Chapter 9
In This Chapter
● Picking a fight with a neighbor
● Getting gold fever
● Diversifying the populace
● Dividing a country
In the 1840s, it seemed America had an unscratchable itch for elbowroom. It annexed Texas, quarreled with England over Oregon, and took half a million square miles of real estate away from Mexico. A good part of the nation — and the world, for that matter — came down with Gold Fever, too.
In the 1850s, however, much of the country’s attention was on trying to cure the seemingly incurable disease of slavery without amputating the Union.
Wrenching Land from Mexico
Pres. James K. Polk was a hard worker with a thick hide, which are good traits in a president. He worked 18-hour days, didn’t miss many days at work and was also a goal-oriented guy. One of his goals was to buy California, which would give America a base on two oceans and fulfill its Manifest Destiny to stretch from sea to sea.
But Mexico wasn’t in a selling mood. Mexican leaders were furious at the admission of Texas as a state in December 1845, even though it had been independent from Mexico for almost 10 years. So when Polk sent diplomat James Slidell to Mexico City in late 1845 with an offer to buy California for around $25 million, Mexican leaders refused to even meet with Slidell.
Provoking a war
Polk then decided to take California by force, pushing America into its first war with another country just to gain territory. A young Army lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant called it “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
It took a little prompting to get it started without firing the first shot. Polk sent an “army of observation,” under the command of Gen. Zachary Taylor, to the banks of the Rio Grande River, an area that Mexico considered its territory. The army was gradually built up until there were about 4,000 U.S. troops there in April 1846. Taylor’s soldiers managed to provoke a small attack by Mexican troops, and the war was on.
It wasn’t much of a war. The United States lost 13,000 men, 11,000 of them to disease, and won every single major battle. The Mexican army was badly led, badly equipped, and badly trained. The American army, while sometimes short on supplies because Polk was a penny pincher, was very well led, chiefly by Taylor and Gen. Winfield Scott.
Taylor, whose men called him “Old Rough and Ready” because he was tough (and something of a slob), was a career soldier. So was Scott, whose nickname was “Old Fuss and Feathers” because he had a taste for pomp and showy uniforms. Scott and Taylor were ably supported by West Point-trained officers such as Grant and Capt. Robert E. Lee, as well as other men to whom the Mexican War would prove a training ground for the Civil War 15 years later.
The first major battle, at Palo Alto, gave a taste of what was to come. Taylor led 2,300 soldiers against a Mexican army of 4,500 and routed them. In a follow-up fight, a U.S. force of 1,700 scattered a Mexican force of 7,500. American losses totaled less than 50 men for the two fights; the Mexicans lost more than 1,000.
In fact, the biggest American worry was that it might have to fight Britain at the same time over a dispute in the Northwest. American officials insisted that a boundary line between America and Canada be drawn at latitude 54 degrees, 40 minutes (which would have given the United States Vancouver, British Columbia). A slogan from Polk’s campaign, “54-40 or fight” became popular with some of the more pugnacious members of Congress. But in July 1846, the two sides agreed to compromise at 49 degrees.
Capturing California and the Southwest
The United States then turned its full attention to acquiring California, which was rather easily captured. Many of the Mexicans in California considered themselves “Californios” first and weren’t overly concerned about a U.S. takeover.
In Mexico, meanwhile, U.S. forces kept their undefeated streak going. Mexican forces were now commanded by Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna of Alamo infamy. Santa Anna, who had been in exile in Cuba, talked U.S. officials into helping him sneak back into Mexico, where he promised he would sell his country out. Once there, he promptly took over command of the army and vowed to crush the hated Yankees.
In September 1846, Taylor’s troops took the city of Monterrey, Mexico. In March 1847, Scott captured the fortified seaport of Vera Cruz after a three-week siege. And in September 1847, his forces captured Mexico City, all but ending the war.
The formalities were contained in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It gave America more than 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory (see Figure 9-1), including California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado. Mexico dropped claims to Texas. Perhaps to soothe a guilty conscience, Polk agreed to pay Mexico $18.25 million, about 80 percent of what he offered before the war.
