by H. W. Brands
YET STANFORD’S 1859 defeat, like Frémont’s in 1856, served the purpose of the party, and when the national Republicans gathered in 1860 to choose a presidential candidate, they did so united—in stark contrast to the Democrats. Kansas still split the Democrats, although the violence in that troubled territory had fallen off after the appointment of Governor John Geary, formerly sheriff of San Francisco from the early days of the Gold Rush. To all intents and purposes, the Democrats had become two parties, one of the North and the other of the South. The northerners decried the 1857 Dred Scott decision; the southerners shuddered at John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, which sought to spark a slave rebellion, and shuddered still more at the respect, even reverence, many in the North accorded Brown on his way to the gallows.
Under the circumstances, the Republicans had every hope of picking a winner when their convention met in Chicago. John Frémont had served his purpose, and now was set aside in favor of the professional politicians. William Seward seemed to many the obvious choice after a decade on the front lines of the sectional debate. Yet to many others, that was precisely why Seward should not receive the nomination. The Democrats were self-destructing; what the Republicans needed was a figure with a bit more political experience and weight than Frémont, but not much more record. A westerner might do (albeit perhaps not one so western as California’s Frémont), for although any Republican could probably carry New England and the upper Great Lakes states, a man of the West would have particular pull in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, where the contest would be won or lost.
Abraham Lincoln’s friends thought the former Illinois congressman fit the description perfectly. And after they recast the railroad lawyer as a rail- splitter, they convinced the convention. Seward led on the first ballot, but Lincoln closed the gap on the second and overtook the New Yorker on the third. Bowing to the inevitable, the Seward forces made the nomination unanimous.
Stanford had intended to represent California at the Republican convention. As the titular leader of the California Republicans, he was chosen by acclamation to be a delegate. And as a New York native, he intended to vote for Seward. But at the last minute, business—to wit, his brothers’ sagging end of the fraternal business—prevented his going. “Every dollar I can spare from this business goes to aid them,” he told his mother and father. “It would not have been prudent for me to leave.” There was an additional business-related reason, which Stanford mentioned only in passing because its importance had yet to be gauged. Various miners from California, frustrated at the diminishing prospects for individuals on the Sierra’s western slope, had crossed the mountains into the region that would become Nevada, and made some promising finds. “We are having a good deal of excitement about gold and silver discoveries on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains,” Stanford related. “It will probably prove a rich mineral country. I shall probably make a trip over there about the first of June. I want to see for myself how much of a disturbing element in the business affairs of this state it is likely to be. I may start a store over there.”
Like so many others in the Republican party, Stanford didn’t know Lincoln personally, but as a loyal Republican he swung into line behind the nominee. He stumped California, starting in Siskiyou County on October 1 and finishing in Amador County on November 3. He spoke every day of the week but Sunday, praising Lincoln and pushing the Pacific railroad— again a part of the Republican platform.
California remained a heavily Democratic state, and the Democrats polled nearly twice as many votes in the presidential election as the Republicans. But the Democratic votes were split, almost evenly, between northerner Douglas and southerner John Breckinridge. As a result, Lincoln narrowly won California’s electors. Repeated in key states across the country, this pattern of voting awarded the presidency to Lincoln and the Republicans.
UPON LINCOLN’S VICTORY, the South made good the threat its spokesman had leveled against Frémont in 1856: to leave the Union in the event of a Republican victory. Jessie Frémont had wanted her husband (and herself) to have the opportunity to deal with a rebellious South; instead the task fell to Lincoln, who procrastinated more than the Frémonts likely would have. One can imagine John Frémont saddling up directly after inauguration and leading an army over the Potomac into the rebel states. Lincoln, by contrast, acted deliberately, insisting that the South fire the first shot, at Fort Sumter. Whether Frémont’s boldness would have succeeded better than Lincoln’s caution is impossible to know. (Lincoln’s strategy did succeed, of course, which counts in its favor; but it required a long and bloody war, which counts against it.)
Leland Stanford observed Lincoln’s strategy at close range. Following the presidential election, Stanford, in his capacity as leader of the California Republicans, sailed east to ensure that his friends and associates receive their share of the offices awarded by the new Republican administration (“having the Federal patronage worthily distributed in California,” was how Stanford explained his goal to one of his brothers). He met with Lincoln personally, and developed considerable respect for the new president. Writing home, he expressed “great confidence” that the country had “an Administration equal to the occasion, great as it is.” He added, “I look forward through these troublous times with the confident hope that the end will be a broad spirit of Nationality, and Democratic Institutions more firmly than ever planted.”
Stanford, accompanied on this trip by his wife, Jane, had hoped to tour the East at leisure, but the outbreak of war forced a return to California. Although Lincoln had carried the state, this was no guarantee the state would support Lincoln against the South. Southern sympathies remained strong in California, and many Californians advocated measures to assist the South, if only indirectly.
