The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (5 page)

Eliza Farnham, New York reformer. Courtesy of The New-York Historical Society.

That entailed taking a steamer from New York or New Orleans to the town of Chagres on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama, then traveling across sixty miles of land to reach the Pacific port of Panama City and catching another steamer to San Francisco. The total distance was about five thousand nautical miles, whereas the trip around the Horn was fourteen thousand nautical miles. With any luck, going by way of Panama cut travel time in half, maybe a third.
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In 1849, however, there was a major bottleneck. The steamers on the Atlantic side were both bigger and more plentiful than the ones on the Pacific. Thus getting to the isthmus was much easier than getting out the other side.

On the Atlantic side the major steamers belonged to George Law, a forty-three-year-old New Yorker who two years earlier had formed the U.S. Mail Steamship Company and taken over a federal contract from A. G. Sloo to provide biweekly mail service between New York, Havana, New Orleans, and Chagres. Under this contract, Law had to have five steamers, each of fifteen hundred tons, working the Caribbean. He did and was able to move about five hundred gold seekers per ship to Chagres. Once they got there, they never stayed long, for Chagres was much like a garbage dump, with rotting hides, bullocks’ heads, fish, cattle, and the remains of other animals lining the thresholds and interiors of huts and putrefying the damp, tropical air. “No one remained in Chagres more than one night, but at the risk of a malignant fever.”
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Once they got across the isthmus to the Pacific side, however, conditions improved dramatically. Panama City was “relatively healthy.” It was an old Spanish town known for its quaint church, narrow sun-shaded streets, cracking walls, mandolins and guitars, monkeys, bananas, cockfights, and bullfights. Unfortunately, finding a ship in Panama City for the last leg of the trip was a major problem. Sometimes the waiting list exceeded two thousand. The more fortunate stayed in hotels, on cots, ten to a room, at eight dollars per week. The less fortunate camped outside city walls.
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Ships that came up the coast were usually full, and the government’s contract with the Pacific mail carrier called for only three steamers, two weighing a thousand tons and one, six hundred tons.

These belonged to another New Yorker, William H. Aspinwall. One year younger than Law, Aspinwall looked and dressed like a typical Wall Street businessman. By nature, however, he was a riverboat gambler. He also had an uncanny knack for making the right bet at the right time. In the early 1840s, he talked his partners into backing a radically new design of clipper ship. That had paid off. And in November 1847, he did something that his fellow merchants considered even more radical. He purchased a contract to carry mail between Panama, San Francisco, and Oregon by steamship. How was he going to make money on this deal? No one thought he could—in 1847—and deemed the contract “Aspinwall’s folly.”
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Authorized and subsidized by Congress, the contract obligated Aspinwall and his partners to have three ships on their way to the Pacific in October 1848. By the time they got there, Panama City was packed with people who wanted to get to San Francisco. Three ships were not enough to handle the crowd that had poured through the isthmus. No one had anticipated that the quaint old Spanish town would suddenly become a boomtown, a jumping-off point for thousands who wanted to get to San Francisco. No one had anticipated that San Francisco, once a sleepy village, would suddenly become a major attraction.

