Then he brought up the horrible prospect of what would happen if the southern states didn’t come to their senses and come back to the Union. He spoke straight to the South when he said whose fault it would be.
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen,” he said, “and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.”
The closing words of his speech showed that he still wanted to believe that the people of the South deep down felt as loyal to the country as he did. Maybe their radical leaders didn’t. But surely the great masses of southerners didn’t really want what was happening.
“We are not enemies,” he said, “but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Chapter 42
Pa in Sacramento
Those were times of peril, those first few months of 1861.
The only trouble was, no one knew how dangerous they really were. No one expected what came afterward. No one knew how bad it would be. If they had, they probably would have done things differently.
As it was, time kept passing, and everybody on both sides got more and more determined not to give in. They all thought they were right and everyone else was wrong. Sometimes that may be true, but it can still be a dangerous way to look at things. Admitting you might be a little wrong yourself is hard for most folks, but it seems like the easiest way to avoid conflicts later.
Pa had gone to Sacramento to get sworn in to the new Assembly in January of 1861. He was gone a week that first time. When he came back he was so full of stories and enthusiasm he hardly stopped talking for days. I had never seen him like that! Almeda couldn’t get over him; she laughed and laughed just to listen to him. It seemed such a short time ago that he’d been just an ordinary soft-spoken man trying to make a gold strike. Suddenly he had a family and a vein of wealth right on his property, a new wife and a business. Before he knew it, he was mayor of a town, then a state legislator.
“If a simple man like Abraham Lincoln can go from a log cabin to splitting wood rails to being president,” said Almeda one day, “then I don’t see any reason why you can’t, too!”
She made the mistake of letting Alkali Jones hear her! He’d been working at the mine with Uncle Nick, Pa, and Tad, and had just walked into the house for lunch. Whenever Pa came back from Sacramento business, he worked at the mine for the next two or three days. “Makes me feel back to normal,” he said, “to get wet and dirty and get my arms and back aching again. Too much sitting around talking like they do down there in the Capitol, it just ain’t natural. A man’s gotta sweat from hard work, at least three or four times a week, or things just get out of order. I gotta be working if I’m gonna think right!”
“Drum fer President!” cackled Mr. Jones, walking in on the tail end of what Almeda had said. “That’s a good’n—hee, hee, hee! I can die in peace now, I’ve heard jist about every dad-burned tall tale a body could dream up! Drum fer President—hee, hee, hee!”
“You don’t think I could do the job, Alkali?” said Pa seriously, giving the rest of us a wink.
“Oh, I ain’t sayin’ no such thing. Fer all I know, you’d march straight down t’ them southern rascals an’ look ’em straight in the eye and say, ‘Now look here, you varmints! You’re breakin’ a passel of laws, an’ worse’n that—you’re all actin’ like a bunch of dang fools. Now git back t’ your homes; let your slaves be the free men they got a right t’ be, and cut it out with all this blamed foolishness of tryin’ t’ start a country of your own. It ain’t gonna work no how!’”
By now we were all in stitches from laughing so hard. Of course, that just spurred Mr. Jones all the more to keep going. There wasn’t anything he loved better than being at the center of stories high on imagination and low on facts.
“Yep,” he kept going, “you jist might make a president that’d git folks in this country t’ stand up an’ take notice of the kind of guts and grit it takes t’ live out here. Drum for President—hee, hee! That’s what them there fools back there need, all right—a Californian with the guts t’ make them rascals back down and git off their dang high horses! Hee, hee, hee!”
“What would you do if you were president, Pa?” Tad asked.
Pa got a real serious expression on his face. The room grew quiet, and we all waited to see what he’d say.
“You mean about the Confederate states, boy?” he said finally.
“Yeah, Pa. How would you make them not do what they’re trying to do to the country?”
“Well, I reckon the first thing I’d do is send my vice-president down to Montgomery to talk to ’em, to look ’em straight in the eye, and to horsewhip some sense into ’em.”
“Who would be your vice-president, Pa?” asked Becky.
“Why, I thought you knew, girl,” answered Pa. “Alkali, of course!”
“Please, Drummond,” said Almeda this time, wiping the tears of laughter out of her eyes and trying to be serious. “I really am curious what you would do.”
Again Pa thought long and hard.
“I don’t reckon I can answer what I would do if I was in Washington without saying what I am doing right down there in Sacramento,” he answered finally.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Uncle Nick, drying his hands off with a towel and walking over toward Pa.
“Just what I said, Nick. I mean, my first business is right here and right now. I tell you, there’s as much foolishness coming out of some of those southern sympathizing Democrats in Sacramento as in those renegades setting themselves up as so all-fired important down in Montgomery! It makes my blood boil just to think of it. That’s why I had to get back here to Miracle and swing the sledge a few times against some good hard rock.”
“How you figure it, Drum?” asked Mr. Jones. I’d never taken him as one much interested in politics, but the look on his face was serious. This dispute between North and South had everyone’s attention!
