CHAPTER SIX

Gateways to the West

But these and all, and the brown and spreading land, and the mines below, are ours,

And the shores of the sea are ours, and the rivers great and small …

—WALT WHITMAN,

“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (1860–61)

Lower Carson River, Nevada Territory, May 1861

THEY MUST HAVE GLIMPSED one another sometime during that week, at some unrecorded point along the Central Overland Trail. Perhaps it was here, at a bend in the sluggish stream. Perhaps the mule drivers paused in their labor and watched the thing coming toward them: a shimmer against the dull, flat sky that resolved itself, quickly, into a horseman. A horseman, truly; for what approached them seemed no ordinary rider and mount but a compound creature, a man-beast out of some bygone millennium. It rushed on in a clatter of hooves, nimbly dodging among stray boulders, headlong and heedless. In the instant it took to pass them, they could see the hunched man-shoulders and the rippling horse-shoulders, the two faces straining forward, nostrils flared, ghost-white with alkali dust from the flats farther east. And then the apparition was gone.¹

The rider, for his own part, barely saw the sunburnt men, the straining mules, or their strange burden: pale, stripped carcasses of aspen and pine, hauled from some distant wooded place into this treeless desert. Mules, men, and tree trunks were obstructions, no more. For him there was only the trail ahead and the animal that strained and swerved between his clenching thighs, thighs that gripped a flat pouch of mail against the saddle as his mind gripped only one thought: westward.

That is how they may have met, two eras brushing past, never touching: the Pony Express and the Western Union Telegraph Company.

Never touching, at least, until a few miles farther on, at Fort Churchill. Here the rider slackened his pace, reining in as he passed the sentry and cantered through the main gate. This was a fresh-built fort, its adobe bricks barely dry. The army had constructed it the summer before, after an ugly clash between the white men and the Paiutes: a lonely outcrop of federal power in a lawless land. For the past few months, Fort Churchill had enjoyed another distinction: it was the Pacific Coast telegraph’s easternmost terminus, though it would not remain so for much longer.²

Now, at least, it was where the horseman handed his flat leather pouch to the operator, who quickly extracted its most precious contents and began tapping the key with his expert finger. In San Francisco, the next day’s headlines would begin with words familiar to every reader: BY MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH. BY PONY EXPRESS. LATEST EASTERN INTELLIGENCE. And then a terse summary of that leather pouch’s most important contents: Thirty-one thousand troops are now in Washington, ultimate destinations still unknown. All work on public buildings at the capital is suspended. In Baltimore, prorebel militia have seized six thousand muskets from the state armory. In St. Louis, an inquest convenes to examine the bodies of those killed in recent clashes.³

Without ceremony, the telegraphist handed back the pouch, the rider threw it across the saddle of a fresh mount, swung himself on top and was off again still westward, his precious cargo clutched again between his thighs: terse business letters from New York and Baltimore, minutely penned political dispatches from Washing-ton, reports on the latest Eastern prices of California bonds and California bullion. There was little room for anecdote or sentiment in a Pony Express pouch; each half ounce of mail cost its sender a five-dollar gold piece plus surcharges, and each rider could carry only ten pounds. Recipients slit open envelopes with a surgeon’s care and extracted leaves as thin as tissue paper, still smelling of sweat and dust and leather.⁴

Back up the trail at the river bend, the men and mules, too, had resumed their labor. Like the passing horseman, they had little time to spare. They carried with them, eastward, the promise of a future without ponies, without pouches, without onionskin paper. Only electrical impulses: weightless, instantaneous, smelling of nothing.

Congress had opened the way the previous summer, by enacting the Pacific Telegraph Act. This was guided discreetly to passage by a certain private gentleman from the East, Mr. Hiram Sibley of New York, who proved quite expert at ducking and running amid the legislative fusillades of sectional conflict, emerging safely downfield with the only major legislation of that entire miserable year.⁵ He had strong incentives to succeed. The final version of the act offered a federal subsidy of up to $40,000, along with other valuable considerations, to any company completing a transcontinental line within two years. Competing bids were invited; rival consortia formed. When the deadline for bids arrived in September, however, it appeared that all except one had been unexpectedly withdrawn at the last minute. That lone bid—asking the maximum subsidy, of course—happened to be in the name of Mr. Hiram Sibley of New York.⁶

Why all the competition withdrew was a mystery perhaps known only to Mr. Sibley and his business partners. These were not men who felt particularly constrained by the rules of gentlemanly fair play. Indeed, they were exactly the type of hard-fisted Yankees that Southerners were always complaining about. Several years earlier, for instance, they had set their eye on the New Orleans & Ohio line, the most profitable in the South. One of Mr. Sibley’s associates had shown up in Louisville, the northern terminus, and word quickly spread among the N.O.&O.’s owners that this Yankee interloper was scouting out the terrain, pricing poles, wiring coded messages to New York—in other words, clearly laying the groundwork for a rival line. In a cold panic, the Southerners signed a contract with Sibley for a relative pittance, effectively ceding him control of their company. It emerged later that the coded messages to New York had been mere gibberish; the whole “rival line” a ruse. And thus the N.O.&O. network had, like so many others, tumbled into the omnivorous maw of the Western Union.⁷

Still, whatever else you might say about Hiram Sibley and his ilk, they certainly knew how to get things done. Within weeks of receiving the Pacific telegraph contract, he had agents fanning out across the West. Lincoln had been elected; the South had seceded; Sibley barely noticed, except insofar as these developments might aid or impede his business plans. Via stagecoach and mule, his envoys set out to secure the friendship of useful men along the planned route: Brigham Young, Chief Sho-kup of the Shoshones, the governor of California. (These agents offered the Mormons lucrative contracts for supplying poles, along with a generous personal loan to Brother Brigham; they offered the Shoshones gifts of food and clothing. What they offered the governor of California, if anything, is unclear.)⁸

The new line would follow an established route, the Central Overland Trail. It was the exact route, in fact, of the Pony Express, across the desert wastes and mountain passes of Utah and Nevada and over the Sierra Nevada into California. Not many years earlier, this country had been considered impassable wilderness. In the winter of 1844, the great Pathfinder himself, John C. Frémont, was hailed as the first white man to cross the Sierra when he and his band of explorers turned up, famished and half naked, on the western side. Two years later, the Donner party met its gruesome fate trying to follow in his tracks, and for a decade after, few others dared to try. But at the very end of the 1850s, private entrepreneurs and military engineers laid out and graded a new trail. By 1861, it had become a busy highway, the quickest and shortest overland route to California. Where frontiersmen had died in a trackless desert, fast stagecoaches now rumbled to and fro, carrying passengers, mail, and even a few tourists. Emigrant wagons passed by the thousands, their occupants pleasantly surprised to find the route lined with trading posts, grog shops, army hospitals, post offices, even hotels. Bridges and ferry crossings spanned the newly tamed rivers.⁹

That was how things were in the West as the Civil War began. Everywhere, it seemed, the Hiram Sibleys and their money were rushing in, along with throngs of lesser entrepreneurs—all those sutlers, tavern keepers, stagecoach owners, and ferrymen. Together, these ruthless and ambitious seekers were changing the continent, connecting city to city and town to town, drawing lines across the blankness of the country.

Indeed, Sibley’s own ambitions went beyond the continent, beyond even the hemisphere. His transcontinental telegraph was only the beginning. Soon, he hoped, he would continue the line up the Pacific coast, through Russian Alaska, and across Bering’s Strait, where he would connect with the czar’s engineers running their own line east from Moscow. Beyond Moscow: Berlin, Paris, London. Hiram Sibley was going to wire the world.¹⁰

And so it was that on May 27, 1861, a train of more than two hundred oxen, twenty-six wagons, and fifty men set out from Sacramento, onto the Central Overland Trail and across the Sierra, laden with coils of high-grade copper wire and crates of glass insulators shipped from back East. Hundreds of contractors had preceded them—those mule drivers along the Carson, for instance—to scour remote valleys for pole material. The route itself was mostly treeless, but they dragged trunks dozens or even hundreds of miles to it: the mighty Western Union bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.¹¹

A few weeks later, at Fort Churchill, they raised the first pole, to the top of which they had nailed an American flag. Tossing hats into the air, the men hailed this moment with a chorus of huzzas: three cheers for the telegraph and three cheers for the Union.¹²

“THERE ARE GRAVE DOUBTS at the hugeness of the land and whether one government can comprehend the whole.”¹³

So wrote Henry Adams in 1861, fretting over whether the sundered Union could—or even should—be restored. But young Adams, though he may have been to Naples and dined with Garibaldi, had never seen Nevada or supped with the likes of Hiram Sibley, let alone with sutlers and stagecoach drivers. (He had rarely been west of Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually.) He and many other Easterners knew little, really, of what the Union was—of what it had become. It had grown and changed too quickly. And a large share of that growth and change was happening beyond the Mississippi.

The West was also the chessboard in the Great Game between North and South. For decades, each new expansion of the country had set off a flurry of tactical moves: advances, flanking maneuvers, sometimes grudging withdrawals. Each new line across the map—whether territorial boundary, national road, railway, or telegraph route—threatened to redraw the entire board, or so it often seemed. Sometimes the slave-state interests advanced; sometimes the free-state. More often, as with so much in the antebellum years, each set of moves ended in a carefully negotiated stalemate.

Recently, however, the game had seemed to tilt decisively toward the North. Eighteen sixty was a federal census year, and the results had begun coming in early that autumn—with exquisitely poor timing, as far as Southern paranoia was concerned.¹⁴ Preliminary figures confirmed what many suspected: that immigration and westward expansion were shifting the country’s centers of population and balance of power. Since the last count, in 1850, the North’s population had increased an astonishing 41 percent, while the South’s had grown only 27 percent. States like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois would each be gaining multiple seats in Congress; Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee would be losing some. Tellingly, the statistical center of national population had shifted for the first time not only west of the original thirteen states but also from slave territory into free: from Virginia to Ohio. (The New York Herald did find at least one source of comfort for the South: the paper’s statistician declared it “very certain” that the nation’s slave population would reach fifty million by the year 1960.)¹⁵

Southern leaders did not lack for an expansionist strategy of their own in the years before the war. The more radical among them spoke of spreading American dominion through Latin America and the Caribbean, forming dozens of new slave states. The filibusters, as we have seen, even took matters into their own hands. In fact, there were occasional successes—and splendid ones—as when Southern planters moved into the Mexican state of Texas, eventually to take it over and annex it to the United States. The ensuing war added vast new territory to the southern half of the country, and many assumed that slavery would be legal there.

Nor did the South lack its own Hiram Sibleys, its own tough and resourceful breed of capitalists. But its Sibleys, by and large, did not invest in building railroads and telegraph lines: instead, they bought slaves and cleared new land for cotton.

All too often, the most visionary schemes for the West ended up stalled endlessly in Congress, victims of sectional infighting. Such was the case with the transcontinental railroad, an idea that had been under discussion for twenty years. Each time it came up for debate, Northerners refused to approve a Southern route and Southerners refused to approve a Northern route. When Congress did finally vote to fund a survey, it reached a compromise by sending out five separate expeditions to find suitable pathways at five different latitudes. Not surprisingly, the man who supervised this entire process—Secretary of War Jefferson Davis—was able to recommend the southernmost one, fudging a bit of data to support his argument. (Davis had already managed to orchestrate a major U.S. land acquisition from Mexico—the Gadsden Purchase—to serve as a southern corridor.)^* Not surprisingly, Northern congressmen balked at this, and by the end of the 1850s, the rail line to the Pacific was still nothing more than a figment of the American imagination.¹⁶

As anxious as Southerners were to extend slavery through the Union’s new states and territories, Northerners were anxious to contain it. The Hiram Sibleys may not have cared much about the plight of the poor downtrodden Negroes, but their own financial interests did demand a West that was free, open, modern, untrammeled—a place, in short, where Yankees could do business. They were damned if they were going to let the Southern oligarchs, with their canting talk of chivalry and their pretensions to aristocratic grandeur, stand in their way.

Now, in early 1861, the game had suddenly changed. It would be played in Congress no longer: the Southerners had called forfeit and gone home in a huff. Already, in the first few months of that year, Kansas had been admitted as a free state and Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada as free territories. An Illinois railroad lawyer was in the White House, and everyone expected that the long-blocked pathway to the Pacific would soon be open for business.

As the Civil War began, a new game opened on the chessboard of the West. There were two key places where it might be won or lost: one on the shores of the Pacific, the other on the banks of the Mississippi. It would be decided in one of these places with words; in the other, with guns.

