1861

by Adam Goodheart

  Burch hailed from slaveholding Missouri, but Governor Weller was a native Ohioan. In fact, not all Californians who desired independence sympathized with the South. Some—with eyes accustomed to picking out flecks of ore amid the gravel—saw opportunities glittering in the wreckage of the old republic. The San Francisco Herald, the city’s Democratic newspaper, conjured alluring visions of a vast new transpacific trading empire. Detachment from the Eastern states, it suggested, would inspire Californians to reach out westward, toward China, Japan, Australia, and the South Sea islands. A neutral California’s merchant ships would—unlike those of the Union and Confederacy—be immune to blockades and privateers, and thus capture the older states’ overseas trade. Countless refugees from the war-torn East would move westward, bringing with them not only a new era of prosperity, but perhaps also the once-cherished ideals that had been trampled upon and broken in the United States. As the American republic had been for Europe, so the California republic would be for America. “Let California,” the editor enthused, “become the home of the oppressed, the temple of liberty; the resting place of those who seek the blessings of peace rather than the questionable glories of war.”29

  Other Californians, less grandiose of temperament, simply didn’t want to be bothered with the East Coast politicians and their incessant wrangling. “We don’t care a straw whether you dissolve the Union or not,” a settler from Maine named Frank Buck wrote to his sister back home. “We just wish that the Republicans and Democrats in the Capital would get into a fight and kill each other all off like the Kilkenny cats. Perhaps that would settle the hash.”30

  Buck lived up in Weaverville, a gold-mining settlement in the mountains of far-Northern California. Hundreds of miles away, among the cattle ranches and roughneck towns in the southern part of the state, people had somewhat less dismissive feelings about the unpleasantness back East. “Our emigration comes from the South; our population are of the South, and sympathize with her,” wrote the editor of the Los Angeles Star. “Why, then, should we turn our backs on our friends, and join her enemies?” Militia companies of dubious allegiance sprang up among the pueblos; rusty sabers and muskets disappeared mysteriously from the state arsenals to resurface a few weeks later in private hands, gleaming beyond all recognition. In San Bernardino—a village of a thousand or so Mormons and Southerners—people openly cursed the Stars and Stripes.31

  And throughout the state that winter and spring, certain ambitious men began to plot a masterstroke that would sever California from the Union with a single blow.

  One of these men was a handsome young Kentuckian with a name out of comic opera: Asbury Harpending. He had come west through a series of picaresque adventures, running away from school at the age of fifteen to join William Walker’s ill-fated filibustering expedition in Nicaragua. Failing to get as far as New Orleans before the federal authorities thwarted his plans, Harpending set out for California with nothing but a revolver and a five-dollar gold piece. Like so many enterprising youths, he went on to make a fortune in mining. But he never entirely gave up his dreams of derring-do. The approach of civil war seemed to bring with it an opportunity for another filibustering expedition of sorts—this one against his own country.32

  One evening, Harpending was summoned to a meeting at the home of a wealthy San Franciscan. The house was in an isolated spot, he later recalled, and its owner “lived alone, with only Asiatic attendants, who understood little English and cared less for what was going on.” One of these “soft-footed” servants ushered Harpending into a large room where about thirty young gentlemen—most of them wealthy, all of them Southern—awaited. That night, they swore a secret oath. Each man would assemble a small fighting force, an easy enough task, as Harpending later recalled, since “California at that period abounded with reckless human material—ex-veterans of the Mexican War, ex-filibusters, ex–Indian fighters, all eager to engage in any undertaking that promised adventure and profit.” The freebooter units would then converge on Alcatraz, seizing the island, the arsenal at Benicia with its 30,000 stand of arms, and other key points. With that accomplished, they would proclaim a Pacific Republic and organize “an army of Southern sympathizers, sufficient in number to beat down any armed resistance.” One particular fact made the plotters especially confident of success: the highest-ranking officer of the U.S. Army at San Francisco—in fact, the commander of the entire Department of the Pacific—was General Albert Sidney Johnston, a known Southern sympathizer and veteran of the Texas Revolution.33

  Harpending wrote his version of the story as an old man, more than half a century later, and some of its details—those soft-footed Asiatics, for instance—seem rather more cinematic than perfectly true. Still, there is no question that in 1861, California was rife with secret pro-Southern groups, organizations with names like the Knights of the Columbian Star and the Knights of the Golden Circle. (The latter referred to the filibusters’ long-held dream of ruling a slaveholding empire encircling the Gulf of Mexico, and including the American South and Southwest, the Caribbean, and much of Latin America.) Police detectives’ reports revealed elaborate codes, rituals, signs, and countersigns—enough to leave loyal Californians badly spooked. Thus, a few hundred Knights multiplied, at least in the popular imagination, into a hundred thousand.34

  Nothing seemed safe that spring, not even the rock-solid fortress at the center of San Francisco Bay. “We felt as though we were upon a volcano of social disruption,” one Unionist later remembered, “and … that the guns of Alcatraz might signal us at any moment to throw up our hands.”35

  But even as the would-be founders of the Pacific Republic conspired among themselves, a counterplot of sorts was being hatched—this one in Mrs. Frémont’s front garden.

