1861 (72 page)

1.
See Mark Twain’s famous firsthand description of a Pony Express rider passing in
Roughing It
(Hartford, 1872), pp. 70–72. For the landscape of the Carson Valley near Fort Churchill, see Sir Richard F. Burton,
The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California
(New York, 1862), pp. 492–93; Horace Greeley,
Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859
(New York, 1860), pp. 272–76. For details of the Overland Telegraph Company operations in the spring of 1861, see James Gamble, “Wiring a Continent,”
The Californian,
vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1881), pp. 556ff; Carlyle N. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” master’s thesis, Iowa State University, 1937, esp. chap. 4.

2.
National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form, “Fort Churchill,” 1978.

3.
San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin,
May 27, 1861.

4.
Christopher Corbett,
Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express
(New York, 2003), pp. 87–88; Twain,
Roughing It,
pp. 70–71;
Daily Evening Bulletin,
May 29, 1861.

5.
Southerners opposed the act’s passage, fearing—correctly—that the line would take a northern rather than a southern route (Klise, “The First Transatlantic Telegraph,” pp. 26–29).

6.
Robert Luther Thompson,
Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States
(Princeton, 1947), pp. 348–58.

7.
Ibid., pp. 290–92; Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” p. 37.

8.
Jeptha Homer Wade Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, passim; Gamble, “Wiring a Continent.” Wade acted as Sibley’s agent in San Francisco.

9.
“Across the Continent,”
Continental Monthly,
vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1862); Tom Chaffin,
Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire
(New York, 2002), pp. 210–19, 262; John D. Unruh, Jr.,
The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60
(Urbana, Ill., 1979), pp.
240–43, 300–01.

10.
The projected Russian-American telegraph ended up reaching only as far northwest as Hazelton, British Columbia. Work stopped abruptly in 1867 after Sibley’s rival, Cyrus W. Field, opened the first successful transatlantic line.
The project, however, was an important factor in the United States’ acquisition of Alaska. Cf. John B. Dwyer,
To Wire the World: Perry M. Collins and the North Pacific Telegraph Expedition
(Westport, Conn., 2001).

11.
Gamble, “Wiring a Continent.” The actual work on the western portion of the line was undertaken by a new firm, the Overland Telegraph Company, in which various California lines participated but with Sibley as the controlling investor. As soon as construction was completed, the short-lived company—along with all the previously autonomous California
ones—was absorbed into Western Union. Alvin F. Harlow,
Old Wires and New Waves: The History of the Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless
(New York, 1936), pp. 311–12.

According to one account, President Lincoln met with Sibley early in 1861 and told him that the planned Pacific line was a “wild scheme” and that it would be “next to impossible to get your poles and materials distributed on the plains, and as fast as you build your line the Indians will cut it down.” George A. Root and Russell K. Hickman, “The Platte Route, Part IV, Concluded: The Pony Express and Pacific Telegraph,”
Kansas Historical Quarterly,
vol. 14, no. 1 (Feb. 1946), p. 66.

12.
Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” p. 52.

13.
Geoffrey C. Ward,
The Civil War
(New York, 1990), p. 17.

14.
The 1860 census has been largely ignored by historians as a source of Southern anxiety during the secession crisis. For detailed early census results, see, e.g.,
New York Herald,
Sept. 13, 1860.

15.
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Apr. 2, 1861 and Feb. 9, 1861;
New York Herald,
Sept. 6, 1860.

16.
See David Haward Bain,
Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad
(New York, 1999), esp. pp. 48–51, for Davis’s role; Adam Arenson,
The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War
(Cambridge, Mass., 2010), p. 69.

17.
Jessie Benton Frémont, “A Home Lost, and Found,”
The Home-Maker,
February 1892; JBF to Elizabeth Blair Lee, June 14, 1860, in Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds.,
The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont
(Urbana, Ill., 1993), pp. 229–30.