“We sat down for our first session,” said Pa. “Half of the new members, like me, had no idea what was going on or what to do or how the place even worked. Then this guy named Zack Montgomery stood up. He talked half the morning about how we needed to break away from the Union ourselves. Later I heard there was a senator named Thornton doing the same thing over in the Senate room. The Democrats are trying to get California to do the same thing as South Carolina!”
“Surely it’s not a serious threat?” said Almeda, in both amazement and shock.
“You gotta realize, Almeda,” said Pa, “the Democrats still outnumber us Republicans in the state. Breckinridge and Douglas together got a heap more votes than Lincoln. A lot of politicians in this state think Lincoln’s a buffoon, and they’re not ashamed to say so. Lots of ’em don’t have that much loyalty to the Union. They figure California’s the only thing that matters, so let Lincoln and the eastern states do whatever they please. Why, there’s a feller named Charles Piercy who voted for Douglas—he’s not a slave man, has no particular loyalties to the South. But he stood up, just a few seats away from me, and he said he’d written up what he called a resolution condemning the Republicans as altogether and solely responsible for bringing on the secession crisis. Then he walked up to the front and handed the piece of paper he was talking about to the Speaker. Then Piercy turned around to face the rest of us—and this was after Montgomery’s fiery speech—and said, ‘My fellow assemblymen, for this reason, I feel most strongly that we Californians will never entirely be able to support our new president. I am urging you, therefor
e, to stand with me in backing the formation of a mighty Pacific Republic, as advocated by our colleague, Mr. Montgomery, earlier today. Our former governor, Mr. Latham, now in the Senate in Washington, has long been in favor of such a proposition, and would no doubt return to help us in the formation of a constitution and provisional government.’”
Pa stopped, then added, “Those are probably not his exact words, but something like ’em. Speechmaking words! And ridiculous words, if you ask me!”
“What did the rest of you do?” asked Uncle Nick.
“There were some folks saying ‘Hear, hear!’ and agreeing with him, but others stood up when he was done and said just what I was thinking, that it was downright foolishness. One fella got up and even brought France into it.”
“France?” repeated Alkali Jones. “What do them foreigners have t’ do with us?”
“Well, this fella said that if we tried to set ourselves up in a new country over here, this far away from the other states, with a thousand miles of coastline and less than a million people and no army, he said we couldn’t defend ourselves against anybody—especially with the North and South at each other’s throats. He said Napoleon would come right in and gobble us up and make us into a Pacific France.”
“Napoleon’s dead, Pa,” said Becky. “Mrs. Rutledge was just teaching us about him and a place called Waterloo last month, before Christmas.”
“Napoleon the Third, Becky,” I said. “He’s the other Napoleon’s nephew. He’s the emperor of France.”
“Well, whoever the varmint is, let him try t’ come in here an’ make trouble! We’ll show him what kind of stuff Californians is made of!”
“With what, Alkali?” said Pa. “We got no army, and hardly no militia to speak of. We’re barely a state, much less a country that could fight off somebody like France!”
“So what happened next, Pa?” asked Becky.
A funny look came over Pa’s face. Almeda recognized it immediately. “I can tell when you’re holding something in, Drummond,” she said. “Now tell us, what happened?”
“Well, all of a sudden I found myself on my feet,” Pa answered, as if he was embarrassed to remember it.
“Good for you, Drum!” exclaimed Uncle Nick. “You gave ’em all what for, didn’t you? I knew you had it in you!”
“No I didn’t give ’em what for, Nick!” Pa shot back. “What do you think, that I wanted to make enemies there my first week in the capital?”
“You must have said something,” said Almeda, her eyes eager to hear what had happened.
“I reckon I did,” said Pa slowly. “The second I realized what I was doing, I got afraid and wanted to sit down something fierce. But I went ahead with what I’d been thinking, and I just told ’em all that I figured since we’d elected Mr. Lincoln, he deserved for us to at least give him a chance of seeing what he could do. I said we oughta let it sit a spell. Gettin’ too hasty’s always a way of hangin’ yourself, I said. I told ’em I’d always made a practice of trying to take important decisions slow. You don’t usually get in trouble from goin’ too slow, I said—that is, unless you’re in a gunfight. They laughed a little when I said that,” said Pa, chuckling as he remembered it. “But you can get yourself in a heap o’ trouble by rushing into something you ought not to have done. So I finished up by saying I figured we oughta wait and give the President our loyalty, and see what happened.”
The room got quiet when Pa finished.
All at once Almeda started clapping, and then the rest of us joined in, just as if we’d been sitting there in the state Assembly room actually listening to Pa’s speech.
“Now cut that out—all of you!” scowled Pa. I don’t think I’d ever seen his face red before, but it was then. “It wasn’t no big thing!”
I glanced over at Almeda. Her face was fixed intently on Pa with a look of admiration and love, and tears stood in her eyes.
“What happened next, Pa?” asked Tad eagerly.
“Well, boy, some of the folks did just what you done—they started clapping, and I sat down pronto and wished I could just sink right down into my chair and hide. I gotta tell you, I felt a mite foolish!”
“What about the resolution, Pa?” I asked. “Did you decide anything?”
