“I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico,” said Ulysses S. Grant in 1879, more than thirty years after he had fought in that war as a young lieutenant. As he was dying of cancer in 1885, Grant reasserted that the American war against Mexico was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”1 Like the adventure in Iraq more than a century later, it was a war of choice, not of necessity, a war of aggression that expanded the size of the United States by nearly one-quarter and reduced that of Mexico by half. And in a striking example of unintended consequences, the issue of slavery in this new American territory set in motion a series of events that would produce a much bigger war fifteen years later that nearly tore apart the United States.
Two principal forces impelled Americans toward what General Grant considered a wicked war. The first was the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845. Soon after Mexico had won its independence from Spain in 1821, the new government offered American settlers large land grants to settle in its sparsely populated northern province of Tejas. The Mexican government soon had reason to regret this policy. The Americans brought slaves in defiance of a Mexican law abolishing the institution. They also defied Mexican efforts to regulate land claims and political activities.
Despite Mexican attempts to ban further immigration, by 1835 30,000 Americans lived in Texas, where they outnumbered native Mexicans (tejanos) by six to one. Determined to establish their own government, the American Texans met at a village appropriately named Washington in 1836 and declared their independence. After suffering the slaughter of all 187 defenders of the mission in San Antonio called the Alamo and another massacre of more than three hundred captives at the city of Goliad, the Texans defeated a larger Mexican army at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. The Texans captured the Mexican commander, Antonio López de Santa Anna, and forced him to sign a treaty recognizing the independent republic of Texas.
Although the Mexican Congress repudiated this treaty, the Texans managed to maintain their independence for almost a decade even as they petitioned repeatedly for annexation by the United States. These petitions, however, ran into a snag in Washington, where the growing controversy over the extension of slavery temporarily derailed the drive for annexation. So did the opposition of most members of the Whig Party to the idea of continual territorial expansion, which was embraced by the “Young America” faction that increasingly dominated the Democratic Party and generated the second impulse toward the Mexican War. The “Manifest Destiny” of the United States was to possess the whole of North America, proclaimed John L. O’Sullivan of the Democratic Review in 1845. “Yes, more, more, more! … till our national destiny is fulfilled and … the whole boundless continent is ours.”2
Set against this demand for expansion of territory was the Whig philosophy of “internal improvements” by building up the infrastructure of transportation, education, and economic development within the existing borders of the United States. “Opposed to the instinct of boundless acquisition stands that of Internal Improvement,” wrote the Whig journalist Horace Greeley. “A nation cannot simultaneously devote its energies to the absorption of others’ territories and improvement of its own.”3
The foremost exponent of this Whig position was Henry Clay, a three-time loser as a presidential candidate who nevertheless was an immensely influential political figure in the first half of the nineteenth century. His third try for the nation’s highest office came in 1844, when he was defeated by the crosscurrents of Manifest Destiny and the antislavery opposition to the annexation of Texas. Clay’s presumptive Democratic opponent in this election was Martin Van Buren, also making his third bid for the presidency after winning in 1836 and losing four years later. Both Clay and Van Buren came out against annexation of Texas in letters published simultaneously on April 27, 1844. As matters turned out, however, these letters sealed their fate. The proannexation current ran so strongly in the Democratic Party that it nominated the dark-horse candidate James K. Polk of Tennessee on a platform that endorsed the acquisition not only of Texas but also of Oregon Territory up to the border of Russian Alaska above the 54th parallel.
Despite the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” that seemingly courted war with Britain over possession of British Columbia, it was the Texas issue that caught fire with the electorate. Annexation sentiment was especially strong in the South, which welcomed the prospect of a huge new slave state. To stem the stampede of many Southern Whigs to Polk on this issue, Clay published two more letters in July explaining that while he still opposed annexation if it would mean war with Mexico, he would acquiesce if it could be accomplished without war and with consensus support of Americans. This waffling probably cost him the election. Enough antislavery Whig voters in New York abandoned Clay and cast their ballots for the tiny Liberty Party to give that state—and therefore the presidency—to Polk by a margin of five thousand votes.
