The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (32 page)

Upon arriving in San Francisco, Broderick immediately learned that the Chivalry had regained much of their former strength. No longer would he be able to play one Chiv faction off against another as he had done during the 1857 Senate election. They were now all united against him. They also realized that Gwin was once again in control of federal patronage. They thus looked to Gwin for leadership and for favors. And so did other party operatives, including some who had once regarded Broderick and Bigler as their only patrons.

Chiv numbers had also increased with the collapse of the Know-Nothing Party. Henry Foote and other Know-Nothing leaders had been delighted with Buchanan’s Cabinet picks, and they had announced that Buchanan’s Cabinet and his political views made their party unnecessary. Many rank-and-file Know-Nothings, in turn, had taken that as a signal to join the Democratic Party. Virtually none, however, had joined the Broderick wing of the party. Few had any desire to be led by an Irish Catholic. In contrast, many affiliated with the Chivs.
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Would these former Know-Nothings be allowed to have a voice in the state Democratic convention in July? That became the telling issue. On opening day, the Broderick men moved to bar all delegates who had voted for anyone other than James Buchanan in the 1856 election. Only “true” Democrats, they argued, should be seated at the convention. William Van Voorhies, a Chivalry Democrat, then offered a substitute motion that welcomed “all national men, of whatever party heretofore, to unite with us in finally and forever destroying within the limits of our state, the evil spirit of disunion and sectionalism.” The substitute motion passed, 224 to 81. The convention then went on to nominate for governor a Chiv mainstay, John B. Weller. The vote on the first ballot was overwhelming, 254 to 61.
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The Chivs thus emerged triumphant. The rival free-soil wing of the California Democratic Party was in shambles, and the man who had once had Chiv leaders begging for his help was now all but pushed out of the state party.

In early October, Broderick left San Francisco for Washington and the December meeting of Congress. He was in a foul mood. Fearing the worst, Governor-elect Weller suspected that Broderick intended to use the rules of “senatorial courtesy” to block Chiv appointments that came before the Senate for confirmation. In anticipation, Weller wrote his old friend Stephen A. Douglas and asked him to stop Broderick in his tracks.
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Weller was right. Broderick had a bit in his mouth when it came to the Chiv power base. On one occasion, he even accused Weller’s brother, a San Francisco postmaster, of overcharging customers and pocketing the ill-gained income. He also accused a former Chiv collector of customs of being “a defaulter to the amount of $430,000” and a Chiv melter and refiner and assayer of the mint of being “a defaulter of about $175,000.” And he especially zeroed in on a Gwin scheme to have the War Department buy Lime Point, a piece of land at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, for $200,000. Gwin claimed the purchase was necessary to protect the port city from military attack. Broderick said that the transaction amounted to an “enormous fraud.” The land, he said, wouldn’t bring even $7,000 at auction, and the deal’s only purpose was to enrich Chiv speculators.
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Douglas, however, couldn’t provide Governor Weller with the assistance he requested. For Douglas desperately needed Broderick’s help when the first session of the Thirty-fifth Congress convened on December 7. There was a new issue on the agenda, one of the many that had grown out of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act. This one had been started by pro-slavery lawmakers in Kansas. Knowing that Congress would not pass legislation enabling them to form a state, they had decided to force the issue. Over the governor’s veto, they had passed legislation calling for a census, the election of delegates to a constitutional convention, and a convention in the fall of 1857. The free-state forces, assuming with good reason that the census would be rigged, boycotted the entire affair.
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As predicted, the census was rigged. In over half the counties pro-slavery officials either never took a census or never bothered to register voters. All in all, half the eligible voters never had a chance to register, and the eight counties bordering slaveholding Missouri ended up with two-thirds of the delegates.

At this juncture, President Buchanan appointed Gwin’s old friend Robert Walker territorial governor. A Pennsylvanian who had migrated to Mississippi as a young man, Walker had long been a major figure in Deep South politics. Not only had he worked hand in hand with the Gwin brothers in Mississippi; he had also advocated the acquisition of both slaveholding Texas and slaveholding Cuba. He had, in short, strong Southern credentials. But he was not foolhardy. He estimated that Democrats in Kansas outnumbered Republicans by two to one, but more than half of them would go over to the Republicans if the Democracy tried to turn Kansas into a slave state. In his view, Kansas was bound to be a free state, and his party simply had to accept that fact. Otherwise, they would lose the people of Kansas to the “abolitionists.” He set about to have honest elections in Kansas and get the free-state majority to participate.

Despite Walker’s pleas, the free-state men refused to partake in the rigged election to choose constitutional delegates. Pro-slavery forces thus prevailed easily and at Lecompton drafted a pro-slavery constitution. It proclaimed that “the right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its issue is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever.” It also prohibited any constitutional amendment for seven years, and declared that even after seven years had passed, “no alteration shall be made to affect the rights of property in the ownership of slaves.”
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Knowing that their handiwork would be rejected if submitted to a fair vote, the delegates first decided to send the document straightway to Washington without a referendum of any kind. But, on sober second thought, a majority decided that such a move was just too brazen to succeed. The delegates then worked out a bogus referendum whereby the voters would not have the opportunity to vote down the fundamental constitution, just the opportunity to choose between two alternative clauses, one that would legally permit additional slaves to be brought into Kansas, the other that would legally bar the future importation of slaves. But here again there was a rub. The election was to be conducted not by Governor Walker but by officials named by the convention, the same men who had rigged the constitutional convention. That further convinced free-state men that the whole constitutional movement was a sham.

