The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (15 page)

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UPON COMPLETING THE CONSTITUTION, SHANNON AND THE
other forty-seven delegates submitted their handiwork to General Riley. Without bothering to get congressional approval, Riley then called for an election, on November 13, 1849, to ratify the document and elect state officials.

The vote was light. Out of an estimated 107,000 people, nearly all of whom were males of voting age, only about 13,000 bothered to vote.
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The low turnout raised fears among newsmen that Congress would underestimate the population of California—and not admit it into the Union and not let it have two House members. On the plus side, the constitution passed easily, 12,061 in favor, 811 against. The dissenters included 66 voters in Mariposa County, who called for a constitution with no restrictions on slavery, and several hundred voters in southern California, who wanted California to become a territory rather than a state.
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On the same day, the voters also elected two members to the House of Representatives. The victors were Edward Gilbert, the editor of the
Alta California,
and George Washington Wright, a onetime Boston merchant. Wright ran as an independent, Gilbert as a Democrat with the backing of David Broderick’s emerging machine. Only in San Francisco did party organization matter. Thanks to Broderick and other organizers, the Democrats carried the town easily, winning two seats in the state senate, five in the assembly. They pretended to be neutral, but they didn’t fool Mary Jane Megquier, a newcomer from Maine, who noted that they made “very sure not to have a whig nominated to fill any office.”
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The Whig they most wanted to defeat was T. Butler King, the five-term Georgia congressman whom Zachary Taylor had sent to California to encourage statehood. A Massachusetts native, the forty-nine-year-old King had moved to Georgia when he was twenty-three, married well, and assumed control of a large plantation on St. Simons Island. By the time he was thirty-five, he owned 355 slaves. Politically, he had become a big supporter of cotton interests and commercial expansion. First a Democrat, then a Henry Clay Whig, he had chaired the House Committee on Naval Affairs. He had hoped to become Zachary Taylor’s secretary of the navy, but that hope had been dashed by his Georgia rivals—Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs.
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With his political future in Georgia looking dim, King now had his sights on becoming a U.S. senator from the new state of California. To accomplish that, he had to win the support of the newly elected state legislature. Thanks to the Democrats of San Francisco, at least seven legislators were certain to vote against him. King had also been to the diggings hustling for votes. He hadn’t done well. By wearing dress clothes and traveling during the heat of the day, he had convinced many a miner that he was a foolhardy aristocrat. To make matters worse, he had an enemy in Edward Gilbert, the editor of California’s most influential newspaper. The
Alta California
made much of the poor turnouts at King’s rallies, and even belittled him on the grounds that he was a newcomer to California.
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In contrast, William Gwin, who arrived in California on the same ship as King, had fared better in the mining districts. Noting that half the legislature would be from the mines, Gwin had campaigned hard in the Sierras. He purposely had toured the mines with a bunch of hard drinkers, including his handpicked candidate for lieutenant governor, John McDougal, who was widely regarded as “the buffoon of the convention,” a man who could not speak unless he was drunk.
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Gwin had also struck a note of rough camaraderie with the miners. According to one observer, on coming into a bar, Gwin said: “I did not come to dig for gold but to represent you in the United States Senate. Come on up to the bar and have a drink.” As a result, Gwin had gained the support of many legislators from the Sacramento and San Joaquin districts.
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Neither Gwin nor King had corralled enough votes, however, before the newly elected legislature assembled at the state’s first capital, Pueblo de San José, on December 15. So both men had their supporters establish an open house, which they called a ranch, to provide the legislators with free drinks. They weren’t the only ones to do so. All their rivals did the same thing. The lawmakers made the most of it, earning the appellation “legislature of a thousand drinks” from none other than Thomas Jefferson Green, who after being driven off the Yuba had moved to Sacramento and won a seat in the state senate.
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On Thursday, December 20, the key vote was held. The process was for each member of the two houses to voice vote for two candidates. The first choice of many was John C. Frémont. He hadn’t campaigned in the mining districts. He didn’t have to. No one could match his status as a western hero. Nor could anyone cope with the widespread disdain miners had for his court-martial.
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Frémont won easily on the first ballot, polling twenty-nine out of a possible forty-one votes. Gwin and King, in contrast, fell short. On the second ballot, Gwin was still short, while King faded. On the third ballot, Gwin polled twenty-four votes and was declared the winner.

Backing Gwin was a coalition of fifteen Southern-born politicians who came to be known as the Chivalry faction in the California Democratic Party. A handful of Chivs, like Gwin, still owned slaves back in their home states. A few, like Thomas Jefferson Green, undoubtedly hoped that California—or at least the southern half of California—might someday be open to slavery. That was not Gwin’s position, however. Not only did he verbally endorse the proposal to outlaw slavery in California; he got all the Chiv politicians to stand with him.
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Also among those who voted for Gwin was Elisha Crosby. A genuine antislavery man and a fellow delegate at the Monterey convention, Crosby didn’t trust Gwin. But he thought that California needed a major slaveholder to get its constitution through Congress. For a while, he had toyed with the idea of supporting King. But he had concluded that King was a lightweight, too much of a “high toned Southern gentleman,” incapable of handling the “rough life,” and also probably incapable of gaining statehood for California. Gwin, in contrast, was the kind of “extreme southern man” that might get the job done. Not only was he “a most persevering and persistent man”; he was “bound and determined to get into the Senate.” He also probably had “a good deal of influence” with the Southerners who dominated Congress. Crosby, however, prayed that Gwin would get the shorter of the two Senate terms so that “he would be there only a few months and we could then send someone else.”
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To Crosby’s dismay, that didn’t happen. After the election, the two winning candidates drew straws to see who would get the longer of the two terms. John C. Frémont wound up with the short term that ended in March 1851, and the Mississippi slave owner William McKendree Gwin got the full six-year term. A week later, on January 1, 1850, the newly elected senators and congressmen boarded the steamship
Oregon,
which also carried $3 million in gold, and set off for Washington. With them, they brought the California Constitution.