In the three years after his inauguration on March 4, 1845, Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any other president. He moved quickly to complete the annexation of Texas, which came in as the twenty-eighth state (and fifteenth slave state) in 1845. Polk then compromised with Britain to establish the northern border of Oregon Territory at the 49th parallel. Having pledged to fight for a border of 54°40´, Polk angered many Northern Democrats by refusing to risk war with Britain while being willing to provoke war with Mexico by annexing Texas and insisting on a border at the Rio Grande River instead of the old Mexican border at the Nueces River, which effectively doubled the size of Texas now claimed by the United States.
The new president sent an envoy to Mexico City to try to intimidate the unstable government into accepting the Rio Grande border and selling New Mexico and California to the United States. Meeting refusal, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to lead a contingent of American soldiers (which included Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant) to the Rio Grande. Polk hoped this move would provoke an incident that would enable the United States to declare war and seize the territory that Mexico refused to sell. If not, Polk intended to ask Congress for a declaration of war anyway. In the event, the Mexican commander on the south bank of the Rio Grande created an incident by sending troops across the river to attack an American patrol, killing eleven of them.
Even before this news reached Washington on May 9, Polk’s cabinet had decided to request a declaration of war. Now the president had his casus belli. He sent a message to Congress asking not for a declaration of war as such but for a resolution asserting that war already existed because Mexico had “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” As the historian Amy Greenberg notes, “None of it was true—but Polk didn’t consider it lies.” He believed that “a greater truth” was at stake: “As war exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interest of our country.”4
Most Democrats were enthusiastic proponents of this war; most Whigs were opposed, branding it “Mr. Polk’s War.” Congressional Democrats attached the declaration that war existed by the act of Mexico as a preamble to a bill to authorize funds and supplies for American soldiers who were now in harm’s way. This was a cynical ploy to force Whigs to vote yes or be forever tainted by a refusal to support the troops. It worked. Only two Whigs in the Senate and fourteen in the House (including former president John Quincy Adams) voted against the declaration.
For the same reason that most Whig congressmen felt compelled to vote yes, many other Whigs volunteered to fight in a war they deplored in order to prove their patriotism. Two of the most prominent were Henry Clay Jr., son of the statesman, and John J. Hardin, a colleague of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois Whig politics who preceded Lincoln as a congressman from the Springfield district. Clay and Hardin became colonels respectively of Kentucky and Illinois regiments. Hardin was a charismatic politician who believed in Manifest Destiny despite his Whig allegiance. When war came in 1846, he was the first man from Illinois to enlist. Henry Clay Jr. was considerably less enthusiastic but no less determined. His departure from home and family was poignant and painful. “How bitter it was,” writes Amy Greenberg, “that Henry Junior was risking death for a president his father detested and a conflict he despised.”5
Death came to both Clay and Hardin at the Battle of Buena Vista in northern Mexico in February 1847. This battle was the most remarkable of American victories in the war, fought against odds of more than three to one. American armies boasted a long string of military successes that gave the United States control of New Mexico and California and captured Mexico City itself by September 1847. Nevertheless, the growing list of casualties and reports of atrocities by American soldiers against Mexican civilians and of savage attacks by Mexican “rancheros” (guerrillas) on American soldiers intensified antiwar sentiment in the United States. Total American deaths of 13,283 (seven-eighths of them from disease) constituted 17 percent of all American soldiers, the highest rate for any war except the Civil War.6
