Historical Footnotes
2. The Slavery Divide
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2. The Slavery Divide
The national division over slavery before the Civil War played out in California in a most dramatic way that shaped its politics and culture, indeed the future of the state.
The U.S. set its eyes on California at a moment when the slaving interest in the Southern states was facing down a crisis. A compromise had been in operation for a generation. A line was drawn dividing North and South, to be extended further West as needed. North of it, with an exception for Missouri, would be free; South of it reserved for slave states. The problem was that almost all the U.S. western territories left to settle were above the line and thus the future power of the slaving interest in the Senate, where it was critical, faced a certain, though eventual, demise.
All the land below the slave line still belonged to Mexico. Texas had become American, and would be joining as a state. Its land mass was so huge compared to all existing states that Southerners hoped to carve out five new separate slave states, each with its own two senators. This would protect the slaving interest for a good long while. But when it somehow didn't happen and Texas was admitted as a single entity, the problem of the Southerners became acute.
The War with Mexico secured the Southwest and California for the United States. The Southwest desert climate made no sense for classical plantation slavery and was too forbidding to attract a population large enough to forge another state for generations. California, to the extent the place was even understood then, was agriculturally fertile. But the North-South line would be a problem. That lattitude cut California right where we distinguish north from south today, just south of Monterey. Only Northern California was sufficiently well watered, and therefore viable for slavery. The southern half was relatively dry and already devoted to cattle ranching, with a settled population that, under laws of Mexico, held slavery illegal.
The only certain benefit that California offered to the slavers was to bookend their ambitions all the way across the continent. If California on the coast should go for slavery, all the country west of Texas would be locked in for the future. But that future would be distant because no one thought when California was first conquered that it would be a state for many years, as it was simply too remote for large-scale immigration from the East.
But the immediate discovery of gold changed everything. So many immigrants from the Atlantic States flooded California in 1849 that it could not possibly be governed as a territory — especially under military rule persisting from the War — and must be made a lawful state. Americans in California met in Monterey in Fall of '49 to write a constitution, in preparation to request admission to the Union. These included some Hispanic Californios, who'd been granted U.S. citizenship in the settlement that closed the War.
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The most contentious issue at the Monterey Convention was Black slavery. To understand why this was so, we need to grasp a most important fact about the birth of gringo California. Everybody knows that Gold Rush California, and especially the City of San Francisco, became a meeting ground for races such had not before been seen on Earth. Americans crossed paths with Chinese, Latinos (Chileans first, then mostly Sonoreno Mexicans), and Blacks -- the first two almost entirely unknown to them. This fact is so essential to all subsequent history and culture in the state that it has wiped out recollection of another contrast in the population that, at that time, was even more important.
Americans who came for gold arrived from everywhere across the country, at a period when, due to culture, politics and transportation, the nation was divided into sections that didn’t mix with one another. The Southerner who only rarely met a Northerner back home, was forced to interact with them in California, and vice versa. Even Westerners (what we today call Middle Westerners) weren't used to mixing with the other sections. Yet here they all were on the streets of San Francisco and in mining towns, doing business with each other and establishing American political authority in California. So much of the founding history of California, in the Gold Rush era ending with the Civil War, was driven by the conflict between these rapidly evolving enemies, thrust suddenly together. The genteel Southern class (as poorer Southern whites had not the means to come to California) conceived themselves as "Chivalry," which tells you everything about their ludicrous pretensions to an aristocracy. The Northern people called them "Chivs." These Northerners did not necessarily identify as "Free Soil men" back home, because most had no strong feelings about slavery. But when they came to California and were confronted with the Chivs, a powerful distaste for slavery and its adherents crystallized at once.
The issue was concrete in the extreme. Washing sands for gold was difficult, exhausting work. Before the crowds arrived, some early gringos used Indians for labor. Trading gold dust pound for pound for woven cloth or blankets, their gains were astronomical. Jim Savage, the first white man in Yosemite, brought a salt pork barrel full of dust up to San Francisco. John Murphy, who had crossed the High Sierra back in 1844, packed his mules out of Murphy's Diggins with $2 million worth of gold within a single year. And the Californio rancheros of the South, with their many Indian dependents, embraced the very same idea. So it seemed obvious to Chivs to bring their slaves across from Dixie, not just for profit, but also because laboring of any kind was socially abhorrent to these gentlemen.
Northerners in California were the majority, and whites in competition with slave labor was an absolute nonstarter. When one rich Chiv brought slaves to work the riverbeds he met with violent reaction. And so Chivs meeting at the Monterey convention understood that slavery in California was going nowhere, at least so long as placer mining was the economic engine. They had to settle for a free state constitution, bide their time and make some other plans. One plan was to cut the state in half along the extrapolated national line. The northern portion would be admitted as a free state under the drafted constitution, as that was where all mining and the major population was. The southern half would stay a territory, providing Chivs with time to swing it to the Southern states and slavery.
But this division plan did not take hold because the massive flows of gold and population made it imperative to act on statehood right away. California might just choose to be an independent nation if the U.S. Congress failed to act at once on its admission. Even so, the admission of all California as a free state, in violation of the compromise that promised slavery below the stated latitude, was so alarming to the slave states that some Southern Senators, led by Jefferson Davis, sought to block it. They succeeded for a year, but had to fold their hand because the gold was simply too important to a nation that still relied on Mexican pesos for its currency.
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From that point on, the Chivs focused on two goals. One was to carve off the southern portion of the state by one means or another just as soon as that seemed possible. The other was to make sure that the state would name at least one Chiv as senator, and preferably two. That way, even if the state itself were free, the slave states would preserve their influence in Washington. Luckily for them, a former Mississippi congressman named William Gwin had raced to California at the starting gun, drew much attention as a leader in the embryonic California Democratic Party, and even signed the California Constitution as a delegate. He was appointed to the Senate (this was well before the era of direct elections) and thus became the agent for the Chivs in Washington and their leader back in California. The other seat was handed to a charismatic U.S. Army officer who did nothing for the state while in the Senate. And so the Chivs had won this much for slavery.
Gwin was an effective senator and had the power, almost by himself, to distribute all the U.S. patronage in California — offices like U.S. Marshall and Collector of the Port of San Francisco. This was the fount of Democratic Party power in that era, as the vehicle to reward supporters. So Gwin, and thus the Chivs, were set to rule the Democratic Party as it rapidly took shape in California, and especially in San Francisco, which dominated politics and commerce absolutely.
But then, to their surprise, a man appeared from New York City, a Free Soil Democrat born of the Irish working class. This creature was a towering inferno of ambition who understood how urban politics was managed in a way that Southerners could not. We'll dig into David Broderick in other footnotes. For now, we’ll merely notice that his burning hate for slavery and contempt for the genteel pretensions of the Chivalry were the major reasons why the Chivs, despite their dogged persistence, did not succeed in breaking California into two, or cracking any other doors for slavery. The battle between Broderick and Gwin became so personal and heated, and so epitomized the cultural and political divide between Northerners and Southerners in California, that it defined the decade of the 1850's. And when, in 1859, Broderick fell, to the surprise of everyone, duelling with a Southerner, a State Supreme Court Justice, the entire state had been expecting a completely separate duel between Broderick and Gwin, both at that moment U.S. Senators for California. When Lincoln was elected shortly after, and the Southern states commenced secession, no one knew where California would end up, and Gwin himself went back to fight for the Confederacy with many other west coast Chivs.