The new line would follow an established route, the Central Overland Trail. It was the exact route, in fact, of the Pony Express, across the desert wastes and mountain passes of Utah and Nevada and over the Sierra Nevada into California. Not many years earlier, this country had been considered impassable wilderness. In the winter of 1844, the great Pathfinder himself, John C. Frémont, was hailed as the first white man to cross the Sierra when he and his band of explorers turned up, famished and half naked, on the western side. Two years later, the Donner party met its gruesome fate trying to follow in his tracks, and for a decade after, few others dared to try. But at the very end of the 1850s, private entrepreneurs and military engineers laid out and graded a new trail. By 1861, it had become a busy highway, the quickest and shortest overland route to California. Where frontiersmen had died in a trackless desert, fast stagecoaches now rumbled to and fro, carrying passengers, mail, and even a few tourists. Emigrant wagons passed by the thousands, their occupants pleasantly surprised to find the route lined with trading posts, grog shops, army hospitals, post offices, even hotels. Bridges and ferry crossings spanned the newly tamed rivers.9
That was how things were in the West as the Civil War began. Everywhere, it seemed, the Hiram Sibleys and their money were rushing in, along with throngs of lesser entrepreneurs—all those sutlers, tavern keepers, stagecoach owners, and ferrymen. Together, these ruthless and ambitious seekers were changing the continent, connecting city to city and town to town, drawing lines across the blankness of the country.
Indeed, Sibley’s own ambitions went beyond the continent, beyond even the hemisphere. His transcontinental telegraph was only the beginning. Soon, he hoped, he would continue the line up the Pacific coast, through Russian Alaska, and across Bering’s Strait, where he would connect with the czar’s engineers running their own line east from Moscow. Beyond Moscow: Berlin, Paris, London. Hiram Sibley was going to wire the world.10
And so it was that on May 27, 1861, a train of more than two hundred oxen, twenty-six wagons, and fifty men set out from Sacramento, onto the Central Overland Trail and across the Sierra, laden with coils of high-grade copper wire and crates of glass insulators shipped from back East. Hundreds of contractors had preceded them—those mule drivers along the Carson, for instance—to scour remote valleys for pole material. The route itself was mostly treeless, but they dragged trunks dozens or even hundreds of miles to it: the mighty Western Union bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.11
A few weeks later, at Fort Churchill, they raised the first pole, to the top of which they had nailed an American flag. Tossing hats into the air, the men hailed this moment with a chorus of huzzas: three cheers for the telegraph and three cheers for the Union.12
“THERE ARE GRAVE DOUBTS at the hugeness of the land and whether one government can comprehend the whole.”13
So wrote Henry Adams in 1861, fretting over whether the sundered Union could—or even should—be restored. But young Adams, though he may have been to Naples and dined with Garibaldi, had never seen Nevada or supped with the likes of Hiram Sibley, let alone with sutlers and stagecoach drivers. (He had rarely been west of Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually.) He and many other Easterners knew little, really, of what the Union was—of what it had become. It had grown and changed too quickly. And a large share of that growth and change was happening beyond the Mississippi.
The West was also the chessboard in the Great Game between North and South. For decades, each new expansion of the country had set off a flurry of tactical moves: advances, flanking maneuvers, sometimes grudging withdrawals. Each new line across the map—whether territorial boundary, national road, railway, or telegraph route—threatened to redraw the entire board, or so it often seemed. Sometimes the slave-state interests advanced; sometimes the free-state. More often, as with so much in the antebellum years, each set of moves ended in a carefully negotiated stalemate.