Poorly disciplined volunteer soldiers occupying Mexican cities “committed atrocities against Mexican civilians that would come to shock Americans back home,” notes Greenberg. Lieutenant Grant wrote to his fiancée, Julia Dent, from Monterrey that “some of the volunteers and about all of the Texans seem to think it perfectly right … to murder them where the act can be covered by the dark. … I would not pretend to guess the number of murders that have been committed upon the persons of poor Mexicans and the soldiers, since we have been here, but the number would startle you.” By the summer of 1847, according to Greenberg, even journalists employed by prowar newspapers “found themselves forced to report on and condemn American atrocities that left them questioning their assumptions about American morality.”7
Although most voters in Western and Southern states supported the war, as the months went by and no end appeared in sight, antiwar sentiment increased even though American arms experienced nothing but victory. The slavery issue compounded the controversy. Much antiwar opinion was fueled by the suspicion that the principal purpose of the conflict was to acquire more territory for slavery. As early as August 1846 a Pennsylvania congressman named David Wilmot introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill for the war stating that “as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico … neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.”8
This famous Wilmot Proviso framed the national debate on slavery for the next fifteen years. Nearly all Northern Democrats joined all Northern Whigs in the majority that passed the proviso, while Southern Democrats and Southern Whigs voted against it. In the Senate, greater Southern strength defeated it. This outcome, which was repeated several times in the next two Congresses, marked an ominous wrenching of the party division between Whigs and Democrats into a sectional division between free and slave states that foreshadowed the political breakdown that led to secession and war in 1861.
As the war dragged on despite American conquest of a huge swath of Mexico, Polk wanted to negotiate peace and complete the accomplishment of his territorial goals before he lost control of events. At this point Nicholas Trist entered the story. Obscure today, Trist was prominent in his time. A protégé of the elderly Thomas Jefferson, who supervised his legal education and made him his private secretary, Trist also married Jefferson’s granddaughter. Later he served as Andrew Jackson’s personal secretary for a time, and in 1845 Jackson persuaded Polk to appoint Trist as chief clerk of the State Department—the equivalent of assistant secretary of state.
Fluent in Spanish, and a Democrat and expansionist, Trist seemed the ideal person to negotiate a peace with Mexico that would force its government to yield half its country to the United States. Polk appointed him as a special envoy to accompany General Winfield Scott’s army, which was closing in on Mexico City. Trist was authorized to offer Mexico up to $20 million in return for the Rio Grande boundary of Texas plus California and New Mexico (embracing the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and part of Colorado). If Mexico would also throw in Baja California, Trist could pay up to $30 million.
During Trist’s sojourn in Mexico, a number of things happened that set up a dramatic confrontation between the envoy and the president who sent him there. Scott’s army captured Mexico City in September 1847 and drove President Santa Anna and his army away to Guadalupe Hidalgo, where Santa Anna refused to capitulate or to negotiate despite the hopelessness of his cause. American military success whetted the appetite of some Manifest Destiny expansionists for more of Mexico than Polk had initially contemplated, perhaps even “all Mexico.”
Polk also began to think that he should demand more territory. But Trist found himself questioning the justice and morality of American policy. His dispatches indicated a growing softness toward Mexico and an unwillingness to go beyond the original territorial goals. In October 1847 Polk decided to recall Trist and send a new envoy to extract harsher terms. Trist ignored the recall order, at the risk of his career, and in February 1848 he negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Santa Anna’s successor, which carried out Polk’s initial goals (minus Baja California).
The arrival of this treaty in Washington presented Polk with a dilemma. He was furious with Trist and tempted to repudiate his treaty in order to force greater concessions from Mexico. But since the autumn of 1847 a growing antiwar movement had begun to threaten to crush Polk between the upper and nether millstones of Democrats’ “all Mexico” clamor and Whig pressures for “no Mexico.” In November Henry Clay, still mourning the death of his son, broke his silence on the Mexican War with a powerful antiwar speech in Lexington, Kentucky, that received national publicity.
