Colin Woodard (34 page)

The barbarians, in this case, were the Forty-niners, whose Gold Rush mentality was completely at odds with the Yankee Puritan ethos. “Never was there such a gold-thirsty race of men brought together,” one resident said of the hordes that came to California in 1848–50. “The principle is to get all of the wealth of the land possible in the shortest possible time, and then go
elsewhere to enjoy it
.”
¹⁰
In what was one of the largest spontaneous migrations in human history to that point, 300,000 arrived in California in just five years, increasing the new American territory's non-Indian population twentyfold. Within twenty-four months San Francisco grew from a village of 800 to a city of 20,000. Its harbor was filled with derelict ships abandoned by their gold-hungry crews, and the pubs, gambling houses, brothels, knife fights, criminal gangs, and drunken parties that followed in their wake were worthy of Port Royal in the time of the buccaneers.

All of this deeply offended Yankees on both coasts, prompting yet another moral crusade, this time to save California. The Reverend Joseph Bendon, a Yale-educated descendant of Puritan preacher John Eliot, proclaimed the Gold Rush a challenge to Protestants to complete the civilizing effort that had been begun by the Franciscan missions. The Congregationalists' American Home Missionary Society immediately dispatched missionaries by steamship, seeing an opportunity not just to save California but to create a Protestant beachhead for taking on the “strong holds of Paganism” in Asia. “If we can plant [in California] a people with our civilization, our Bible, our Puritanism, our zeal for spreading what we know and believe to others, it will be a direct means of pouring light upon the Isles of the Sea and the land of Sinim [Sin] that lies beyond,” the society's journal proclaimed on the eve of the great enterprise. “It is the will of God to make some great use of the new movement towards Oregon and California.”
¹¹

The missionaries and their Yankee followers regarded their journey as yet another Pilgrim-like errand to the wilderness, a chance to erect a second City on the Hill. “Sons and daughters of New England, you are the representatives of a land which is the model for every other,” Presbyterian minister Timothy Dwight Hunt told San Francisco's New England Society in 1852. “Here is our colony. No higher ambition could urge us to noble deeds than, on the basis of the colony of Plymouth, to make California the Massachusetts of the Pacific.”
¹²

Large numbers of Yankees joined the migration: 10,000 in 1849 alone, or a quarter of all those arriving by sea. Some were undoubtedly headed straight to the “diggings,” but a remarkable number lent support to the effort to create a Yankee California. Some donated land, money, and materials for the missionaries to build their churches and schoolhouses in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Monterey. Graduates of Amherst, Bowdoin, Harvard, Yale, and other Congregational colleges traveled into the mountains to set up outdoor schools among the miners. John Pelton of Andover, Massachusetts, arrived with school supplies, teaching materials, and a bell to found California's first free public school. By 1853 the San Francisco school board was entirely staffed by New Englanders, who made the Boston curriculum mandatory in the city. Sherman Day, the son of the president of Yale, joined a group of New England lawyers and clergymen to help transform a Congregational preparatory school into the College of California, which is now the University of California at Berkeley; most of the professors at the “Yale of the West” were New Englanders. Even the Boston and California Joint Stock Mining and Trading Company brought a staff pastor and divinity students with them in 1849, and required in company rules that they preach sermons on Sunday and host prayer meetings at midweek. Members of the Bunker Hill Mining and Trading Company pledged to “abstain from all the vices and intimidations” of California.
¹³

However well funded and organized they were, the Yankees had little luck with their efforts beyond their coastal beachheads. They successfully lobbied to get the state legislature to pass laws protecting the Sabbath, but the California Supreme Court was by then dominated by Borderlanders from the mining districts, who declared the law invalid. San Franciscans on the whole rejected Puritan morality. “In California, the Sabbath is ignored by the masses,” the
San Francisco Bulletin
reported in 1860. “The more abandoned resort to gambling saloons where, with drugged whisky and logwood wines they manage to stake their previous week's earnings on a throw of dice or a doubtful game of pasteboard.” Yankees had influenced the Left Coast, but they could not make it a commonwealth of saints.
¹⁴