“Naw. Politics is mostly talking, Corrie. There ain’t much doing, only yammering about everything. I reckon we’ll be voting on what to do one day, but I don’t know when. Most likely we’ll just keep talking for a long spell, and I’ll keep getting my fill of it and have to spend more time up at the mine crushing rocks just to keep from going looney from all the words that don’t accomplish much of anything!”
It was quiet for a long time. Finally I asked Pa the question that had been on my mind ever since he had come back home from Sacramento.
“Did you see Mr. Burton when you were there?” I said shyly.
“As a matter of fact, I did, Corrie. He congratulated me on my getting elected, and told me to give you his fond regards. Those were his words—his fond regards. And he told me to give you this. I was so anxious to get up and pound them rocks in the mine that I nearly forgot.”
He reached inside his coat and took out a rumpled letter, then handed it to me.
My face flushed with embarrassment, but that didn’t keep me from snatching the letter and getting up to go to my room to read it.
Everybody else got up too. Just as I was going into the bedroom, I heard Alkali Jones behind me, opening the door to head back outside. He was muttering and chuckling to himself.
“Drum fer President . . . hee, hee, hee!” he was saying. “Blamed if he ain’t startin’ t’ sound like one, at that.”
Chapter 43
Outbreak!
Shortly after the inauguration, I received another letter, this one from Mr. Kemble.
You get to writing, Corrie! he said. There’s foolishness and plots and subversion afoot all over this country. The Union’s in trouble, Corrie, and we’ve got to have a strong, supportive position. Half of California’s papers are advocating everything from throwing in with the Confederacy to the Pacific Republic.
He had enclosed a clipping from one of the other San Francisco papers, which read:
We shall secede, with the Rocky Mountains for a line, and form an Empire of the Pacific, with Washington Territory, Oregon, and California, and we shall annex all of this side of Mexico. We don’t care a straw whether you dissolve the Union or not. We just wish that the Republicans and Democrats at the Capitol would get into a fight and kill each other like the Kilkenny cats. Perhaps that would settle the hash.
Mr. Kemble finished his letter: “It’s time for the Alta to take its stand, and you along with it. The Union needs us all, Corrie!”
He hardly needed to tell me how desperate the situation was! Every day I’d been reading, not only in the Alta but in other papers as well, about everything that was happening in the East. With the Pony Express making news only two weeks late, everything that was going on felt so real and urgent. I saved all the papers so I’d know just what was happening, and that when I did write things, I’d have my facts straight. If I was going to help Mr. Lincoln and the Union, I had to make sure what I wrote was right and true. I didn’t want anyone to be able to complain that the young lady newswoman from California wrote nothing but female emotionalism and that she didn’t know what she was talking about. So I tried to understand the events that were going on and keep track of everything as it happened.
The time to have saved the country was back in November or December of 1860. If only Mr. Lincoln had been able to become president right after he was elected! But by the time he set foot in Washington, the Confederacy was already better organized than his new administration! The Republicans had never been in power before. So Mr. Lincoln had to set up an entire executive branch of government from scratch—a cabinet, and all kinds of other appointments. While he was busy having to be an executive and an administrator, the Confederacy was growing stronger and stronger every day.
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br /> Not only was the Confederacy stronger right at first, they were confident that Lincoln and the northern states could never stand against southern might. The South had economic strength, strong ties with foreign governments because of the worldwide demand for cotton, and the best politicians in the land. Now that leadership was all in the South. Washington had a group of bumbling Midwesterners and Republicans who had never governed a nation before. In addition, the South had strong financial reserves in her banks, while the North was financially strapped. Perhaps most importantly, the South had the best generals.
By the time Lincoln took office, the Confederacy had a permanent constitution, a treasury, an army, a navy, a post office, and a legal system. Its organizers had been busy. A completely functioning government had been created and was in full operation. Southern leaders had not a doubt in the world that Lincoln would be powerless to oppose them. What could he do? The Confederacy existed, and he could not undo it! If he tried to use force with the two or three thousand army troops he might muster from the Northeast and Midwest, the results would be laughable. The South would beat them back so fast it would make the tall, lanky rail-splitter from Illinois wish he’d never run for president!
Pa returned from his next trip into Sacramento right at the end of February with serious and disturbing news. Suddenly the dispute between North and South wasn’t so far away!
A plot had been discovered, he told us, by a group of southern supporters, to take control of the government of California!
“Knights of the Golden Circle, that’s what they called themselves,” he said. “Once they had control of Sacramento, they were going to send an armed force down into Mexico where they would seize control of Sonora.”
“They could never have gotten away with it!” exclaimed Almeda.
“They had powerful men from the South behind it,” said Pa. “They had 50,000 guns on the way to California by the southern route. The knights had 16,000 supporters. They might have been able to do it if we hadn’t got word from Washington. They were going to set up an independent republic of the Pacific. Their first move was to grab the Presidio to hold the entrance of the Golden Gate, then the rest of San Francisco’s forts, Alcatraz, the Mint, the post office, everything of the government’s. Then they were going to join the Confederacy!”
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