Among others, Clay’s speech solemnly affected Abraham Lincoln, who happened to be in Lexington visiting his in-laws while on his way to Washington to take the congressional seat to which he had been elected in 1846. Lincoln heard Clay denounce an “unnecessary” war of “offensive aggression” that had produced “sacrifice of human life … waste of human treasure … mangled bodies … death, and … desolation” in a conflict “actuated by a spirit of rapacity, and an inordinate desire for territorial aggrandizement.” Clay also endorsed the Wilmot Proviso and insisted that the United States must not “acquire any foreign territory whatever, for the purpose of introducing slavery into it.”9
Clay’s speech inspired many antiwar meetings around the country and emboldened Whigs to speak out more vigorously against Mr. Polk’s War in the congressional session that began in December. One of those Whigs was Lincoln. The freshman congressman achieved national exposure with his “spot resolutions” and speeches in the House advocating these resolutions in December 1847 and January 1848. The resolutions demanded from Polk a description of the exact “spot” where Mexican soldiers shed American blood to start the war, suggesting instead that American soldiers shed Mexican blood on Mexican soil.10
The political turmoil surrounding the debates about responsibility for the war forced Polk to conclude that he should get the controversy behind him by submitting Trist’s treaty to the Senate for approval rather than try to negotiate a new treaty. In the Senate, seven Democrats who wanted more Mexican territory and seven Whigs who wanted none voted against ratification. But enough senators of both parties voted in favor to pass the treaty with four votes to spare. Polk fired Trist from his job in the State Department and even withheld his pay for the extra time he remained in Mexico. Clay forfeited any chance for another presidential run in 1848 by jettisoning his political base in the South and West, where the war and conquest remained popular. And the Whigs lost Lincoln’s congressional district in 1848, in part because of the unpopularity there of his antiwar speeches.
But the biggest fallout from this “wicked war” was the controversy over slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico. This altercation was all so unnecessary, according to historians whose interpretation of the Civil War’s causes once prevailed. With the expansion of the cotton frontier into eastern Texas in the 1830s, they maintained, slavery had reached the “natural limits” of its growth and could spread no farther into the arid and inhospitable Southwest.11 This Natural Limits thesis sustained an argument that the Civil War was a needless war, a “repressible conflict” brought on by self-serving Northern politicians who seized on the artificial issue of slavery’s expansion to vault into power by scaring Northern voters with false alarms about an aggressive “Slave Power.” Their self-righteous, anti-Southern rhetoric finally goaded slave states into secession when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860.12
The Natural Limits thesis echoed the voices of antebellum politicians exasperated by antislavery claims that slaveholders intended to expand their “peculiar institution” into the territory taken from Mexico. This whole matter, insisted one Southern congressman, “related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place.” President Polk wrote in his diary that the agitation about slavery’s expansion was “not only mischievous but wicked” because “there is no probability that any territory will ever be acquired from Mexico in which slavery could ever exist.”13 Senator Daniel Webster insisted that the arid climate would keep slavery out of those territories, so why insult the South by the Wilmot Proviso legislating exclusion? “I would not take pains to reaffirm an ordinance of nature,” said Webster, “nor to reenact the will of God.” Governor John J. Crittenden of Kentucky maintained in 1848 that “the right to carry slaves to New Mexico or California is no very great matter … the more especially when it seems to be agreed that no sensible man would carry his slaves there if he could.”14
It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to discover that the territories of Utah and New Mexico (which included also the future states of Nevada and Arizona) legalized slavery in 1852 and 1859 respectively, that slaveholding settlers in California made strenuous and partly successful efforts to infiltrate bondage into that state, and that California’s representatives and senators in Congress voted mainly with the proslavery South in the 1850s. The distinguished historian Leonard L. Richards, who was born and raised in California, learned nothing of this history from his teachers and textbooks there. “Somehow I had gone through the California schools from kindergarten through graduate school,” he writes, and never heard or read that several of the state’s early political leaders “might as well have been representing Mississippi or Alabama in national affairs.” One reason that he wrote The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (2007), he explains in the book’s introduction, was “to bring myself up to speed—to learn material that I should have learned forty or fifty years ago.”15
About the same time in early 1848 that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California from Mexico to the United States, workers building a sawmill on the American River near Sacramento discovered flecks of gold in the riverbed. Word of this find leaked out despite efforts to keep it secret. Rumors reached the eastern United States in August 1848, where a public surfeited with tall tales out of the West initially proved skeptical. Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, aide to the military governor of California, persuaded his commander to send a tea caddy containing more than two hundred ounces of pure gold to Washington. It arrived in December 1848, two days after President Polk confirmed the “extraordinary” discovery of gold. All doubts vanished. By the spring of 1849 tens of thousands of men from all over the United States as well as Chile, China, Mexico, Australia, France, and other countries were on their way to California. So many arrived that by the fall of 1849 the region had as large a population as Delaware and Florida, which were already states.
