The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (34 page)

On this issue, too, Gwin battled Broderick. In late September 1858, Broderick again made the long trip from San Francisco to Washington. This time he purposely went by stage to get a firsthand look at the highly publicized “central route.” It took him six weeks to get to St. Louis, the stage flipped over on the last leg of the journey, and Broderick ended up with a cracked rib and frostbitten toes.

Nonetheless, when Gwin introduced his railroad bill, Broderick took him to task. The only logical route, he said, was the central one. It had long been the chief route for most migrants to the Far West. The surrounding countryside provided more than enough timber and stone to build the road. The grade was easy. And it led directly to the major cities of the West—namely, Sacramento and San Francisco. The southern route, in contrast, ended up in Guaymas. And that was ridiculous. Who wanted to go to Guaymas? It would be equally logical, said Broderick, to make Mexico City the western terminus.
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When Congress adjourned in early March, the two warring senators began their long trip back to California. On the agenda of both men was another battle, the upcoming state election on September 7.

Broderick stopped briefly in Philadelphia on his way to catch a steamer out of New York. While waiting for an omnibus at the corner of Sixth and Chestnut streets, he had a long talk with John Forney, the Philadelphia newsman who had aided him in getting a meeting with Buchanan. Forney found him “much depressed.” The campaign against Lecompton, said Broderick, had caused “the worst elements” in California to organize against him. Broderick then told Forney: “I feel, my dear friend, that we shall never meet again. I go home to die. I shall abate no jot of my faith. I shall be challenged, I shall fight, and I shall be killed.” Then, after Forney tried to console him, he responded with a “sad smile” that Forney would never forget: “No, no, it is best; I am doomed. You will live to write of me and keep my memory green; and now good-by forever.”
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Did this actually happen? Or was it just a good yarn that Forney later devised after Broderick’s death?
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Oddly enough, by the time this meeting took place, predictions of Broderick’s coming death had become almost commonplace. A few months earlier, in a hotel lobby in New York, two men from New Orleans had accosted Broderick. They repeatedly baited him. He tried to ignore them, but they kept at it until he finally turned upon them with his cane. Some bystanders then intervened, and nothing further came of this incident. Several onlookers, however, thought that the two men were hit men, hired to provoke a duel or a gunfight, and rumors soon spread that there was a price on Broderick’s head.
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Whether there was a price or not, Broderick had a good reason to be “much depressed.” For Gwin undoubtedly now had a decisive edge in California politics. Broderick’s most powerful ally, John Bigler, was off in Chile, and the Chivs now had the lion’s share of all patronage jobs. Only in San Francisco did Broderick still control the regular party machinery. There the Chivs were at a disadvantage, and there he might force the Chivs to organize from scratch. But elsewhere the Chivs had well-built machines that could mobilize hundreds of state and federal employees on Election Day.

And that, as Broderick knew, was the key fact. In an age when parties provided voters with ballots on Election Day, he had no chance of winning unless he had an army of dedicated workers to hand out ballots and march men to the polls. He could be eloquent. He could give rousing campaign speeches. He could have the support of dozens of newspapers. Yet if he was short of men with ballots on Election Day, it was all for naught. There was simply no way that men who responded to his message could vote for the men on his ticket.

That fact had been proven beyond doubt in the 1858 election. Broderick’s strongest candidate in 1858 had been John Currey, who had run for a seat on the state supreme court. Currey, a free-soil Democrat, not only had the backing of Broderick and his men. He had also been endorsed by the Republicans. In the state’s population centers, in San Francisco and Sacramento, Currey had won handily. He had carried San Francisco by a two-to-one margin. But in the diggings and the “cow counties,” where the Chivs had far more men handing out ballots on Election Day, Currey had received just a handful of votes. And as a result, he lost the election.
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By 1859, moreover, the Chiv organization was stronger than ever before. Strengthened mainly through patronage, it had also been strengthened by an all-out effort by Stephen A. Douglas to pretend that Lecompton hadn’t ripped the party apart. The Illinois Democrat had his eye on the presidency, and more particularly on the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, scheduled for the spring of 1860. Somehow, he had to get two-thirds of the delegates to that convention to support his candidacy. For years, Broderick and his followers had criticized Douglas for destroying the Missouri Compromise. Yet it had been Gwin and his Southern colleagues who had stripped Douglas of his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories.

Among Gwin’s followers, however, were a sizable minority who saw no inconsistency in supporting Gwin and the Illinois senator at the same time. And since Douglas desperately wanted to have their support, he pretended that the California Democratic Party was still one big happy family. Lecompton? It was just a passing irritant, and at heart they all had been “good” Douglas Democrats and strong supporters of popular sovereignty.

The Chivs thus found it easy to walk a crooked path, supporting Lecompton to the hilt one day, Douglas and popular sovereignty the next. From reading their campaign literature, no one would realize that they had lambasted Douglas over the Lecompton constitution. Not one word was said about that “old” fight.

Also complicating the 1859 election was a hot state issue. Once again, a movement was afoot to split the state in two. This time its primary sponsor was Andrés Pico, a forty-eight-year-old assemblyman from Los Angeles.

Pico was a member of one of the state’s most distinguished Mexican families. His older brother had been governor of Mexican California at the time of the U.S. conquest, and he himself had led troops against both General Kearny and Frémont. Since the conquest, Pico had represented Los Angeles in the state legislature, first as a Whig, later as a Chiv. He, along with Joseph L. Brent and Tomás Sánchez, now ran the Los Angeles branch of Gwin’s statewide political machine.
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In May 1858 and again in February 1859, Pico introduced legislation to divide the state in half. Like earlier legislation, it essentially called for lopping off the southern half of the state at San Luis Obispo and turning it into a new territory, the “Territory of Colorado.” Pico himself probably hoped to become the governor of this new territory, and prominent Mexican families like his claimed that they needed separation to be free from unfair California taxes. So, too, did other southern California landowners.
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Andrés Pico. Courtesy of The San Fernando Valley Historical Society.

