Chapter 47
The War in California

California wasn’t the only state split over loyalties to the North and South. In June, after Virginia had joined the Confederacy, the western part of that state broke away and formed a new state, loyal to the Union, called West Virginia.

When news of it came, I found myself wondering if such a thing was bound to happen to California one day.

The election for governor, however, would serve to put the dispute to rest. It was a campaign fought not just along Republican-Democrat lines, but North-South as well. A famous lawyer named Edmond Randolph made fiery speeches against Mr. Stanford. He was outspoken in his calling for Confederate victories in the East, and after Bull Run, claimed that the South would put an end to the war any day. “If this be rebellion,” he cried in a speech that I heard when I was in Sacramento with Cal and Mr. Stanford, “then I am a rebel. Do you want a traitor? Then I am a traitor.”

There were far more Democrats in California than Republicans. But the split between them kept being the most important factor of all. The Democrats got almost 64,000 votes in September. Mr. Stanford got only 56,000.

But since he was running against two Democrats, he was elected governor even with a minority!

I expected Cal to be happier over the victory than he was. This was one of those “opportunities” he was always talking about. He was going to be personal assistant to the governor of the state! He had talked about it before with such a light in his eyes that I would have thought nothing could please him more. He had made it seem like getting to the nation’s Capitol was his greatest goal, and that Mr. Stanford would be the one to take him there. But the southern victory at Bull Run seemed to shake him, and even after the election, he was still quieter than usual. We were all worried when we heard the army had been defeated and had to retreat. But Cal seemed more upset about it than I could understand.

Mr. Stanford was so behind the North, the Union, and Mr. Lincoln that the Republican victory ended once and for all any possibility that California would support the South or would withdraw from the Union to form a new republic of some kind. Talk of a third country, and even talk of splitting the state, diminished. The War Between the States was the most important thing on everyone’s minds, and the Pony Express deliveries with papers from the East were anticipated eagerly to find out if any more battles had been fought or if anything else had happened. Nothing much did happen, though, throughout the whole rest of that summer and fall.

But just because Mr. Stanford was now governor did not mean support for the southern cause stopped altogether. It just meant the state would officially be pro-North. So all the supporters of the Confederacy—and there were lots of them!—had to go into hiding. They had lost their chance to take California into the Confederacy with the vote. So they turned instead to hidden and underground plots and schemes. There was news every week, it seemed, of some new threat that had been exposed, even threats of plots to take over California for the South.

All kinds of secret societies of southern sympathizers sprang up. Mr. Kemble told me there were as many as fifty thousand people involved, but I don’t know if that was true. They caused mischief, but after the middle of 1861 there weren’t any serious uprisings.

The debate over which side was “right” in the war continued. William Scott, the pastor of one of San Francisco’s largest churches, the Calvary Presbyterian Church, openly preached his belief in the Confederate cause. He outraged many people in the state, including my editor, Mr. Kemble, who knew him personally.

Besides men, money was something the Union army needed more than anything. The North was not as economically strong as the South, and to feed, clothe, and pay an army was expensive.

California was too far away to help with any actual fighting. It was too small a state to be able to provide very many men. But there was one thing that California had more of than any other state in either the Union or the Confederacy.

That was gold. California could help President Lincoln finance the war, if nothing else.

The Unitarian pastor Thomas Starr King, who had become a good friend of Governor Stanford, turned his speaking skills and popularity in a new direction. He began to organize a fund-raising drive in California in order to send money to Washington.

Of course whenever money is involved in anything, there is always the chance of deception and robbery. Since the first gold miners had started pulling gold out of the rivers and streams of California in 1848, there had been claim jumpers and thieves. Now, with southern supporters carrying out their designs more secretively, and with their bitterness over losing California’s support for the Confederate cause, there was worry that they would try to steal what Mr. King was able to raise.

According to Mr. Kemble, a quarter of all San Franciscans favored the Confederacy. There were even more down south in Los Angeles. After Mr. Stanford’s election as governor, a lot of secessionists moved down there and kept calling, even then, for California to split in half, with southern California to become a slave state and join the Confederacy. The Los Angeles Star was so seditious and against the Union that Governor Stanford had it banned from the mail so that it couldn’t even be delivered and read in the northern part of the state.

There weren’t enough people in Los Angeles or the rest of southern California, however, to worry about actual trouble—all the mischief they could do was in writing. And because they had no gold, they couldn’t do the Confederacy much good, either.