18.
Selections of Editorial Articles from the St. Louis Enquirer
(St. Louis, 1844), p. 5, quoted in Henry Nash Smith, “Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny,”
Huntington Library Quarterly,
vol. 10, no. 4 (Aug. 1947), pp. 378–79 n. Benton’s vision, of course, did not account for the Spanish colonists, who had long since reached the Pacific—let alone for the Native American children of Adam who had been settled along its shores
for millennia.

19.
Elbert B. Smith,
Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton
(Philadelphia, 1958), pp. 47–48, 63–64, 68–69; Tom Chaffin,
Pathfinder: John C. Frémont and the Course of American Empire
(New York, 2002), pp. 80–81.

20.
It later turned out that the place where Frémont planted his famous flag—the
tallest peak in the Wind River Range—was not, in fact, the highest point of the Rockies, though he believed it to be at the time.

21.
Sally Denton,
Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America
(New York, 2007), p. xi; Pamela Herr,
Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography
(New York, 1987), pp. 82–83, 110–11; Jessie Benton Frémont,
Souvenirs of My Time
(Boston, 1887), p.
186. The question of how large a hand Jessie Frémont had in her husband’s books has been a point of contention almost since they were published. Many people believed then that she was the sole author. The most careful recent historians conclude that the reports were a joint effort but that Jessie was responsible for much of the color, style, and literary touch that won them a large readership.

22.
Early in his career, Benton always placed “Southern rights” ahead of antislavery principles, but by the end of his life, his views shifted to the point where he wrote to Charles Sumner congratulating him on his inflammatory “Crime Against Kansas” speech. William Nisbet Chambers,
Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West
(New York,
1970), p. 419.

23.
Allan Nevins,
Frémont: Pathmarker of the West
(New York, 1928), pp. 387–89; Denton,
Passion and Principle,
pp. 180–81; Leonard L. Richards,
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York, 2007) pp. 57–59, 102–3.

24.
David Grant, “ ‘Our Nation’s Hope is She’: The Cult of Jessie Frémont in the Republican Campaign Poetry of 1856,”
Journal of American Studies,
vol. 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 187–213; Denton,
Passion and Principle,
pp. 243–48; Ruth Painter Randall,
I Jessie
(Boston, 1963), pp.
176–78. Colonel Frémont was such a popular figure that Southern Democratic leaders had previously offered to make him their party’s standard bearer, on the condition that he pledge not to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This he refused to do—after a long discussion with Jessie—even though he knew that whomever the Democrats nominated that year would be almost certain to win the presidency. Nevins,
Frémont,
pp. 424–25.

25.
Richards,
California Gold Rush,
pp. 93ff.; Robert J. Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need: Republicans and Black Civil Rights in California During the Civil War,”
Arizona and the West,
vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 319–21; Imogene Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,”
Historical Society of
Southern California Publications,
vol. 9 (1912–13), p. 106.

26.
See Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 105.

27.
See Joseph Ellison, “Designs for a Pacific Republic, 1843–62,”
Oregon Historical Quarterly,
vol. 31, no. 4 (Dec. 1930), pp. 319–42.

28.
Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 108;
San Francisco Herald,
Jan. 3, 1861.

29.
San Francisco Herald,
Apr. 25, May 1, and May 8, 1861.

30.
Katherine A. White, ed.,
A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush; The Letters of Franklin A. Buck
(Boston, 1930), p. 183 (Jan. 22, 1860). In January 1861, on hearing that secession had begun, Buck wrote his sister again: “I wash my
hands of it. Let what will come, I am innocent. If you attempt to coerce the seceding states you will have all the
slave states united and how a war would affect you! You had better scrape together what you can and all come out here.”

31.
Los Angeles Star,
Jan. 5, 1861; J. M. Scammell, “Military Units in Southern California, 1853–1862,”
California Historical Society Quarterly,
vol. 29, no. 3 (Sept. 1950), pp. 229–49; Percival J. Cooney, “Southern California in Civil War Days,”
Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California,
vol. 13 (1924), pp. 54–68. One early historian sniffed that San Bernardino’s disloyal
citizenry also included large numbers of “outlaws and English Jews” (Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 117).