  THOUSANDS OF MILES from San Francisco Bay, at the West’s opposite gateway—St. Louis, Missouri—two civilians sat disconsolately at the sidelines of the war.

  One had recently taken a desk job running St. Louis’s horse-drawn trolley line. He spent most of his days pushing papers, trying his hardest to concentrate on the minutiae of fare revenues and fodder costs, in an office permeated with pungent aromas from the company’s adjacent stables. The other man was a visitor to town, a down-at-the-heels shop clerk from Illinois, who had come in search of an officer’s commission. He camped out at his in-laws’ house, trudging around the city each day, fruitlessly trying to attract the attention of the local military authorities.36

  The trolley-car executive was named William Tecumseh Sherman. The luckless clerk was Ulysses S. Grant.

  Of all the places where these two men could have found themselves, St. Louis was perhaps the one where war loomed largest. The leading city in one of the nation’s most populous slaveholding states, St. Louis was a military prize like no other. Not only the largest settlement beyond the Appalachians, it was also the country’s second-largest port, commanding the Mississippi as well as the Missouri River, the great waterway to the Rockies, then navigable as far upstream as what is now the state of Montana. It was also the eastern gateway of the overland trails to California, Oregon, and the Southwest. Last but far from least, the city was home to the Jefferson Barracks, the largest military installation in the entire United States, and to the St. Louis Arsenal, the biggest cache of federal arms in the South.37

  Whoever held St. Louis truly held the key to the whole American West. And, in contrast to what was brewing in California, the struggle for the West in Missouri was in the open, it was armed, and it was about to explode into full-blown violence.

  But it was not yet Grant’s or Sherman’s Civil War in the spring of 1861. During this opening act, the two future titans were fated to watch from offstage. It was not yet time for the clashes of great armies, for columns of conscripts trudging across the ruined landscape of the South. Instead, the struggle for Missouri was a civil war in the truest and rawest sense, resembling those fought in our own time in such places as Beirut and Baghdad: gun battles in the streets, long-simmering ethnic hat
reds boiling over, and wailing mothers cradling slain children in their arms. It was also quite literally a revolution—but with the Union side, not the Confederates, as the rebels.

  The Union revolutionaries, who would soon fight the battle for Missouri, were drilling clandestinely by night in beer halls, factories, and gymnasiums, barricading the windows and spreading sawdust on the floor to muffle the sound of their stomping boots. Young brewery workers and trolley drivers, middle-aged tavern keepers and wholesale merchants, were learning to bear and aim guns, to wheel squads left and right in the proper American fashion. Most of the younger men handled the weapons awkwardly, but quite a few of the older ones swung them with the ease of having been soldiers once before, in another country, long ago. Sometimes, when their movements hit a perfect synchrony, when their muffled tread beat a single cadence, they threw caution aside and sang out. Just a few of the older men would begin, more and more men joining in until dozens swelled the chorus, half singing, half shouting verses they had carried with them from across the sea:

  Die wilde Jagd, und die Deutsche Jagd,

  Auf Henkersblut und Tyrannen!

  Drum, die ihr uns liebt, nicht geweint und geklagt;

  Das Land ist ja frei, und der Morgen tagt,

  Wenn wir’s auch nur sterbend gewannen! *

  There were two distinct Missouris in 1861: an old and a new.

  The old flourished in the central counties of the state, in the rich alluvial lands between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. Here, in the early decades of the century, had come settlers from the seaboard South: enterprising young Marylanders and Virginians who had forsaken the exhausted acreage of their ancestral plantations, rounded up the able-bodied field hands, and marched them in shackled droves through the Cumberland Gap. Others made the journey from Kentucky and Tennessee, moving southwestward with the frontier, as their mothers and fathers had done before. Land could be had for twenty-five cents an acre, and, after the slaves had cleared it, there were abundant yields of cotton, tobacco, and hemp. These earliest settlers had agitated for Missouri’s admission as a slave state, and after the Compromise of 1820 settled the matter, more followed. Although there were few large plantations, the region became known as Little Dixie.38 Planters and small farmers sent their crops to market in nearby St. Louis, a frontier town of wood-frame houses that the early French colonists had built.39

  As the Civil War began, Little Dixie still flourished as it had for the past half century. But St. Louis, in that time, had changed beyond all recognition. Here and there, a quaint French colonial house still tottered picturesquely, but most had given way to block after block of redbrick monotony: warehouses, manufacturing plants, and office buildings, stretching for miles along the bluffs above the river. Each year, more than four thousand steamboats shouldered up to the wharves, vessels with names like War Eagle, Champion, Belle of Memphis, and Big St. Louis. The smoke from their coal-fired furnaces mingled with the thick black clouds belching from factory smokestacks, so that on windless days the sun shone feebly through a dark canopy that hung above the entire city.40

  More and more Northerners were coming to this new Missouri, attracted by the opportunities of booming industry—both wealthy businessmen and poor but hopeful laborers. So alarmed were the “old” Missourians by the influx that one Virginia-born judge suggested, only half in jest, that the state legislature pass a law barring Yankees from crossing the Mississippi. When asked how the ban could be enforced, he suggested that ferrymen require all their passengers to pronounce the word cow—anyone replying “keow” would be banished forever to the Illinois side of the river.41