The central problem, of course, was that from 1850 onward the overwhelming majority of California's Left Coast residents—and those of the state as a whole—weren't Yankees. The Gold Rush had drawn people from all over the world: Appalachian farmers, Chilean and Australian miners, Irish and Italian adventurers, and hopeful Chinese laborers. In a land whose colonial culture was yet to be defined, few were willing to simply follow the Yankees' lead. Catholics rejected it altogether in favor of their own dreams that California, on account of its relative isolation and Spanish heritage, might serve as a refuge from Protestant America. They, too, had their schools, missions, orphanages, and colleges: Italian Jesuits were issuing degrees at Santa Clara while Berkeley was still a prep school. When voters elected delegates to the territory's constitutional convention in 1849, Yankees were a distinct minority, outnumbered by Borderlanders and
norteños
. California's first two governors were San Francisco residents, but both were from Appalachia.
¹⁵

While the Yankees failed in their broad mission, they did have a lasting effect on coastal California from Monterey north. The coast blended the moral, intellectual, and utopian impulses of a Yankee elite with the self-sufficient individualism of its Appalachian and immigrant majority. The culture that formed—idealistic but individualistic—was unlike that of the gold-digging lands in the interior but very similar to those in western Oregon and Washington. It would take nearly a century for its people to recognize it, but it was a new regional culture, one that would ally with Yankeedom to change the federation.

CHAPTER 21

T
he Civil War era has long been portrayed as a struggle between “the North” and “the South,” two regions that, culturally and politically, didn't actually exist. Historians have danced around the problem, offering a variety of terms to try to support the flawed paradigm: Border South, Middle South, Upper South, Lower South, Cotton South, Border North, or Upper North. They've agonized over the deep internal divisions in Maryland and Missouri, Tennessee and Louisiana, Indiana, Virginia, and Texas. They've argued over whether or not the war was fought for slavery or whether it was a struggle between Celts and their Anglo and Teutonic rivals. Any state-by-state analysis inevitably produces results that are confusing and unsatisfactory.

Seen through the lens of the continent's ethnoregional nations, the parties' motivations, allegiances, and behaviors become clearer. The Civil War was ultimately a conflict between two coalitions. On one side was the Deep South and its satellite, Tidewater; on the other, Yankeedom. The other nations wanted to remain neutral, and considered breaking off to form their own confederations, freed from slave lords and Yankees alike. Had cooler heads prevailed, the United States would likely have split into four confederations in 1861, with dramatic consequences for world history. But hostilities could not be avoided, and the unstable Union would be held together by force of arms.

 

The first half of the nineteenth century saw a four-way competition for control of the western two-thirds of North America, with Yankeedom, the Midlands, Appalachia, and the Deep South extending their cultures over discrete swaths of the Trans-Appalachian West. At stake, all parties knew, was control of the federal government. Whoever won the largest parcel of territory might hope to dominate the others, defining the norms of social, economic, and political behavior for the rest, much as Russians, Austrians, Spanish, or Turks were doing in their respective multicultural empires.

But by midcentury this demographic and diplomatic struggle was becoming a violent conflict between the continent's two emerging superpowers: Yankeedom and the Deep South, far and away the wealthiest and most nationally self-aware of the four contestants. Neither could abide living in an empire run on the other's terms.

For fifty years the Deep South had been winning the race. The cotton and sugar booms had encouraged the rapid westward expansion of slave culture and made the region fabulously rich. It had eclipsed Tidewater as the dominant force in the South and enlisted the support of Appalachian presidents and politicians in a white supremacy campaign that had cleared the South and Southwest of Indian nations and Mexican officials. Their southern coalition had dominated the federal government since the War of 1812, pushing the empire-averse Yankees and pacifist Midlanders aside to engage in a series of expansionistic wars. With U.S. troops in control of Mexico City in 1848, Deep Southerners could imagine completing their proposed Golden Circle, adding enough slave states to ensure their permanent control over federal policy and hemispheric affairs. Victory, it seemed, was at hand.

