The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  Chinese miners in the Sierra camps lived about twenty men to a cabin and took orders from a foreman who had brought the group from San Francisco—a Chinese boss who guided the digging and took most of the profit. By contrast, white miners worked alone or in pairs and did not mingle with their Chinese rivals. But Leland Stanford sold anything to everyone.

  Native Americans stayed out of the mining boom. They weren’t inclined to chase gold, and anyway episodes of warfare with whites often flared. The year after Stanford moved to California, settlers massacred some twenty-five Indians in the village of Tehama, one hundred miles northwest of Michigan Bluff. A native group the papers called only “the Indians of Colusa County” had been trying to move American ranchers off their land by killing their livestock and vandalizing fences. “The mountains are alive with these red devils,” as the reporter neutrally put it. White ranchers retaliated by capturing and killing two Indian men. They tortured a third captive, who then led the ranchers to a cave where his people lived. The ranchers smoked out the cave with fires and shot ten men and three women as they fled. Five children survived. The leader of the attack took one child, whose parents he had killed, home with him. Four others younger than ten years “were disposed in the same charitable manner among the party,” as the paper explained. Mile by mile (child by child?), California was made safe for white possession.17

  The Stanford store at the mining camp of Michigan Bluff, California, ca. 1853 (Illustration Credit c13.3)

  Michigan Bluff lacked a church, but instead it had four saloons where the miners drank, gambled, and paid for sex. Stanford probably had the best education in town. He got himself named justice of the peace, his first political office, and simultaneously he bought one of the barrooms, the Empire Saloon, for $575, on October 18, 1854. Justice Stanford’s saloon differed from the other barrooms in that women, and not men, paid out the money from the gambling operation, a gimmick probably taken from the bar’s previous owner. Stanford used his tavern to hold court proceedings during the day. Most cases involved assault, but he heard one murder case, which he sent to the next town, claiming the right jurisdiction rested there. Another thing comes to mind: no evidence suggests that Stanford’s Empire Saloon might also have been a brothel, but the fact remains that most saloons at this place and time were also brothels, and there is the curious detail of women running the gaming till. The absence of evidence of prostitution is not evidence of absence.18 With his wife three thousand miles away, did Justice Stanford operate a bordello?

  Stanford was thirty. He and his wife, Jenny, had lived apart for three years, with Jenny sequestered in New York State with her parents. In May 1855, Stanford received a letter that his wife’s father, Dyer Lathrop, had died. Within a week, he sold his half of the grocery business to his partner, Nicholas Smith, and resigned his justiceship. (There is no record of what he did with the Empire Saloon.) In June, Stanford arrived back in Albany, where he found his wife in a serious depression. Jenny’s father had died, but apparently worse than this, she later remembered, she had been the victim of intense gossip. For a long time, people in her church and social circle had referred to her as “the deserted wife.” She would resent this piece of condescension for the rest of her life. After leaving Albany, she gave it as a reason why she never went back.

  He had expected to move home to New York State and set up in business, Stanford said later. He said his California stores had given him a big bankroll and that he even looked for a house to buy in Albany. Stanford later pointed out that his wife, Jenny, had been the one to talk him out of moving home. Because of the gossip, which had hurt her, she wanted the two of them to go to California. There may be some truth here, although the explanations that people give for what they do usually amount to less than half the whole.

  Leland and Jenny Stanford left Albany behind, arriving in California in November 1855. They rented a house in Sacramento, 92 Second Street. Stanford’s oldest brother, Josiah, had built the Stanford Brothers store at 56–58 K Street, and now Leland bought it from him. Next door to it stood a larger retail operation, Huntington & Hopkins, purveyors of hardware. Within a few days Stanford was friendly with its owners, Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins, two men with whom he would later build and run the railroad.

  Stanford wrote his mother and father: “I suppose you all feel anxious to know how my business progresses. I think I shall be able to nurse it into a flourishing state. I sell my goods low and intend to continue doing so. I deal on the square with all, I shall try to be content with moderate gains.” He wrote of himself as a modest man, happy to have less, and yet he was not. Stanford had appetites. A clue appears in another letter.