But such concerns had little, if any, impact on the California legislature. For the legislature was totally dominated by northern Californians. That had been the case since the gold rush, and it would remain that way for many years to come. In 1859, legislators from northern California outnumbered legislators from the southern half of the state by more than twelve to one. At best only a handful cared about the plight of the Picos and other Mexican ranch owners. A few may have wanted to increase the power of the West in national affairs, to have the opportunity to create yet another state on the Pacific. But, according to most observers, the bill’s main backers were Chivs who wanted to turn southern California into slave country.

In any event, the Chivs had the votes to get the Pico bill through both houses of the legislature in the spring of 1859. The measure first passed the assembly, 34 to 26, and then the state senate, 15 to 12. Of the total aye votes, 4 came from legislators representing the southern half of the state, 45 from legislators representing the northern half. The Chiv governor, John B. Weller, then signed the bill on April 19. The question of dismemberment was then to go to the voters, but only the voters in the affected districts, where the measure was certain to pass in the September elections.

Was this the first step in turning southern California into a slave state? One Chiv leader, Milton Latham, in explaining the measure to James Buchanan, attributed the Pico bill mainly to the desire of Mexican landowners to be free from unfair taxes. But Elisha Crosby and most other observers dismissed the tax argument as balderdash. As they saw it, the Chivs had been wanting to divide the state in two for years. They now had the votes to do it, and thus they had succeeded in taking a gigantic first step in making southern California into slave country.
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Agreeing with them was none other than Henry Foote. By this time, Foote had returned to Mississippi, but he still followed California politics. Delighted with the reports he received from California, he told a Vicksburg convention in 1859 that in two years the South would have a slave state in southern California because the state had been divided “for that purpose.”
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Much was thus at stake in the September 7 election. The Republicans met first, in early June. Lincoln’s friend and the party’s chief orator, Edward D. Baker, called for fusion with the Broderick Democrats. He made the case that there was no way the free-soilers could win unless they combined forces and agreed to a single slate of candidates. But he was outvoted. The majority insisted on remaining “independent” and put up a full slate of Republican candidates.

A week later the Broderick men gathered in Sacramento. They seemed to be better organized than a year before, when they lacked representation in fourteen counties. Now they had delegates from all but six counties. But the meeting was not harmonious. Five men sought the gubernatorial nomination, two the congressional nomination. Two of the losers blamed Broderick for “poisoning” their chances. One got into a near brawl, then a near duel, with a close Broderick associate, Congressman Joseph McKibbin. Both later campaigned for the Chiv ticket.

By the time the Chivs met in Sacramento in late June, everything was going their way. Among the delegates was Philip A. Roach, a former Mississippi resident, who kept Jefferson Davis abreast on California affairs. He liked what he saw. As he explained the situation to Davis, the only flaw was the Chiv platform. It had been written by men who had not been “fully weaned from Broderickism.” A mishmash, it repeatedly sang the praises of the Buchanan administration and came close to condemning the free-soil movement. Yet it also seemed to endorse Douglas and popular sovereignty, and it clearly condemned the demand for a federal slave code for the territories.

What truly pleased Roach, however, was the candidates. They were far better than the platform, he told Davis. They weren’t “mild” at all. Many of them were “fire-eating men.” And to prove his point, Roach carefully listed their nativity. Nine of the twelve had been born and raised in the South. And of the remaining three, two had lived in the South before migrating to California. Could such “fire-eating men” be elected? Roach was certain they would win—even “over united opposition”—and if Broderick and the Republicans did “not coalesce,” they could beat either by twenty thousand votes.
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Essentially, Roach was right. In July, Broderick took his case to the people. In his first stump speech, in Placerville, in the heart of the gold country, he challenged Gwin to meet him face-to-face. He then repeated the challenge at Forest Hill, Marysville, and Nevada City. At first Gwin made light of the challenges, but eventually he felt compelled to trail Broderick around the circuit.

Neither man had much experience as a stump speaker. Broderick was a complete novice, and Gwin had never been good at it. But for six weeks, the residents of such obscure gold towns as Downieville, La Porte, Quincy, Yreka, and Weaverville got the chance to see and hear the state’s two warring senators. In each town, the meetings were much the same. They were invariably held in front of the town’s largest hotel. They were always festive occasions, usually with music and fireworks, and the speaker’s stand was always draped in bunting and in signs welcoming the speaker. The speeches began around 8:30 p.m., with the main speaker talking for an hour and a half, and then three or four lesser lights exhorting the crowd for another two or three hours. Broderick’s audiences ranged from five hundred to six thousand; Gwin’s from three hundred to five hundred.
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Each man spent much of his time insulting the other. Gwin called Broderick a dishonest man, a cheat, a pathological liar, a renegade, a traitor, a turncoat, a failure, a vulgarian, a dog. Broderick was more inventive. In addition to calling Gwin a liar, cheat, traitor, leper, and turncoat, he compared Gwin to Pecksniff, Benedict Arnold, Tartuffe, Iago, and Hester Prynne. In the course of insulting each other, the men inevitably made the “Scarlet Letter” an issue. Broderick gave a detailed account of the senatorial election of 1857 and claimed that possession of the letter had led to William Ferguson’s death. Gwin eventually had to publish a pamphlet justifying his actions in 1857.
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