  But it was a wave of newcomers from even farther afield that was truly transforming the face of St. Louis. Beginning in the 1840s, German and other central European immigrants poured into the city, attracted at first by a pioneer propagandist named Gottfried Duden, who described the Mississippi Valley as a kind of American Rhineland: just as romantic, but with lusher vegetation and a milder climate, both politically and meteorologically. This may not have been quite accurate, but by the time Duden’s countrymen made the trek and realized as much, the migration had taken on a momentum of its own. By 1861, a visitor to many parts of the city might indeed have thought he was somewhere east of Aachen. “Here we hear the German tongue, or rather the German dialect, everywhere,” one Landsmann en-thused. Certainly you would hear it in places like Tony Niederwiesser’s Tivoli beer garden on Third Street, where Sunday-afternoon regulars quaffed lager while Sauter’s or Vogel’s orchestra played waltzes and sentimental tunes from the old country. You would hear it in Henry Boernstein’s St. Louis Opera House on Market Street, where the house company celebrated Friedrich Schiller’s centennial in 1859 by performing the master’s theatrical works for a solid week. You would hear it in the newspaper offices of the competing dailies Anzeiger des Westens and Westliche Post, as well as the weekly Mississippi Blätter. You would hear it even in public school classrooms, where the children of immigrants received instruction in the mother tongue.42

  St. Louis was still officially slave territory, of course. Indeed, it was here that Dred Scott—“the best known colored person in the world,” locals liked to boast—had sued for his freedom; here that his widow and daughters still lived in an alleyway just off Franklin Avenue.* Mrs. Scott and her children were free, though—as were most black St. Louisans. The number of slaves in the city had dwindled to fewer than two thousand, or less than 1 percent of the population. Local politicians—even some who owned a few slaves themselves—were calling for the state to enact gradual emancipation. It would be good for business, they said; it would lure even more Yankee capital to town.43

  No wonder that when cotton growers from Little Dixie came into the city they sometimes felt as though they were in an alien country. Yet Missouri as a whole still lay firmly in the political grasp of such men: the Southern planters, the slaveholders, the aristocratic scions of old French colonial families. As a bloc, they and their supporters far outnumbered the German newcomers, and in the early months of 1861, as their sister states seceded one by one around them, these men naturally assumed that it was they who would decide Missouri’s fate.

  In January, the state had sworn in a new governor. Claiborne Fox Jackson was a poker-playing, horse-trading, Little Dixie planter who had once led armed Border Ruffians into neighboring Kansas to keep it from becoming a free state. Better just to let the Indian savages keep Kansas forever, Jackson had once said, since “they are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight.”44

  Officially, Jackson was neutral on secession, reassuring everyone that the ultimate decision would be up to the citizens of Missouri. But in his inaugural address, he made his leanings clear enough. “The weight of Kentucky or Missouri, thrown into the scale,” could tip the balance nationally from the Union to the Confederacy, the governor said. And should the federal government try to coerce the seceding states, he warned, “Missouri will not be found to shrink from the duty which her position upon the border imposes: her honor, her interests, and her sympathies point alike in one direction, and determine her to stand by the South.” (Judging by the printed sources, Jackson seems to have been a man who spoke frequently in italics.) One of the governor’s first acts in office was to secure legislative approval for a statewide convention to determine where Missouri would pledge her loyalties and her considerable resources. To leave the Union would require a statewide referendum. But neither the Governor nor the legislature seemed to have the slightest doubt about which way the convention—or Missouri’s citizenry—would vote. The delegates certainly seemed like a reliable enough group: some four-fifths of them were slaveholders. They gathered first in Jefferson City, the state’s tiny capital, and then, seeking better hotel accommodations, moved to St. Louis.45

  The gentlemen did indeed find the creature comforts of the metropolis far more satisfactory. In every other respect, however, the move to St. Louis was the worst strategic blunder that the hard-co
re Jacksonites could have ventured. For they arrived in a city that was tense, frightened, and divided—and whose inhabitants were arming themselves not just for secession, not just to preserve the Union, but for an all-out ethnic war.

  Almost since their first arrival, the Germans of St. Louis had been a class apart politically as well as culturally. Many had left their native land to escape not only poverty but also the reactionary regimes that ruled Germany’s claustrophobic labyrinth of tiny duchies and principalities. Arriving in the United States, they rejoiced in the expansive landscape, in the freedom of expression, and in the spirit of a nation whose watchword, they had been told, was liberty.

  And they almost immediately fell afoul of their new American neighbors. In 1836, when a black St. Louis man was accused of murdering a police officer, a group of whites seized the prisoner from the city jail, manacled him to a tree at the corner of Seventh and Locust, and burned him alive before a large crowd of spectators. The next day, the shocked editor of the city’s recently established German-language newspaper, the Anzeiger des Westens, denounced the atrocity. “Citizens of St. Louis!” he wrote. “The stain with which your city was defiled last night can never be erased.”