Not everyone was thrilled. In Congress, a gangly representative from Illinois named Abe Lincoln attacked the war as unjust aggression. In Massachusetts, the contrary writer Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because the money might be used to support the war. His aunt paid it for him after he spent only one night in jail, but the essay that came out of it, “Civil Disobedience,” became a handbook for non-violent protestors and passive resistance demonstrators around the world well into the next century.
Much of the dissent about the war stemmed not just from being uncomfortable about picking on Mexico, but also from fears that the war was designed to acquire more territory for the spread of slavery. “They just want Californy / So’s to lug new slave states in / To abuse ye and to scorn ye / And to plunder ye like sin,” wrote poet James Russell Lowell in 1848. But even as Lowell wrote, another, richer reason was lying on the bottom of a California river.
Figure 9-1: Territory won from Mexico.
Rushing for Gold
On the chilly morning of January 24, 1848, a man looked down into a sawmill ditch off the American River, about 40 miles east of Sacramento, California, (or 120 miles east of Yerba Buena, which soon became known as San Francisco). The man, a dour carpenter from New Jersey named James Marshall, saw a pea-shaped dollop of yellow metal glinting in the gravel.
“Boys,” Marshall told the group of laborers who were helping build the sawmill, “By God, I believe I have found a gold mine.”
What he had really found was the ignition switch for one of the most massive migrations in human history: the California Gold Rush. It was quite literally a rush, as soon as the news got out. That took awhile. Although rumors of the find surfaced in the East not long after Marshall’s discovery, no one paid much attention. Then President Polk announced in December 1848 that there looked to be enough gold in California to pay for the costs of the Mexican War many times over. That made people sit up and take notice.
Risking life and limb to strike gold
More than 90,000 people made their way to California in the two years following the first discovery and more than 300,000 by 1854 — or one of about every 90 people then living in the United States. The stampede ripped families apart and stripped towns of a large percentage of their young men. Not all the prospectors were American. An 1850 census showed that 25 percent of those counted were from countries as far away as Australia and China.
It wasn’t easy getting there. From the East Coast, one could take a 15,000-mile, five-month voyage around the tip of South America. More than 500 ships made the voyage in 1849 alone. You could also cut across the Isthmus of Panama and take two months off the trip, if you were willing to risk cholera and malaria. By land, the 2,200-mile journey from trailheads in Missouri or Iowa might take three or four months — with a lot of luck.
Some of those who came were already famous, like explorer and soldier John C. Fremont, who got rich when a land agent bought him property in the foothills rather than along the ocean where Fremont wanted to buy — and the foothills land proved to be drenched in gold. Some became famous later, like the New York butcher who made enough money from a meat shop in the Gold Rush metropolis of Hangtown to open a meatpacking plant in Milwaukee. His name was Phillip Armour.
History recalls them as the 49ers, because the first big year of the Gold Rush was 1849. They called themselves Argonauts, after the mythical Greek heroes who sailed in the Argo with Jason to search for the Golden Fleece. Most of them found nothing but disappointment, and many found death.
With few women to add a touch of civilization and balance, and no government, it was a pretty rough place. In just one July week in 1850 in a town called Sonora, two Massachusetts men had their throats slit, a Chilean was shot to death in a gunfight, and a Frenchman stabbed a Mexican to death. The town of Marysville had 17 murders in one week, and at the height of the Gold Rush, San Francisco averaged two murders a day.
A miner making $8 a day (about $205 in 2007 dollars) was doing eight times better than his coal-mining counterpart in the East. But prices were outrageous, too. A loaf of bread that cost 4 cents in New York cost 75 cents in the goldfields. All in all, most gold seekers weren’t any better off than laborers in the rest of the country.
What was worse, many of the diggers had always believed in the American adage that working hard would bring success. Finding gold, America learned, depended a lot more on luck than good intentions. Of course, there were other ways to find gold than digging for it. Men like Collis Huntington,
Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, and Mark Hopkins — who became known as California’s “Big Four” — made fortunes selling miners supplies and then branching into other pursuits such as banks and eventually railroads.
But there was gold, and plenty of it. During the Civil War alone, California produced more than $170 million worth of bullion, which helped prop up wartime Union currency.