These men (and they were nearly all men) in San Francisco and the mining camps needed law and order, courts, land and water laws, mail service, and other institutions of government. The U.S. House of Representatives with its Northern majority passed legislation to organize California as a free territory. Southern strength in the Senate blocked this move. Settlers in California soon took matters into their own hands. In October 1849 they drew up a state constitution and petitioned Congress for admission. The Whig administration of President Zachary Taylor (elected in 1848) supported statehood as a way of circumventing the troublesome issue of slavery in California as a territory.
But there was a problem: The proposed state constitution (modeled on Iowa’s) banned slavery. Most of the Forty-Niners wanted to keep that institution out of California, not because of moral principle but because they did not want to compete with slave labor. Several slaveowners had in fact brought their bondsmen with them to work in the mines. “There is no vocation in the world in which slavery can be more useful and profitable than in mining,” declared one of the South’s leading newspapers, the Charleston Mercury. Another journal, the Southern Quarterly, declared that “California is by nature peculiarly a slaveholding State.” If it were not for the agitation to exclude slavery, “thousands of young, intelligent active men … would have been in that region, having each carried with them from one to five slaves.”16
Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi pointed out that “it was to work the gold mines on this continent that the Spaniards first brought Africans to the country.” Although Davis had never been to California, he insisted that “the European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat and sudden changes of climate, to which the African race are altogether adapted.” (He seems to have confused Northern California’s climate with Mississippi’s.) Davis denounced California’s free-state constitution as having been written by “a few adventurers uniting with a herd as various in color and nearly as ignorant of our government, as Jacob’s cattle.”17
Underlying this rhetoric was the Southern fear that admission of California as the sixteenth free state would tip the balance of power against slave states in the Senate and set a precedent for additional free states from the Mexican cession. “For the first time,” warned Davis, “we are about permanently to destroy the balance of power between the sections.” This was nothing less than a “plan of concealing the Wilmot Proviso under a so-called state constitution.” Other Southern leaders described the exclusion of slavery from California as an unconstitutional violation of property rights and political equity that would justify a drastic response. “If by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico,” thundered Representative Robert Toombs of Georgia, a rich slaveholder, “I am for disunion.”18
Several Southerners echoed Toombs’s threat. Secession and perhaps war in 1850 over the admission of California seemed a real possibility. Into this crisis strode Senator Henry Clay with a compromise proposal, as he had done twice before, in 1820 and 1833. Clay’s compromise would offset the admission of California as a free state and the abolition of slave trading in the District of Columbia (an international embarrassment) by the creation of New Mexico and Utah Territories without restrictions on slavery, by a guarantee of slavery itself in the District of Columbia against federal interference, and by a powerful new fugitive slave law to be enforced by federal marshals, commissioners, and if necessary the army to return slaves who had escaped to free states. One by one these measures became law during a long and contentious session of Congress in 1850. Many Southerners continued to protest the admission of California, but just enough voted for it (or abstained) to get it through Congress. And just enough Northerners in return supported the quid pro quo measures favoring the South.
