The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Leonard L. Richards (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2007

It has always been understood that the 1848 discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada influenced the battle over the admission of California to the Union. But now, in this revelatory study, award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards makes clear the links between the Gold Rush and many of the regional crises in the lead-up to the Civil War.

Richards explains how Southerners envisioned California as a new market for slaves and saw themselves importing their own slaves to dig for gold, only to be frustrated by California’s passage of a state constitution that prohibited slavery. Still, they schemed to tie California to the South with a southern-routed transcontinental railroad and worked to split off the southern half as a separate slave state. We see how the Gold Rush influenced the squabbling over the Gadsden Purchase, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and various attempts to take Cuba and Nicaragua. We meet David Broderick, a renegade New York Democrat who became a force in San Francisco politics in 1849, and his archrival William Gwin, a major Mississippi slaveholder and politician who arrived in California with the intent of making it a slave state and himself one of its first senators. Richards recounts the Washington battles involving Taylor, Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Davis, Webster, Fillmore, and others, as well as the fiery California political battles, feuds, duels, and perhaps outright murder as the state came shockingly close to being divided in two.

When war did break out efforts were made to push California to secede, but there was little general enthusiasm for secession, and many prominent Southerners went off to join the Confederate Army. And with the South out of the Union, the Pacific Railroad Act passed, insuring a comfortably northern route.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Richards, a leading historian of 19th-century America (The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams), superbly illuminates gold rush California as a land in contention between national pro- and anti-slavery lobbies in the decade leading up to the Civil War. For Southerners the labor-intensive gold riches to be found in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains seemed custom-made for exploitation by slave labor working for the aggrandizement of whites. Southern men of means also saw California—up until its entrance to the Union as a free state in 1850—as a potentially large new market for slaves. Northern industrialists, on the other hand, sought California as a market for manufactured goods and as a gateway for shipping those goods to the Orient. Richards hones in most productively on the internal and external politics related to the pre-1850 California territory, revealing the intense maneuvering and impassioned rhetoric as the statehood debate proceeded. And he demonstrates how close California came to being cut in two, once Southern senators realized admittance of the territory in its entirety as a slave state was a nonstarter and proposed to "settle" for the fertile valleys to the south, there to start a new slave-holding culture in the West. B&w illus., maps. (Feb. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

After the victory in the Mexican War, both northerners and southerners viewed California as the prize acquisition. With its lush, fertile soil, southerners saw the great agricultural potential, especially if California was open to slavery. Northern merchants envisioned the building of numerous ports and the chance to dominate the China trade. Of course, the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in January 1848 dramatically magnified the hopes and dreams of Americans devoted to "Manifest Destiny." The gold rush launched a sort of national madness that populated the West, turned some into instant millionaires, and others into frozen corpses. As Richards illustrates, it also intensified the hostility between the North and South; at a minimum, it was a contributing factor in causing the Civil War. Richards offers a broad panorama that moves seamlessly from the goldfields to the halls of Congress. This is an excellent work of popular history that will add to the appreciation of a critical epoch in our national development. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition Stated edition (February 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030726520X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307265203
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #489,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not the California History You Learned in School..., February 21, 2007

By 

John M (Lafayette, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (Hardcover)

This was an extremely interesting book that discusses a time period (between the Gold Rush and the outbreak of the Civil War) in California history that has been downplayed.

The book opens with a 1859 dual in San Francisco between David Broderick, California's US Senator, and David Terry, a former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court over slavery-related politics in which Broderick was mortally wounded. It then moves back in time to the discovery of Gold in the Mother Lode and the increasing value of California to the nation. From that point, Richards then demonstrates how political and social tensions became so fierce in California in the 1850's.

The book provides an nice overview of the history of the Gold Rush and then illustrates the surpising number of cross-influences between California and the growing sectional conflict in the nation. It discusses in some detail early California politics in the 1850's and how much it was affected by activist pro-slavery and abolitionist forces. As an example, I was quite surprised the number of times that they proposed dividing California in two - a free Northern half and a pro-slave Southern half. In fact, a proposal to do just that was approved by both the California Assembly and Senate and signed by the Governor in the late 1850's. Only James Buchanan's relcutance to push it forward to avoid antagonizing an increasingly polarized congress stopped it for good.

This is a great book for people interested in California history or people interested in the build up to the Civil War on a national stage. Readers interested in both topics will be especially delighted.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars California's Unknown Political History Between the Gold Rush and the Civil War, March 14, 2007

By 

George Wood (Sweden) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (Hardcover)

Most books about the American Civil War ignore the West. At best they will take up the 1862 Confederate invasion of New Mexico, and perhaps mention that a handful of Confederate troops made it as far west as Tucson.