Stanford arrived in Sacramento in time to receive a second nomination for governor. He spent the summer of 1861 stumping the state once more; a supporter who saw him at Santa Rosa described the man in his prime:
His personal appearance was impressive. He was then thirty-seven years of age, large in frame, with a swarthy complexion and something of the plain, rugged features of the frontiersman. He was dignified in manner, with a peculiarly attractive composure. His voice was melodious and pleasant; his language clear and expressive. He was listened to by a large audience with respectful interest.
The party platform again endorsed the Pacific railroad; Stanford again explained how this would benefit California. But the current national crisis elevated another issue—the Union—above the railroad. Privately Stanford was characterizing the contest as pitting opposing visions of government against each other. “Everything confirms the view I long since took that the struggle is one between the Democratic and Aristocratic element of the country,” he wrote his brother Philip. “I have ever held that the true end of the Republican party was to maintain the Democratic character of our institutions.” In public he simply spoke (and spoke simply, “with the eloquence of an honest conviction,” the Santa Rosa admirer explained) of the need to rally to Lincoln and the Union.
As in the recent presidential election, the California Democrats were divided. The Breckinridge wing of the party, headed by gubernatorial candidate John McConnell, openly sympathized with secession; the Douglas wing stood for the Union. Once more calls arose for fusion between the Republicans and the Union Democrats, but this time—with a Republican in the White House—Stanford seemed the more promising bearer of alliance hopes. The heretofore Democratic San Francisco Bulletin explained, “The naked truth is that the success of the McConnell ticket next Wednesday week would be tantamount to a declaration of war by California against the general government. Nothing could prevent its being followed by open hostilities in our borders. No man can be so blind to inevitable consequences as not to see it.” A group of San Francisco businessmen—including, by their own testimony, several individuals “politically opposed to the Republican party”—circulated a letter decrying “the dreadful consequences that must ar
ise from the division of the Union men of the State, and the possible election of the Secession-McConnell ticket.” Dire circumstances compelled distasteful action, the erstwhile Democrats declared. “We have carefully collected the best advices that we could obtain of the relative strength of the Douglas and Republican tickets, and feeling convinced that the latter is the stronger, have unhesitatingly determined to vote for Mr. Stanford, the Republican candidate for Governor—believing that thereby we shall save ourselves from the result of foolish political divisions which now threaten us with ruin and disaster.”
Such crossover support carried Stanford to victory in the September 1861 election. He understood the meaning of his victory: that he had been elected as a Unionist rather than a Republican. But that was good enough. As things happened, the first overland telegraph line was completed just weeks after the balloting, and Stanford cabled Lincoln: “Today California is but a second’s distance from the national capital. Her patriotism with electric current throbs responsive to that of her sister states and holds civil liberty and union above all price.”
THIS WAS AN EXAGGERATION. Notwithstanding Stanford’s victory, support for the South persisted in California. Only two years earlier the state legislature had taken the extraordinary step of authorizing secession within the state—that is, of allowing the portion of California lying below the Missouri Compromise line to separate from the rest of the state, with the understanding that this southern region, to be named Colorado, would institute slavery. And in 1860, just months before Lincoln’s election, California Democrat Gwin declared, “I believe that the slave-holding states of this confederacy can establish a separate and independent government that will be impregnable to the assaults of all foreign enemies.” The senator made clear that he classed the North under the category of “foreign enemies” of a southern confederacy. He went on to predict that in the event of secession, “California would be found with the South.”
Yet California stuck with the Union. For some Californians, this decision connoted a genuine attachment to the handiwork of the Founders, and a corresponding reluctance to participate in its undoing. For many others, including a large portion of those with connections to the South, devotion to the Union was more mercenary. After the Republicans took power in Washington, the new congressional leaders made clear that if California remained loyal, it could count on a Pacific railroad, which would do more than anything since the gold discovery itself to enhance the prospects of the state. On the other hand, if California seceded—either to join the Confederacy outright or to establish an independent but effectively pro-South “Pacific republic”—it could forget about the railroad. California collectively required no time at all to make the calculation and affirm its attachment to the Union. The state legislature asserted, “California is ready to maintain the rights and honor of the national government at home and abroad, and at all times to respond to any requisition that may be made upon her to defend the republic against foreign or domestic foes.”
A collective decision, however, wasn’t the same as a consensus decision, and a substantial part of the state’s population abetted the rebellion. Some did so openly and honorably, traveling east to enlist in the Confederate army. Others remained in the West, plotting silent support of the southern cause and hoping to accomplish covertly what the light of the day wouldn’t allow.