  “We are very comfortable,” he told his parents. “Jane does her own work, and has the neatest house in town. We live well, have plenty of good coffee, bread, meat and potatoes and such other things as we want, but we are both fond of the substantial.”19

  In his understated way, Stanford showed his grit, plus his greed. We are fond of the substantial.

  In 1856 Stanford built a new store in Sacramento at 64 Front Street, at the corner of L Street. An idea of the inventory comes from a newspaper ad: groceries, wine, liquor, cigars, camphene (fuel oil), flour, grains, produce, and mining tools. The two-story brick building had a footprint of forty-two feet in frontage, with a deep awning, and 150 feet in length. Stanford did well in business and quickly saved tens of thousands, but he still wore an apron.

  The hardware store belonging to Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins, at 54 K Street, Sacramento, ca. 1855. Leland Stanford, a grocer, went into business next door, at number 56, and the three future railroad associates met. (Illustration Credit c13.4)

  About the time the new store went up, Leland made an uncharacteristically rash investment, which turned out to be the smartest move of anything he’d tried. The boom economy of California had grown up on mines and options to extract minerals from the Sierra foothills. Both mineral rights and options went for sale all the time, with the usual result that buyers came up with nothing. Stanford didn’t gamble and preferred to watch other people buy up their stakes and take the fall, except this one time. In 1856 he bought a piece of a dead gold strike, the so-called Amador mine, near the town of Placer City. The wager didn’t fit his character: he liked to build his bank balance with no setbacks of the impulse and remorse variety. But two years later, to Stanford’s and everyone else’s surprise, a new vein of gold turned up at Amador, and the mine started paying in a gush. He decided to cash in, selling his claim for one hundred times what he had paid for it.

  The Amador mine gave Stanford his first windfall. It raised him and Jenny to the upper ranks of the local rich, and it paid for a big new house, one of the finest in town, or one of the most ostentatious, depending on your view of it.

  During his year as justice of the peace with a courtroom saloon, Stanford had tasted public office. After the Amador mine deal, he seems to have decided to go back to politics: he wanted to add influence to the money he now had in hand. When he lived in Wisconsin and worked as a lawyer, he had run for the office of county prosecutor as the Whig Party candidate and lost. Now, living in the California state capital, with extra cash for nice clothes and entertaining, and with literacy from his lawyering days, Stanford had the outward credentials to become a politician. It could also be said that the bar for entering politics in Sacramento tended to hang pretty low. Elections attracted thin public interest and thinner turnout. About 42 percent of white men—the only eligible group, blacks and Chinese men being barred—voted. (Put another way: 20 percent of the population decided the government.) The list of parties could be long and confusing, with six appearing on most ballots: Citizen’s Reform (the so-called Know-Nothings), Whig, Independent Citizen’s, Custom House Whig, Democratic, and Ciudad.20

  One problem for Stanford, as a would-be rookie politician, was that his old party had rapidly fallen from favor. The Whigs had been defeated in several national races, including the federal ele
ction of 1854, and as a result, the party had dwindled. To claim the Whig banner at this point would be to call yourself something of a loser. With the demise of the Whigs, however, the Republican Party, formed back east in 1854, comprised a new movement of liberals. Republicans, in a radical stand, opposed slavery. This position put them on the left fringe of national politics, but it also appealed to Stanford, who idolized the antislavery activist Cassius Clay and had been educated in the abolitionist terrain of upstate New York.

  In California, the first meeting of Republican agitators took place in San Francisco, in April 1856. Five months later, another small group came together in Sacramento, and Stanford saw this as a moment to join the party’s ranks. He and his brother Philip attended the meeting. At this stage, to be a Republican meant running some risks. The Democratic State Journal, a Sacramento newspaper that supported the proslavery Democrats, called the meeting that Stanford attended a “convention of nigger worshipers.” The Republican Party’s slogan for the year 1856 was “Freedom, Fremont, and the Railroad.” (Freedom meant “free soil,” or a stand against slavery in the West; Fremont was John C. Fremont, the Republican candidate for president; and the railroad meant a scheme to lay track from California to the Mississippi.)