FROM HER VERANDA, the Pathfinder’s wife watched the sun vanish between the two great western headlands, leaving America behind until next dawn. She loved this place more than any other that she had ever known, either on this continent or in her wide travels abroad. Her quaint Gothic cottage commanded all of Black Point, the finest spot on the whole bay, with dark thickets of scrub oak and laurel covering steep hillsides that sloped down to a sandy beach. She had recently built the porch around three sides of the house, laid out gardens and gravel paths, and planted climbing rosebushes and trellised vines. She took joy even in the tolling of the fog bells on oceanbound vessels, and in the night beacon that flashed on the harbor fort: “my night light,” she called it. When the wind was off the bay, she claimed, she could hear the flapping of sails on the schooners as they rounded the point, and the swearing of captains pacing their decks.¹⁷

But Jessie Benton Frémont could also look out at this wide, God-given landscape and almost believe that she and her family had brought it all into being, had conjured the ships and the fort and the bay—and a prospering American city whose growth was the marvel of the entire world—as surely as she had planted the clambering roses.

Her father, the legendary Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, had fought for three decades in Congress to advance his vision of a transcontinental American empire, the grand historical culmination that Providence and nature had foreordained. As long ago as 1818, he had written:

Europe discharges her inhabitants upon America; America pours her population from east to west.… All obey the same impulse—that of going to the West, which, from the beginning of time, has been the course of the heavenly bodies, of the human race, and of science, civilization, and national power following in their train. Soon the Rocky Mountains will be passed, and the “children of Adam” will have completed their circumnavigation of the globe.¹⁸

After the American imperium had extended itself to the shores of the Pacific, he said, it would reach farther yet, to East Asia, as “science, liberal principles in government, and the true religion … cast their lights across the intervening sea,” while the newly liberated masses of China and Japan poured forth eastward, in turn, to settle the valley of the Columbia River. This empire, Benton said, would advance not by military conquest but by peaceful commerce, bringing in train universal principles of enlightenment. The senator championed his cause with all the tenacity and toughness to be expected of a man who had once gotten into a gunfight with Andrew Jackson, and had slain another opponent in a duel with pistols at three yards.¹⁹

Jessie’s husband, Colonel John C. Frémont, had—in the eyes of many Americans—made her father’s dream a reality. From the upper Mississippi to the southwestern deserts, he had mapped a quarter of the North American continent, gathering a wealth of geographical and scientific knowledge that made Lewis and Clark’s contributions look meager in comparison. He had opened highways to the Pacific, and planted the Stars and Stripes on the highest peak in the Rockies.²⁰ He had led United States forces into California and captured the state for the Union. He had reached the wild shore of this bay, looked out at those very headlands that his wife now gazed at from her porch, and given the rocky portal a name: the Golden Gate.

Jessie Frémont took perhaps even greater pride in being the human link between the dream and the land; the senator and the soldier. In many respects, she was more remarkable than either of the two men. Jessie had inherited all of her father’s toughness or even more: President Buchanan once called her, admiringly or not, “the square root of Tom Benton.” She had a cooler head and sharper wits than the old senator, though—and was a more brilliant politician, philosopher, and strategist than her soldier husband. A better writer, too: she had taken the dry data of the colonel’s expeditions and crafted them into literary epics of the American West, official government reports that became best sellers and made her husband a national hero.^* (Some even went so far as to say that Jessie Frémont had made her husband what he was.) Her own vision of the West—unlike her father’s baroque fantasies—was clean, compelling, and modern. “How can I tell all that the name, California, represents?” she once wrote, reflecting on her time there before the war. “If our East has a life of yesterday, and the [Midwest] of to-day, then here to-morrow had come.… What a dream of daring young energy—of possibility—of certainties—of burdens dropped and visions realized!”²¹

Burdens dropped and visions realized. Senator Benton and the two Frémonts were all Southerners, from slaveholding families, who had reinvented themselves as Westerners and in the process had become foes of slavery. How could human bondage coexist with the Western dream? The old man, though he owned slaves until the day he died, had made no secret of his distaste for the “peculiar institution,” and ultimately sacrificed his political career to his conscience.²² His daughter went considerably further. In 1849, California’s new territorial legislature debated whether to allow slavery; some settlers from the South had brought their slaves with them, while many others had visions of gold mines worked by black and Indian bondmen. Jessie Frémont made her home the command center for the opposition, presiding at the dinner table—in the absence of her husband, usually—plotting strategy with the men.

Once she even invited fifteen proslavery lawmakers to her house to debate them single-handedly. Having received a piece of her mind, one of them replied dismissively, “Fine sentiment, Mrs. Frémont, but the aristocracy will always have slaves.”

“But why not an aristocracy of emancipators?” she retorted. “It isn’t a pretty sight in a free country for a child to see and hear chain gangs clanking through the streets.”

The legislature voted to keep California free. A few months later, the debate was carried to Washington, when Congress considered statehood for the fast-growing territory. Jefferson Davis argued in the Senate that slavery was part of California’s natural destiny: “It was to work the gold mines on this continent that the Spaniards first brought Africans to the country. The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat and sudden changes of climate, to which the African race are altogether better adapted.” In the end, though, Washington ratified the verdict already reached in Sacramento.²³

In 1856, the Frémonts carried their antislavery ideals into the national arena. When the new Republican Party sought its first presidential nominee, it was John C. Frémont who—with considerable prodding from his wife—agreed to run, under the slogan “Free Speech, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont.” Unlike any previous candidate’s wife in American history, Jessie figured prominently in the campaign (more than her soft-spoken husband, some critics would snipe). Republican marchers waved banners reading frémont and jessie, and women, shockingly, joined these political demonstrations, wearing violets—Mrs. Frémont’s favorite flower—pinned to their bosoms. When the colonel addressed his supporters, they often insisted that his wife step forward to wave and smile as well. Despite his loss to Buchanan, many staunch Republicans still thought him a better man than Lincoln, a more steadfast foe of the slave power.²⁴

But here in California, slavery’s supporters—though thwarted since Congress had declared it a free state—had never conceded defeat.

In early 1861, as Jessie Frémont looked out from her veranda over San Francisco Bay, her dream of the West, of a free American empire stretching from ocean to ocean, seemed to be in peril. Texas had already been lost to the Confederacy despite the valiant efforts of Governor Sam Houston, her father’s old friend, who had been evicted from office after refusing to betray his country. The immense territory of New Mexico, then also encompassing what is now Arizona and part of Nevada, was leaning the same way. Much closer to Black Point, in the city just east of the sand dunes, men were plotting to detach California from the Union, too. Some reports had it that the island fort just opposite the Frémonts’ cottage—the walled citadel of Alcatraz—might fall at any moment into enemy hands. Rumblings of disloyalty, and of secret plots, were being felt throughout the state.

Though California may officially have been free territory, its political leadership was still dominated by Southern sympathizers—voters called them the Chivalry faction, or the Chivs. No Northern state had more draconian laws restricting the lives and rights of its black inhabitants.²⁵Moreover, it seemed to many citizens, even those with little fondness for the South, that only the most tenuous threads bound their state to the Union. California lay as far from the old Eastern states as could be; the quickest route from one American coast to the other was via a perilous sea voyage of four thousand nautical miles aboard a cramped steamer, with an overland trek across the Isthmus of Panama midway. (And this was affordable only for relatively well-heeled travelers; ordinary emigrants had to try their luck on the overland trails.) Many of the Gold Rush settlers were rootless adventurers who felt no particular loyalty to any piece of land except those on which they’d staked their mining claims up in the hills. Thousands upon thousands of foreigners had been drawn to the region, too: Europeans, East Asians, and Latin Americans, many of whom had simply come to scoop up Yankee dollars before heading home, and whose allegiances were still with Prussia, or China, or Chile. Two other significant populations, the Mormons and the Mexicans, had every reason to hate the United States, a nation that had quite recently defeated them on the battlefield.²⁶

As Jessie Frémont herself recognized, California felt like a place wholly new. Why, then—a great many Californians reasoned—should it not be its own nation? Let the old states fight their old battles; this distant shore would turn its face away, toward its own destiny. The dream of a Pacific Republic had flickered for decades; now—with the word pacific taking on a newly ironic double meaning—the moment seemed more opportune than ever.²⁷

In fact, most of the state’s political leaders had already endorsed the idea of lowering the Stars and Stripes and running up the Bear Flag in the event that the United States split apart. Back in early 1860, then-governor John B. Weller predicted to the legislature that Californians “will not go with the North or the South, but here on the shores of the Pacific found a mighty republic, which may in the end prove the greatest of all.” All of the state’s senators and representatives had voiced similar ideas in Congress at one time or another, though they often retreated coyly when it seemed politically convenient. In the wake of Lincoln’s election, Congressman John Burch declared that if war came, Californians should “raise aloft the flag of the ‘Bear,’ surrounded with the ‘hydra’ pointed cactus of the Western wilds, and call upon the enlightened nations of the earth to acknowledge our independence … [as] the youthful but vigorous Caesarian Republic of the Pacific.”²⁸

Burch hailed from slaveholding Missouri, but Governor Weller was a native Ohioan. In fact, not all Californians who desired independence sympathized with the South. Some—with eyes accustomed to picking out flecks of ore amid the gravel—saw opportunities glittering in the wreckage of the old republic. The San Francisco Herald, the city’s Democratic newspaper, conjured alluring visions of a vast new transpacific trading empire. Detachment from the Eastern states, it suggested, would inspire Californians to reach out westward, toward China, Japan, Australia, and the South Sea islands. A neutral California’s merchant ships would—unlike those of the Union and Confederacy—be immune to blockades and privateers, and thus capture the older states’ overseas trade. Countless refugees from the war-torn East would move westward, bringing with them not only a new era of prosperity, but perhaps also the once-cherished ideals that had been trampled upon and broken in the United States. As the American republic had been for Europe, so the California republic would be for America. “Let California,” the editor enthused, “become the home of the oppressed, the temple of liberty; the resting place of those who seek the blessings of peace rather than the questionable glories of war.”²⁹

Other Californians, less grandiose of temperament, simply didn’t want to be bothered with the East Coast politicians and their incessant wrangling. “We don’t care a straw whether you dissolve the Union or not,” a settler from Maine named Frank Buck wrote to his sister back home. “We just wish that the Republicans and Democrats in the Capital would get into a fight and kill each other all off like the Kilkenny cats. Perhaps that would settle the hash.”³⁰

Buck lived up in Weaverville, a gold-mining settlement in the mountains of far-Northern California. Hundreds of miles away, among the cattle ranches and roughneck towns in the southern part of the state, people had somewhat less dismissive feelings about the unpleasantness back East. “Our emigration comes from the South; our population are of the South, and sympathize with her,” wrote the editor of the Los Angeles Star. “Why, then, should we turn our backs on our friends, and join her enemies?” Militia companies of dubious allegiance sprang up among the pueblos; rusty sabers and muskets disappeared mysteriously from the state arsenals to resurface a few weeks later in private hands, gleaming beyond all recognition. In San Bernardino—a village of a thousand or so Mormons and Southerners—people openly cursed the Stars and Stripes.³¹

And throughout the state that winter and spring, certain ambitious men began to plot a masterstroke that would sever California from the Union with a single blow.

One of these men was a handsome young Kentuckian with a name out of comic opera: Asbury Harpending. He had come west through a series of picaresque adventures, running away from school at the age of fifteen to join William Walker’s ill-fated filibustering expedition in Nicaragua. Failing to get as far as New Orleans before the federal authorities thwarted his plans, Harpending set out for California with nothing but a revolver and a five-dollar gold piece. Like so many enterprising youths, he went on to make a fortune in mining. But he never entirely gave up his dreams of derring-do. The approach of civil war seemed to bring with it an opportunity for another filibustering expedition of sorts—this one against his own country.³²

One evening, Harpending was summoned to a meeting at the home of a wealthy San Franciscan. The house was in an isolated spot, he later recalled, and its owner “lived alone, with only Asiatic attendants, who understood little English and cared less for what was going on.” One of these “soft-footed” servants ushered Harpending into a large room where about thirty young gentlemen—most of them wealthy, all of them Southern—awaited. That night, they swore a secret oath. Each man would assemble a small fighting force, an easy enough task, as Harpending later recalled, since “California at that period abounded with reckless human material—ex-veterans of the Mexican War, ex-filibusters, ex–Indian fighters, all eager to engage in any undertaking that promised adventure and profit.” The freebooter units would then converge on Alcatraz, seizing the island, the arsenal at Benicia with its 30,000 stand of arms, and other key points. With that accomplished, they would proclaim a Pacific Republic and organize “an army of Southern sympathizers, sufficient in number to beat down any armed resistance.” One particular fact made the plotters especially confident of success: the highest-ranking officer of the U.S. Army at San Francisco—in fact, the commander of the entire Department of the Pacific—was General Albert Sidney Johnston, a known Southern sympathizer and veteran of the Texas Revolution.³³

Harpending wrote his version of the story as an old man, more than half a century later, and some of its details—those soft-footed Asiatics, for instance—seem rather more cinematic than perfectly true. Still, there is no question that in 1861, California was rife with secret pro-Southern groups, organizations with names like the Knights of the Columbian Star and the Knights of the Golden Circle. (The latter referred to the filibusters’ long-held dream of ruling a slaveholding empire encircling the Gulf of Mexico, and including the American South and Southwest, the Caribbean, and much of Latin America.) Police detectives’ reports revealed elaborate codes, rituals, signs, and countersigns—enough to leave loyal Californians badly spooked. Thus, a few hundred Knights multiplied, at least in the popular imagination, into a hundred thousand.³⁴

Nothing seemed safe that spring, not even the rock-solid fortress at the center of San Francisco Bay. “We felt as though we were upon a volcano of social disruption,” one Unionist later remembered, “and … that the guns of Alcatraz might signal us at any moment to throw up our hands.”³⁵

But even as the would-be founders of the Pacific Republic conspired among themselves, a counterplot of sorts was being hatched—this one in Mrs. Frémont’s front garden.