Aspinwall’s “folly” thus became a gold mine. His three ships could only handle about three hundred passengers each. So while Law’s fleet was bringing about twenty-five hundred passengers to Chagres, Aspinwall on the other side had room to move out only about nine hundred. To make matters worse, the route north was not easy. A direct path was impossible because of the prevailing winds and currents that came down the coast. Ships therefore had to head out into the Pacific to about the longitude of the Hawaiian islands, and then catch a westerly and make their way to San Francisco. The time lag and lack of berths created a major bottleneck.
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Ticket prices thus surged. The original price was $250 for first cabin, $200 for lower cabin, $100 for steerage. But with scalping, steerage went as high as $1,000. So, in July 1849, Aspinwall jacked up his rates: $300 in cabin, $150 for steerage. He was well on his way to becoming one of the richest merchants in Manhattan.
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Among those who added their mite to Aspinwall’s fortune in the spring of 1849 was David Broderick. For him the long wait in Panama City was a nightmare. He suffered continually from a tropical fever, an unwanted souvenir of a night in Chagres. Accompanying Broderick was his future business partner, Frederick Kohler. At first glance the two men had little in common. At age twenty-nine Broderick was nine years younger than Kohler. He was also of Irish Catholic stock, while Kohler was of German descent. Kohler was a native New Yorker, having grown up on Staten Island, while Broderick had spent the first five years of his life in the District of Columbia, where his father, a stonecutter, had worked on the ornamentation of the Senate chamber. Broderick’s hands were gnarled from his years as a stonecutter and bouncer in New York saloons. Kohler had been a jeweler by trade.
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Broderick’s rough looks, however, were deceiving. He was a bookworm by nature. He had dropped out of school at age fourteen, on the death of his father, and helped support his mother and brother by apprenticing at a stonecutter’s yard on the corner of Washington and Barrow streets. But he continued to study on his own. He was also befriended by two men who more or less served as his tutors. One was Townsend Harris, a China importer and Tammany Hall member who opened his personal library to Broderick. He later relieved Broderick from the long hours of stonemasonry, finding him work as a saloon keeper, first at the Subterranean at age twenty, later at the Republican. From all reports, Broderick used the time well. He never drank; instead, he spent all his spare time poring over books. The other tutor was George Wilkes, a man with a gifted pen who later founded the
National Police Gazette.
To make ends meet, Wilkes often wrote and published “trash.” At heart, however, he was an intellectual and an insatiable reader of all the eminent authors of the day. He encouraged Broderick to broaden his reading habits, to master the great works of the English language, and to study political theory.
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Broderick, moreover, had known Kohler for years. Both were old New York firemen, Broderick as a member of Howard Engine Company No. 34 and Kohler as an assistant engineer of the New York Volunteer Fire Department and a member of Protection Engine No. 5. In New York, as well as other eastern cities, volunteer fire companies did more than fight fires. They were also the premier social clubs in working-class neighborhoods. They were essentially fraternal orders with their own badges, mottoes, and initiation procedures. They tried to outdo one another in staging prizefights, dogfights, dances, parades, and an occasional formal ball. They had also been political organizations since the 1830s, initially used by elite politicians to get out the vote, but now used as a voice for men like themselves. Out of their ranks would come six mayors of the city.
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For Broderick, as well as many others, service as a fireman had been a stepping-stone to a political career. Shortly after he joined the Howard Company, one of the oldest in New York, he had been elected foreman, even though he was not yet old enough to vote. Among his associates was Mike Walsh, who had become a master in roughhouse politics. A fellow Irishman but a Protestant, Walsh was ten years Broderick’s senior. He also had a gift that Broderick never acquired. He was a “naturally gifted” speaker, one who could raise crowds to a fighting pitch, and in 1840 he had founded the Spartan Association, a gang of Bowery boys who at his bidding frequently took to the streets, often in support of workingmen’s rights, but also to rough up “regular” Tammany Hall and Albany Regency Democrats.
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In 1842, on Election Day, Walsh’s troops got into a street fight with Tammany Democrats that resulted in a full-scale riot.
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Along with Walsh, Broderick and his friend Wilkes established a political constituency that challenged Tammany Hall from below. As spokesmen for some of the poorest neighborhoods in Manhattan, they sided initially with the Locofocos, a radical Tammany faction that wanted to widen the Democratic Party’s “Bank War” into a crusade against all bankers, local as well as national, Tammany allies as well as Tammany enemies.