Robert Walker. Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:334.

Walker then set off for Washington to enlist Buchanan’s support against the Lecompton Constitution. The president had wavered for nearly half a year. Maybe he could now be persuaded to support honest government. But before Walker got to the nation’s capital, Buchanan decided to follow the advice of his Cabinet and his pro-slavery friends in Congress. He threw his full weight behind the Lecompton constitution. Sharing his friends’ hatred of abolitionists and Republicans, he apparently saw no great wrong in extending slavery into Kansas. He also knew that he had enough votes to get the admission bill through the Senate, and he was confident that with executive pressure he could bring enough Northern Democrats in line to get the measure through the House.

Once the Washington
Union
announced Buchanan’s decision, many Northern Democrats panicked.
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The administration, as they saw it, had handed the Republicans another issue with which to beat down any chance they had of recapturing their home districts. They were already being lambasted for the Supreme Court’s action in Dred Scott. Now they were expected to defend fraudulent elections in Kansas as well as a pro-slavery constitution that even the territorial governor, a onetime Mississippi slaveholder, deemed unacceptable.
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The president then formally asked Congress to endorse his decision in early December 1857. The next day, Stephen A. Douglas rose in the Senate and attacked the administration’s Kansas policy. A few days later, Walker resigned in protest. And a few days after that, the referendum called by the Lecompton convention took place. With most of the free-state men abstaining, the official results showed some six thousand votes for Lecompton with additional slavery, and some five hundred for it without additional slavery. Of the pro-slavery votes, nearly three thousand came from areas along the Missouri border that had yet to be settled. Towns with six buildings and forty settlers had over four hundred voters. Two weeks later there was still another election in Kansas, this one called by the state legislature. This time the pro-slavery men abstained, and Lecompton was voted down by over ten thousand votes.

Buchanan nevertheless pushed ahead. Denouncing the actions of the free-staters in Kansas and announcing that “Kansas is…at this moment as much a slave State as Georgia or South Carolina,” he sent the Lecompton constitution to both houses for adoption.
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What followed was a dramatic contest, with long sessions, filibusters, and fistfights on the floor. Much attention was focused on the Senate, where the Little Giant of Illinois led the revolt against the Buchanan administration.

For Douglas, political principle as well as political survival was at stake. Lecompton’s rigged convention and fraudulent votes had made a mockery out of popular sovereignty. Accepting Lecompton was thus out of the question. Yet rejecting it outright meant going against a president of his own party. And, as everyone in Washington knew, Andrew Jackson had crushed two party members who had openly opposed him. Would Buchanan do the same to Douglas? The Pennsylvania Democrat left no doubt. He promised to crush Douglas and any other Democrat who dared to cross him.
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Douglas thus had trouble finding Democratic allies. Although many agreed with him in principle, few were willing to take on the administration. In the Senate, there were now twenty Republicans, all from the free states, and thirty-seven Democrats, all but twelve from the slave states. Douglas had the support of nearly all the Republicans but only two members of his own party. One was Charles Stuart of Michigan. The other was David Broderick. Like Douglas, Stuart was cautious. He tried to downplay the fact that he was going against the president. He focused mainly on the fraud and illegalities in drafting the Lecompton constitution. He did not attack the president directly.

In contrast, Broderick singled out Buchanan and his Cabinet for blame. On December 23, he addressed the Senate. It was his maiden speech, and he began by emphasizing that he was a “regular” Democrat, one who had rejected free soil at the time of the Barnburner revolt in New York, and that he had supported Buchanan in the last election—indeed, supported him even before Buchanan had been chosen as the Democratic nominee. Broderick then became brutally direct: “If I understand this subject, and I hope I do, I think that the President of the United States is alone responsible for the present state of affairs in Kansas. It is the first time, I believe, in the history of this country, that a President of the United States ever stepped down from the exalted position he held, to attempt to coerce the people into a base submission to the will of an illegalized body of men.” As for the delegates who wrote the Lecompton constitution, said Broderick, “the only thing that has astonished me…is the forbearance of the people of Kansas.” If they had seized these men “and flogged them, or cut their ears off, and driven them out of the country, I would have applauded them for the act.”
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Broderick, despite the hullabaloo he created with his maiden speech, had little to say for the next three months.

He did, however, push one item on the free-soil agenda. He introduced a resolution, one that his old friend George Henry Evans had been advocating for years. It called on the federal government to survey the public domain and distribute it “for the free and exclusive use of actual settlers not possessed of other lands.” The resolution went to the Committee on Public Lands, of which Broderick was a member, but was subsequently defeated by the Senate’s Southern bloc.
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Then, on March 22, the last day of the Lecompton debate, Broderick again made his mark. The previous day James Henry Hammond of South Carolina had given a long speech praising slavery and the South. In words that ended up in some ten thousand pamphlets and were repeated as far west as San Francisco, the South Carolina Democrat had lectured his fellow senators on the moral superiority of slavery as a labor system.

Among other things, Hammond had told his Northern colleagues that they dared not make war on cotton, that no power on earth dared make war on cotton, that “cotton was king.” He had also acknowledged that slaveholders had long ruled the United States. Indeed, he boasted about it. He regarded slaveholder rule as “the brightest page of human history.” He had also praised California and Oregon as being the only free states that had not run roughshod over the Fugitive Slave Law. Indeed, they were pro-Southern in outlook, and as a result there was “no antagonism between the South and these countries and there never will be.”