The fears expressed by Jefferson Davis and others that California would tip the balance against the South in Congress proved baseless. The state could scarcely have given the South more aid and comfort in national politics if it had been a slave state. The Democratic Party dominated California politics through the 1850s. And the California party in turn was dominated by a coalition of Southern-born politicians that became known as the “Chivalry.” Most of them continued to own slaves in the states from which they had emigrated. The foremost “Chiv” was William Gwin, a Mississippi planter who arrived in California in 1849 and served as one of its senators for most of the next decade. Gwin controlled federal patronage in the state during the Democratic administrations of Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. The other California senator from 1851 to 1857 was, in the political lexicon of the time, a “doughface”—a Northern man with Southern principles. Together these senators voted for every proslavery measure demanded by Southern Democrats, most notably the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the earlier ban on slavery in Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30´, and the notorious proslavery Lecompton state constitution by which Buchanan tried (but failed) to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state in 1858. Both former California senators supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.
William Gwin’s chief challenger for control of California’s Democratic Party was David Broderick, a New Yorker who opposed the Chivalry’s proslavery tilt. Broderick was a hardened political fighter who had learned his trade in the rough politics of New York City before migrating to California. But he proved no match for the Chivs, who outmaneuvered him to gain the support and patronage of the Buchanan administration even though Broderick managed to get himself elected to the Senate in 1857. His tenure there was short-lived. In 1859 a political mudslinging match between Broderick and David Terry, a Texan who had arrived in California in 1849 and became a prominent Chiv, led to a duel. Terry resigned from his post as chief justice of the California Supreme Court in order to challenge Broderick. Winning the coin toss for choice of weapons, Terry selected pistols with hair triggers that he had brought with him. Unaccustomed to these weapons, Broderick fired too soon and wildly, whereupon Terry took careful aim and shot him dead. This was the third duel in California during the 1850s in which a Chiv Democrat killed a member of the anti-Chiv faction of the party.
In addition to killing off the opposition, the Chivs made repeated efforts to infiltrate slavery into California—or at least into part of it. In 1852 the legislature enacted a law that permitted a slaveowner to “sojourn” indefinitely in California with his human property, and the two justices on the state supreme court who hailed from slave states upheld it. The law was renewed in 1853 and 1854 before finally lapsing the following year. By then the proslavery forces had come up with a new idea: to divide the state in two, with the southern portion reverting to territorial status and open to slavery like New Mexico and Utah.
All of the gold mines were in the northern part of the state, so there was no more talk of slavery’s adaptability to mining. Instead, according to the Chivs, slaves in southern California could grow “Cotton, Rice, & Sugar.” By “this peculiar labor,” they said, California’s “valuable soils” could be “rendered productive.”19 In 1859 the state legislature enacted a bill providing for splitting off southern California at approximately the latitude of San Luis Obispo, subject to a two-thirds majority vote in a referendum in the affected counties. They voted for it by almost three to one, but when the measure reached Congress at the end of 1859 it died a quiet death in the House, where the Republicans were now the largest party. For better or worse, California remained one state.
California’s admission as a free state gave an impetus to one of the more bizarre phenomena of the 1850s—“filibustering,” after the Spanish word filibustero, a freebooter or pirate. A new slave state was needed to offset California. The leaders of the Polk administration had not been satisfied with the acquisition of Texas and the Southwest. They wanted Cuba as well, where planters restive under Spanish colonial rule looked to the Americanos. Several Southern politicians were strongly drawn to the prospect of adding Cuba with its almost four hundred thousand slaves to the United States. Spain refused to sell, however, so a private army of American filibusterers led by the Venezuela-born Cuban soldier of fortune Narciso López invaded the island twice, in 1850 and 1851. The first time Spanish soldiers drove them back to their ships; the second time they killed two hundred of the invaders and captured the rest. They garrotted López in Havana’s public square and killed fifty-one American prisoners by firing squad, including William Crittenden, nephew of the attorney general.
