by H. W. Brands
Harpending’s plan was to buy and refit a coastal vessel for the privateering work. This ship need serve only temporarily, as its first target would be one of the Pacific Mail steamers that regularly carried the gold south from San Francisco to Panama on its way to New York. The captured craft would be refitted as a privateer to replace the original vessel. Harpending guessed that he could seize at least three gold ships, with cargoes totaling perhaps $12 million, before the news reached the East and the Union navy started pursuing them. “After that we proposed to let events very much take their own course.”
Harpending attempted to purchase the Otter, a steam vessel registered to an owner in Oregon. But on trial its performance fell short. “She failed to develop a speed much greater than that of a rowboat—not enough either to fight or run away.” The three conspirators were lamenting that they’d never find a suitable ship when one pulled into port. The Chapman had made a quick passage from New York via Cape Horn, which proved both its speed and its seaworthiness. The owners were willing to sell, and didn’t inquire too closely regarding the purchasers’ plans.
At this point, local memories of William Walker worked to Harpending’s advantage. He hired a Mexican national to present himself around San Francisco as the chief of security for a mine in Mexico beset by filibusters. In this guise the agent purchased a pair of cannons and plenty of shot and shell. He also laid in a supply of smaller arms: rifles, revolvers, cutlasses. As additional cover he bought a variety of trade goods and ordinary provisions.
Harpending meanwhile interviewed and engaged a crew of regular seamen and a separate contingent of twenty men for the raiding and boarding. He vetted the politics of each of this latter group, quietly rejecting all those not in strong sympathy with the South. He didn’t inform them of the precise nature of their mission, beyond saying that fighting would be required, and well compensated.
The last man hired was the navigator. Here Harpending had to take a chance, for the South wasn’t exactly a school for seamen, especially not experienced navigators who could guide a ship far from land. He settled on a fellow named William Law, who was referred to him by an acquaintance, and who professed to favor the South. Harpending didn’t like Law’s appearance—“He was the possessor of a sinister, villainous mug, looked capable of any crime, and all in all was the most repulsive reptile in appearance I ever set eyes on”—but none better appeared, and Harpending was impatient to go after the gold.
Departure from San Francisco was set for the night of March 14, 1863. The arms were stowed belowdeck, as were the members of the special fighting force. The crew made the vessel ready. All that was missing was Law, the navigator. Harpending considered sailing without him, but the crew vetoed any such plans. Ten o’clock passed, then midnight, then two o’clock. Harpending’s suspicions mounted, yet there seemed nothing to do but get some sleep before daylight, and decide at that point on the next step.
Daylight came, and it revealed that Harpending’s suspicions were right. He and the others awoke to find themselves staring into mouths of the guns of the U.S. man-of-war Cyane. Law had revealed the plot to the Union commander—not for conscience’s sake but for money. As Harp- ending put it, relating information that came out at the ensuing trial, “It occurred to his sordid mind that a handsome sum of money could be obtained from the government, without any risk at all, by betraying his associates. He made a cold-blooded, mercenary bargain with the authorities through which he realized a small fortune.”
All aboard were arrested, and Harpending, Greathouse, and Rubery were tried for treason. The jury convicted them after deliberating four minutes. Each was sentenced to ten years in prison and a fine of $10,000. President Lincoln, however, pardoned Rubery at the request of his influential English uncle, who suggested that the boy hadn’t appreciated what he was doing. That the arguments of Uncle John Bright were largely responsible for Britain’s decision not to back the Confederacy, despite the long- standing connection between Confederate cotton planters and British cotton spinners, doubtless influenced Lincoln’s decision as well.
16
From Sea to Shining Sea
With Harpending in jail, the gold got through. By the beginning of the Civil War, California’s mines had produced more than $600 million in gold. During the four years of the war, another $130 million came out of the ground. Not all of the gold went east right away; much was employed to build San Francisco and the other cities and towns of California. But most eventually—during the war, quickly—wound up in the banks of New York or with the Treasury at Washington. (Not a little went to Europe as well.) Before the war, the South received considerably less California gold than the North did, on account of the South’s lack of large financial institutions and its relative dearth of goods the miners wished to buy. After the war started, the South was cut off almost completely—which was what drove Harpending to his desperate plot. Some contraband gold penetrated the Union blockade, but in quantities minuscule by comparison with what the North received.