THOUSANDS OF MILES from San Francisco Bay, at the West’s opposite gateway—St. Louis, Missouri—two civilians sat disconsolately at the sidelines of the war.

One had recently taken a desk job running St. Louis’s horse-drawn trolley line. He spent most of his days pushing papers, trying his hardest to concentrate on the minutiae of fare revenues and fodder costs, in an office permeated with pungent aromas from the company’s adjacent stables. The other man was a visitor to town, a down-at-the-heels shop clerk from Illinois, who had come in search of an officer’s commission. He camped out at his in-laws’ house, trudging around the city each day, fruitlessly trying to attract the attention of the local military authorities.³⁶

The trolley-car executive was named William Tecumseh Sherman. The luckless clerk was Ulysses S. Grant.

Of all the places where these two men could have found themselves, St. Louis was perhaps the one where war loomed largest. The leading city in one of the nation’s most populous slaveholding states, St. Louis was a military prize like no other. Not only the largest settlement beyond the Appalachians, it was also the country’s second-largest port, commanding the Mississippi as well as the Missouri River, the great waterway to the Rockies, then navigable as far upstream as what is now the state of Montana. It was also the eastern gateway of the overland trails to California, Oregon, and the Southwest. Last but far from least, the city was home to the Jefferson Barracks, the largest military installation in the entire United States, and to the St. Louis Arsenal, the biggest cache of federal arms in the South.³⁷

Whoever held St. Louis truly held the key to the whole American West. And, in contrast to what was brewing in California, the struggle for the West in Missouri was in the open, it was armed, and it was about to explode into full-blown violence.

But it was not yet Grant’s or Sherman’s Civil War in the spring of 1861. During this opening act, the two future titans were fated to watch from offstage. It was not yet time for the clashes of great armies, for columns of conscripts trudging across the ruined landscape of the South. Instead, the struggle for Missouri was a civil war in the truest and rawest sense, resembling those fought in our own time in such places as Beirut and Baghdad: gun battles in the streets, long-simmering ethnic hatreds boiling over, and wailing mothers cradling slain children in their arms. It was also quite literally a revolution—but with the Union side, not the Confederates, as the rebels.

The Union revolutionaries, who would soon fight the battle for Missouri, were drilling clandestinely by night in beer halls, factories, and gymnasiums, barricading the windows and spreading sawdust on the floor to muffle the sound of their stomping boots. Young brewery workers and trolley drivers, middle-aged tavern keepers and wholesale merchants, were learning to bear and aim guns, to wheel squads left and right in the proper American fashion. Most of the younger men handled the weapons awkwardly, but quite a few of the older ones swung them with the ease of having been soldiers once before, in another country, long ago. Sometimes, when their movements hit a perfect synchrony, when their muffled tread beat a single cadence, they threw caution aside and sang out. Just a few of the older men would begin, more and more men joining in until dozens swelled the chorus, half singing, half shouting verses they had carried with them from across the sea:

  Die wilde Jagd, und die Deutsche Jagd,

  Auf Henkersblut und Tyrannen!

  Drum, die ihr uns liebt, nicht geweint und geklagt;

  Das Land ist ja frei, und der Morgen tagt,

  Wenn wir’s auch nur sterbend gewannen!^*

There were two distinct Missouris in 1861: an old and a new.

The old flourished in the central counties of the state, in the rich alluvial lands between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. Here, in the early decades of the century, had come settlers from the seaboard South: enterprising young Marylanders and Virginians who had forsaken the exhausted acreage of their ancestral plantations, rounded up the able-bodied field hands, and marched them in shackled droves through the Cumberland Gap. Others made the journey from Kentucky and Tennessee, moving southwestward with the frontier, as their mothers and fathers had done before. Land could be had for twenty-five cents an acre, and, after the slaves had cleared it, there were abundant yields of cotton, tobacco, and hemp. These earliest settlers had agitated for Missouri’s admission as a slave state, and after the Compromise of 1820 settled the matter, more followed. Although there were few large plantations, the region became known as Little Dixie.³⁸ Planters and small farmers sent their crops to market in nearby St. Louis, a frontier town of wood-frame houses that the early French colonists had built.³⁹

As the Civil War began, Little Dixie still flourished as it had for the past half century. But St. Louis, in that time, had changed beyond all recognition. Here and there, a quaint French colonial house still tottered picturesquely, but most had given way to block after block of redbrick monotony: warehouses, manufacturing plants, and office buildings, stretching for miles along the bluffs above the river. Each year, more than four thousand steamboats shouldered up to the wharves, vessels with names like War Eagle,Champion, Belle of Memphis, and Big St. Louis. The smoke from their coal-fired furnaces mingled with the thick black clouds belching from factory smokestacks, so that on windless days the sun shone feebly through a dark canopy that hung above the entire city.⁴⁰

More and more Northerners were coming to this new Missouri, attracted by the opportunities of booming industry—both wealthy businessmen and poor but hopeful laborers. So alarmed were the “old” Missourians by the influx that one Virginia-born judge suggested, only half in jest, that the state legislature pass a law barring Yankees from crossing the Mississippi. When asked how the ban could be enforced, he suggested that ferrymen require all their passengers to pronounce the word cow—anyone replying “keow” would be banished forever to the Illinois side of the river.⁴¹

But it was a wave of newcomers from even farther afield that was truly transforming the face of St. Louis. Beginning in the 1840s, German and other central European immigrants poured into the city, attracted at first by a pioneer propagandist named Gottfried Duden, who described the Mississippi Valley as a kind of American Rhineland: just as romantic, but with lusher vegetation and a milder climate, both politically and meteorologically. This may not have been quite accurate, but by the time Duden’s countrymen made the trek and realized as much, the migration had taken on a momentum of its own. By 1861, a visitor to many parts of the city might indeed have thought he was somewhere east of Aachen. “Here we hear the German tongue, or rather the German dialect,everywhere,” one Landsmann en-thused. Certainly you would hear it in places likeTony Niederwiesser’s Tivoli beer garden on Third Street, where Sunday-afternoon regulars quaffed lager while Sauter’s or Vogel’s orchestra played waltzes and sentimental tunes from the old country. You would hear it in Henry Boernstein’s St. Louis Opera House on Market Street, where the house company celebrated Friedrich Schiller’s centennial in 1859 by performing the master’s theatrical works for a solid week. You would hear it in the newspaper offices of the competing dailies Anzeiger des Westens and Westliche Post, as well as the weekly Mississippi Blätter. You would hear it even in public school classrooms, where the children of immigrants received instruction in the mother tongue.⁴²

St. Louis was still officially slave territory, of course. Indeed, it was here that Dred Scott—“the best known colored person in the world,” locals liked to boast—had sued for his freedom; here that his widow and daughters still lived in an alleyway just off Franklin Avenue.^* Mrs. Scott and her children were free, though—as were most black St. Louisans. The number of slaves in the city had dwindled to fewer than two thousand, or less than 1 percent of the population. Local politicians—even some who owned a few slaves themselves—were calling for the state to enact gradual emancipation. It would be good for business, they said; it would lure even more Yankee capital to town.⁴³

No wonder that when cotton growers from Little Dixie came into the city they sometimes felt as though they were in an alien country. Yet Missouri as a whole still lay firmly in the political grasp of such men: the Southern planters, the slaveholders, the aristocratic scions of old French colonial families. As a bloc, they and their supporters far outnumbered the German newcomers, and in the early months of 1861, as their sister states seceded one by one around them, these men naturally assumed that it was they who would decide Missouri’s fate.

In January, the state had sworn in a new governor. Claiborne Fox Jackson was a poker-playing, horse-trading, Little Dixie planter who had once led armed Border Ruffians into neighboring Kansas to keep it from becoming a free state. Better just to let the Indian savages keep Kansas forever, Jackson had once said, since “they are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight.”⁴⁴

Officially, Jackson was neutral on secession, reassuring everyone that the ultimate decision would be up to the citizens of Missouri. But in his inaugural address, he made his leanings clear enough. “The weight of Kentucky or Missouri, thrown into the scale,” could tip the balance nationally from the Union to the Confederacy, the governor said. And should the federal government try to coerce the seceding states, he warned, “Missouri will not be found to shrink from the duty which her position upon the border imposes: her honor, her interests, and her sympathies point alike in one direction, and determine her to stand by the South.” (Judging by the printed sources, Jackson seems to have been a man who spoke frequently in italics.) One of the governor’s first acts in office was to secure legislative approval for a statewide convention to determine where Missouri would pledge her loyalties and her considerable resources. To leave the Union would require a statewide referendum. But neither the Governor nor the legislature seemed to have the slightest doubt about which way the convention—or Missouri’s citizenry—would vote. The delegates certainly seemed like a reliable enough group: some four-fifths of them were slaveholders. They gathered first in Jefferson City, the state’s tiny capital, and then, seeking better hotel accommodations, moved to St. Louis.⁴⁵

The gentlemen did indeed find the creature comforts of the metropolis far more satisfactory. In every other respect, however, the move to St. Louis was the worst strategic blunder that the hard-core Jacksonites could have ventured. For they arrived in a city that was tense, frightened, and divided—and whose inhabitants were arming themselves not just for secession, not just to preserve the Union, but for an all-out ethnic war.

Almost since their first arrival, the Germans of St. Louis had been a class apart politically as well as culturally. Many had left their native land to escape not only poverty but also the reactionary regimes that ruled Germany’s claustrophobic labyrinth of tiny duchies and principalities. Arriving in the United States, they rejoiced in the expansive landscape, in the freedom of expression, and in the spirit of a nation whose watchword, they had been told, was liberty.

And they almost immediately fell afoul of their new American neighbors. In 1836, when a black St. Louis man was accused of murdering a police officer, a group of whites seized the prisoner from the city jail, manacled him to a tree at the corner of Seventh and Locust, and burned him alive before a large crowd of spectators. The next day, the shocked editor of the city’s recently established German-language newspaper, the Anzeiger des Westens, denounced the atrocity. “Citizens of St. Louis!” he wrote. “The stain with which your city was defiled last night can never be erased.”

Citizens of St. Louis promptly taught him a lesson. Several hundred of them gathered as an angry mob outside the Anzeiger’s office, and only with difficulty were restrained from committing another lynching. The next morning’s issue of the St. Louis Commercial Bulletin, a leading English-language newspaper, chastised the editor for insulting in an “unjust manner the whole community.”⁴⁶

But the newcomers were not to be intimidated so easily. Over the succeeding years, as their ranks swelled, they grew ever bolder and more outspoken. In 1848 and 1849, the steady flow of arrivals became a flood as Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians fled the aftermath of the failed liberal revolutions across Europe. Among those it swept into St. Louis was Franz Sigel, the daring military commander of insurgent forces in the Baden uprising, comrade of Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini; in his new homeland, Sigel became a teacher of German and school superintendent. Another political refugee was Isidor Bush, a Prague-born Jew and publisher of revolutionary tracts in Vienna, who settled down in St. Louis as a respected wine merchant, railroad executive, and city councilman—as well as, somewhat more discreetly, a leader of the local abolitionists.^*

Most prominent among all the Achtundvierziger—the Forty-Eighters, as they styled themselves—was a colorful Austrian émigré named Heinrich Börnstein. Whether Börnstein was a hero or a scoundrel depended on whom you asked. In Europe he had been a soldier in the imperial army, an actor, a director—and, most notably, an editor. During a sojourn in Paris, he launched a weekly journal called Vorwärts!, which published antireligious screeds, poetry by Heine, and some of the first “scientific socialist” writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. When Börnstein helped organize a German Legion to aid the 1848 revolution, things became a bit hot for him with the Parisian authorities, and he prudently decamped. In America he became Henry Boernstein: homeopathic physician, saloonkeeper, brewer, pharmacist, theatrical impresario, hotel owner, novelist—and, naturally, political agitator. After purchasing the ever more influential Anzeiger des Westens in 1850, he swung the paper even harder to the left. Though he may have cut a somewhat eccentric figure around town, with his flamboyant clothing and a pair of Mitteleuropean side-whiskers that would have put Emperor Franz Josef to shame, Boernstein was a force to be reckoned with in St. Louis, a man both admired and hated.⁴⁷