Then things began to come apart. While the plantation slave state was winning few hearts and minds in the wider world, the Yankee and Midland Midwest was filling with foreign immigrants who correctly saw fewer opportunities for themselves in the Deep South and Tidewater; many had already suffered under aristocratic feudal systems at home and were determined to stay far away from their North American equivalents. In 1850 the free states had eight foreign-born inhabitants for every one living in a slave state. With each passing year, Yankeedom, the Midlands, and New Netherland held a greater proportion of the nation's population and therefore a greater number of seats in the House of Representatives. Yankee influence over the Left Coast compounded the problem, ensuring California, Oregon, and Washington would join the United States as free states even as federal authorities declined to seize new territories in the Caribbean. By 1860 the leaders of the Deep South and Tidewater realized the rest of the nations had the political strength to control federal institutions and policy without them. The Deep Southern way of life was in jeopardy. To save it, they would have to leave the Union.
¹

Whatever qualms Americans had about slavery in the 1850s, most people living outside of Yankeedom were willing to overlook it and the issues it raised. Spurred by their mission to improve the world, however, Yankees were not about to ignore it and the moral affront it presented and became the undisputed center of the abolitionist movement. A Connecticut Yankee, William Lloyd Garrison, founded and published the leading antislavery journal,
The Liberator
. Lyman Beecher's daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote the hugely popular
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, which mobilized the public against federal laws requiring U.S. citizens to return runaway slaves to their masters. Frederick Douglass, an escaped Tidewater slave, found refuge in Massachusetts, where he became one of the American federation's most powerful abolitionist voices. When the federal government decided to allow the citizens of the new Kansas Territory to decide whether they would allow local slavery, Bostonians created the New England Emigrant Society, which founded the Kansas towns of Lawrence and Manhattan and helped populate the territory with Yankees. When Appalachian-born residents sacked and burned Lawrence in 1856, another Connecticut-born Yankee, John Brown, slaughtered five men in retaliation; he later tried to provoke a slave rebellion by seizing a federal arsenal in western Virginia in an operation that established him among Yankees as a martyred freedom fighter and as a notorious terrorist to Deep Southern and Tidewater people.

Yankee abolitionists argued that the Deep South and Tidewater were autocratic despotisms. Slave lords' absolute power over those under them, they argued, led to corruption of the family and Christian virtue. “The slave states are one vast brothel,” declared English-born Congregational minister George Bourne, in a pamphlet published in Boston. Slave masters and their sons raped their slaves, he and others charged, accounting for the large number of mixed-race children born to slave mothers. “It is so common for the female slaves to have white children that little or nothing is ever said about it,” Connecticut minister Francis Hawley reported from the Deep South in Theodore Dwight Weld's
American Slavery as It Is
, a best-selling abolitionist anthology published in 1839. Another contributor, a Connecticut justice of the peace, described how a Tidewater North Carolina planter offered a friend of his $20 for each slave he impregnated. “This offer was no doubt made for the purpose of improving the stock,” he added, “on the same principle that farmers endeavor to improve their cattle by crossing the breed.” Southern newspaper classifieds were reprinted in abolitionist publications to publicize the fact that slave families were regularly broken up to pay debts, often by selling off toddlers or even a spouse. The “domestic institution,” they argued, was a threat to domesticity itself.
²

In 1860 Yankeedom voted overwhelmingly for the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, an Illinoisan of mixed Yankee, Midland, and Appalachian ancestry who opposed the creation of additional slave states. Lincoln won every single county in New England, the Western Reserve of Ohio, and the Yankee-settled Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania; he won all but a handful of counties in the entirety of upstate New York and the Yankee Midwest.
³