Otherwise, aside from the Union occupation of New Orleans, Grant's actions in Tennessee and Mississippi, and Sherman's March to the Sea, most books on the conflict concentrate on Lee's campaigns in Virginia and his two invasions of the North. Books about the approach of the war take up the issues of slavery and States' Rights in the context of the politics in the East and the repercussions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The West is not usually discussed. Yet, California's gold helped finance the Union victory, and Californians were deeply involved in the politics that led to the conflict.

Leonard L. Richards, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, tries to redress this imbalance. In this new book he takes up the politics of California, from the entrance of John C. Frémont on the eve of the Mexican War, through the Gold Rush and California's admission as a state, to the 1860 election that led to the war.

Many Northern Californians today often wonder why the state couldn't have been divided into two? The more ecologically-minded north could manage its own water, and the thirsty south would have had to limit its unbridled growth. Richards tells us how the state almost did become divided, several times in fact. The closest division came was in 1858 when the California legislature passed an act to separate the state, creating a Territory of Colorado south of the vicinity of San Luis Obispo. Richards says this was because of a desire among the Mexicans of the south for more self-determination, but they would have never succeeded without the votes of the pro-Southern Democrats in the north who hoped to create a slave state in southern California.

The southern part of the state voted three to one in a referendum in support of the plan, but the US Congress, faced with the approaching Civil War, ignored the proposal. Considering the great interest among many in Congress and the Buchanan Administration in the vain attempt to create a pro-slavery Kansas, their negligence of a much more possible new slave state in southern California is surprising, but by 1858 the Republicans were in the ascendancy and the Democrats were fragmenting.

Against the background of the national debate, Richards describes the local politics in California, a free state dominated by pro-slavery Southerners, highlighted by a famous duel between the pro-slavery Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court and an anti-slavery US Senator. The several plans to create a transcontinental railroad are also described against the background of the slavery issue and the Kansas statehood debate.

My only wish is that the Epilogue, a concise summary of California and California soldiers during the Civil War, should instead have been expanded into several chapters. The book is called "...the Coming of the Civil War" and that's what it is. But when there are so few books that discuss California during the war, it would have been nice if Richards could have written more.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Close Run Thing: California, CSA, April 6, 2007

By 

Rea Andrew Redd "http://civilwarlibrarian.blo... (Pittsburgh, PA metropolitan area) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (Hardcover)

A Close Run Thing: California, CSA
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, Richards, Leonard L., Knopf Publishing, 304 pp., illus., maps, 2007.

Gold Rush! California, like Kansas in the 1850s, was caught between pro- and anti-slavery settlers. To migrating Southerners, the labor-intensive mines in the Sierra Nevada Mountains begged for slave labor. Southern slave holders, who did not migrate to California, viewed Californaia as a new market for slaves. The Mexican state of California became the U.S. state of California through intense political maneuvering, timely military presence, and impassioned hypocritical rhetoric. A 'free state' (wage labor as opposed to slave labor) California narrowly missed being divided, north to south, wage labor and slave labor.

Conversely, Northern migrants envisioned the building of ports which in turn would lead to extensive participation in the China trade. The struggle for California statehood, the divisions within the Democratic Party, the contentious spirit of the American (Know Nothing) Party, the demise of the Whig Party, and the explosive growth of the Republican Party is subperbly described by the author. Slanders, duels, law suits, graft, were a frequent occurrence. In an era when voters received paper ballots at home and then went to the polls, party organization was essential.

The author offers telling details within in the mural of the political, social and economic panorama of California. Richards opens the story with the murder of an Irish Catholic Democratic U.S. Senator and ends the book with the unmourned death of one of the conspirators 20 years later. In the middle of the work, Richards reveals that the senator predicted his own death within a next few months. Seamlessly moving from the Sierra Nevada goldfields to San Fransico, from Panama and to the halls of Congress, and then back again, Professor Richards tells a story of gold and railroads, Mexicans and Anglos, miners and politicians, frontier women and ballroom damsels.

Refreshingly, Richards draws his conclusions hestitantly. He offers no platitudes nor does he reveal an agenda. The reader draws his own conclusions and meanings regarding the Slave Power Conspiracy, Stephen Douglas' quest for a railroad for the West, James Buchanan's activism and paralysis, and John Fremont's reputation and his actual accomplishments. This reader realized how close California was to becoming North California and South California. How may have the Civil War turned out if the North had not received almost $3 million dollars a month during the Civil War from the California gold fields? How may have the war turned out if gold had been king and cotton had been queen of the South?