For such men, and even for their less radical compatriots, Missouri’s slaveholding class represented exactly what they had detested in the old country, exactly what they had come here to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs, boorish aristocrats obstructing the forces of modernity and progress. By contrast, the Germans prided themselves on being, as an Anzeiger editorial rather smugly put it, “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity, than most peoples of the earth”—more imbued with true democratic spirit, indeed more American, than the Americans themselves. Such presumption did not exactly endear them to longtime St. Louisans. The city’s leading Democratic newspaper excoriated the Forty-Eighters as infidels, anarchists, fanatics, socialists—“all Robespierres, Dantons, and Saint-Justs, red down to their very kidneys.” Clearly these Germans were godless, too: one need only walk downtown on a Sunday afternoon to see them drinking beer, dancing, and flocking to immoral plays in their theaters—flagrantly violating not just the commandments of God but the city ordinances of St. Louis.⁴⁸

Few if any of the city fathers were prepared, however, to risk enforcing the blue laws. Those beer drinkers and theatergoers had become a powerful voting bloc. Many Missouri Germans cast their first votes for Thomas Hart Benton, when the old maverick—not unmindful of demographic shifts in his home state—steered toward populism. Then they rallied to the new Republican Party. Their special hero in 1856 was John C. Frémont. Here was a leader in the true style of the Forty-Eighters: no dough-faced politician but a dashing idealist, a man of action, a bearded paladin. (That Colonel Frémont happened to be the illegitimate son of a French mural painter only enhanced his Romantic cachet.) It was with somewhat less enthusiasm that they would unite behind Lincoln four years later—split rails held little charm for the acolytes of Goethe and Hegel. But support from intellectuals like Boernstein encouraged them: the editor, who was fast becoming one of Missouri’s top Republican power brokers, hailed his party’s nominee, in proper Achtundvierzigerisch terms, as “the man who will see his way through a great struggle yet to come, the struggle with the most dangerous and ruthless enemy of freedom.”⁴⁹

A few months later, the Wide Awake craze reached St. Louis. Capes! Torches! Secret meetings! It was just like the good old days back in Dresden and Heidelberg. Before long, Germans by the thousands were joining up, and relishing the opportunity to get back into fighting trim. One of the local movement’s leaders (discreetly writing in the third person) later recalled:

From their headquarters … the Wide Awakes marched in procession to the places of appointed political gatherings, and while the meeting continued, (if at night,) each man, with a lighted lamp placed securely on the end of a heavy stick, stationed himself on the outside of the assembled crowd, thus depriving ruffianly opponents of their hiding-places in the dark. At the first two meetings which the Wide Awakes thus attended, the enemy, not understanding the purposes of the club, began their usual serenade of yells and cheers, but they were speedily initiated into the mysteries of the new order; which initiation consisted in being besmeared with burning camphene, and vigorously beaten with leaded sticks. The least sign of disorderly conduct was the signal for an assault upon the offender, and if he escaped unmaimed he was lucky indeed.⁵⁰

The national Republican establishment was quick to exploit this touching display of pro-Lincoln sentiment in the heart of a slave state. William Seward hastened to the city and, from the balcony of his hotel room, addressed a crowd of Wide Awakes who had come to serenade him by torchlight. The master politician—forearmed, as usual, with flattery specific to his audience—exulted: “Missouri is Germanizing herself to make herself free.” (Frederick Douglass had already expressed similar enthusiasm: “A German only has to be a German to be utterly opposed to slavery,” he wrote.)⁵¹

Of all those attempting to harness the unruly energy of St. Louis’s Wide Awake Germans, none was more assiduous or effective than Francis Preston Blair, Jr. The younger brother of Montgomery Blair—Lincoln’s postmaster general, and his cabinet’s strongest proponent of defending Fort Sumter—thirty-nine-year-old Frank Blair, a former protégé of Senator Benton, had won a seat in Congress as a Missouri Republican. Although publicly opposed to slavery (he favored resettling the nation’s blacks as a new American colony somewhere in Central America), Blair was first and foremost a narrow-eyed opportunist, a tireless strategist for his own sake and for that of his vast web of kin by blood and marriage, a network whose nerve center was the family’s Washington mansion, which faced the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue. His canny instincts told him early on that secession and civil war were inevitable. In the Wide Awakes of St. Louis, he saw not a constituency of any national electoral importance—there was no way that Lincoln could carry Missouri anyhow—but rather a personal power base, a legion of Republican centurions who might march at his back through the chaotic days to come.⁵²

Blair made sure that the Wide Awake clubs did not disband after the election. By Christmas, in fact, rumor had it—correctly, for once—that he was starting to arm them with Sharps rifles provided by certain unofficial sources in the East. (Some of the Germans’ new weaponry arrived hidden, appropriately enough, in empty beer barrels shipped to Tony Niederwiesser’s saloon and others.) Under the supervision of General Sigel, and with veterans of the Prussian officer corps acting as instructors, they began their clandestine drills, practicing with wooden muskets when they lacked real ones. St. Louis, however, was not a place where such things could be kept secret for long. By early March, Democratic papers carried reports of a terrifying new battalion known as the Black Jaegers (it sounded even more horrible in German, the Unabhängige Schwarzer Jägerkorps), allegedly so named because they would fight under a black flag, signifying no quarter to their foes.⁵³

The Jaegers’ foes, for their part, were not sitting idly by. The secessionists formed their own force of armed Minute Men—“the grimmest of German-haters,” Boernstein called them—establishing a headquarters in the old Berthold mansion at the corner of Fifth and Pine. Many of the city’s old-line militia groups affiliated themselves with the new organization. Unlike Blair’s forces, the Minute Men had little need for secrecy. On February 13, in fact, they were officially mustered en masse into the Missouri State Guard—a clear signal of Governor Jackson’s intentions, in case anyone was still in doubt.⁵⁴

Democratic newspapers fanned the flames more vigorously than ever against “the Red Republicans or Infidel Germans,” the “ ‘fugitives from justice’ of foreign lands, who by some trickery have become citizens of our country.” Abolitionist fanatics were concocting some dark plot, one editor warned, and “the German population of our city are to be used as the means for carrying out the objects of the dastard enterprise.” Ordinary Missourians used more direct language: along with the usual racial epithets, “Damn Dutch,” a corruption of Deutsch, became a term of abuse throughout the state.⁵⁵

Such was the atmosphere in which the statewide convention assembled in St. Louis to determine Missouri’s fate.

ONE DAY TOWARD THE END OF 1860, Jessie Frémont tripped over a board that had come loose on one of San Francisco’s rickety plank sidewalks, hurting her leg so badly that for the next six months she was largely confined to the cottage at Black Point. But Mrs. Frémont hardly needed to go down into the city anyhow: San Francisco, as usual, came up to see Mrs. Frémont.⁵⁶

In her aerie above the Bay, she presided over a salon—almost all male—of the quickest wits and keenest minds on the Pacific Coast. The lure of a golden land had already drawn to California a remarkable array of thinkers, dreamers, talkers, and schemers, all of whom rejoiced to discover a distant shore where the social proprieties and cultural pieties of Boston and Philadelphia did not apply. At Jessie Frémont’s gatherings, silver-haired politicians chatted with youthful poets; famous novelists collected sea yarns from the captains of China-trade clippers. The house itself suggested a kind of newfangled cultural mélange unlike anything seen in the East: silk hangings and damask-shrouded furniture in the latest Paris taste intermingled with American Indian baskets and photographs of Western landscapes, along with a splendid Albert Bierstadt painting of the Golden Gate. On the walls of her young sons’ room Mrs. Frémont pasted cutout pictures of ships and horses.

Guests lingered for hours over luncheon on the veranda, or strolled together through the gardens, enjoying the perfume of flowers mixing with the smell of the sea. They relished, too, the charisma of their famous hostess, who enthralled them with her tales of a girlhood spent dandled on the knees of presidents. She had never been a conventional beauty, and was growing stout and matronly as middle age approached, but she still retained all the charm that had won her, at the age of seventeen, the handsomest man in Washington as husband.⁵⁷

When Herman Melville, in the gloomy eclipse of his literary fame, passed through San Francisco, he naturally called at Black Point, where a lively afternoon of conversation cheered him considerably. A much more frequent visitor was a shy, intense young writer named Bret Harte, whom Jessie Frémont had discovered while he was working as a typesetter and living in a tiny apartment above a restaurant. Harte’s comic poems and tales of life in the mining camps enchanted her, as did his newspaper columns, signed The Bohemian, which evoked a particularly Californian kind of cultural life in which writers and artists lived as rugged free spirits. Each Sunday afternoon, he would come to dinner and read aloud from his latest manuscript for her to critique. “Sometimes her comments cut like a lash, but her praise is sincere and freely given,” Harte told a friend. “To know her is a liberal education.” Mrs. Frémont soon shared her “pet,” as she called him, with the Eastern literary establishment, helping him land a short story in The Atlantic Monthly—and thus introduced a new, distinctively Western voice into American letters.⁵⁸

As for the famous Pathfinder, when he was there at all he was usually just a taciturn presence hovering at the margins of his wife’s sparkling soirees. More often, Colonel Frémont was away from San Francisco attending to his troubled gold-mining enterprises and other personal affairs.

Even when the former presidential candidate was absent, though, politics was very much in the air at Black Point. Senator Edward D. Baker, the West Coast’s most prominent Republican—indeed, one of the national party’s rising stars—was a habitué. A handsome, hot-tempered, powerfully built Midwesterner, the Gray Eagle probably reminded Mrs. Frémont of her father. Like old Tom Benton, Baker was one of the most captivating orators in Congress. His skills had been honed back in Illinois, where he had joined the Disciple sect to become, like James Garfield, a youthful sensation on the preaching circuit.⁵⁹ Only after migrating to the West Coast, however, did he develop his own distinctive brand of Republicanism.

In October 1860, shortly before she injured her leg, Jessie Frémont brought several friends along to the American Theatre on Sansome Street to see Baker give a campaign speech for Lincoln. The senator had arrived in town by steamer the week before, met at the wharf by a phalanx of Wide Awakes, his ever-present “bodyguard” for the duration of his stay. Thousands of San Franciscans turned out to hear his address at the theater; Baker’s friendship with Lincoln went back more than twenty years, to a time when they had both been young lawyers in Springfield, and no doubt many of his listeners hoped to hear personal anecdotes of the Rail-Splitter. It turned out, however, that Baker had very little to say about his party’s nominee. He addressed larger themes, in words that spoke directly to an audience of Western pioneers:

The normal condition of the Territories is freedom. Stand on the edge of the Sierra Nevadas, or upon the brow of any eminence looking down upon the Territories beyond, and what do you behold? You find there the savage, the wild beast, and the wilderness; but you do not find slavery.… The Western man goes into the Territory with his family, his horses, his oxen, his ax and other implements of labor. The Southern man goes with his slave.

A savvy politician, the senator reassured everyone that a vote for the Republicans was simply a vote for free white labor, not a vote for black emancipation: the party was committed not to interfere with slavery wherever it was already legal. Yet, at the climax of his speech, Colonel Baker, as he was often called, seemed to advocate nothing less than an American revolution:

Everywhere abroad, the great ideas of personal liberty spread, increase, fructify. Here—ours is the exception! In this home of the exile, in this land of constitutional liberty, it is left for us to teach the world that slavery marches in solemn procession! that under the American stars slavery has protection, and the name of freedom must be faintly breathed—the songs of freedom be faintly sung! Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, hosts of good men are praying, fighting, dying on scaffolds, in dungeons, oftener yet on battle fields for freedom: and yet while this great procession marches under the arches of liberty, we alone shrink back trembling and afraid when freedom is but mentioned!

At this, one newspaper reported, the entire hall broke out into “terrific cheers.” And that was not all: “While the people were cheering, Mr. Harte, who sat on the platform, apparently carried away with enthusiasm, rushed to the footlights, and with extended arms, excessive vehemence and loud voice, declared: ‘It is true! it is true, gentlemen! We are slaves, compared with the rest of the world. The colonel is right!’—then, pale as a ghost, staggered back to his seat, the people cheering vociferously.”⁶⁰

It was, to say the least, out of character for the shy young poet. People said afterward that his patroness must have put him up to it. More than a few said that but for being a lady, and a famous man’s wife, Mrs. Frémont would have liked to be shouting from the footlights herself.⁶¹

But the voice that would carry farthest and loudest across California in the months to come was neither the distinguished senator’s nor the mercurial poet’s. It was another of Jessie Frémont’s protégés who accompanied her to the American Theatre that evening. He was perhaps the most unlikely-looking hero in the entire hall. But in years to come, people would call him “the man who saved California for the Union.”⁶²

Mrs. Frémont had become acquainted with the young Reverend Thomas Starr King one evening in the spring of 1860, when he and his wife had come to dinner at Black Point—an obligation of all interesting newcomers to San Francisco. The hostess, possessing as she did a keen eye for masculine beauty, cannot have been particularly impressed as she clasped King’s frail white hand in welcome. The clergyman stood barely over five feet tall, with greasy hair that hung lankly over the collar of his ill-fitting coat. His eyes, large and luminous, bulged slightly from their sockets like a sickly child’s; indeed, he seemed somehow not fully adult, a sexless boy-man in the garb of a preacher.