The Gold Rush had other impacts as well. Although many of the 49ers came and left after a relatively short stay, many of them stuck around. From a non-Native American population of about 18,000 in January 1848, California grew to a resident population of 165,000 within three years. San Francisco became a booming U.S. port and doorway to the Pacific. The growth and importance of the state also helped spur long-delayed congressional approval of the proposal for a transcontinental railroad.
Eventually the state was to become a magnet for different kinds of gold rushes. The beginning of the aerospace industry, Hollywood, the beginnings of the computer age in Silicon Valley, and the birth of the biotechnology industry all had California roots. But before all that could happen, it had to become a state.
Compromising on the slavery issue
Zachary Taylor was probably the least political of all American presidents. He served 40 years in the U.S. Army but never held any other office before being elected president. In fact, he had never even voted in a presidential election. But the popularity of “Old Rough and Ready” carried him to the White House in the 1848 election after Polk lived up to his promise not to seek a second term.
Taylor had expressed no opinions during the campaign about the hottest issue of the time, slavery, and had no plans for what to do about all that land he had just helped take from Mexico. At the time, the country was equally, if uneasily, divided into 15 free and 15 slave states. So when California asked to be admitted as a state, the debate raged on which side it should fall. Its own constitution banned slavery, mostly on the practical grounds that gold miners didn’t want to compete with slaves digging for their masters. The president agreed.
Those aging giants of Congress, Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, urged yet another compromise approach, which eventually became the Compromise of 1850. But Taylor was adamant that California be admitted without delay as a free state. Southerners, led by their own aging giant, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, were just as adamantly opposed. Representatives from nine southern states met in Nashville in June 1850 to consider leaving the Union if California was made a free state.
Fortunately for everyone but himself, Taylor helped solve the problem by suddenly dying of typhoid fever. His successor, a pliable fellow from New York named Millard Fillmore, was much more agreeable to a compromise. Pushed by the last great speeches given by Clay and Webster, and with the help of a U.S. Senate newcomer from Illinois named Stephen Douglas, a deal was reached.
The Compromise of 1850 consisted of a series of five bills. California was admitted as a free state; New Mexico and Utah were admitted as territories, with the slavery question to be settled later; Texas received $10 million for land it gave the new territory of New Mexico; the slave trade was abolished in Washington, D.C.; and a fugitive slave law was approved that made it much easier for slave owners to recapture escaped slaves by getting federal help.
The Fugitive Slave Law put all African Americans at risk, because all a slave owner had to do was sign a paper saying the person was an escaped slave, show it to a federal magistrate, and slap the chains on. Although only a few hundred African Americans were victims of the law, it outraged many Northerners, and anti-slavery resentment grew. But talk of dissolving the Union died down. For the last time, a compromise worked. Clay, Calhoun, and Webster would all be dead before it fell apart.
Coming Over and Spreading Out
One thing you could say with certainty in the middle of the nineteenth century was that there sure were a lot more Americans than there were when the century started. The country’s population in 1860 was 31.4 million, nearly four times more than it had been a half-century before. Of the world’s predominantly white nations, only France, Russia, and Austria had larger populations.
Many of the new Americans had been born elsewhere. The number of immigrants to America in 1830 was about 25,000. In 1855, the number was closer to 450,000. They came from as close as Mexico and Canada and as far away as China and Japan. When they got here, they tended to stay with their fellow expatriates, where the language, food, and culture were more familiar, creating mini-nations.
They also increasingly stayed in cities, even if they had come from a farm background. In 1840, there were 10 Americans living on farms to every 1 that lived in a town. By 1850, that ratio was 5 to 1, and many of the new city dwellers were from foreign shores.
The Germans, the Irish, and the Know-Nothings who opposed them
The parts of the cities they dwelled in were usually like something from a horror movie: dark, smelly, filthy, and violent. Many of the immigrants were so appalled that reality didn’t match their glittering visions of America that they went back home.
