It comes as something of a surprise ... to discover that the territories of Utah and New Mexico (which also included 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 voted mainly with the proslavery South in the 1850s. The distinguished historian Leonard L. Richards was born and raised in California, but 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 for writing The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, he explains, was "to bring myself up to speed—to learn material that I should have learned forty or fifty years ago."Before I discuss the California politics more, though, I want to highlight McPherson's compact description of how the post-Mexican War dispute over slavery in the captured territories furthered the political conflict over slavery that led to the Civil War:
The annexation of Texas to the United States in 1845 and the conquest of what became the American Southwest in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 reduced the size of Mexico by more than half and increased the size of the United States by a third. These acquisitions also reopened the vexed question of slavery's expansion, which supposedly had been settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.As McPherson explains, the slaveowners in the South and their representatives in Congress wanted California to come into the Union as a slave state, which the free states opposed. Before it was settled as part of the Compromise of 1850 package, as McPherson writes, "Secession and perhaps war in 1850 over the admission of California seemed a real possibility."
Three months into the Mexican War, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot introduced his famous "Proviso" stipulating that in any territory acquired from Mexico "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory." Almost unanimous support by Northern congressmen, Whig and Democrat alike, passed this resolution over the virtually unanimous opposition of representatives of both parties from the South. In the Senate, however, the equal representation of the fifteen slave states and fifteen free states enabled Southern senators to block Wilmot's Proviso.
These events sounded an ominous knell for the future of the republic. Congressional votes normally divided along party lines, with Northern and Southern Democrats lining up together against Northern and Southern Whigs. The wrenching of this partisan pattern into a sectional split on the Wilmot Proviso foreshadowed the increasing polarization that finally plunged the nation into disunion and civil war fifteen years later.
He describes the colorful state of California around that time:
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 that 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 then the notorious proslavery Lecompton state constitution for Kansas by which Buchanan tried (but failed) to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state in 1858. Both supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.The manner in which Terry himself was dispatched to his Maker, McPherson also describes in a passage that reminds us this was very much a civil war, not simply a regional conflict:
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. (my emphasis)
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.In this connection, McPherson also discusses what he calls the Natural Limits thesis of slavery, which held that slavery was unsuited to areas outside of the South for a variety of reasons. McPherson argues that his involves a real misunderstanding of the functioning of the American slave system:
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. He returned to California in 1868 to practice law and dabble again in politics. In 1889, exactly thirty years after he had killed a United States senator, Terry became embroiled in a dispute with another California political rival from the 1850s. This time it was Stephen J. Field, who had been appointed by Lincoln 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, Terry vowed revenge. The US 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 this was truly the last shot of the Civil War. (my emphasis)
It 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. 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.In fact, there were those who argued strenuously that slavery was very well suited to California mining. And by the time of the Civil War, slaves were being used for some industrial occupations in the South. Having a working class of chattel slaves did have inherent problems. But it was by no means impossible for the slave system to expand a great deal more in that direction. And some slaveowners were in the process of doing just that.
The Natural Limits thesis echoes 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 James K. Polk, who presided over the Mexican War, 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." Senator Daniel Webster insisted that the arid climate would keep slavery out of these 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."[6] Kentucky Governor John J. Crittenden maintained in 1848 that "the right to carry slaves to New Mexico or California is no very great matter...and the more especially when it seems to be agreed that no sensible man would carry his slaves there if he could."
Tags: california politics, confederate heritage month 2008, slavery
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