32.
James H. Wilkins, ed.,
The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending
(Norman, Okla., 1958), pp. 5–16.

33.
Ibid., pp. 16–23.

34.
See C. A. Bridges, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: A Filibustering Fantasy,”
The Southwestern Historical Quarterly,
vol. 44, no. 3 (Jan. 1941), pp. 287–302; Benjamin Franklin Gilbert, “The Confederate Minority in California,”
California Historical Society Quarterly,
vol. 20, no. 2 (June 1941), pp. 154–70;
Ollinger Crenshaw, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: The Career of George Bickley,”
American Historical Review,
vol. 47, no. 1 (Oct. 1941), pp. 23–50; Richards,
California Gold Rush,
p. 231; Frank L. Klement,
Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason in the Civil War
(Baton Rouge, 1984), chap. 1. One exchange of signs and countersigns by which the Knights in California recognized one another was recorded
by an informer: “Do you know Jones?” “What Jones?” “Preacher Jones.” “Where does he live?” “At home.” “Where is his home?” “In Dixie.” Cooney, “Southern California in Civil War Days,” p. 58. Such details might seem to strain credibility, but in fact mid-nineteenth-century America was rife with secret political societies of all sorts—most famously the
Know-Nothings and, later, the Ku Klux Klan—that drew on Romantic fantasies, the faddish appeal of medieval chivalry, and the general craze for fraternal organizations.

35.
Hugh A. Gorley,
The Loyal Californians of 1861
(n.p., 1893), p. 4.

36.
William T. Sherman,
Memoirs,
2nd ed. (New York, 1887), vol. 1, pp. 196–97; William S. McFeely,
Grant: A Biography
(New York, 1981), pp. 74–75; John Y. Simon, ed.,
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant,
vol. 2:
April-September 1861
(Carbondale, Ill., 1969), pp. 25–28.

37.
Christopher Phillips,
Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon
(Baton Rouge, La., 1996), p. 134.

38.
See Jeffrey C. Stone,
Slavery, Southern Culture, and Education in Little Dixie, Missouri, 1820–1860
(New York, 2006); Louis Gerteis,
Civil War St. Louis
(Lawrence, Kans., 2001), pp. 37–38.

39.
Charles Dickens, passing through in 1842, described the old French buildings “lop-sided with age” that “hold their heads askew besides, as if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American Improvements.”
American Notes,
quoted in Arenson,
Great Heart,
p. 15.

40.
Galusha Anderson,
A Border City in the Civil War
(Boston, 1908), pp. 1–3, 9.

41.
Stephen Aron,
American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State
(Bloomington, Ind., 2006), pp. 235–36.

42.
Arenson,
Great Heart,
pp. 19–20; Steven Rowan and James Neal Primm, eds.,
Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857–1862
(Columbia, Mo., 1983), p. 88; Don Heinrich Tolzmann, ed., and William G. Bek, trans.,
The German Element in St. Louis: A Translation of Ernst D. Kargau’s
“
St. Louis in Former Years: A Commemorative History of the German Element
” (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 42, 179–80.

43.
Rowan and Primm,
Germans for a Free Missouri,
pp. 3–4; Lea VanderVelde,
Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier
(New York, 2009), pp. 320, 424.

44.
Hans Christian Adamson,
Rebellion in Missouri: 1861
(Philadelphia, 1961), p. 72; Aron,
American Confluence,
p. 241.

45.
Arenson,
Great Heart,
p. 111; Gerteis,
Civil War St. Louis,
p. 79; Walter Harrington Ryle,
Missouri: Union or Secession
(Nashville, 1931), pp. 179–80; Anderson,
Border City,
pp. 41–42; James Neal Primm,
Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980
(St. Louis, 1998), p. 233.

46.
A. A. Dunson, “Notes on the Missouri Germans on Slavery,”
Missouri Historical Review,
vol. 54, no. 3 (April 1965), pp. 355–58; Walter B. Stevens,
St. Louis: The Fourth City, 1764–1911
(St. Louis, 1911), vol. 1, p. 165.