This experience put a damper on filibustering expeditions to Cuba. The scene shifted three thousand miles west to California itself. In 1857 Henry Crabb, who had migrated to California from Mississippi and had joined the Chivalry wing of the Democratic Party, led a filibustering invasion of the Sonoran province of Mexico. Mexican troops ambushed them, killed or wounded twenty-one filibusterers, and executed fifty-nine others, including Crabb. The all-time filibuster champion was William Walker, a Tennessee native who also turned up in California in 1849. A failed invasion of Baja California in 1853 did not discourage him. In 1855 Walker led an army of two thousand American filibusterers into Nicaragua, where in alliance with local rebels he gained control of the government in 1856, named himself president, and reinstated slavery. But a coalition army from other Central American countries overthrew his regime. After several attempts to return, he was captured and executed by Honduran troops in 1860.20
All of the filibuster efforts to organize another slave state to offset California came to grief. They did succeed, however, in exacerbating the controversy over the expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, Minnesota and Oregon came in as free states in 1858 and 1859. By the latter year the South had also lost its campaign to make Kansas a slave state. The balance of power permanently tipped against the South, which strengthened the influence of those who clamored for disunion. This process, which had begun with the loss of California to freedom in 1849, is the implicit theme of Richards’s The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War. Richards does not make the theme explicit, however. The central thread of his narrative is the colorful and violent history of internal California politics in the 1850s.
If Richards had made his title theme explicit, the argument would have gone something like this: The discovery of gold in California produced a mass migration there in which settlers who wanted to exclude slavery prevailed. Their application for statehood provoked a polarizing sectional debate in Congress that generated threats of secession if the South did not get its way. The Compromise of 1850 papered over these divisions temporarily, but tensions continued to simmer and burst into flame again with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. That crisis might not have occurred, at least so soon, without the perceived need for a railroad to connect California with the Mississippi Valley.
Repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36°30´ was the price that Senator Stephen Douglas had to pay for Southern support of the territorial organization of Kansas and Nebraska, through which the railroad would be built. The dominance of the Chivalry faction in California politics invigorated the proslavery element in the national Democratic Party, whose overweening grasp for power in the effort to make Kansas a slave state alienated Northern voters and strengthened the antislavery Republican Party. So did the filibustering expeditions, several of which originated in California. Of course, tensions between North and South had existed before California became part of the United States and would probably have intensified in the 1850s even if gold had never been discovered there. But the precise shape of the sectional conflict that led to secession and war in 1861 was surely influenced by the California story.
Within California itself, perhaps the first shot of the Civil War came from David Terry’s hair-trigger pistol that killed David Broderick in September 1859. The backlash against what many Californians saw as a political assassination weakened the Chivs and redounded to the advantage of the state Republican Party, which had never previously gotten more than 23 percent of the vote. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln won a plurality of 32 percent of California’s votes in the four-party contest and came away with the state’s four electoral votes. During the Civil War most Californians remained loyal to the United States, and the state’s shipments of gold helped finance the Union war effort.
Several prominent Chivs, however, went South. One of them was David Terry, who had suffered no legal punishment for his killing of Broderick. He fought with the 8th Texas Cavalry and was wounded at Chickamauga in September 1863. He returned to California in 1868 to practice law and dabble again in politics. In 1889, exactly thirty years after he had killed a U.S. senator, Terry became embroiled in a dispute with another California political rival from the 1850s. This time it was Stephen J. Field, whom Lincoln had appointed as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1863. In 1888 Field, as senior justice of the California circuit court, presided over a lawsuit by Terry’s second wife against her former husband, a Nevada senator. When Field jailed Terry and his wife for contempt because of their behavior during the trial, Terry vowed revenge. The U.S. Marshal assigned a bodyguard for Field. The following year Terry encountered Field in a railroad station near Stockton and slapped his face (as a challenge to a duel, presumably). The bodyguard shot Terry dead. Perhaps that was truly the last shot of the Civil War.