Yet behind those strange eyes flashed a wit as keen as Mrs. Frémont’s own. Almost as soon as they began conversing, both felt a marriage of true minds: a sense of communication as free, electric, and unimpeded as a telegraphic transmission. “An enchanted evening,” she would call it. The Gray Eagle was at the dinner table that night, too, as was the Great Pathfinder, but these political giants could only sit and watch as the bons mots flew back and forth between the mistress of Black Point and this odd little creature. Mr. King’s conversation was extraordinary: an incessant running commentary on life’s perplexities, spiced with literary references, antic puns, self-deprecating jokes, mimicry, and even some slightly risqué allusions. Only Jessie Frémont, perhaps, could have kept up with him. King was no less charmed by his new friend—not least because of her responsiveness to his performance. “She is a superb woman,” he wrote. “She is my one admirer in the universe.” Before long he was a regular at the cottage, coming and going almost as if it were his own home and talking with Mrs. Frémont for hours on the veranda.⁶³

They were the same age, thirty-five, but in most respects their lives could hardly have been more different. Unlike the pampered senator’s daughter, the little clergyman had grown up in a modest house in Charlestown, Massachusetts, beside Boston Harbor—“under the shadow of Bunker Hill,” he liked to say—and, being unable to afford the tuition at Harvard, had scrounged an education in lecture halls and free libraries, where he picked up French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and a bit of German by the time he was nineteen.⁶⁴ While Mrs. Frémont was, naturally, forbidden from speaking before an audience or appearing in print under her own name, Mr. King had built a public career entirely out of words. He wrote, but—much more surprising—he also spoke, in a “manly, sonorous” voice, by turns passionate and playful, that was all the more impressive because it emanated from such a tadpole-like body. Called to the ministry, he had his own pulpit by the age of twenty-four, at a Unitarian church in Hollis Street, Boston. By his early thirties, King was hobnobbing with Emerson, Phillips, Beecher, and the Adamses; he was earning fifty dollars each time he lectured at a college or lyceum; and, inspired by Thoreau, he had just published a little book (half ode and half travel guide) about his rambles in the White Mountains. It was he who would bring Melville to see Mrs. Frémont.⁶⁵

And then, in April 1860, he suddenly gave it all up—Hollis Street, Bunker Hill, tea with the Adamses—and went to California.⁶⁶

He did not come to convert the Golden State, Sodom though it may have seemed. Rather, King came to be healed and converted himself. As he wrote to a friend not long before departure: “I do think we are unfaithful in huddling so closely around the cosy stove of civilization in this blessed Boston, and I, for one, am ready to go out into the cold and see if I am good for anything.” In fact, Boston was “cosy” for him only to a point. Emerson might compliment his work; Mr. and Mrs. Adams might enjoy his tea-table chitchat; but their Brahmin circle could never accept the man from Charlestown as its moral and intellectual preceptor.⁶⁷

Now, just a few weeks later, here he was, taking his tea not in some stuffy Beacon Street parlor but on an airy hilltop above the Pacific, as this brilliant and world-renowned woman spoke with him as few people in Boston ever had: with neither condescension nor deference but frankly, directly, as between equals.

There was so much for them to talk about! He loved California, and hated it. San Francisco appalled him, at first: its swaybacked wooden shanties, its fleas and bedbugs, its streets “bilious with Chinamen.” But the Golden Gate, carpeted with spring flowers in colors more vibrant than any he had seen in a New Hampshire autumn, delighted him.⁶⁸ Even the occasional earthquakes, he said, made him want to stand up and shout “Encore!” King made a midsummer jaunt to the Sierra Nevada—no doubt at the Frémonts’ urging—and sent an ebullient series of articles about it to the Boston Evening Transcript, the paper of record for the Beacon Hill set. One dispatch included, amid the scenic sublimities, an equally extravagant appraisal of the colonel’s real estate holdings, currently on the market for investment: “perhaps the most valuable mining property in the world,” King called it. (Clearly, the author was already getting the hang of California, a place where high art and hucksterism bunked contentedly together.)

But it was the garden at Black Point that truly opened King’s eyes to the wonderful possibilities of the West. Life and landscape were integrated there. Nature was not something you traveled to on the Boston & Maine Railroad. The wild heart of the American continent lay just beyond the edge of the luncheon table. “Yesterday I dined with Mrs. Frémont,” King told an old friend back East, “& walked bareheaded among roses, geraniums, vines & fuchsias in profuse bloom.” Here was a place where even a Boston Unitarian could take his hat off outdoors!⁶⁹

Another afternoon, King came unannounced, asking simply whether he could sit alone in the garden, on a small rug that he spread beneath a laurel tree: the view of sea and mountains, he told Mrs. Frémont afterward, helped him to “regain” himself. After this she set up a study in a secluded corner of the grounds where he could come each morning to work undisturbed on his articles and sermons. At noon, she would send over a servant with lunch, and at teatime he would emerge to share with her what he had written.⁷⁰

The West was transforming him. In his Boston sermons, King had trod somewhat cautiously down the pathways of transcendentalism, offering palatable versions of Emersonian abstractions. In his White Mountains book, he had rhapsodized over the scenery but had also taken care to advise readers on local hotels. Here in California, however, he made the very crags and valleys resound with divine reproach, with glory and terror: “So many of us there are who have no majestic landscapes for the heart—no grandeurs of the inner life! We live on the flats. We live in a moral country, which is dry, droughty, barren. We have no great hopes. We have no sense of Infinite guard and care. We have no sacred and cleansing fears. We have no consciousness of Divine, All-enfolding Love. We may make an outward visit to the Sierras, but there are no Yosemites in the soul.”⁷¹

He had always hated slavery, of course, but from his pulpit on Hollis Street he had rarely even uttered the offensive word, let alone tried to preach politics. His denunciations were almost always couched in biblical allegories. (The week that Anthony Burns was marched down State Street between ranks of soldiers, King had preached a sermon that he was rather proud of, on the trial of Christ before Pilate.) Indeed, he had made quite clear that he disdained “radical eloquence” and “abstract principles”: Boston already had more than enough Sunday-morning legislators.⁷²

In San Francisco, though, his resolve began to waver. He accompanied Mrs. Frémont and Mr. Harte to the American Theatre on the night of Senator Baker’s great speech and was overwhelmed with several strong emotions, not least of them envy. “That is the true way to reach men!” he said, pacing around the Frémonts’ private box in his excitement. His own preaching was a paltry thing by comparison, he told Jessie: it could never have the seismic effect of Baker’s. Later that night, she set out to convince him otherwise. She told him he was destined for politics; she even claimed, King said in wonder, to be “distressed that I have not lived longer in the state, so that she could have me elected Senator this winter.” In this pasty-skinned clergyman, she saw not only wit and intellect but also something that less perceptive eyes missed: a kind of soldierly strength. Indeed, something there had often reminded her of her husband’s old frontier guide, Kit Carson: the gunfighter, the sunburnt trailblazer, the hero of pulp fiction.⁷³

Needless to say, Mrs. Frémont’s protégé did not get a Senate seat that winter. But at a San Francisco theater on the evening of February 22, 1861—at the very hour when, three thousand miles away, President-Elect Lincoln was pulling a shawl over his face and slipping aboard the night train to Baltimore—the Reverend Mr. King stepped up to a lectern draped with an American flag.

It was Washington’s Birthday, and San Francisco was celebrating the holiday as never before: schools and businesses were closed, people filled the streets, and, as the Bulletin reported, “there were as many stars aloft as a cloudless night displays—as many stripes as the traitors who plot to despoil the country of its unity and glory are entitled to.” In the afternoon, more than ten thousand had gathered for a mass meeting and adopted, by acclamation, a series of resolutions professing their loyalty to the Union—as well as their willingness to “cheerfully acquiesce” in any honorable compromise that might keep the South in the fold. King’s oration, before an overflow crowd at the Music Academy, was to be the climax of the day, the crowning expression of unconditional love for the united country.⁷⁴

But his message was one his listeners were unprepared for. What would George Washington do today if he were in the White House, he asked? And then with a ferocity such as the audience had never seen, came the surprising answer: “Nothing. He would have acted four months ago. He would have purged his Cabinet of treason. He would have awed out of it conspirators and thieves. He would not have been a lump of shilly-shally incarnate.”

Then he tore into the would-be compromisers—into the very ideas that San Francisco’s Unionists had unanimously embraced earlier that day: “Change the Constitution in order to save it!” This was not politics but suicide. And King spoke powerfully of the American continent’s geography, how it bound together East and West, North and South:

[Washington] believed that God created this country to be one. The Creator placed no Mason and Dixon’s line upon it; that was the work of foolish men. He marked no boundaries for rival civilizations in the immense basins of the West.… The Mississippi, like a great national tree, has its root in the hot Gulf, and spreads its top in the far icy North, a glorious tree, with boughs in different latitudes, and branches binding the Rocky Mountains and the lakes together, its great trunk the central artery of a national unity.⁷⁵

Afterward, in a letter to a close friend (a black New Yorker named Randolph Ryer), King exulted like a warrior returning from the field of victory. “I pitched into Secession, Concession, and Calhoun, right and left,” he wrote, “and made [even] Southerners applaud. I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to ‘a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp,’ and the audience came down with thunder.” When the oration was all over, Mrs. Frémont made her way to King through the pressing throng, and told him, he said, that “she would like to hear it forty nights in succession.… [I] am urged to give it all over the State, and help kill the Pacific-Republic folly. It was the occasion, thus far, of my existence.”⁷⁶

He did not offer it for quite forty solid nights. But in the weeks ahead, King gave that speech again and again, to one packed house of Californians after another—not just in San Francisco, but in Marysville, Stockton, Sacramento. He spoke in gold-mining camps, and standing on saloon porches or tree stumps in towns with names like Deadwood, Rough and Ready, and Mad Mule—places where Southerners hissed him, or worse. He had never known the true exhilaration of public speaking, he told Mrs. Frémont, until he had to encounter a front row bristling with revolvers and bowie knives. Far better to face these, somehow, than the supercilious front pews of the Hollis Street church.⁷⁷

When not traveling and speaking he was writing, usually in Mrs. Frémont’s garden. He composed a new oration on Daniel Webster—conveniently glossing over the Compromise of 1850, he admitted privately, but taking the occasion to remember the senator’s words when California achieved statehood: “At last we have seen our country stretch from sea to sea, and a new highway opened across the continent from us to our fellow-citizens on the shore of the Pacific. Far as they have gone, they are yet within the protection of the Union, and ready, I doubt it not, to join us all in its defence and support.” On April 19, he spoke on the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington—another opportunity to turn American history to the uses of the present.

Even the Eastern press was taking notice now. “The ghost of old Sam Adams abides with Mr. King,” wrote the New York Times’ West Coast correspondent. “While he charms his hearers with eloquence, he charges them with the very spirit that filled the air about Bunker Hill in 1774 and ’75…. He has brought every element of power that his popularity gives him to bear in all our cities in favor of liberty and human rights.”⁷⁸

To be sure, the “Pacific-Republic folly” lingered, but now its would-be founding fathers were in full retreat. Asbury Harpending’s Alcatraz plot was foiled when one of his own coconspirators—a failed Senate candidate who had publicly called for Lincoln’s assassination—approached General Johnston to enlist him in the scheme. General Johnston may have been a Southerner, but he was a man of honor first. His response was to fortify all the federal outposts at risk, especially Alcatraz, and to transfer weapons from the Benicia arsenal to the less vulnerable island fortress. A few months later, the general would resign his commission and cross a thousand miles of the West on foot to take command of a Confederate army—but until then, as he promised the governor of California, he would defend the property of the United States, “and not a cartridge or a percussion cap belonging to her shall pass to any enemy while I am here as her representative.” The Alcatraz plot was dead, and Harpending and his friends slunk off into other, more promising, pursuits.⁷⁹

Thomas Starr King, the awakened Christian warrior, relished the sense of combat. “I do not measure enough inches around the chest to go for a soldier,” he told Jessie Frémont, “but I see the way to make this fight.” What a remarkable war, to enlist even him as a hero!

And he considered her a soldier, too—if anything, a more potent force than he. “Have you met Mrs. Frémont?” he would later ask a friend. “Her husband I am very little acquainted with, but she is sublime, and carries guns enough to be formidable to a whole Cabinet—a she-Merrimack, thoroughly sheathed, and carrying fire in the genuine Benton furnaces.”⁸⁰

Indeed, he had spent precious little time with Colonel Frémont. The Pathfinder was off on an extended trip through Europe in pursuit of capital for his mining ventures—accompanied by his mistress, a certain Mrs. Corbett of San Francisco.⁸¹ Mrs. King, for her own part, hardly appeared at Black Point. Irritable and chronically unwell, she missed Boston and despised their new home—“an ardent hater of this city, coast, and slope,” King called her.⁸² Whether he and Jessie Frémont ever took the opportunity to advance their mutual admiration past friendship is doubtful, however. Both seem to have remained devoutly observant of Victorian sexual proprieties, despite long hours alone together, including at least one overnight trip spent strolling in the meadows of San Mateo, skipping rocks on a stream, and lodging at a country inn.⁸³ But they were ecstatic comrades-in-arms all the same: they shared in the giddy exhilaration of wartime, and thrilled at the events unfolding around them. “What a year to live in!” he exulted. “Worth all other times ever known in our history or in any other.”