  In April 1857, Stanford went into politics as a Republican, running for a seat as an alderman in Sacramento. He won 87 votes of the 3,068 cast. Two things sabotaged him: the proslavery Democrats who dominated California disdained Republicans, seen as the party of liberal people who had too much money. The second handicap was Stanford’s speaking style. He bored crowds. “Stanford is no orator,” one paper said, “a fact patent to all who hear him.”21

  Three months later he was running again, this time for state treasurer. He accepted the nomination in the most awkward terms possible. “It is with unfeigned regret that I have to thank the convention,” Stanford said, addressing a small rally. “I do not know precisely what chance there is for my election. I think our ticket may succeed.”22 In the election, in September, he ran third in a field of three.

  Stanford went back to his grocery, thinking himself unelectable. Two years passed, but in June 1859, he spoke at another Republican convention. There was talk in the press that the Southern states might secede if a Republican administration replaced the proslavery government in Washington. Abolitionist speakers had aroused him when he was a young man, and “free labor” seems to have been one of the issues that pulled him into politics. In the late 1850s, slavery had become a dividing knife in California, and sometimes people got shot for their views. On September 13, 1859, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, David S. Terry, a Kentuckian who had come to California with enslaved people to serve him, shot to death U.S. senator David C. Broderick in a duel. Broderick had made speeches against slavery that the chief justice could not tolerate.

  Stanford was a moderate opponent—he did not call for abolition—and he made it clear that he wouldn’t break up the racial order. The Republicans named him as their candidate for governor in the 1859 race. He had never won an election, and he knew he would lose this one. Accepting the nomination, he said, “Were I an aspiring man, I might hesitate about allowing myself to be placed in this position. Now, I stand for the cause of the white man—the cause of free labor, of justice and of equal rights.” He talked liberal, but he would go slowly on slavery, he said. So that no one could mistake him, he added this: “I prefer the white man to the Negro as an inhabitant of our country.”23 Stanford crisscrossed the state in the month before the election, appearing at small meetings in thirty towns. On election day, September 7, 1859, he lost by a margin of ten votes to one, finishing third in a field of three.

  He’d run for office four times, always losing, but he consoled himself that he still made money. He sent home thousands of dollars to his parents and gave money to his brothers in San Francisco, Josiah and Charles, to keep their businesses afloat. (In letters home to Albany, he complained to his parents about having to do this.)

  Yet another election came, in fall 1860, and this one brought Leland his long-needed stroke of luck. Among the Republicans running for president that year, U.S. senator William Seward was a former Whig who had led the antislavery faction of that party, now defunct. He had won the governor’s office in New York State and then a senator’s seat. Seward was expected to win the Republican nomination for president at the party convention in May 1860, and he did win a plurality of delegate votes on the first ballot. But Abraham Lincoln had been working the convention, and after three more ballots, Seward’s support thinned. The nomination went to Lincoln. Stanford wrote his parents that he had hoped Lincoln would lose.

  Stanford might have been as mystified as anyone on Election Day, November 6, 1860. Lincoln won in the East, and surprisingly, he also won in California. Although proslavery Democrats comprised the majority of white voters, they were split between their party’s two candidates, Stephen Douglas and John Breckenridge.

  After the election, the California Republicans decided to send someone to Washington to talk to Lincoln, the new president. A party stalwart now, Stanford received the nod. He went east to collect the spoils—to measure the scale of patronage for the West and to discuss the names of those who might get the handouts, the appointments, the jobs, the western distribution. In February 1861, Leland and Jenny left for Washington to attend the inauguration in March and shake the president’s hand.

  Lincoln had been in office two weeks when, on April 12, militias in Charleston, South Carolina, fired on Fort Sumter, the event that put the Civil War in motion. California was impossibly far from the East and South—it seemed to most Americans to be practically a separate country—but a backlash nevertheless rolled across the country and Stanford’s fortunes picked up. When the South seceded, people in the West, isolated from Washington but feeling a national urge, swung to the Union cause and backed the Northern side.