By the time the California delegation set sail, the Thirty-first Congress had been in session for nearly a month. It had been a miserable month in Washington. On opening day, December 3, the nation’s lawmakers had been pelted with sleet and freezing rain as they made their way to the Capitol. Little had gone right since.

The members of the lower house had found that their meeting hall had been redecorated with a new carpet and drapes. It looked splendid. The hall, however, was still an acoustical disaster, with sounds bouncing off the domed ceiling and walls, echoing back and forth, so that no one except the Speaker could hear exactly what a member was saying. In this echo chamber, 229 men from thirty states had been sworn in. Ninety were from the slave states, 139 from the free states. They were a wretched collection of men, according to thirty-nine-year-old Robert Toombs of Georgia, who was beginning his third term in the House. “The present Congress,” wrote Toombs, “furnishes the worst specimens of legislators I have ever seen here, especially from the North on both sides. There is a large infusion of successful jobbers, lucky serving-men, parishless parsons and itinerant lecturers among them who are not only without wisdom or knowledge but have bad manners, and therefore we can have little hope of good legislation.”
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To make matters worse, neither major party had a majority. The membership consisted of 111 Democrats, 105 Whigs, and 13 Free-Soilers. Only the Free-Soilers were united. The major parties, especially the Whigs, were split along North-South lines. Who would be the Speaker? Howell Cobb of Georgia was the choice of most Democrats, Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts of most Whigs. Both parties, however, had dissidents who wouldn’t support the choice of their party.

After three days of caucusing, Cobb reported that “the slavery question” had “so completely alienated north from south” that it was “utterly impossible” to achieve party unity. The situation had gotten so bad that many of his “warmest friends from the north” had told him they could never vote for him again because “the threats and menaces of southern men” would be reported in their home districts and “destroy their position at home.”
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How, then, was the House to organize itself?

As that battle brewed, so did the issue of California statehood. On December 13, Richard K. Meade, a forty-six-year-old Virginia Democrat, rose to speak. The House members knew what to expect. Not only had they heard from Meade many times before, but he had provided each one of them with a copy of a fiery speech that he had given to his constituents the previous summer.
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Meade was a pro-slavery zealot and proud of it. He also typified his peers in one key respect. From his frequent remarks on the California question, no one would have realized that non-slaveholding Southerners were going west by the thousands, that they were clearly welcome in the Sierras, and that a few had even found pound diggings. What concerned Meade, as well as most of his peers, was the slaveholding South, the white minority that owned slaves, and especially the tiny fraction that owned half the South’s slave population. They needed room to expand, contended Meade. Cooping up slaves on worn-out land was dangerous. It was certain to generate race war in the long run.

What made matters worse, argued Meade, was that California was ideal for slavery and the owners of the South’s black population were being cheated out of it. “But for the fear of robbery under the forms of law, there would be at least 50,000 slaves in California by the first of December. It is the best field for such labor now in America, and it would be invaluable to us as a means of thinning the black population. When people say that the climate and productions are unsuited to slave labor, they are either endeavoring to deceive or are deceived themselves.”
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Not only was exclusion of slaveholders unfair, said Meade. It also endangered the white South. “My race and my country are threatened…we are even now engaged in a death struggle…. The war against our institutions has been declared…. We must retain the power of self-protection, or we must finally yield. What will give us this power? Space-empire…. I say, then, to the South, stretch your arm to the Pacific; let no enemy flank or take post in your rear…. To effect this you have only to demand half your rights—half justice. To the Pacific, then, I say—to the Pacific. Your future security depends entirely upon your strength; secure to yourselves while you can, an empire.”
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On December 13, when Meade rose to speak, House members anticipated more of the same, another fiery speech like the ones he had given to his constituents. That didn’t happen. Instead, Meade merely asserted that the California question threatened to “destroy this confederacy.” His words, however, nearly triggered a donnybrook. First Joseph M. Root, an Ohio Whig, ridiculed Meade. Then others rushed to Meade’s defense. Tempers flared. Speeches became hotter. Then William Duer, a New York Whig, called Meade a disunionist. Meade denied it. Duer then called him a liar. Meade charged toward Duer. Colleagues yelled, “Shoot him! Shoot him!” “Where is your bowie knife?” Finally the sergeant at arms, Nathan Sargent, stepped in. Waving a mace over his head, he forced the belligerents back into their seats and restored order.
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Robert Toombs, who had made a fortune in Georgia slaves and real estate, then took the floor. Widely regarded as a man of superior intelligence, yet erratic, the tall, broad-shouldered Georgian issued a warning: “I do not…hesitate to avow before this house and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in this District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the States of this Confederacy,
I am for disunion.
”
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