Recently, however, the game had seemed to tilt decisively toward the North. Eighteen sixty was a federal census year, and the results had begun coming in early that autumn—with exquisitely poor timing, as far as Southern paranoia was concerned.14 Preliminary figures confirmed what many suspected: that immigration and westward expansion were shifting the country’s centers of population and balance of power. Since the last count, in 1850, the North’s population had increased an astonishing 41 percent, while the South’s had grown only 27 percent. States like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois would each be gaining multiple seats in Congress; Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee would be losing some. Tellingly, the statistical center of national population had shifted for the first time not only west of the original thirteen states but also from slave territory into free: from Virginia to Ohio. (The New York Herald did find at least one source of comfort for the South: the paper’s statistician declared it “very certain” that the nation’s slave population would reach fifty million by the year 1960.)15
Southern leaders did not lack for an expansionist strategy of their own in the years before the war. The more radical among them spoke of spreading American dominion through Latin America and the Caribbean, forming dozens of new slave states. The filibusters, as we have seen, even took matters into their own hands. In fact, there were occasional successes—and splendid ones—as when Southern planters moved into the Mexican state of Texas, eventually to take it over and annex it to the United States. The ensuing war added vast new territory to the southern half of the country, and many assumed that slavery would be legal there.
Nor did the South lack its own Hiram Sibleys, its own tough and resourceful breed of capitalists. But its Sibleys, by and large, did not invest in building railroads and telegraph lines: instead, they bought slaves and cleared new land for cotton.
All too often, the most visionary schemes for the West ended up stalled endlessly in Congress, victims of sectional infighting. Such was the case with the transcontinental railroad, an idea that had been under discussion for twenty years. Each time it came up for debate, Northerners refused to approve a Southern route and Southerners refused to approve a Northern route. When Congress did finally vote to fund a survey, it reached a compromise by sending out five separate expeditions to find suitable pathways at five different latitudes. Not surprisingly, the man who supervised this entire process—Secretary of War Jefferson Davis—was able to recommend the southernmost one, fudging a bit of data to support his argument. (Davis had already managed to orchestrate a major U.S. land acquisition from Mexico—the Gadsden Purchase—to serve as a southern corridor.)* Not surprisingly, Northern congressmen balked at this, and by the end of the 1850s, the rail line to the Pacific was still nothing more than a figment of the American imagination.16
As anxious as Southerners were to extend slavery through the Union’s new states and territories, Northerners were anxious to contain it. The Hiram Sibleys may not have cared much about the plight of the poor downtrodden Negroes, but their own financial interests did demand a West that was free, open, modern, untrammeled—a place, in short, where Yankees could do business. They were damned if they were going to let the Southern oligarchs, with their canting talk of chivalry and their pretensions to aristocratic grandeur, stand in their way.
Now, in early 1861, the game had suddenly changed. It would be played in Congress no longer: the Southerners had called forfeit and gone home in a huff. Already, in the first few months of that year, Kansas had been admitted as a free state and Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada as free territories. An Illinois railroad lawyer was in the White House, and everyone expected that the long-blocked pathway to the Pacific would soon be open for business.
As the Civil War began, a new game opened on the chessboard of the West. There were two key places where it might be won or lost: one on the shores of the Pacific, the other on the banks of the Mississippi. It would be decided in one of these places with words; in the other, with guns.
FROM HER VERANDA, the Pathfinder’s wife watched the sun vanish between the two great western headlands, leaving A
merica behind until next dawn. She loved this place more than any other that she had ever known, either on this continent or in her wide travels abroad. Her quaint Gothic cottage commanded all of Black Point, the finest spot on the whole bay, with dark thickets of scrub oak and laurel covering steep hillsides that sloped down to a sandy beach. She had recently built the porch around three sides of the house, laid out gardens and gravel paths, and planted climbing rosebushes and trellised vines. She took joy even in the tolling of the fog bells on oceanbound vessels, and in the night beacon that flashed on the harbor fort: “my night light,” she called it. When the wind was off the bay, she claimed, she could hear the flapping of sails on the schooners as they rounded the point, and the swearing of captains pacing their decks.17
But Jessie Benton Frémont could also look out at this wide, God-given landscape and almost believe that she and her family had brought it all into being, had conjured the ships and the fort and the bay—and a prospering American city whose growth was the marvel of the entire world—as surely as she had planted the clambering roses.