  Although the Republicans had lost with Stanford multiple times, in June 1861 the party convention in Sacramento named him its candidate for governor, his second run at the office. He accepted with a studied blandness that crowds by now recognized. “I believe in the people; I believe in the democracy; I believe in the elevation of the masses,” he said, emphatically vague. This time he knew he had a chance. The Democratic vote had split in two during the last election; if it split again, he would be governor.

  In advance of the election Mr. and Mrs. Stanford used the windfall from the Amador mine to buy their big house in Sacramento, on Eighth Street. The house was grand enough to serve as a governor’s mansion, should it be necessary.

  At the same time, Stanford was cutting a deal with his friends, the other Sacramento shopkeepers, to invest in the unlikely train scheme brought to market by a railroad engineer with a manic personality named Theodore Judah. On June 28, 1861, a week after he accepted the Republican nomination for governor, Stanford was named president of the Central Pacific Railroad, a company that existed only on paper. And on September 4, Stanford cast a ballot for himself. He received fifty-six thousand votes, and another sixty-four thousand were divided between two Democratic candidates. Stanford, at age thirty-six, became California’s governor.

  Governor Leland Stanford (in a top hat on the balcony) reviewing troops on DuPont Street in San Francisco, July 4, 1863 (Illustration Credit c13.5)

  THE IMMIGRANT

  When Edward Muggeridge was growing up in England, he went by the name of Ted.1 America tried to be a more casual place than Britain, so in the States, he probably kept his nickname.

  Ted Muggeridge turned up in New York in 1850, landing in a city that shined and seethed and stank. New York was ancient by the American clock, two hundred years old, and the biggest city in the republic. About half a million people lived on Manhattan Island, a quarter of them coming from Ireland. With the influx of mostly desperate people escaping the Irish famine, the city had doubled in size in twenty years, and it was growing faster than anywhere on the continent except San Francisco.
The edge of New York had moved north from Twenty-third Street to Forty-second in about a decade—conferring on many neighborhoods a thrown-together appearance. City Hall’s plan for a grid of streets justified the cutting and chewing through farms and hills, and immigration fueled the build-out, but so did the Erie Canal. A 360-mile-long ditch upstate, the Erie Canal meant that barges could leave Manhattan, push up the Hudson River, cross over to the Great Lakes, steam five hundred miles west, and never unload until Chicago, the front door of the western territories. The Erie Canal meant that every week a new flood of people, money, machines, factory goods, and crops piled up in New York and then washed through, leaving sediments of gold and filth, a residue that was stately and wretched in equal parts.

  Ted Muggeridge would have been familiar with some of this, the rhythm of a metropolis. He had grown up outside of London, a sprawl five times the size of New York, and he seems to have lived there before emigrating. His London was a capital of empire, the place New York wanted to become. The rush of business in Manhattan, the preening of the rich on the streets, might have looked about the same as they had in England. Yet many things must have been new to Ted: the accents, the curses, the food. The slums in the neighborhood of Five Points, for instance, which differed in their poverty and desperation from London’s East End. And the way Americans talked about their country, their attitude of national self-love, the idea that God had picked out their republic for a special destiny.

  He had arrived with a job, salesman with the London Printing & Publishing Company, offices at 55 Dey Street, in the oldest and densest part of town.2 To find it, start at City Hall, go south along Broadway for five blocks, then turn right; 55 Dey stood half a block down. London Printing & Publishing sold upmarket books and prints, respectable things, encyclopedias for the parlor, lithographs you could frame. The firm hired artists to make engravings and etchings, the kind to hang on the wall above the settee. A company inventory gives an idea of the prints Ted had to unload: a portrait of Shylock from the Merchant of Venice, The Cartoons of Raphael, History of the Indian Mutiny, Picturesque Rambles in the English Lake District. The immigrant came to America to spread the emoluments of English history and taste. In addition to art, the company published reference books, dignified volumes for proper libraries. The flagship product was its Royal Dictionary-Cyclopaedia for Universal Reference (“literary, classical, historical, biographical, geographical, scientific, and technological”)—at fifteen volumes, almost a ship’s ballast. Other titles included A History of England (in eight volumes), Dictionary of the Science and Practice of Architecture, and The Heroines of Shakespeare.