The western mines—including the new mines of Nevada that intrigued Leland Stanford and seduced the sunshine secessionists who abandoned Harpending—weren’t what won the war for the North. Union soldiers accomplished that bloody feat. And the fact that there were more of them than Confederate soldiers certainly helped in the task. But the decisive advantage the North had over the South was in economics: in the guns, bullets, boots, bread, bandages, horses, mules, barges, and railroads the Union armies employed to crush the secession. And in an era when precious metals were the bedrock of any economy—and the currency foreign creditors insisted on—control of the western mines gave the Union an advantage the Confederacy had no prayer of offsetting. Or rather, its one prayer went unanswered when Asbury Harpending was arrested.
Yet the transforming effects of gold in American life were only beginning. The project that provoked the fight for Kansas and so contributed centrally to the coming of the war—the California railroad—got under way even while the Federals and Confederates battled on. And four years after the army of Abraham Lincoln and his political allies guaranteed the union of North and South, the railroad of Leland Stanford and his business partners ensured the union of East and West—a feat that was no less crucial than Lincoln’s in launching America into the modern era.
AT THE OUTBREAK of the Civil War, William Sherman had no idea what a large role he would play in the terrible conflict; indeed, he had little reason to believe that anything large, or even successful, lay before him. His political humiliation in the affair of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee in 1856 had been followed shortly by financial embarrassment, when another bank panic forced his office of Lucas & Turner to close. His partners sent him to New York to open a branch on Wall Street, but bad luck followed him east. On September 11, 1857, the steamer Central America sank in a storm off the Georgia coast. The human cost was great, as more than five hundred passengers went down with the ship. Sherman might easily have been among the dead, having sailed on the vessel before and nearly doing so this time. He informed Ellen from New York, “We are all safe ashore,” adding wryly that he guessed he was not doomed to drown, “else I would have been long ago.”
But he didn’t escape injury altogether. Besides its passengers, the Central America was carrying nearly $2 million in California gold bound for the banks of New York. The gold was awaited most anxiously, for the panic that had seized San Francisco was already gripping Wall Street. Shares in California mines and other enterprises had been soaring; now they plummeted to earth, bringing down banks overextended to the West. The loss of the gold of the Central America delivered the coup de grâce to hopes that the situation might be retrieved.
Sherman initially expected to ride out the tempest. He had never been a gambler, and his experience in California had, if anything, rendered him more cautious than ever. The balances of his New York office were solid; his position seemed secure. “Having nothing seemingly at stake,” he recalled, regarding the panic arou
nd him, “I felt amused.”
The joke was on him. Although the Lucas & Turner bank was not directly at risk, one of the principals—Lucas—lost heavily in a separate venture. And his loss compelled the closing of Sherman’s New York office. With dark humor Sherman looked back at his recent career. “I suppose I was the Jonah that blew up San Francisco,” he told Ellen, “and it took only two months’ residence in Wall Street to bust up New York.” Shortly after this, Sherman encountered Ulysses S. Grant, whose luck at farming had been no better than Sherman’s at banking. They compared notes and spoke of some other former officers they knew; the meeting led Sherman to observe, “West Point and the Regular Army aren’t good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants and mechanics.”
His latest experience cured Sherman of any residual desire to be a banker. “I would as soon try the faro table as risk the chances of banking,” he told Ellen. He attempted law in Kansas, but was not reassured of the high standards of his new profession when he was admitted to the bar simply on grounds of general intelligence. “If I turn lawyer,” he predicted, “it will be bungle, bungle, from Monday to Sunday, but if it must be, so be it.” In fact, after bungling his way through a couple of cases, he decided he wasn’t meant to be a lawyer any more than a banker. He tried to return to the army, but the army wasn’t looking for officers.