Broderick and Wilkes also embraced George Henry Evans’s radical politics. The editor of
The Working Man’s Advocate
and later
The Radical,
Evans was primarily concerned with the plight of free white labor, the growing subjugation of white labor, which he termed “white slavery.” He thought all slavery was a disgrace, black as well as white, but that Northerners ought to set an example for slaveholders of the South by tending to their own problems first. He blamed the unequal distribution of wealth, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, first on banks and monopolies, and then on land speculation. To bring about equality, Evans and his followers originally advocated land confiscation. Later, however, they downplayed this radical demand and championed free distribution of public lands to actual settlers. That proposal eventually made its way into national politics through the homestead movement and the Free-Soil Party.
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In going up against Tammany Hall, Broderick invariably came out on the losing end. In 1841, without Tammany’s blessing, he got a federal patronage job as one of seventy-six inspectors at the New York Custom House. That was largely because the incumbent president, John Tyler, was desperate. A renegade Democrat, Tyler had run for vice president in 1840 on the Whig ticket because the Whig chieftains thought his presence might help them carry Virginia. They miscalculated. Not only did they lose Virginia; they also had to cope with Tyler when William Henry Harrison, their choice for president, died after one month in office. As president, Tyler quickly proved that he was still a Democrat at heart and vetoed one Whig bank bill after another. He so irritated Whig leaders that they read him out of the party. But Tyler was still a young man, at age fifty-one the youngest to yet hold the presidency, and he had high hopes of creating a new party, mainly from disaffected Democrats.

Thus Broderick got his Custom House appointment. He loved it, especially the fact that it gave him the power to bestow favors on his friends. But it wasn’t his for long. Once the Democrats regained the presidency in 1845, they made sure that all seventy-six jobs went to “regular” Tammany men.
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Broderick, however, was not one to “wait his turn.” That earned him a host of enemies later that same year when Tammany Hall hosted the new president. The leaders selected forty party members, half old guard, half youngsters, to go to New Jersey and escort President Polk to Manhattan. Broderick, at age twenty-five, was one of the youngest chosen. After reaching New Jersey by steamer, most of the forty waited silently outside the house where Polk was staying. Broderick, however, refused to be humble and silent. Instead, he went inside and returned with the president on his arm. He then told the men, in a loud, commanding voice, to form a circle and “give attention to the President.” Then, after Polk said a few words, Broderick told the men to “form a line of march,” took Polk by the arm, and led him to the steamer that was to bring him to New York. Polk, naturally, thought Broderick was in charge and acted accordingly.
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Many Tammany graybeards were furious. Not only was Broderick a youngster. He was also an Irish Catholic, a member of the ethnic group that had shaken much of old New York. More than 300,000 half-starved Irish tenant farmers had descended upon the city since the War of 1812, and many thousands more were coming. Desperate for living space, they had helped turn Five Points into a major slum. Through sheer numbers and terrorism, they had driven blacks off the docks, taken away their jobs as hackney coachmen and draymen, stripped them of their livelihoods as ditchdiggers and domestic servants. At the same time, the skyrocketing growth of their Roman Catholic church, manned largely by Irish priests, had sparked violent opposition from white Protestants.

At first, both major parties had sought the Irish vote. But in the 1840s the Whigs had teamed up with anti-Catholic Protestants and shown some sympathy toward blacks, thus driving the Irish into the arms of Tammany Hall. The Tammany chieftains thus had become dependent on the Irish vote. They also needed Irish brawn in bare-knuckled ward politics. They had no intention, however, of letting an upstart Irishman run their party.
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The graybeards got even, one year later, when Broderick ran for Congress. He was just twenty-six, one year over the minimum, but with the backing of Mike Walsh’s newspaper,
The Subterranean,
and George Henry Evans’s newspaper,
The Working Man’s Advocate,
he won the Democratic nomination easily. That should have resulted in victory on Election Day had the Democratic Party been united. His Tammany adversaries, however, entered another Democrat, Jack Bloodgood, a hard-drinking lawyer of old Knickerbocker stock. They then directed Custom House officials to get out the vote for Bloodgood. This split the Democratic vote and led to the victory of a Whig aristocrat, Fred A. Tallmadge.
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The treachery of the Tammany elite left a lasting mark on Broderick. He brooded for months. He fired off angry letters denouncing the men who caused his defeat. He finally concluded that they were no different from blue bloods the world over, just another bunch of mean-spirited aristocrats who looked down on all men who worked with their hands and took pleasure in crushing them. He also condemned the Custom House workers who did the bidding of the Tammany elite, especially men of his own social class, claiming that they were jealous of him, unable to even understand why he wanted to better himself, and thus willingly did the work of his tormentors.
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