Mrs. Frémont observed, with somewhat more restraint but greater penetration: “All over our country now we are being called to lay aside self.” To be selfless, perhaps; but perhaps also to shed old selves and create new ones.

Several days after King’s speech on Washington, Jessie Frémont dared step into the public limelight as she had never done before: she published an article in a newspaper. The Frémonts’ former coachman, Albert Lea, a Negro, had been sentenced to death for murder, and although he was clearly guilty, she felt the sentence was unjust, motivated by the judge’s racism and pro-Southern leanings. Her open letter of protest in the daily Alta California, signed J.B.F., shocked the city: a lady of national prominence airing a political grievance in the press, and defending a Negro murderer to boot!

Lea would go to the gallows in the end, but in Mrs. Frémont’s life it was a turning point. Never again was she content merely to be one famous man’s daughter and another’s wife.⁸⁴

Did Mr. King and Mrs. Frémont’s rhetorical campaign—in which she was the chief strategist, he the field marshal—actually save California for the Union? She would never stop believing that it had. Many others thought likewise; Ralph Waldo Emerson would write King the following year to say that “the salvation and future of California are mainly in your hands.”⁸⁵

This was almost certainly an exaggeration. The shock of actual secession, and of the news from Fort Sumter, were surely more influential in making most Californians realize that no middle ground, no neutrality, was possible. Their state could not stand outside American history, any more than any other part of the country. California—and each of its citizens—would have to stand with the new Union, with the warlike Union, or be classed among its enemies. This realization awoke in many people an idealism they had not known they possessed. “The noble and beautiful side of the nation is now apparent,” Mrs. Frémont wrote to a friend back East.⁸⁶

Yet there is no denying that King’s words, reaching millions in person and in print, articulated a rationale for linking California’s destiny to that of the beleaguered East. Speaking as if he were the voice of history itself, he reconnected what seemed the land of the past to the land of the future. In his Lexington speech—first delivered while news of Sumter’s surrender was crossing the plains in a Pony Express pouch—he asked the audience to imagine the sun rising on that first morning of the Revolution: shining first on the Maine coast and his beloved New England mountains, then sweeping over the Alleghenies and turning the Hudson into a thread of gold, crossing the Mississippi, flooding the prairies with light, climbing the far slope of the Rockies, then gleaming upon the highest peaks of the Sierras before dawn rolled at last over the western ocean—this heavenly path confirming the rightness of the continent’s unity.⁸⁷

The men, women, and children in the room listened in silence. It was the kind of journey that almost every one of them had also taken. And it was a time when gorgeous words could move spirits in a way that they rarely can today.

King brought Eastern culture with him to the West, even into the mining camps. Curious people came just to see this expatriate Bostonian, this friend of Beecher and Emerson: names that all literate Americans knew. Another message that King carried with him wherever he spoke: This is yours, too.

In June 1861, Frank Buck—the man who had told his sister that he didn’t “give a straw” if the Union perished—went to hear King’s speech on Washington in the raw wooden meetinghouse up in Weaverville. As soon as he came home, still electrified by the experience, he sat down to write her another letter:

Who do you think we had to preach? ‘T. Starr King.’ … It was beautiful beyond description. Language just flows from his mouth so easily. Everybody was in ecstasies. He held the audience spell bound for two hours. It was a great treat for us I assure you. Even the men from Virginia and Texas admired him although he lashed the Secessionists without mercy.

I had intended to write you at some length on politics but there are no longer any political parties. We are all either for this Government or against it.… You may set us down as loyal to the Union. No matter whether this rebellion was caused by Northern Abolitionists or Southern Fire Eaters we won’t discuss the matter but put it down at any sacrifice.⁸⁸

Back in San Francisco three weeks later, King accompanied Mrs. Frémont and her children to the wharf where the Vanderbilt Line steamship North Star awaited them. The Pony Express had brought a letter from Colonel Frémont in London: he was returning at once to the United States, and wanted them to close up the cottage at Black Point and meet him in New York. King escorted his friend to the door of her stateroom. Their parting was difficult; both were overcome not just with emotion but with the exhaustion of the past few months. At last he pressed into her hands a bouquet of long-stemmed violets and a volume of Emerson’s essays. “Smell, read, and rest,” he said.⁸⁹

Neither she nor he would rest much in the months and years ahead. Each would continue separately the campaign they had begun together.

THE CONVENTION TO DETERMINE Missouri’s course in the national crisis assembled in St. Louis on March 4. Although this was also, by chance, the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, it dawned unpropitiously for the local Unionists. They awoke to find two secessionist flags flying above their city. One floated from the staff atop the courthouse dome; unguarded, it was easily removed. The other would be a good deal trickier to deal with. It wasn’t much to look at: a dark blue cloth hastily stitched with a crude patchwork of secession emblems, from the palmetto and star to the Southern cross to the state arms of Missouri. But it hung from the front porch of the Berthold Mansion, which was very well guarded indeed.⁹⁰

Before long, a large and angry crowd—mostly Germans—was filling the streets for several blocks in each direction, shouting for the flag to be taken down. Each window of the mansion bristled with loaded muskets: clearly the Minute Men were prepared to defend their banner at all costs. (The protesters didn’t know it, but the defenders also had a swivel gun, loaded with musket balls and tenpenny nails, aimed from the inside at the front door.) Soon, drumbeats were heard approaching through the streets: the Wide Awakes were coming, and they too were armed.⁹¹

The two sides faced each other across the narrow porch. A thousand miles away, the Black Republican president was taking his oath of office. Everyone knew that this standoff on Fifth Street might erupt at any moment into a bloodbath—and they knew what such a bloodbath could mean, not just for their state but for their country.

Somehow violence was averted that morning. One eyewitness account says vaguely that “after many entreaties by the thoughtful and intelligent of the Unionists, the rank and file accorded obedience.” Another, more specific, describes a civic elder who climbed atop an Italian fruit vendor’s small donkey cart—a convenient platform accidentally stranded there—to address the crowd. The donkey, “suddenly taking fright either at the eloquence of the orator or at the shouts of the crowd,” bolted and sent the gentleman tumbling, to the spectators’ amusement. Perhaps credit is due to that donkey—whose name, if he had one, is lost to history—for breaking the tension and preventing a clash of arms that might have touched off the Civil War six weeks early.⁹²

In any event, the rebel flag still flew unmolested from the Berthold Mansion the next day. Thanks to it, however, the Missouri leaders meeting to decide their state’s allegiance had just caught a glimpse of the future. The consequences of secession, which had seemed like remote abstractions in bucolic Jefferson City, were now all too vividly manifest. Isidor Bush, the only Forty-Eighter among the delegates, rose to admonish his colleagues: “While you … only imagine the horrors of war and fancy the evils of revolution, I know them. My eyes have seen what you cannot imagine, what I cannot describe.” The next day, to Governor Jackson’s chagrin, the convention almost unanimously endorsed a resolution that “at present there was no adequate cause to impel Missouri to dissolve her connection with the federal Union.”⁹³

Still, every Missourian knew that in the event of federal aggression toward a Southern state—say, a battle at Charleston or elsewhere—the “adequate cause” might very suddenly present itself.

What only a few knew was that the raising of the two rebel flags had not been some rash act of a few young hotheads. It had been a coolly plotted provocation. The Minute Men had actually hoped to spark an explosion of violence throughout the city. Amid the chaos, they thought, they could seize the choicest prize of the Mississippi Valley, indeed, one of the choicest in the entire country: the United States Arsenal at St. Louis.⁹⁴

The Arsenal was a central munitions depot for federal forts throughout the West. Its present stores could equip an entire Confederate army: 60,000 muskets, 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, 1.5 million cartridges, and several dozen cannon—in addition to machinery for arms manufacture, of which the South had woefully little. The Buchanan administration, displaying its usual strategic acumen, had initially left only forty soldiers guarding this bounty, the largest single arms cache in all the slave states. Thanks to some urgent string pulling by Frank Blair, the force was increased to some five hundred federal troops, still hardly enough, given the thousands of secessionist volunteers now arming themselves in St. Louis and throughout Missouri. But as winter turned into spring and the plots and counterplots multiplied, the Arsenal’s greatest asset would turn out to be one very strange little man.⁹⁵

Captain Nathaniel Lyon of the United States Army could hardly have seemed a less imposing warrior. A slight, red-bearded Yankee, he was constantly sucking on hard candies, which clicked wetly against his ill-fitting dentures. Yet Lyon embodied, in his five-foot-five frame, nearly everything that Southerners loathed and feared. He was a man of fervent, almost fanatical, Republican antislavery beliefs, which he never hesitated to vocalize in his harsh, nasal Connecticut bray. It was not, he made clear, that he gave a damn about the slaves—in fact, he publicly professed himself “not concerned with improving the black race, nor the breed of dogs and reptiles.” No, it was mostly just that he hated the South, detested its authoritarian institutions, and tasted bile at the very thought of secessionist treason. Many tales about him circulated in the army. Perhaps the most famous was of the time at Fort Riley when the captain came upon one of his privates beating a dog: after knocking the soldier to the ground and kicking him in the stomach a few times, he made him get on his knees and beg the animal for forgiveness. To know that story was to know Nathaniel Lyon.⁹⁶

People called him “mentally unbalanced”; no doubt present-day psychiatry has a term for his condition. Whenever an underling committed some trifling infraction, Lyon would inflict an ingeniously sadistic punishment—one favorite involved honey and stinging flies—then seek out his victim a few hours later and abjectly apologize. On meeting someone, Lyon would coax out of him some mild expression of political or religious opinion (the captain himself was an avowed atheist), so that he might reply with a scalding shower of profanities. And yet somehow he also managed to inspire loyalty, even trust. A brother officer wrote:

If he had lived four hundred years ago he would have been burned at the stake as a pestilent and altogether incorrigible person, whose removal was demanded in the interests of the peace of society.… There was no middle ground with him in any matter that engaged his attention, and he conceived that it was his duty to enforce his doctrines or ideas upon all with whom he came in contact, even to the point of being offensive. At the same time he was possessed of as tender a heart as ever beat in a man’s breast.… He had in him an indomitable spirit that was always awake, a fixity of purpose that never faltered, and a courage that was never for an instant met by the slightest feeling of fear. He did not know what fear was.⁹⁷

In this man’s hands rested the fate of the St. Louis Arsenal.

He had arrived in February at the head of a company of reinforcements, just eighty soldiers, and reported to his superior officer at the Arsenal, a certain Major Hagner, who seemed not quite combat-ready, to put it mildly. (When a squad started moving howitzers across the yard, the major admonished them sharply “not to spoil his lawn.”)⁹⁸ But within days of his arrival, Lyon met Frank Blair and immediately recognized a kindred spirit: one as hard-nosed and ruthless as himself. Blair had thousands of men at his command, but few weapons; Lyon commanded just a few dozen men but had access to enough weapons to arm half of St. Louis. No wonder they found each other.

There was another very important respect in which the well-connected Blair could be useful: he had the ear of the Lincoln administration. Within a week of the inauguration, he dropped a quick note to Secretary of War Cameron, and almost immediately, new orders went out to St. Louis, assigning command of the Arsenal’s troops and defenses to Captain Nathaniel Lyon, relieving the feckless Hagner.⁹⁹

The armed standoff—between the Minute Men and heavily secessionist state militia on one side, and the Arsenal troops and former Wide Awakes on the other—lasted through early April. (Blair had now renamed his forces the Home Guards.) Then came the momentous news from Charleston Harbor. Now it was the governor’s turn to act.

On the very day that word of Sumter’s surrender arrived in St. Louis—Sunday, April 14—Jackson struck the lowest and most dastardly blow he could inflict on the German community: he orchestrated a police raid to enforce the blue laws. Squads of officers fanned out across the city, storming into saloons and beer gardens and driving the clientele into the streets. (Drinking establishments popular among “Americans,” such as the bar at the Planter’s House hotel, famous for its mint juleps and sherry cobblers, were not disturbed. Afterward, one report had it that misdirected police came to break up a saloon where Governor Jackson himself happened to be drinking with some cronies, but this seems too good to be true.) Forty armed policemen appeared at Henry Boernstein’s Opera House just before the evening performance and shut down the theater; it never reopened. This was, however, only the opening salvo of a larger campaign to oppress the city’s Unionists by the arbitrary exercise of government authority. It was quickly announced that English would henceforth be the only official language of state business, and that funds for St. Louis’s public schools were being reallocated to arm Governor Jackson’s militia. Citizens were forbidden from gathering in large groups in the streets. All assemblies of “negroes or mulattoes,” including church services, were summarily banned unless a police officer was present, and hundreds of free blacks, terrified that reenslavement might be next, flocked to the courthouse seeking official certificates of freedom.¹⁰⁰

“Not One Word More—Now Arms Will Decide,” the Anzeiger’s headline announced grimly. “Every question, every doubt has been swept away,” the article continued. “The Fatherland calls us—we stand at its disposal.”¹⁰¹

The Fatherland’s first official call to the state of Missouri, however, failed to elicit the desired effect. When Governor Jackson received Lincoln’s April 15 order for state troops to be mustered into federal service, he replied in no uncertain terms:

Sir, … your requisition in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade.

