The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (20 page)

The dispatch was a bombshell. Written mainly by Soulé, it urged the United States to immediately buy Cuba at any price up to $120 million. It also proclaimed that if Spain refused to sell and if its possession of Cuba seriously endangered the “internal peace” of the slave states, then the United States would be justified in seizing Cuba “upon the very same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home.”
¹⁴

News of this saber-rattling manifesto sent shock waves through the Northern wing of the Democratic Party. They had just suffered huge election losses that fall. They had entered the election holding ninety-three seats in the House. They now had only twenty-two.
¹⁵
What, many asked, was the Pierce administration up to? Didn’t they realize that the “burning house” rhetoric would provide Horace Greeley’s
New-York Tribune
with even more ammunition to attack the party faithful? One Democratic newspaper after another thus distanced itself from the manifesto, even branding its authors “brigands” and “highwaymen.” The Pierce administration also ran for cover, disavowing the proposal and letting “the three wise men of Ostend” fend for themselves.
¹⁶

That December, enraged by the reaction, Soulé resigned as minister to Spain. Several months later, in April 1855, Quitman gave back to the Cuban junta the powers it had bestowed upon him. No longer did either warrior have much hope of acquiring “the pearl of the Antilles” to offset the addition of California as a free state.

Meanwhile, other Southern leaders still hoped to find some way to split California in two. Leading the pack was a sixty-three-year-old Charleston railroad man, James Gadsden.

In 1850, Gadsden had been one of the leaders of the secession movement in South Carolina.
¹⁷
In his youth, however, he had marched to a different drummer. A native of South Carolina, he had gone north to college, to Yale, and soldiered under Andrew Jackson, rising to the rank of colonel. During those years he had been a zealous nationalist and an outspoken critic of any form of sectionalism. But in 1821 the Senate had rejected his nomination to adjutant general of the army because of his close ties to Jackson and Calhoun. This affront so soured Gadsden that he became a bitter opponent of everything the Senate did.

In 1823, at the behest of President James Monroe, Gadsden went to Florida to build the first government roads and to move the Seminoles to reservations. He remained there for the next sixteen years, spending half his time building a rice plantation, which bored him, and half running for one public office after another, which excited him. He never won, but he became well known for his hostility to the federal government. He talked frequently about territorial rights and in 1831 called on Floridians to nullify federal law and become truly “independent.” That, in turn, cost him the patronage of Jackson.

At the same time, Gadsden became more ardent in behalf of slavery. He deemed it “a social blessing” and denounced Northern abolitionists as “the greatest curse of the nation.” By 1840, he had exceeded even Calhoun in his pro-slavery zeal.

To expand slavery and secure it against Northern opposition, Gadsden looked to the West. He hoped to unite it with the South, partly by taking slaves west and partly through an imaginative railroad system. Long interested in railroads, he said good-bye to his boring Florida plantation in 1839 and became the president of the South Carolina Railroad Company, a rather shaky enterprise that had only 136 miles of track and $3 million in debt. With Charleston as the base, his dream was to knit all southern railroads into one system and then connect it to a southern transcontinental railroad to the Pacific. That, in turn, would make the West an appendage of the South rather than of the North. It would also give the South access to Asia and weaken Northern commercial power, which, in his judgment, rested largely on the North’s control of ocean trade.

In July 1845, Gadsden tried to sell this idea to delegates at a commercial convention in Memphis. He proposed building a transcontinental railroad from Memphis through Arkansas and Texas to the Pacific. A few months later, in February 1846, he made the same pitch in his annual report to stockholders of the South Carolina Railroad. To his dismay, they didn’t share his enthusiasm about tying all the southern railroads together, much less about laying track all the way to the Pacific. Instead, they demanded dividends.
¹⁸

Even harder for Gadsden to stomach was California’s decision to become a free state. He was furious. He first called on his fellow South Carolinians to secede from the Union. When that effort failed, he conspired to split California in two. Among his collaborators was his fifty-five-year-old cousin, Isaac Edward Holmes, who had represented South Carolina in Congress for six terms. Holmes left Charleston for California in 1851 and established a law practice in San Francisco. Also working with Gadsden was none other than Thomas Jefferson Green, who had once lived in Florida and was now a sitting California state senator.

Gadsden and his fellow conspirators had several goals. First, they wanted to establish a slaveholding colony in southern California that would produce rice, cotton, and sugar. Long term, they also wanted to build a southern railroad to the gold country, starting either from the Red River or from San Antonio. In the meantime, they envisioned building a “high way” in stages by “an organized Corps of Pioneers & Axe men & reach California with both Negroes & animals in full vigor to go to work.”

Gadsden himself planned to become the leader of the proposed slaveholding colony. But first some preliminary work had to be done. On December 31, 1851, he contacted Green with instructions. He wanted Green and Holmes to obtain a land grant at the “Sources of the Joachin.” They were to petition the legislature for a large land concession, somewhere between the 34th and the 36th parallels, which he perceived to be a natural point to divide the state. Once they got the grant, he would bring in slaves to produce “rice and cotton and sugar.”
¹⁹

A few months later, Gadsden and some twelve hundred citizens of South Carolina and Florida petitioned the California legislature for permission to become permanent citizens. In their memorial, they deplored free labor and described California’s agricultural potential in glowing terms. They said that to make California agriculture flourish, the legislature only had to grant them “permission to colonize a rural district” with “not less than Two Thousand of their African Domestics” who had skill and experience “in the cultivation of Cotton, Rice, & Sugar.” Only “by this peculiar labor” could California’s “valuable soils” be “rendered productive.”
²⁰