Because of the glut of people wanting any kind of a job when they got here, wages in the largest cities were pitifully low. In 1851, New York newspaperman Horace Greeley estimated it took a minimum of $10.37 a week to support a family of five, and that didn’t include money for medical needs or recreation. The average factory worker, laboring six days a week for 10 or 11 hours a day might make $5 a week, which meant everyone in the family had to do something to make ends meet.
Because they were newcomers and because most native-born Americans still lived in smaller towns or on farms, there was little appetite for reforms or cleaning up the cities. That wouldn’t come until the number of immigrants got even larger and middle-class Americans became more affected by it.
And still they came, from 600,000 immigrants in the 1830s to 1.7 million in the 1840s to 2.6 million in the 1850s. More than 70 percent of the immigrants between 1840 and 1860 were from just two areas in Europe: Ireland and the German states.
For the Irish, it was come or starve. A fungus all but wiped out Ireland’s potato crop in 1845, and there was a widespread famine. So more than 1.5 million Irish scraped up the $10 or $12 one-way fare and piled into America-bound ships for an often hellish two-week trip in a cargo hold.
Many of the ships had brought Southern cotton to Britain, and in a way they were bringing back the North’s cash crop — cheap labor to work in factories and build railroads.
Many of the Irish settled in New York City or Boston. Politically savvy, they served first as soldiers for the big-city political machines and then as bosses. Even so, they were harshly discriminated against in many places, and “N.I.N.A.” signs hung in many employers’ windows. It stood for “No Irish Need Apply.”
Almost as many Germans as Irish came during this period, although they were more likely to spread out. The Germans also came because of food shortages or other tough economic conditions. But many decided to come after efforts failed to throw off despotic rule in the various German states in the late 1840s. Generally better off financially and better educated than other immigrant groups (they brought the idea of “kindergarten,” or “children’s garden,” with them), many Germans pushed away from the Eastern cities to the Midwest, especially Wisconsin.
The rise in immigration also increased anti-immigrant feeling, especially in areas where the newcomers were competing with people born in America for jobs. In 1849, an organization surfaced called the Nativists. They were better known as the Know-Nothing Party, because members supposedly replied, “I know nothing” when asked by outsiders what was going on at their meetings. The Know-Nothings demanded an end to immigration, a prohibition on non-natives voting or holding office, and restrictions on Roman Catholics.
The Know-Nothings made a lot of noise for awhile. Renamed the American Party, they attracted more than 1 million members by 1855 and managed to elect several governors and scores of congressmen. Their 1856 presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, who as a Whig had been vice president under Taylor and served as president from 1850 to 1853 after Taylor died in office, even managed to carry one state, Maryland. But the Know-Nothings faded away as the Civil War approached, torn apart by differences between Northern and Southern members over the dividing issue of slavery.
Making Waves: The Mormons
Although one of the Know-Nothings’ chief targets had been Roman Catholics, Americans in the mid-nineteenth century were generally a pretty tolerant bunch when it came to religion. About three-fourths of them were regular churchgoers, and there were so many denominations that no one church dominated. By 1860, almost every state had repealed laws against Jews or Catholics holding public office, and the question “What can you do?” was more prevalent than “How do you worship?”
Of course, try telling that to a Mormon in 1846. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints began in 1830 with the publication of the Book of Mormon by a New York man named Joseph Smith. To escape persecutions, Smith moved his headquarters to Ohio, and then Missouri and then to Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi. Nauvoo became one of the most thriving cities in the state.
But the Mormons’ habits of working hard, sticking to themselves, and having more than one wife at a time seemed to irk outsiders, and the persecutions began again. This time Smith and his brother were killed by a mob, and Mormon leaders decided they needed some distance between themselves and the rest of America.
Led by a strong and capable lieutenant of Smith’s, Brigham Young, the Mormons moved west, many of them pushing two-wheeled carts for hundreds of miles. Finally, they settled in the Great Salt Lake Basin, a forbidding region in Utah that most other people thought of as uninhabitable. Establishing a rather rigidly run society and economic system, the Mormons thrived. By 1848, there were 5,000 living in the area, many of them Europeans who had been converted by Mormon missionaries.
