by H. W. Brands
Belle was more discreet, but ran into trouble anyway. One evening she and Charles Cora attended a performance at the American Theater. Federal marshal William Richardson and his wife were seated nearby, and Mrs. Richardson complained of the presence of the notorious madam. At his wife’s urging, Richardson insisted that the theater manager eject Belle and Cora. The manager refused, causing the Richardsons to leave, although not before they insulted Belle and Cora. The gambler and the madam stayed till the end of the performance, but the next day Cora defended Belle’s honor by calling on Richardson and returning the insult. One thing led to another, and Cora shot Richardson dead.
Cora was charged with murder and brought to trial. Belle enlisted the best and most expensive counsel—she reportedly paid $15,000 to lead attorney Edward Baker—on her lover’s behalf. Baker cast Cora as a gentleman among gamblers, and Belle as a good-hearted woman merely giving the city what it wanted. Baker’s version didn’t sufficiently move the jury to acquit, but it did produce a deadlock. Cora was awaiting retrial when the Vigilance Committee stepped in.
Belle realized that neither her money nor her capacity for blackmail— the idea evidently occurred to her—could stay the march of popular justice. (The possibility of being blackmailed, or at least embarrassed by Belle’s testimony, may well have influenced the calculations of those who could have kept Cora out of the Vigilance Committee’s hands but declined to do so.) Yet she did manage to shame the committee into granting a final request. At the eleventh hour, in the very shadow of the noose, she married Charles Cora. For a moment she was his wife—and then became his widow.
IN A FEW YEARS the world would discover how William Sherman felt about armed resistance to constitutional authority. Those who knew him in San Francisco in 1856 got a preview, as well as a reminder of how close to the frontier the city remained, with everything such proximity implied in terms of lawlessness and lack of stable political institutions.
The hanging of Cora and Casey might have ended the rule of the revived Vigilance Committee if Thomas King, the brother of the murdered reform editor, hadn’t taken up the fallen quill. The second King demanded that his brother’s mission continue. In an editorial entitled “What the People Expect of the Vigilance Committee,” he declared, “The people look to them for reform—a radical reorganization in spirit if not in fact—of our city government.” The larger conspiracy behind his brother’s murder must be rooted out and the plotters punished, King said. Beyond this, the political corruption that allowed such conspiracies to flourish must be extirpated. “If we would have order hereafter, an example must now be made of the ballot-box stuffers.” King minced no words in explaining what he meant. “Let the men who have insulted our community, disgraced our State, and sown the seeds of which we have been lately reaping the fruits, meet their due fate, DEATH BY HANGING…. Hang one ballot-box stuffer, and we shall have no more of them.”
Not all the Vigilance men considered vote-tampering a capital offense, but most believed that some additional housecleaning was required. A few wanted to extend the forcible reforms beyond the city government to the state. A committee headquarters was established on Stockton Street (called “Fort Gunnybags” after the sandbags that afforded protection from sniper fire; bunkered cannon added an offensive threat). The committee leadership met behind the sandbags, while armed Vigilance squads roamed the city.
Such open sedition compelled Governor Johnson to respond. He summoned Sherman to Benicia, where the local commander of federal troops, General John Wool, was stationed. By Sherman’s recollection, Wool agreed to supply Sherman with federal arms and ammunition, which Sherman, as the commander of the California militia, would use to suppress the insurrection at San Francisco.
The governor then prevailed on the chief justice of the California supreme court, David Terry, for a writ of habeas corpus against the Vigilance Committee, to require the committee to hand back another prisoner they had seized from jail. When the committee rejected the writ, the governor issued a proclamation declaring the Vigilance Committee in violation of state law and commanding General Sherman to move against it. Sherman responded by publishing an order to his militiamen, summoning them to service in defense of the state.
Alarmed, several Vigilance leaders visited Sherman. If he carried out his order, they said, blood would flow on San Francisco’s streets.
Sherman, perhaps recalling the insubordination of John Frémont and the troubles it caused during the American occupation, had no sympathy for the rebels. Fixing them with his cold blue eyes, he declared that if they wanted to avert bloodshed, they would have to get out of the way. “Remove your fort; cease your midnight councils; and prevent your armed bodies from patrolling the streets,” he said.
The rebels asked Sherman where he was going to get arms for his men. He declined to answer, except to say that he would certainly get them. Some while later, a second Vigilance delegation—“a class of the most intelligent and wealthiest men of the city, who earnestly and honestly desired to prevent bloodshed,” Sherman thought—approached him. He gave them the same answer he had given the others. “I told them that our men were enrolling very fast, and that, when I deemed the right moment had come, the Vigilance Committee must disperse, else bloodshed and destruction of property would inevitably follow.”
Sherman prepared for battle and began to devise his strategy. But suddenly General Wool flinched. The army commander decided not to get involved in a state squabble without express authorization from Washington. Awaiting this, he declined to release the weapons from the federal arsenal to Sherman.