Her father, the legendary Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, had fought for three decades in Congress to advance his vision of a transcontinental American empire, the grand historical culmination that Providence and nature had foreordained. As long ago as 1818, he had written:
Europe discharges her inhabitants upon America; America pours her population from east to west.… All obey the same impulse—that of going to the West, which, from the beginning of time, has been the course of the heavenly bodies, of the human race, and of science, civilization, and national power following in their train. Soon the Rocky Mountains will be passed, and the “children of Adam” will have completed their circumnavigation of the globe.18
After the American imperium had extended itself to the shores of the Pacific, he said, it would reach farther yet, to East Asia, as “science, liberal principles in government, and the true religion … cast their lights across the intervening sea,” while the newly liberated masses of China and Japan poured forth eastward, in turn, to settle the valley of the Columbia River. This empire, Benton said, would advance not by military conquest but by peaceful commerce, bringing in train universal principles of enlightenment. The senator championed his cause with all the tenacity and toughness to be expected of a man who had once gotten into a gunfight with Andrew Jackson, and had slain another opponent in a duel with pistols at three yards.19
Jessie’s husband, Colonel John C. Frémont, had—in the eyes of many Americans—made her father’s dream a reality. From the upper Mississippi to the southwestern deserts, he had mapped a quarter of the North American continent, gathering a wealth of geographical and scientific knowledge that made Lewis and Clark’s contributions look meager in comparison. He had opened highways to the Pacific, and planted the Stars and Stripes on the highest peak in the Rockies.20 He had led United States forces into California and captured the state for the Union. He had reached the wild shore of this bay, looked out at those very headlands that his wife now gazed at from her porch, and given the rocky portal a name: the Golden Gate.
Jessie Frémont took perhaps even greater pride in being the human link between the dream and the land; the senator and the soldier. In many respects, she was more remarkable than either of the two men. Jessie had inherited all of her father’s toughness or even more: President Buchanan once called her, admiringly or not, “the square root of Tom Benton.” She had a cooler head and sharper wits than the old senator, though—and was a more brilliant politician, philosopher, and strategist than her soldier husband. A better writer, too: she had taken the dry data of the colonel’s expeditions and crafted them into literary epics of the American West, official government reports that became best sellers and made her husband a national hero.* (Some even went so far as to say that Jessie Frémont had made her husband what he was.) Her own vision of the West—unlike her father’s baroque fantasies—was clean, compelling, and modern. “How can I tell all that the name, California, represents?” she once wrote, reflecting on her time there before the war. “If our East has a life of yesterday, and the [Midwest] of to-day, then here to-morrow had come.… What a dream of daring young energy—of possibility—of certainties—of burdens dropped and visions realized!”21
Burdens dropped and visions realized. Senator Benton and the two Frémonts were all Southerners, from slaveholding families, who had reinvented themselves as Westerners and in the process had become foes of slavery. How could human bondage coexist with the Western dream? The old man, though he owned slaves until the day he died, had made no secret of his distaste for the “peculiar institution,” and ultimately sacrificed his political career to his conscience.22 His daughter went considerably further. In 1849, California’s new territorial legislature debated whether to allow slavery; some settlers from the South had brought their slaves with them, while many others had visions of gold mines worked by black and Indian bondmen. Jessie Frémont made her home the command center for the opposition, presiding at the dinner table—in the absence of her husband, usually—plotting strategy with the men.
Once she even invited fifteen proslavery lawmakers to her house to debate them single-handedly. Having received a piece of her mind, one of them replied dismissively, “Fine sentiment, Mrs. Frémont, but the aristocracy will always have slaves.”
“But why not an aristocracy of emancipators?” she retorted. “It isn’t a pretty sight in a free country for a child to see and hear chain gangs clanking through the streets.”