He finally accepted a position as headmaster of a military academy in Louisiana, a job he found congenial on its merits but increasingly untenable as the country careened toward disunion. Despite the fact that his younger brother had become a Republican stalwart in Congress, he thought the new party pernicious for aggravating the slavery question. “Avoid the subject as a dirty black one,” he urged John, to no avail. Sherman’s opinion of the Republicans only diminished when they nominated John Frémont for president. Sherman declared of Frémont, “If he is fit for the office of President, then anybody may aspire to that office.” All political issues, Sherman complained, were being reduced to “the nigger question.” He wanted everyone simply to quiet down and leave things alone. “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery,” he wrote Tom Ewing, his foster brother (and brother-inlaw). “I don’t know that I would materially change the actual political relation of master and slave. Negroes in the great numbers that exist here must of necessity be slaves.” Sherman thought the South had legitimate complaints, and, living among southerners as he did, he was willing to assist his neighbors. “If they design to protect themselves against negroes, or abolitionists, I will help.” Yet he would go only so far. “If they propose to leave the Union on account of a supposed fact that the northern people are all abolitionists like [Joshua] Giddings and [John] Brown, then I will stand by Ohio and the North West.”
When the South left the Union, Sherman had no choice but to head north. By then, of course, the federal army was looking for trained officers, and he was welcomed back into his original profession. (The Confederate army was looking for officers, too, and unavailingly promised Sherman a high command if he stayed south.) Sherman’s experiences during the next four years summarized, in many respects, the wartime experiences of the Union as a whole: defeat followed by disorientation, followed in turn by retrenchment and reorganization, leading only then to the discovery of the secret of victory—namely, the application of overwhelming force against the secessionists.
Sherman saw his first action at Bull Run in July 1861, and he did about as poorly as the rest of the Union army there. Unable to coordinate the actions of his untrained men, he watched with mortification as they broke and ran under the Confederate assault. “I had read of retreats before, have seen the noise and confusion of crowds of men at fires and shipwrecks,” he wrote Ellen. “But nothing like this. It was as disgraceful as words can portray.”
In the grim weeks that followed, Sherman tried to whip his men into shape. When one volunteer officer from New York asserted that he had served out his term and was heading home, Sherman threatened to shoot him. The officer subsequently complained to President Lincoln, who was visiting Sherman’s camp. Lincoln, having seen the determination in Sherman’s blue eyes, told the officer he’d better listen when Sherman talked of shooting. “I believe he would do it,” Lincoln said.
As the Union forces attempted to regroup, Sherman received charge of the defense of Kentucky. Between the politics that plagued the northern war effort at this point and the special trials of holding a slave state in the Union, Sherman grew increasingly frustrated. He vented his frustration in a meeting overheard by a reporter, who, in an article first published in the New York Tribune and widely reprinted around the country, painted Sherman as a defeatist. The negative publicity intensified Sherman’s upset and poisoned his feelings toward reporters—who responded by making his life still more miserable, by alleging mental imbalance and even insanity. Sherman gnashed his teeth and lay awake nights; he smoked cigars at a furious rate; he muttered about having to suffer fools and traitors. Finally his superior, Henry W. Halleck—of the Monterey constitutional convention— transferred him west to Missouri, closer to Halleck’s headquarters.
It was in the West that Sherman found his footing—at the same time and in the same place as the Union generally. In early 1862, Sherman reconnected with Ulysses Grant, who like Sherman had found his way back to the army, and who was preparing an offensive intended to sever the western wing of the Confederacy from the East. With other Unionists, Sherman took heart from Grant’s recent victories in Tennessee; eager to carry the war to the enemy, he volunteered to serve under Grant, despite being Grant’s senior. “Command me in any way,” he wrote Grant.
Halleck liked the idea and gave Sherman a division in Grant’s army. At Shiloh that spring Sherman led his troops bravely into battle, receiving two wounds and having three horses killed beneath him. When Grant reported the—bloody—Union victory, he especially commended Sherman; Halleck, relaying the news to Washington, declared, “Sherman saved the fortune of the day.” (Sherman’s good fortune was the ill fortune of Albert Sidney Johnston, who, having returned from California to take a commission with the Confederacy, was killed at Shiloh.) Sherman joined Grant in the successful 1863 assault on Vicksburg, which split the Confederacy and recaptured the Mississippi River for the Union. Grant’s reward was promotion to command of all Union forces; Sherman was given the western theater.
