to all our southern friends.”
Needless to say, this put a crimp in the plotting. But there was something else that, to Harpending’s view, was even more important in derailing the conspiracy. Apparently by coincidence, several of the leaders of the cabal had financial interests in the new mines of Nevada, which by now promised to be quite rich. The more they reflected on the logistics of secession, the more they realized that the only defensible eastern frontier of a breakaway California would be the Sierra Nevada, and that their mines would be on the wrong side of that frontier. Harpending explained their thinking:
When it became apparent that the surface [of the Nevada mines] had been barely scratched and that secession might mean the casting aside of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, then patriotism and self-interest had a lively tussle. If Nevada could have been car
ried out of the Union along with California, I am almost certain that the story of those times would have been widely different…. That’s the only way I can size up what followed.
What followed was that the plotters abandoned their own plot. A vote was taken on whether to proceed, and a majority chose western wealth over southern patriotism.
Yet Harpending, one of the minority voting to proceed, wasn’t so easily deterred. He traveled east to Richmond, where he met with Confederate president Jefferson Davis and proposed a plan to capture the gold being transported east from California to finance the Union war effort. Davis was intrigued. “He fully realized the importance of shutting off the great gold shipments,” Harpending wrote. “President Davis said it would be more important than many victories in the field.” Davis arranged for Harpending to receive a commission as captain in the Confederate navy, despite Harp- ending’s never having been near a warship in his life. Harpending also received letters of marque, the licenses that under international law made privateers—that is, authorized raiders—of those who would otherwise have been mere pirates. Finally, he was entrusted with a large packet of mail, including highly confidential—because very compromising—letters to Confederate sympathizers in California.
Harpending left Virginia via blockade runner, which carried him to Aspinwall, a town that had grown up on the Caribbean coast of Panama as an alternative to the disease-ridden Chagres. Crossing the isthmus, he boarded the Pacific Mail steamer for San Francisco. The passengers included a niece of John Calhoun, a woman who shared her uncle’s fighting spirit and uncompromising southern loyalty. When Harpending informed her of the letters he was carrying, and expressed concern that he might be searched on landing in San Francisco, she insisted that he give the letters to her. And when, indeed, he was frisked and his baggage opened at the dock, she sashayed past the customs men untouched. Shortly she returned the letters, saying that their rumpled appearance resulted from having been hidden in the lining of her dress. “I had to sit up all night sewing those wretched papers in my dress,” she explained with a toss of her head. “What
was worse, I never dared to change it. Just imagine what the other women thought of me.”
Harpending discovered that in his absence the Nevada boom had further diminished the ranks of those willing to promote the separation of California from the Union. He was reduced to going ahead with a single southern partner named Greathouse and an Englishman named Rubery. Harpending earlier had talked Rubery, who happened to be a favorite nephew of the English statesman John Bright, out of a duel in which the young man almost certainly would have been killed; as a result, Rubery became Harpending’s bosom friend—and fellow conspirator.
Harpending’s plan was to buy and refit a coastal vessel for the privateering work. This ship need serve only temporarily, as its first target would be one of the Pacific Mail steamers that regularly carried the gold south from San Francisco to Panama on its way to New York. The captured craft would be refitted as a privateer to replace the original vessel. Harpending guessed that he could seize at least three gold ships, with cargoes totaling perhaps $12 million, before the news reached the East and the Union navy started pursuing them. “After that we proposed to let events very much take their own course.”
Harpending attempted to purchase the
Otter
, a steam vessel registered to an owner in Oregon. But on trial its performance fell short. “She failed to develop a speed much greater than that of a rowboat—not enough either to fight or run away.” The three conspirators were lamenting that they’d never find a suitable ship when one pulled into port. The
Chapman
had made a quick passage from New York via Cape Horn, which proved both its speed and its seaworthiness. The owners were willing to sell, and didn’t inquire too closely regarding the purchasers’ plans.
At this point, local memories of William Walker worked to Harpending’s advantage. He hired a Mexican national to present himself around San Francisco as the chief of security for a mine in Mexico beset by filibusters. In this guise the agent purchased a pair of cannons and plenty of shot and shell. He also laid in a supply of smaller arms: rifles, revolvers, cutlasses. As additional cover he bought a variety of trade goods and ordinary provisions.
Harpending meanwhile interviewed and engaged a crew of regular seamen and a separate contingent of twenty men for the raiding and boarding. He vetted the politics of each of this latter group, quietly rejecting all those not in strong sympathy with the South. He didn’t inform them of the precise nature of their mission, beyond saying that fighting would be required, and well compensated.