Many of the Mormons fought in the Mexican War as a way of “earning” what had been Mexican territory. In 1850, Utah became a territory. But its statehood was delayed for almost 50 years, in part because of the Mormons’ refusal until then to drop their practice of multiple wives, or polygamy.
Wagons ho!
Although it’s often attributed to Horace Greeley, it was actually Indiana journalist John B. Soule who advised in 1850, “Go west, young man, go west!”
He was a little late. Even before the Gold Rush, Americans in ever-increasing numbers were moving west. Despite the awesome dangers and hardships, settlers piled their belongings into a fortified farm wagon and started out, mostly from St. Joseph or Independence in Missouri.
Some of them stopped on the Great Plains of Kansas and Nebraska, while others pushed on to the West Coast. By 1846, 5,000 Americans had settled in the Willamette Valley in the Oregon Territory, and by 1859, the territory had become a state. America’s Manifest Destiny was being achieved.
Becoming aware of women's rights (or the lack thereof)
As more and more women got involved in the fight over slavery, many of them came to resent how, in many ways, they were also second-class Americans. Like slaves, women couldn’t vote, they couldn’t retain their property when they got married, and they could legally be beaten by their husbands.
Leaders, such as Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, began to publicly demand more rights. In 1848, feminists met at Seneca Falls, New York, at a women’s rights convention. Stanton read a declaration of sentiments that paraphrased the declaration Thomas Jefferson had written 72 years before: “All men and women are created equal.”
Although some states began allowing women to keep their own property after marriage and some colleges began admitting women in the 1840s, the feminist crusade was overshadowed by the fight over slavery. For many of their rights, women would have to wait.
The Beginning of the End
The issue of slavery not only overshadowed the women’s movement, it overshadowed virtually every part of American life. The Methodist and Baptist churches split into North-South factions because of it. Families with branches in the North and South stopped speaking to each other. It even strained business relations in a country where hardly anything got in the way of making a dollar.
And it was showing no signs of going away by itself. Despite a federal ban on importing slaves, the slave population grew from 3.2 million in 1850 to almost 4 million in 1860, almost all of it through childbirths. Adult slaves who could put in a full day’s work had become so expensive that some Southerners had begun calling for an end to the ban on new slaves from Africa.
Factoring a slave's life
Actually, about 75 percent of Southern families didn’t even own any slaves. But even nonslave owners defended slavery. Slaves received the benefits of being exposed to the Christian religion, of having cradle-to-grave shelter and food, and of being a contributing part of Southern society. That was more, they said, than many Northern factory workers could say. (Of course, that ignored the fact that even the most miserable factory worker could still make his own choices as to where he worked, didn’t have to submit to beatings from his employer, and wasn’t very likely to see his wife and children taken from him and sold off to some other state.)
Proslavery forces also pointed out that slaves were actually well treated if they behaved. “Negroes are too high [priced] in proportion to the price of cotton,” explained a slave owner in 1849, “and it behooves those who own them to make them last as long as possible.” And, slavery’s defenders said, what would the nation do with them if all the slaves were freed?
That was a question that stopped many Northerners who did oppose slavery but did not agree with the abolitionists’ demand for an immediate end to it. In 1854, Abraham Lincoln, who was then in private practice as a lawyer, admitted, “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing situation.”
But Lincoln and others balked at the idea of slavery being allowed to spread, and that’s what the fighting was about.
Battling in Kansas
The South wanted a railroad, Kansas and Nebraska wanted to be states, and the combination of wants caused even more troubles. Spurred by the California Gold Rush and westward expansion, Congress was getting ready to decide on a route for a transcontinental railroad.
The route that made the most sense, and the route the South wanted, started in New Orleans and moved across Texas before ending up in San Diego. It was the shortest route and went most of the way through already organized states or territories. But Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was pressing hard for a central route, starting in Chicago. Douglas owned a lot of real estate in the area and stood to make a sizeable chunk of cash if the trains ran through his property. Trouble was his route went through land that had been given to the Native Americans. (See Chapter 12 for more on the railroads.)
So Douglas pushed a bill through Congress that organized the area into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. To win Southern support, his bill also repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which would have prevented slavery in the new territories. Instead, it said the people of Kansas and Nebraska should decide for themselves, a process he called popular sovereignty.