Wool’s reversal outraged Sherman. He believed he had Wool’s promise to supply the weapons necessary to uphold the law and preserve order; without such a promise Sherman never would have agreed to call out the state troops. But now that Wool refused to cooperate, Sherman was made to appear an impotent fool, a general without arms. He angrily resigned his commission in the militia.
Sherman’s resignation marked the beginning of a reign of uncontested power on the part of the Vigilance Committee. For many weeks the committee issued orders from Fort Gunnybags, directing the arrest of prominent malefactors. These were tried, usually in secret, and punished. Besides Casey and Cora, two other men were executed, both for murder. Another man committed suicide while in detention. (Later generations would greet jailhouse “suicides” with rightful skepticism, but considering the readiness of the Vigilance men to conduct executions openly, there is little reason to think they resorted to this ruse.) The committee declined Thomas King’s advice to hang vote-tamperers, but it banished those convicted of ballot irregularities, under penalty of death for return.
The illicit authority of the committee met its severest test when Chief Justice Terry, a vicious scrapper besides being a vocal critic of the vigilance movement, got into a fight with one of the committee’s constables. In the fight Terry stabbed the constable, who for several days lingered between life and death. The committee arrested Terry and held him at Fort Gunny- bags.
Besides revealing the shocking anarchy into which San Francisco and now California were falling—when the Founding Fathers had established the principle of checks and balances between the branches of government, they certainly didn’t have daggers in mind—Terry’s arrest put the committee in a quandary. To try the judge would be to raise the flag of rebellion even higher, but to let him go would mock the principles for which the committee stood. If the victim died, the committee’s dilemma would grow still more acute; consequently the committee leaders prayed for his survival. As it happened, the man did pull through, and Terry was quietly released.
The experience with Terry sobered many of the Vigilance men, and the committee began looking for a graceful way to terminate its business. Sherman wasn’t a neutral observer but probably an accurate one when he told his brother, “I think the community is getting sick and disgusted with their secrecy, their street fools, and parades, and mock trials.” Anyway, the committee could reasonably cl
aim that its work was done. The example of those brought before the committee had, as anticipated, encouraged many others to leave the city. One tally placed the departures at about 800, in addition to the 25 formally banished.
Accordingly, in August 1856 the Vigilance Committee voted to adjourn. With medals struck for the occasion (showing the All-Seeing Eye on the obverse, the Goddess of Justice on the reverse), the committee authorized a final parade, in which the popular forces of order appeared one last time before marching off—as it turned out, into history.
The sunburnt immigrant, walking with his wife and little ones beside his gaunt and weary oxen in mid-continent; the sea-traveller pining on shipboard, tortured with mal de mer; the homesick bride whose wedding trip had included a passage of the Isthmus; the merchant whose stock needed replenishing; and the miner fortunate enough to be able to return home— everyone, except of course the men of the Pacific Mail Steamship company, prayed for a Pacific railroad.
—Hubert Howe Bancroft
In conceptualizing America’s past, historians often draw a dividing line at 1865, which is accounted a critical moment in the nation’s political evolution. And so it was, for in finally settling the dual controversies of slavery and states’ rights that had vexed American politics since the founding of the republic, the Confederate defeat finished the work the framers of the Constitution had commenced in 1787.
Yet, from another vantage, the turning point can be detected earlier, in 1848 at Coloma. In political terms, the gold discovery can be seen as the beginning of the end of the antebellum era, as the catalyst for the transforming reactions of the decade that followed. By peopling the West far faster than anyone imagined, the Gold Rush compelled Congress to confront the contradictions it had long preferred to avoid. Had the territory taken from Mexico in 1848 filled up as slowly as the territory acquired from France in 1803, the likelihood of a peaceful resolution of the sectional controversy almost certainly would have been much greater. It is impossible to know whether war might have been averted; history never tells us what would have happened, only what did happen. But the gold discovery collapsed the calendar, demanding an answer to the crucial question of slavery in the territories before the collective wisdom of national politics could devise an answer that didn’t fatally antagonize powerful constituencies on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. In pounding on the Union’s door in 1850, California awakened the dogs of division and set them howling all at once. From the Compromise of 1850 ran a straight, if tortured, path to southern secession and civil war. And Californians, beginning with John Frémont but including such other striking characters as William Walker and Asbury Harpending, did their full part in propelling America down that path.
Beyond politics, the Gold Rush helped initiate the modern era of American economic development. The Industrial Revolution had begun in America before James Marshall struck gold, but the new wealth of the new West accelerated the revolution. The gold of California, and the gold and silver of California’s nephew Nevada, poured liquidity east, lubricating the gears of the nation’s industrial machinery (and in the process underwriting the Union’s victory in the Civil War). More important, California demanded, and received, a transcontinental railroad. The construction of the Pacific railroad was a huge project, the largest construction job of the age; its effects on American capital, commodity, and labor markets were felt from coast to coast (and beyond the coasts to Europe and Asia). But the true significance of the railroad emerged only upon its completion. By tying the coasts together, the Pacific railroad created the largest unified market in the world, the market that allowed the American economy to grow into the colossus it became by the beginning of the twentieth century.