The last man hired was the navigator. Here Harpending had to take a chance, for the South wasn’t exactly a school for seamen, especially not experienced navigators who could guide a ship far from land. He settled on a fellow named William Law, who was referred to him by an acquaintance, and who professed to favor the South. Harpending didn’t like Law’s appearance—“He was the possessor of a sinister, villainous mug, looked capable of any crime, and all in all was the most repulsive reptile in appearance I ever set eyes on”—but none better appeared, and Harpending was impatient to go after the gold.
Departure from San Francisco was set for the night of March 14, 1863. The arms were stowed belowdeck, as were the members of the special fighting force. The crew made the vessel ready. All that was missing was Law, the navigator. Harpending considered sailing without him, but the crew vetoed any such plans. Ten o’clock passed, then midnight, then two o’clock. Harpending’s suspicions mounted, yet there seemed nothing to do but get some sleep before daylight, and decide at that point on the next step.
Daylight came, and it revealed that Harpending’s suspicions were right. He and the others awoke to find themselves staring into mouths of the guns of the U.S. man-of-war
Cyane
. Law had revealed the plot to the Union commander—not for conscience’s sake but for money. As Harp- ending put it, relating information that came out at the ensuing trial, “It occurred to his sordid mind that a handsome sum of money could be obtained from the government, without any risk at all, by betraying his associates. He made a cold-blooded, mercenary bargain with the authorities through which he realized a small fortune.”
All aboard were arrested, and Harpending, Greathouse, and Rubery were tried for treason. The jury convicted them after deliberating four minutes.
Each was sentenced to ten years in prison and a fine of $10,000. President Lincoln, however, pardoned Rubery at the request of his influential English uncle, who suggested that the boy hadn’t appreciated what he was doing. That the arguments of Uncle John Bright were largely responsible for Britain’s decision not to back the Confederacy, despite the long- standing connection between Confederate cotton planters and British cotton spinners, doubtless influenced Lincoln’s decision as well.
With Harpending in jail, the gold got through. By the beginning of the Civil War, California’s mines had produced more than $600 million in gold. During the four years of the war, another $130 million came out of the ground. Not all of the gold went east right away; much was employed to build San Francisco and the other cities and towns of California. But most eventually—during the war, quickly—wound up in the banks of New York or with the Treasury at Washington. (Not a little went to Europe as well.) Before the war, the South received considerably less California gold than the North did, on account of the South’s lack of large financial institutions and its relative dearth of goods the miners wished to buy. After the war started, the South was cut off almost completely—which was what drove Harpending to his desperate plot. Some contraband gold penetrated the Union blockade, but in quantities minuscule by comparison with what the North received.
The western mines—including the new mines of Nevada that intrigued Leland Stanford and seduced the sunshine secessionists who abandoned Harpending—weren’t what won the war for the North. Union soldiers accomplished that bloody feat. And the fact that there were more of them than Confederate soldiers certainly helped in the task. But the decisive advantage the North had over the South was in economics: in the
guns, bullets, boots, bread, bandages, horses, mules, barges, and railroads the Union armies employed to crush the secession. And in an era when precious metals were the bedrock of any economy—and the currency foreign creditors insisted on—control of the western mines gave the Union an advantage the Confederacy had no prayer of offsetting. Or rather, its one prayer went unanswered when Asbury Harpending was arrested.
Yet the transforming effects of gold in American life were only beginning. The project that provoked the fight for Kansas and so contributed centrally to the coming of the war—the California railroad—got under way even while the Federals and Confederates battled on. And four years after the army of Abraham Lincoln and his political allies guaranteed the union of North and South, the railroad of Leland Stanford and his business partners ensured the union of East and West—a feat that was no less crucial than Lincoln’s in launching America into the modern era.
A
T THE OUTBREAK
of the Civil War, William Sherman had no idea what a large role he would play in the terrible conflict; indeed, he had little reason to believe that anything large, or even successful, lay before him. His political humiliation in the affair of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee in 1856 had been followed shortly by financial embarrassment, when another bank panic forced his office of Lucas & Turner to close. His partners sent him to New York to open a branch on Wall Street, but bad luck followed him east. On September 11, 1857, the steamer
Central America
sank in a storm off the Georgia coast. The human cost was great, as more than five hundred passengers went down with the ship. Sherman might easily have been among the dead, having sailed on the vessel before and nearly doing so this time. He informed Ellen from New York, “We are all safe ashore,” adding wryly that he guessed he was not doomed to drown, “else I would have been long ago.”