The North seethed with anger. Douglas was burned in effigy all around the North and ripped in the press. Nebraska proved to be too far north to attract much proslavery interest. But Kansas became a warm-up for the Civil War. Antislavery forces clashed with proslavery forces, and both sides were guilty of terrorism and guerilla warfare.
One of the effects of Douglas’s bill was to kill off the Whig Party, whose leaders were wishy-washy on the whole subject. In its place came the Republican Party, which was strongly against the spread of slavery. In 1856, the Republicans ran John C. Fremont, a famous explorer and military man, against the Democrats’ James Buchanan, a former Pennsylvania congressman and secretary of state, who had Southern sympathies. Buchanan, a heavy man with tiny feet and almost no backbone, won. He proved to be nearly worthless as president.
Making a “dredful” decision
Dred Scott was a slave who was temporarily taken by his master to Illinois, which was a free state. When they returned to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom, claiming that his time in Illinois, on free soil, made him an ex-slave.
But the seven Southern members of the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, found against Scott in 1857. The court decided that as an African American, Scott wasn’t a U.S. citizen and, thus, had no right to sue; that as a Missouri resident, Illinois laws didn’t apply to him; and that as a slave, he was property, just like a mule, and the government had no right to deprive his master of property without a good reason. The decision absolutely infuriated people in the North. The court’s contention that Scott had no more rights than a mule caused many moderate Northerners to take a harder look at the true injustice of slavery.
The decision, along with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, also added greatly to business on the Underground Railroad, the name given to a network of abolitionists in the North and South who worked together to get escaped slaves to freedom, often in Canada. It’s estimated that the system, which involved “conductors” and “stations,” or hiding places, helped from 50,000 to 100,000 people with their escape.
Squaring Off for a Showdown: The Lincotn-Dougtas Debate
In 1858, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of seven debates as part of their race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. It was a classic confrontation. Douglas, the incumbent, was barely 5 feet tall, with a big head made larger by his pompadour hairstyle. He was resplendent in finely tailored suits and arrived for the debates in a private railroad car. Lincoln was 6 feet 4 inches, with a homely face topped by a shock of unruly hair. He wore ill-fitting suits that stopped well short of his wrists and ankles and arrived for the debates on whatever passenger train was available.
Their debate strategies were simple. Douglas tried to make Lincoln look like an abolitionist, which he wasn’t, and Lincoln tried to make Douglas look like he was proslavery, which he wasn’t. But they did have a fundamental disagreement on what the eventual outcome of slavery would be.
Douglas won the election, but Lincoln won a national reputation. In the meantime, the country edged closer to a final showdown, needing only a spark to set off the firestorm. It got two.
Spark number 1: John Brown
John Brown was an Ohio abolitionist who was crazier than an outhouse rat. He believed he had been commanded by God to free the slaves, and he went about it by killing people in the Kansas fighting. On October 16, 1859, Brown led a group of 18 white and black men on a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. After killing the mayor and taking some hostages, Brown’s gang was surrounded by militia and U.S. troops under the command of Capt. Robert E. Lee. Brown and five others were captured, and the rest killed. After a trial, Brown was hanged. Many Southerners were convinced Brown had done what a lot of Northerners wanted to do; many Northerners considered him a martyr to a noble cause.
Spark number 2: Lincoln's election
Lincoln, now a national figure, was nominated by the young Republican Party as its 1860 presidential candidate, mostly because they thought he would appeal to the North and the West. The Democrats were split, however, by the slavery issue. Douglas was the official nominee, but a splinter group supported Buchanan’s vice president, John Breckenridge of Tennessee. Still a fourth group of moderates, called the Union Party, supported John Bell of Kentucky.
When the votes were in, Lincoln had won less than a majority of the popular vote, but easily won the electoral vote and was the new president. Before he could take office, however, seven Southern states had already pulled out of the Union. Buchanan did nothing to try to stop them, and once the fighting started, they were followed by four more.
As the sun rose on the morning of April 12, 1861, secessionist guns fired on Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. America’s Civil War had begun.