During the spring of 1864, Sherman laid plans for a campaign that would transform the war (and transform warfare, by setting an example for a subsequent century of generals). He proposed to drive from Tennessee to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to the sea. “If the North can march an army right through the South, it is proof positive that the North can prevail,” he told Grant. Skeptics observed that Sherman lacked the men and provisions to hold the territory he captured. That wasn’t the point, Sherman answered. He didn’t aim to hold territory but to break the enemy’s will. “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it,” he told Grant. “But the utter destruction of its roads, houses and people will cripple their military resources….I can make the march, and make Georgia howl!”
Sherman marched and Georgia howled. From May 1864 to April 1865 he carved a swath of destruction that left Atlanta in cinders and the Carolinas quaking. Along a relentlessly advancing front sixty miles wide, his men burned fields and warehouses, smashed cotton gins and wagons, tore up railroad tracks and loading docks, and generally obliterated everything that might contribute to the Confederate war effort. Many in the North were almost as horrified as everyone in the South by the devastation Sherman wrought. But the rebels got the message. When Grant caught Lee at Appomattox, the Confederate general’s capitulation set a precedent for southern surrender; yet equally important in convincing other Confederates to quit was the searing memory of Sherman’s march—and the daunting specter of his return.
The war made Sherman a hero (in the North; in the South it made him a second Satan). At the grand victory review on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, the crowds applauded him with a
dmiration verging on awe. “The acclamation given Sherman was without precedent,” reported the New York World. “The whole assemblage raised and waved and shouted as if he had been the personal friend of each and every one of them…. Sherman was the idol of the day.” His stern demeanor had often frightened the ladies, but now that he was a military conqueror, it was very becoming. Young women planted kisses on his red-bearded cheek; before long he was referred to as “the great American soldier who whipped every foreman who stood before him and kissed every girl that he met.” His name and the presidency began frequenting the same sentences.
Yet Sherman—unlike Grant—realized he wasn’t cut out for politics. His temper was too short and his tolerance for fools too thin. “At first he was affable,” explained an observer of one afternoon’s outing. “Then he grew less cordial as the crowds crushed. He pushed down the steps, step by step, and refused proffered hands, finally exclaiming, ‘Damn you, get out of the way, damn you!’” When a voice from the crowd called out to know whether he would lead an army to Mexico to drive out the French-imposed emperor Maximilian, Sherman responded, “You can go there if you like, and you can go to hell if you want to!” He understood his limitations in the political arena and explained them to a reporter. “When I speak, I speak to the point; and when I act in earnest, I act to the point. If a man minds his own business I let him alone, but if he crosses my path, he must get out of the way.” His politics were simple and didn’t require his being president. “I want peace and freedom for every man to go where he pleases, to California or to any other portion of our country without restriction.”
SHERMAN’S LISTENERS ON this occasion might have missed it, but California was no idle example for him. As one who had spent a sizable part of his life—cumulatively speaking—getting to and from California, he had long desired a faster route from the East to the Pacific. In San Francisco he had helped organize the Sacramento Valley Railroad, the first railroad west of the Missouri, and served as company vice president. Some of his partners had a grander dream, of a railroad spanning the continent, but Sherman thought their vision premature. “The time for the great national railroad has not yet come,” he told brother John in 1856. Much surveying work had to be done, and would require years. Yet a start could be made, and interim benefits secured, by the construction of a highway across the plains and mountains. “A good wagon road is very timely,” he said. “Advocate the wagon road with all the zeal you possess, and you will do a good thing.” A well-maintained road would substantially ease the continental crossing, rendering it swifter, cheaper, and more secure. “The great object to be accomplished is to afford convenient resting places, where the emigrant can buy a mule or ox and can have his wagon repaired at moderate cost.” The road would also benefit those who traveled lighter and therefore faster. “A stage will use the wagon road as soon as the wants of the people demand.”