Of the plotters, none was more fervent in his southern feeling or more audacious in his desire to help the Confederate cause than Asbury Harp- ending. Another latecomer to California—in his case from Kentucky— Harpending had hoped to join William Walker’s “immortals” but was prevented from doing so by those pesky federal agents. Harpending resented their interference, and when the South seceded, he did, too, in spirit. “I was young, hot-headed, and filled with the bitter sectional feeling that was more intense in the border states than in the states farther north or south. It would have been hard to find a more reckless secessionist than myself.” Harpending circulated about San Francisco, seeking kindred spirits to join him in opposing the tyrannical Unionism. These weren’t hard to discover, and the group began meeting in secret to plot the overthrow of the government of California and its replacement by a pro-southern regime. According to their scheme, each member of the cabal would recruit a small company of soldiers, for whose training, equipment, and pay he would be responsible. As cover, these soldiers would be told that a Walker-like filibustering expedition to Mexico was afoot. The companies would be unknown to one another, for better security against informers. At the appointed moment, all would rise up and overwhelm the small federal garrisons at Fort Point (on the southern shore of the Golden Gate), at Alcatraz Island, at Mare Island (near the property Mariano Vallejo was about to lose), and at Benicia (where the arsenal General Wool had declined to release to Sherman was located). At the same time, the insurgents would assault the militia arsenals in San Francisco and carry off the weapons there.
At first the conspirators hoped for encouragement, if perhaps only tacit, from the federal commander at San Francisco, General Albert Sidney Johnston. Johnston was a Kentuckian like Harpending and had made a name and career in Texas, where he served as commander of the army of the Republic of Texas. He was decorated for valor in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, and now had charge of the army’s Department of the Pacific. A devoted southerner, Johnston was thought to be leaning toward secession. The conspirators decided to sound him out, with Harpending and two others being assigned the delicate task.
“I will never forget that meeting,” Harpending wrote. “He was a blond giant of a man with a mass of heavy yellow hair, untouched by age, although he was nearing sixty. He had the nobility of bearing that marks a great leader of men, and it seemed to my youthful imagination that I was looking at some superman of ancient history, like Hannibal or Caesar, come to life again.”
The general bade his visitors sit down. As they did so, he said, almost casually, “Before we go further, there is something I want to mention. I have heard foolish talk about an attempt to seize the strongholds of the government under my charge. Knowing this, I have prepared for emergencies, and will defend the property of the United States with every resource at my command, and with the last drop of blood in my body. Tell that to all our southern friends.”
Needless to say, this put a crimp in the plotting. But there was something else that, to Harpending’s view, was even more important in derailing the conspiracy. Apparently by coincidence, several of the leaders of the cabal had financial interests in the new mines of Nevada, which by now promised to be quite rich. The more they reflected on the logistics of secession, the more they realized that the only defensible eastern frontier of a breakaway California would be the Sierra Nevada, and that their mines would be on the wrong side of that frontier. Harpending explained their thinking:
When it became apparent that the surface [of the Nevada mines] had been barely scratched and that secession might mean the casting aside of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, then patriotism and self-interest had a lively tussle. If Nevada could have been car ried out of the Union along with California, I am almost certain that the story of those times would have been widely different…. That’s the only way I can size up what followed.
What followed was that the plotters abandoned their own plot. A vote was taken on whether to proceed, and a majority chose western wealth over southern patriotism.
Yet Harpending, one of the minority voting to proceed, wasn’t so easily deterred. He traveled east to Richmond, where he met with Confederate president Jefferson Davis and proposed a plan to capture the gold being transported east from California to finance the Union war effort. Davis was intrigued. “He fully realized the importance of shutting off the great gold shipments,” Harpending wrote. “President Davis said it would be more important than many victories in the field.” Davis arranged for Harpending to receive a commission as captain in the Confederate navy, despite Harp- ending’s never having been near a warship in his life. Ha
rpending also received letters of marque, the licenses that under international law made privateers—that is, authorized raiders—of those who would otherwise have been mere pirates. Finally, he was entrusted with a large packet of mail, including highly confidential—because very compromising—letters to Confederate sympathizers in California.
Harpending left Virginia via blockade runner, which carried him to Aspinwall, a town that had grown up on the Caribbean coast of Panama as an alternative to the disease-ridden Chagres. Crossing the isthmus, he boarded the Pacific Mail steamer for San Francisco. The passengers included a niece of John Calhoun, a woman who shared her uncle’s fighting spirit and uncompromising southern loyalty. When Harpending informed her of the letters he was carrying, and expressed concern that he might be searched on landing in San Francisco, she insisted that he give the letters to her. And when, indeed, he was frisked and his baggage opened at the dock, she sashayed past the customs men untouched. Shortly she returned the letters, saying that their rumpled appearance resulted from having been hidden in the lining of her dress. “I had to sit up all night sewing those wretched papers in my dress,” she explained with a toss of her head. “What was worse, I never dared to change it. Just imagine what the other women thought of me.”
Harpending discovered that in his absence the Nevada boom had further diminished the ranks of those willing to promote the separation of California from the Union. He was reduced to going ahead with a single southern partner named Greathouse and an Englishman named Rubery. Harpending earlier had talked Rubery, who happened to be a favorite nephew of the English statesman John Bright, out of a duel in which the young man almost certainly would have been killed; as a result, Rubery became Harpending’s bosom friend—and fellow conspirator.