The legislature voted to keep California free. A few months later, the debate was carried to Washington, when Congress considered statehood for the fast-growing territory. Jefferson Davis argued in the Senate that slavery was part of California’s natural destiny: “It was to work the gold mines on this continent that the Spaniards first brought Africans to the country. The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat and sudden changes of climate, to which the African race are altogether better adapted.” In the end, though, Washington ratified the verdict already reached in Sacramento.23
In 1856, the Frémonts carried their antislavery ideals into the national arena. When the new Republican Party sought its first presidential nominee, it was John C. Frémont who—with considerable prodding from his wife—agreed to run, under the slogan “Free Speech, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont.” Unlike any previous candidate’s wife in American history, Jessie figured prominently in the campaign (more than her soft-spoken husband, some critics would snipe). Republican marchers waved banners reading frémont and jessie, and women, shockingly, joined these political demonstrations, wearing violets—Mrs. Frémont’s favorite flower—pinned to their bosoms. When the colonel addressed his supporters, they often insisted that his wife step forward to wave and smile as well. Despite his loss to Buchanan, many staunch Republicans still thought him a better man than Lincoln, a more steadfast foe of the slave power.24
But here in California, slavery’s supporters—though thwarted since Congress had declared it a free state—had never conceded defeat.
In early 1861, as Jessie Frémont looked out from her veranda over San Francisco Bay, her dream of the West, of a free American empire stretching from ocean to ocean, seemed to be in peril. Texas had already been lost to the Confederacy despite the valiant efforts of Governor Sam Houston, her father’s old friend, who had been evicted from office after refusing to betray his country. The immense territory of New Mexico, then also encompassing what is now Arizona and part of Nevada, was leaning the same way. Much closer to Black Point, in the city just east of the sand dunes, men were plotting to detach California from the Union, too. Some reports had it that the island fort just opposite the Frémonts’ cottage—the walled citadel of Alcatraz—might fall at any moment into enemy hands. Rumblings of disloyalty, and of secret plots, were being felt throughout the state.
Though California may officially have been free territory, its political leadership
was still dominated by Southern sympathizers—voters called them the Chivalry faction, or the Chivs. No Northern state had more draconian laws restricting the lives and rights of its black inhabitants.25 Moreover, it seemed to many citizens, even those with little fondness for the South, that only the most tenuous threads bound their state to the Union. California lay as far from the old Eastern states as could be; the quickest route from one American coast to the other was via a perilous sea voyage of four thousand nautical miles aboard a cramped steamer, with an overland trek across the Isthmus of Panama midway. (And this was affordable only for relatively well-heeled travelers; ordinary emigrants had to try their luck on the overland trails.) Many of the Gold Rush settlers were rootless adventurers who felt no particular loyalty to any piece of land except those on which they’d staked their mining claims up in the hills. Thousands upon thousands of foreigners had been drawn to the region, too: Europeans, East Asians, and Latin Americans, many of whom had simply come to scoop up Yankee dollars before heading home, and whose allegiances were still with Prussia, or China, or Chile. Two other significant populations, the Mormons and the Mexicans, had every reason to hate the United States, a nation that had quite recently defeated them on the battlefield.26
As Jessie Frémont herself recognized, California felt like a place wholly new. Why, then—a great many Californians reasoned—should it not be its own nation? Let the old states fight their old battles; this distant shore would turn its face away, toward its own destiny. The dream of a Pacific Republic had flickered for decades; now—with the word pacific taking on a newly ironic double meaning—the moment seemed more opportune than ever.27
In fact, most of the state’s political leaders had already endorsed the idea of lowering the Stars and Stripes and running up the Bear Flag in the event that the United States split apart. Back in early 1860, then-governor John B. Weller predicted to the legislature that Californians “will not go with the North or the South, but here on the shores of the Pacific found a mighty republic, which may in the end prove the greatest of all.” All of the state’s senators and representatives had voiced similar ideas in Congress at one time or another, though they often retreated coyly when it seemed politically convenient. In the wake of Lincoln’s election, Congressman John Burch declared that if war came, Californians should “raise aloft the flag of the ‘Bear,’ surrounded with the ‘hydra’ pointed cactus of the Western wilds, and call upon the enlightened nations of the earth to acknowledge our independence … [as] the youthful but vigorous Caesarian Republic of the Pacific.”28
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