The job of presenting this petition fell to Archibald C. Peachy, a young Virginia lawyer who now represented San Francisco in the California assembly. As Peachy read the document, many of his fellow legislators couldn’t believe their ears. Didn’t Gadsden and the twelve hundred co-signers realize that California was a free state? What did they expect the legislature to do? To simply ignore the state constitution? The petition thus generated a “highly exciting discussion” and a “multitude of motions.” Finally the members decided to send the memorial to the Committee on Federal Relations. There it quietly died.
²¹

Meanwhile, news circulated in San Francisco about additional slaves being brought into the state. Much quoted was an article in the
Charleston Courier,
which boasted that a steamer out of Charleston had taken seventy-four slaves to the diggings that winter. Then, on April 15, the steamer
Isthmus
arrived in San Francisco. The passenger list included “several gentlemen with a number of servants—one with twelve, another eight, another seven, another five, and so on.” What did they think? That California might soon become a slave state?
²²

The timing of the petition and the strange new arrivals coincided with an all-out effort by Chivs in the state legislature to make California more friendly to the nation’s slave owners. Leading that effort was Henry A. Crabb, the twenty-four-year-old son of a Tennessee aristocrat with “heavy investments in slaves.”
²³

Now a San Joaquin assemblyman, Crabb had briefly practiced law in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Even though he was barely old enough to vote, he had been a Whig in politics and had killed a rival in a duel, one of the bloodiest in Vicksburg memory, following the 1848 election. Shortly thereafter, he had come overland to California and established a law practice in Stockton. Despite his Whig past, he had teamed up with the followers of Gwin, whom he had known in Mississippi.

Henry Crabb. Courtesy Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

In January 1852, Crabb introduced two bills in the assembly. The first placed California foursquare behind the national Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and also supplemented that act. In the heat of the sectional battle over the Wilmot Proviso, Southerners had demanded a tougher Fugitive Slave Law. The original law of 1793, they contended, didn’t work. Northerners had failed to faithfully perform their duties. And the Supreme Court, in the case of
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
in 1842, had relieved Northern states of their enforcement obligations and placed them entirely on the shoulders of the federal government.

In 1850, Henry Clay had included a stricter law among his compromise proposals, but Southern senators led by James M. Mason of Virginia had rejected it, partly because it provided the accused fugitive with the right of habeas corpus and a jury trial in his home state. They made it clear that slaves were property and, just like horses and cows and other forms of property, had no right to trial by jury and habeas corpus. They demanded a more stringent law to protect their property, and they got it.

The final bill gave federal commissioners the authority to summarily decide the fate of the accused and provided an extra $5 fee if they decided in favor of the claimant slave owner. It left Northern blacks at the mercy of venal tribunals, with no legal protections whatsoever. It also imposed heavy fines on Northern whites who hid fugitives and helped them in any way. All in all, it was a tough measure for Northern legislators to support, and in the end only one in five—almost all Democrats—voted for the bill.
²⁴

The new law sparked several spectacular acts of resistance, including the Christiana Riot in southeastern Pennsylvania, the “Jerry” rescue in Syracuse, and the Anthony Burns trial in Boston. It also inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
a melodrama that sold some 300,000 copies the first year and eventually 7 million worldwide. But despite the headline events, most Northern communities complied with the new law.
²⁵
In San Francisco, however, a judge had ruled in 1851 that the new federal law didn’t apply to “Frank,” a Missouri slave who had been brought to California to mine gold and had fled in 1849, because California was not a state at the time and Frank had not crossed state lines. That decision had infuriated pro-slavery men.

To nullify it, Crabb’s bill deemed any slave who had come to California before its admission to statehood a fugitive under the new federal law. The bill also levied heavy fines on anyone who aided a runaway, and enabled a slave owner to reside in California for an indefinite time with an alleged slave. And since black testimony was forbidden under California law, it essentially forced free blacks to carry freedom papers or be victimized by any white looking for human chattel.

Titled “An Act Respecting Fugitives from Labor, and Slaves Brought into This State Prior to Her Admission into the Union,” the measure got through the assembly but ran into trouble in the senate, thanks to the opposition of David Broderick. On April 15, however, the Chivs mustered enough votes to get the measure passed, 14 to 9. The new law was then upheld that summer when a Mississippian named Perkins, through his agents, claimed that three black men working in Placer County, two of them also named Perkins, were his fugitive property. A battery of legal talent tried to keep the black men from being sent back to slavery. But two judges on the California Supreme Court, one from Missouri, the other from Tennessee, ruled in the master’s favor. The law was renewed in 1853, and then again in 1854. Finally, in 1855, antislavery forces in the legislature made sure that it lapsed.
²⁶

The California Fugitive Slave Act was largely symbolic. The state’s total black population was minute, about two thousand, and very few had fled the cotton fields of the Deep South. More ominous was the second bill that Crabb introduced. For one thing, it had a powerful cosponsor, Richard P. Hammond, the Speaker of the assembly. It also called for another constitutional convention. For what purpose? The state had just written a constitution three years earlier. Why did it need another—and so soon? What were Crabb and Hammond up to?

The two legislators never tipped their hand. Nearly every observer, however, thought they had a hidden agenda. And many saw their bill as just the first step in an all-out effort to split the state in two and open the southern half to slavery. Talk of division had been brewing for months. The previous summer, at a convention in Santa Barbara, some disgruntled southern Californians had lambasted the new state government for costing them too much in taxes and leaving them out of patronage spoils. They wanted out. They wanted to become a separate territory.
²⁷