Even many moderate Missourians who would have disowned their governor’s harsh rhetoric agreed in wanting no part of Lincoln’s call to arms. One man spoke for many when he wrote to a pro-Union acquaintance: “We ask nothing of the gov’t at Washington but to be left alone.” Publicly, Jackson announced a policy of “armed neutrality” for the state. Privately, he sent envoys to Montgomery to ask Jefferson Davis for siege guns and mortars to be used against the Arsenal.¹⁰²

On village squares, county fairgrounds, and fallow fields across Missouri, young men were forming militia companies to defend their state against the Yankees. They armed themselves with hunting rifles and shotguns, sharpened homemade bowie knives to a razor’s edge, and buckled on old swords cadged from neighbors who had fought in Mexico. Many years later one of these Missouri volunteers would pen a wry account—a parody of the Civil War memoir genre—of his company from the town of Hannibal. In his telling, the unit was little more than a dozen or so boys playing at war, fighting hand-to-paw combats against barnyard dogs and “retreating” headlong through the night from nonexistent Union patrols. But ex-Lieutenant Sam Clemens was viewing the past through the sentimental haze of a quarter century, not to mention through the satirical lens of Mark Twain. In the spring of 1861, the secessionist militias were in deadly earnest.

A different volunteer, making his way from the far west of the state to join the rebel forces, stopped with his comrades at a wayside inn, where the landlord’s pretty daughter entertained them with “Dixie” on the piano. “I made a promise to her that I would kill two ‘duchmen,’ ” the young man recorded.¹⁰³

Across the country, in fact, many people framed the conflict in ethnic as well as racial terms—an aspect of the war that has been largely forgotten. Many white immigrants embraced the opportunity to prove their identity as true Americans, and as they watched their adopted homeland fall unexpectedly to pieces, they looked to their own traditions for guidance. In New York, the Irish Brigade marched down Broadway behind a banner reading “Remember Fontenoy,” referring to a 1745 battle where Irish Jacobites fought British troops. (Although Irish soldiers have often been stereotyped as racists and unwilling conscripts, one immigrant, writing in February 1861, compared enslaved blacks to his own oppressed nation and said of the impending war: “this is Just the only effectual Speedy way of setting the Coulered population at liberty.”) In Kansas, a young Jewish immigrant had a final conversation with his parents before riding off to join the Union cavalry: “My mother said that as a Jehudi [Jew] I had the duty to perform, to defend the institutions which gave equal rights to all beliefs.”¹⁰⁴

And in St. Louis, a group of German women made a flag. They stitched it together out of heavy silk, with stars of silver thread. Across its red and white stripes they painted an inscription in gold letters: “III. Regiment MISSOURI VOLUNTEERS. Lyons Fahnenwacht.”¹⁰⁵ “Lyon’s Color Guard” was a new unit under Sigel’s command. The ladies presented their handiwork at an impressive ceremony with both Sigel and Lyon in attendance, as well as the entire regiment. Miss Josephine Weigel stepped forward and addressed the commander in their native tongue:

Herr Oberst Sigel! It is a great honor for us to present you with this flag, made by German women and maidens, for your regiment.…

In keeping with old German custom, we women do not wish to remain mere onlookers when our men have dedicated themselves with joyful courage to the service of the Fatherland; so far as it is in our power, we too wish to take part in the struggle for freedom and fan the fire of enthusiasm into bright flames.¹⁰⁶

Nor was this the only female contribution to the cause—far from it. Throughout the city, one St. Louisan reported, women and girls were wrapping gunpowder and musket balls into cartridges “as fast as their fingers could fly.”¹⁰⁷

The resourceful Lyon and Blair had managed to take Jackson’s rebuff of Lincoln’s orders and turn it to their advantage. In a long letter to Secretary Cameron on April 18, Blair officiously instructed the administration on how to win the war within a few months, laying out an elaborate strategy that began with mustering his Home Guards into the U.S. Army and putting him and Lyon in charge of them.

In other words, if Jackson would not supply his militia, their motley bands of Germans would step in to fill the gap. Cameron passed this request along to General Scott, who approved the order with a shrug, scribbling, “It is revolutionary times, and therefore I do not object to the irregularity of this,” before Lincoln signed off as well. Thus, Lyon, still officially a mere company captain, now found himself briefly commanding the entire Department of the West—in other words, almost everything between the Mississippi and the far side of the Rockies. April 1861 was a time when such things could happen.¹⁰⁸

Within days, four regiments of loyal Home Guards were mustered into federal service: Sigel’s Lyons Fahnenwacht, plus one regiment under Blair, one under the versatile Boernstein (who dusted off the skills he had acquired in the Imperial Austrian Army), and one under Nicholas Schuettner, another local Forty-Eighter and leader of an anti-secessionist street gang. Of these forty-two hundred troops, all but one hundred were Germans. Several more regiments started forming as reserves. Lyon, without any official promotion, began styling himself “General.” Forests of white tents sprouted on the Arsenal grounds, as thousands of muddy boots dealt their coup de grâce to Major Hagner’s beloved lawn. Bands played; companies marched; some of the soldiers, according to a reporter, even tried “running and leaping in the Zouave practice.” At dusk the light of cooking fires flickered among the encampments, while “all nooks and crannies sounded with German war songs and soldiers’ choirs,” Boernstein recalled after the war. Ever upbeat, he claimed that even those officers with the most refined European palates pronounced the camp food excellent. “The general happiness, the humorous mood, the awareness of doing a good deed and the physical exertions served as seasoning to stimulate the appetite,” he wrote. “I cannot recall days so cheerful, exciting or invigorating as those first few days at the arsenal when we were forming our volunteer regiments.” The main thing, one recruit wrote, was that each man was “eager to teach the German-haters a never-to-be-forgotten lesson.”¹⁰⁹

Less visible maneuvers were also taking place at the Arsenal. Having issued his troops all the weapons and ammunition they would need, Lyon determined to send much of what remained out of harm’s way, to the Union troops mustering in Illinois. As a handpicked crew of men worked secretly to pack up the weaponry, Lyon had spread a rumor, via local barrooms, that a shipment of weapons from the Arsenal would be sent across the city in streetcars that night. Sure enough, at 9:00 p.m., a trolley convoy loaded with wooden crates rolled slowly up Fifth Street. Minute Men instantly rushed out of ambush, halted the trolleys, pried open the containers, and pulled out the guns: a few rusty old flintlocks from the Arsenal’s junk room. Meanwhile, down on the river, the steamboat City of Alton, her lamps doused and paddlewheels barely turning, slipped quietly from the Arsenal quay and up the Mississippi with 25,000 well-oiled muskets and carbines aboard.¹¹⁰

Over the next couple of weeks, the opposing forces in St. Louis performed an uncanny pantomime. Across the city from the Arsenal, secessionists set up an armed camp of their own in an area called Lindell’s Grove, formerly a park and picnic ground. They dubbed it Camp Jackson in honor of the governor, laid out rows of tents grandiosely dubbed Beauregard Street and Davis Street, and before long, more than a thousand state troops had arrived, under Missouri’s militia commander, General Daniel Frost. These soldiers, William T. Sherman later recalled, included many “young men from the first and best families of St. Louis.” Ostensibly, Jackson and Frost had assembled them for a regular militia encampment, just as might be done in peacetime. As at a typical antebellum militia gathering, a festive, even indolent atmosphere prevailed; young ladies came and went to visit their beaux, and mothers brought hampers of food to their sons. But in fact, the commanders were expecting more troops to assemble, and they were awaiting a much-anticipated gift from Jefferson Davis.¹¹¹

Late on the night of May 8, another mysterious steamboat docked in St. Louis—this one unloading cargo rather than taking it aboard. Perplexed longshoremen were summoned to the levee to help move some enormously heavy crates marked “Tamaroa marble”: material for an upcoming art exhibition, they were told. Actually, the crates contained two howitzers and two siege cannons, five hundred muskets, and a large supply of ammunition, all recently confiscated by Confederate authorities from the U.S. arsenal down in Baton Rouge. As far as arms caches went, this wasn’t much, but it was a start.¹¹²

Unlike Lyon’s ingenious trolley-car trick, though, the midnight shipment of “art supplies” was a lame ruse indeed. By midmorning, several longshoremen, who happened to be Germans, had reported the suspicious activity to the Arsenal commander.

Instead of being alarmed, Lyon seemed elated. For weeks he had thirsted for a chance to humiliate the rebels. But the state militia and Minute Men had not given him an opportunity. Jackson, though hungry for the Arsenal and its stores, could not attack while so badly outgunned and outnumbered. Without such provocation, Lyon and Blair had felt constrained from moving against Camp Jackson. After all, the officers and men there were officially state troops, and the state had not yet gone over to the Confederacy; indeed, the Stars and Stripes still flew above the camp. So while the arrival of Jeff Davis’s cannons and muskets may not have given Jackson and Frost much additional firepower, it gave Lyon and Blair exactly what they needed: a pretext.

IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of May 9, a handsome barouche with a black coachman in the driver’s seat pulled up to the front gate of Camp Jackson. Inside it rode a genteel old lady dressed in a shawl, a heavy veil, and an enormous sunbonnet. In her lap she held a small wicker basket. The sentries waved her through; clearly this was just a widow paying a visit to her militiaman son. The basket must be full of sandwiches she had lovingly prepared for her dear boy.

In fact, the wicker basket held two loaded Colt revolvers. And if the sentries had peered under the old lady’s veil, they would have glimpsed something even more surprising: a bushy red beard.

Surely there must have been a hundred simpler ways to reconnoiter the rebels’ picnic ground. Nathaniel Lyon, however, was not one to pass up an opportunity for intrigue, and apparently thought his escapade would seem picturesque rather than ridiculous. He had borrowed the dress, shawl, veil, and sunbonnet from Frank Blair’s mother-in-law. Anyhow, his leisurely drive through Camp Jackson showed him exactly what he wanted to see: the mysterious crates from the steamer, still unopened.¹¹³

Early the next morning, a horseman was seen galloping southward down Carondelet Road, on his way to the U.S. troops’ outlying encampments. By midday, columns of soldiers were marching through the streets of the city, converging on Camp Jackson. Boernstein, in a splendid plumed Alpine hat, rode astride a horse at the head of his regiment. Herr Oberst Sigel, on the other hand, rolled along in carriage behind his men: the first casualty of the day, he had fallen off his horse onto the cobblestones and hurt his leg. Tony Niederwiesser, the saloonkeeper, strutted at the head of a company.¹¹⁴

For weeks, the city’s German press had throbbed with ever-purpler prose. “The North has awakened from its slumber; the earth shakes under the tread of its legions, and the South trembles,” exulted the Westliche Post. “Suddenly a new race arises like a phoenix from the general conflagration, and our workaday politicians sink into the oblivion they deserve.… The great goal of mankind—the demand for freedom—will rise ever more glorious and flow like gold in the heat from the fire of battle.” Two days before the advance on Camp Jackson, the editors had hailed “the uprising of the people in the Northern states”—that is, the tremendous surge of patriotic feeling and military enlistment after Sumter—as one of the greatest events in world history since the defeat of Napoleon. “This period will be called the second American Revolution,” they predicted. “It will … be able to turn the great principles enunciated in the first revolution into reality.” And, thanks to the quick dissemination of news by steamboat and telegraph, this revolution would also spread across the Atlantic, so that “soon the cry of jubilation of the liberated nations of Europe will echo across the ocean, greeting us as saviors and brothers.”¹¹⁵

Yet the German volunteers themselves, after all their excitement during the previous months, seemed strangely subdued on the morning of the attack. As they marched through the streets of St. Louis, no one sang; no bands played. Dressed in their civilian clothes, they seemed to trudge like cattle, one observer said. Perhaps, like Isidor Bush (himself now a private in one of the Home Guard regiments), too many had already seen firsthand the unpredictable calamities of war.¹¹⁶

Ulysses Grant stood across from the Arsenal’s main gate, in front of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, watching the troops file out. (Still eager to make acquaintances that might lead to a commission, he took the opportunity to introduce himself to Blair, who was on horseback marshaling the companies, and wish him luck.) William T. Sherman, on his way to the streetcar company office, heard people on every corner saying excitedly that the “Dutch” were moving on Camp Jackson. The streets were filling with people hurrying after the troops, swept along almost involuntarily, “anxious spectators of every political proclivity,” one witness wrote, “never doubting for a moment that if a fight should occur they could stand by unharmed and witness it all.” One big, bearded man, distraught at Lyon’s surprise attack, shouted, “He’s gone out to kill all the boys,—to kill all the boys!” Although a couple of Sherman’s friends urged him to come and “see the fun,” he hurried in the opposite direction, walking quickly home to make sure his seven-year-old son, Willie, had not joined the packs of schoolboys scampering toward the excitement.¹¹⁷

With soldierly precision that impressed the onlookers, Lyon’s regiments surrounded Camp Jackson on all sides. In the grove itself, there seemed to be little commotion and no sign of resistance. General Frost’s militiamen were outnumbered at least eight to one. Lyon, on horseback, surveying the scene with satisfaction, sent in an adjutant with a curtly worded note:

SIR—Your command is regarded as evidently hostile to the Government of the United States.