14
The Pathfinder’s Return
Had the rest of the country known what William Sherman knew about life in California in 1856, John Frémont might not have won the first Republican nomination for president. But the struggle for order in San Francisco loomed far larger locally than in the affairs of the nation, which had problems aplenty of its own, and Frémont’s run of good fortune continued.
That it kept Frémont in politics was rather surprising. By the bad luck of the draw (the other senator selected by California’s first legislature, William Gwin, got the longer straw, and hence the longer term) and the slowness of Congress to accept California as a state, Frémont served only a few weeks in the Senate before having to return to California to defend his seat. Although he hadn’t been away long, the debate over the Compromise of 1850 so polarized California politics—as it was polarizing politics throughout the country—that an outspoken free-soiler like Frémont could no longer pass muster with the predominantly Democratic and South- leaning California legislature. His candidacy failed (although it took the legislature almost another year to agree on his successor).
The San Francisco fire of 1851 shortly added injury to insult by destroying his and Jessie’s home; he responded by taking the family to Europe for an extended holiday. His reputation preceded him and his wealth accompanied him; the family lived and were treated like royalty. In England, John was most intrigued to meet the Duke of Wellington, now past eighty but still impressive. Jessie preferred her audience with Queen Victoria. In Paris they were entertained by the recovering nobility, who recovered enough before the Frémonts left to put the imperial crown back on the head of a Bonaparte, Napoleon III.
On their return to America, Frémont deposited Jessie and the children in Washington, where she tended to her ailing mother; and he headed west on his fifth exploratory expedition. The plans for a California railroad had by now become thoroughly entangled in the sectional struggle. The secretary of war, Mississippi Democrat Jefferson Davis, aggravated the struggle—in the guise of attempting to resolve it—by commissioning five separate surveys of possible routes. Frémont’s previous exploratory work was ignored, as was the explorer himself. Frémont took the snub personally, and politically. The regular army—Davis was a West Pointer—obviously still bore a grudge against the man who had crossed General Kearny; moreover, the Democrats and the South were determined to stall construction of a line that would strengthen the North by linking free California to the other free states. While others besides Frémont complained at the politics of the superfluous surveys, he took matters into his own hands, and his own pocket, by funding a survey of his own.
This final expedition of Frémont’s career lacked the grisly drama of some of the previous four. No one ate anyone else, although at one point of low rations Frémont swore everyone to abstinence from human flesh and vowed to shoot the first man who eyed his fellow hungrily. As always, Jessie worried about her husband; she later convinced herself that she knew telepathically the precise moment of the expedition’s greatest peril, and, just subsequently, of its deliverance.
The expedition contributed little to public understanding of the West, but it did serve to put Frémont once more in the public eye—which almost certainly was one reason he undertook it. By the time he emerged from the mountains, the sectional controversy had a new twist, in the form of the new party. The Republicans held organizing conventions in 1854; shortly thereafter they began planning for the presidential election of 1856.
They had a cause—antislavery—but they needed a candidate. As a new party, the Republicans had no party stalwarts to call upon, no party regulars to reward, no party debts to repay. The most likely choices from the professional political world carried some heavy baggage. William Seward of New York had stirred antislavery hearts in the debate over California by referring to a “higher law” that transcended federal statutes and even the Constitution. Although few Americans doubted that such a higher law existed, to cite it on the floor of an already divided Congress seemed to many to be dangerously incendiary. (“Wild, reckless and abominable,” was Henry Clay’s judgment.) Seward, in other words, scared people. A second possibility, Salmon Chase of Ohio, had won his antislavery spurs by defending fugitive slaves (“the attorney general for runa
way Negroes,” he was often called) and denouncing both the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But Chase seemed more comfortable in a courtroom than on the stump. Besides, both Seward and Chase were career politicians with offices and reputations to consider. The chances of a Republican nominee in 1856 weren’t so bright as to convince them to jeopardize what they worked for years to gain. Indeed, smart money guessed that the role of the Republican nominee in 1856 would be merely to break trail for the party’s candidate four years later.
Frémont had much of what Seward and Chase lacked, and lacked what they had. He was an arresting figure: still young (he turned 43 in 1856), still handsome (a lithograph circulated during the campaign might have made him an idol in the theater), demonstrably brave (in wilderness and war), and wonderfully wealthy (which, besides impressing people, helped with campaign costs). His wife had a reputation of her own as being fearless in the face of physical hardship and unyielding to her husband’s political foes. Jessie’s Benton heritage added just the right touch of establishment respectability to her husband’s outsider appeal. The connection of both John and Jessie to California, whose political troubles paled, in the national mind, beside its still-golden promise, lent an additional aura to a Frémont candidacy. As important as anything else, Frémont possessed no political record, and therefore almost no political enemies.