It is for the most part made up of those secessionists who have openly avowed their hostility to the Government, and have been plotting at the seizure of its property and the overthrow of its authority. You are openly in communication with the so-called Southern Confederacy, which is now at war with the United States; and you are receiving at your camp, from the said Confederacy and under its flag, large supplies of the material of war.…

In view of these considerations … it is my duty to demand, and I do hereby demand of you, an immediate surrender.

Frost had little choice. He sent the adjutant back with a note acquiescing, under strong protest, to the demand.¹¹⁸

At this point the second casualty of the day was suffered. Dismounting with the note in hand, Lyon was promptly kicked in the stomach by the overexcited horse of one of his aides. Doubling over in pain, he collapsed senseless on the ground. A doctor from one of the German regiments hurried over to him, and Lyon gradually began regaining consciousness, but apparently he was still incapacitated when the evacuation of Camp Jackson began.¹¹⁹

Blair’s and Boernstein’s regiments drew up in formation on each side as Frost’s men began to file out through an opening in the fence. All around them, crowds of civilians pressed in. Many were friends and relatives of the captured soldiers, anxious to see that their loved ones were all right; others had come to hail the Union triumph; most were probably just gawkers. Even Sherman, hearing that Frost had surrendered peacefully, now came to watch, holding young Willie by the hand. These spectators were amazed at the sight: militiamen in the splendid uniforms of Missouri’s most elite dragoon regiments; the flower of the old families—Longuemares, Ladues, Gareschés; the cream of St. Louis in “the beauty of youth, aristocratic breeding, clannish pride”—now captives, every one of them, stacking their arms in submission, trudging sullenly down Pine Street between the ranks of their drab “Dutch” captors. Two black women in the crowd, exultant, began laughing and yelling taunts at the humiliated militia. Soon other bystanders began hurling insults at the victorious Germans: “Damn Dutch!” “Hessians!” “Infidels!” One man cheered for Jeff Davis; another for Abe Lincoln. Lyon’s officers, trying to drown out the cacophony, ordered a brass band at the head of the column to start playing. Still the obscenities flew; women spat on the Union volunteers; others started scooping up rocks and dirt to throw at them. A few men brandished revolvers and knives.¹²⁰

Afterward, no one could agree on how the shooting started. One teenager recalled seeing a boy his own age pitch a clod of dirt at a mounted officer. Other witnesses described an unarmed man stepping out of the row of onlookers and being savagely bayoneted by one of the “Dutchmen.” The most credible accounts corroborate what Sherman would remember. As he and Willie watched, a drunken man in the crowd tried to push his way through the ranks of Sigel’s troops to reach the other side. When a sergeant blocked him with his musket, shoving him roughly down a steep embankment, the drunkard staggered to his feet, pulled a small pistol from his pocket, and fired. An officer on horseback screamed as the bullet tore a gaping wound in his leg. (The captain, an exiled Polish nobleman named Constantin Blandowski, would die of his injury a few weeks later.) And so it was that the panicking soldiers turned their muskets on the crowd. Somewhere up at the head of the column, surreally, the German band kept playing.¹²¹

Sherman ran back toward the grove, pulling Willie into a ditch and covering the boy with his body as they heard bullets cutting through the leaves and branches overhead. Around them people stampeded in all directions, some of them wounded. A few bold civilians stood their ground and fired back at the soldiers. Captain Lyon, one of the few professional soldiers on hand and perhaps the only one capable of bringing his raw recruits under control, was still woozy from the kick he had received. By the time the shooting stopped, bodies lay everywhere: a middle-aged street vendor, a teenage girl, a young German laborer in his work clothes, and several soldiers from both Frost’s and Lyon’s commands. A wounded woman sat keening on the ground, clasping the body of her dead child in her arms. In all, more than two dozen people had been killed or mortally hurt.

Lyon, dazed, stood looking around him, murmuring in a strange, soft voice: “Poor creatures … poor creatures …”¹²²

Others stared amazed at the sight of buildings pockmarked with bullet holes, like wounds torn in the city itself. Much commented on afterward was the remarkable power of the new Minié rifle balls, how such small lumps of lead could make such big craters in brickwork and stone.

A twelve-year-old boy, returning home with his father to Pine Street, saw something that would still haunt him more than six decades later:

Two bullets had struck our house, and just outside a German soldier was sitting on the side-walk with his back to the wall. Coming closer we could distinguish where the Minié bullet had penetrated his temple. He was dead. Close by a servant with a pail of water was washing a stream of blood off the side-walk where someone had been killed, and the sight to me was indescribably horrible. My father said this was civil war.¹²³

The retaliation began that night. Crowds of secessionists gathered in front of the Planter’s House as impromptu orators railed against the Black Republicans and Hessian mercenaries. At last the mob decided to wreck the Anzeiger print shop; storming down Main Street, they smashed the window of Dimick’s gun store and began grabbing shotguns and rifles. Fortunately for Boernstein’s paper, some quick-thinking Home Guards blocked the street and fended off the attack with fixed bayonets. For the next twenty-four hours, though, Germans foolish enough to appear in public were chased down and beaten, stoned, sometimes lynched. One of the reserve regiments was ambushed by secessionists firing from behind the pillars of a Presbyterian church; in the ensuing confusion, several soldiers unlucky enough to become separated from their comrades were seized and executed with shots fired point-blank to the head. Rumors began reaching the city of similar reprisals across the state; in towns too small to have any Germans, Republicans were slain or “abolitionist” churches burned.¹²⁴

Meanwhile, in the wealthier neighborhoods of St. Louis, it was said that the “Dutch” were about to sack and burn the city. “The ‘upper ten,’ the rich, proud slaveholders,” as Boernstein called them, loaded up draymen’s wagons with mahogany furniture and chests of linen and fled by the thousands, crowding aboard ferryboats, seeking the safety of the Illinois shore.¹²⁵

But Captain Lyon’s sights were now set beyond St. Louis. He had accomplished everything he needed to do there.

Within a matter of weeks, Lyon, Blair, Sigel, and their German volunteers were marching toward central Missouri in hot pursuit of Governor Jackson, who by this point had unilaterally declared war on the United States and called for 50,000 volunteers to defend against Yankee invasion. (Boernstein and his men stayed behind to guard St. Louis.) Jackson fled Jefferson City at the troops’ approach, accompanied by most of the prosecession legislature and the Missouri state troops. Lyon caught up with them fifty miles away, at Boonville, where he dealt them a quick but decisive defeat. After just a few casualties on each side, the state troops broke ranks and fled, hotly pursued by the German regiments, into the far southwestern corner of the state. Missouri would never again be in serious danger of falling into rebel hands.¹²⁶

While Thomas Starr King and Jessie Frémont may not have saved California for the Union, it is reasonable to say that Nathaniel Lyon, Frank Blair, and the Germans did save Missouri. Somehow, the strange, almost accidental alliance of two outsize egotists (one of them possibly psychotic) and several thousand idealists had carried the day.

Grant himself would believe for the rest of his life that but for them, the Arsenal—and with it St. Louis—would have been taken by the Confederacy. Some historians have argued that the militia at Camp Jackson, even if reinforced, could never have posed any serious threat by itself, which is perhaps true. But by seizing the initiative, by transforming the Wide Awakes into soldiers and moving against the secessionists before they could properly organize, the “damn Dutchmen” had sent their enemies reeling, never to regain balance. In effect, a small band of German revolutionaries accomplished in St. Louis what they had failed to do in Vienna and Heidelberg: overthrow a reactionary state government. And they had done it in a matter of weeks, while in the East the armies were stumbling toward a war of attrition that would last almost four years. If the Union in 1861 had just had a few more Lyons and Blairs in charge of its troops, its conquest of the South might have played out very differently.¹²⁷

But even swift victory did not come without a price. For the rest of those four years, Missouri would be the scene of atrocities unlike any seen elsewhere: ceaseless guerrilla warfare that erased distinctions between soldier and civilian almost entirely; violence with no greater strategic purpose than avenging the violence that had come before; in a few notorious instances, hundreds lined up and executed in cold blood. There would be many more shattered buildings, dead children and dead mothers, gutters awash in blood.

ON JULY 4, 1861, a thousand miles from Fort Churchill—at Julesburg in the newly organized Colorado Territory—a crew of workmen raised the first pole at the eastern end of the transcontinental telegraph. On the same day, too, news went out that President Lincoln had just appointed John C. Frémont, newly returned from Europe, to command the Department of the West. He and his wife would set out as soon as possible for St. Louis.

Throughout that summer, two telegraph lines converged over the deserts and plains. As the termini drew closer, the route of the Pony Express grew shorter and shorter, until at last the swift horsemen were carrying messages across only the little distance between the wires. The connection was made in October at Salt Lake City; the indomitable Hiram Sibley and his partners had beaten Congress’s seemingly impossible deadline by more than a year. Within days, communications traffic was so heavy that operators began talking of the need for a second wire and even a third. “When once the Yankees get started,” an Ohio newspaper editor marveled, “it is hard for them to stop.”¹²⁸

The honor of sending one of San Francisco’s first messages across the continent was accorded to the Reverend Thomas Starr King. His words raced eastward as dots and dashes, arriving thus at the office of the Boston Evening Transcript:

All hail! A new bond of union between Pacific and Atlantic! The lightning now goeth out of the west and shineth even in the east! Heaven preserve the republic, and bless old Boston from hub to rim!

The arc of the sun he had once so powerfully traced was now reinforced by a strand of copper filament.

Over the four years to come, as the war raged east of the Mississippi, more and more lines would be drawn across the West.

In 1862, Congress—suddenly liberated from sectional gridlock in its half-empty chamber—would pass the Homestead Act, promising 160 acres of federal land to any man or woman willing to settle it. In the autumn of the following year, the first lengths of the transcontinental railway were laid at Sacramento. Lines of new counties, farm boundaries, townships, and streets spread across the map, mere pencil markings that soon took shape on the landscape itself. Miles of rail fences followed, and the twin ruts of new wagon roads.

And across all of it, the wire—busier and busier, its indifferent electrons carrying speeches and sermons, grain prices and casualty lists, through mountain passes that the Pathfinder once had crossed.

*Expedition leaders named an especially prickly new species of hedgehog cactus Opuntia davisii in honor of the secretary of war.

*Joaquin Miller, later a great Western poet, was then a boy on an Ohio farm; he would later remember his father reading him Frémont’s reports aloud: “I never was so fascinated. I never grew so fast in my life.… I fancied I could see Frémont’s men, hauling cannon up the savage battlements of the Rocky Mountains, flags in the air, Frémont at the head, waving his sword, his horse neighing wildly in the mountain wind.… Now I began to be inflamed with a love for action, adventure, glory, and great deeds away out yonder under the path of the setting sun.” Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007), p. 47.

*The wild hunt, the German hunt,/For hangmen’s blood and for tyrants! / O dearest ones, weep not for us: / The land is free, the morning dawns, / Even though we won it in dying!

This song, “Lützows wilde Jagd,” dated from the German struggle against Napoleon in 1812–13 and had also been popular during the revolutions of 1848. Baron von Lützow was the dashing commander of a German cavalry corps. The description of the St. Louis volunteers singing “Lützows wilde Jagd” is in Heinrich Börnstein (Henry Boernstein), Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, ed. and trans. by Steven Rowan (St. Louis, 1997), pp. 284–85. The German lyrics are from Lisa Feurzeig, ed., Deutsche Lieder für Jung und Alt (Middleton, Wisc., 2002), p. 96.

*Dred Scott and his family had been freed just after their case ended; their master had become embarrassed by all the publicity. Scott took a position at Barnum’s Hotel (owned by the circus impresario’s cousin), where his job was simply to welcome arriving guests, as a kind of celebrity greeter. He enjoyed his freedom for barely a year: he died in 1858 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the city’s Wesleyan Cemetery. His widow, Harriet, remained in St. Louis and supported herself as a laundress, living until 1876.

*Bush tried at first to continue his publishing career in America by launching a Jewish literary and philosophical journal, Israels Herold, but this quickly proved unprofitable, since St. Louis in the 1840s had only about a hundred Jews.