29. San Francisco Herald, Apr. 25, May 1, and May 8, 1861.
30. Katherine A. White, ed., A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush; The Letters of Franklin A. Buck (Boston, 1930), p. 183 (Jan. 22, 1860). In January 1861, on hearing that secession had begun, Buck wrote his sister again: “I wash my hands of it. Let what will come, I am innocent. If you attempt to coerce the seceding states you will have all the slave states united and how a war would affect you! You had better scrape together what you can and all come out here.”
31. Los Angeles Star, Jan. 5, 1861; J. M. Scammell, “Military Units in Southern California, 1853–1862,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (Sept. 1950), pp. 229–49; Percival J. Cooney, “Southern California in Civil War Days,” Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California, vol. 13 (1924), pp. 54–68. One early historian sniffed that San Bernardino’s disloyal citizenry also included large numbers of “outlaws and English Jews” (Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 117).
32. James H. Wilkins, ed., The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending (Norman, Okla., 1958), pp. 5–16.
33. Ibid., pp. 16–23.
34. See C. A. Bridges, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: A Filibustering Fantasy,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3 (Jan. 1941), pp. 287–302; Benjamin Franklin Gilbert, “The Confederate Minority in California,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (June 1941), pp. 154–70; Ollinger Crenshaw, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: The Career of George Bickley,” American Historical Review, vol. 47, no. 1 (Oct. 1941), pp. 23–50; Richards, California Gold Rush, p. 231; Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984), chap. 1. One exchange of signs and countersigns by which the Knights in California recognized one another was recorded by an informer: “Do you know Jones?” “What Jones?” “Preacher Jones.” “Where does he live?” “At home.” “Where is his home?” “In Dixie.” Cooney, “Southern California in Civil War Days,” p. 58. Such details might seem to strain credibility, but in fact mid-nineteenth-century America was rife with secret political societies of all sorts—most famously the Know-Nothings and, later, the Ku Klux Klan—that drew on Romantic fantasies, the faddish appeal of medieval chivalry, and the general craze for fraternal organizations.
35. Hugh A. Gorley, The Loyal Californians of 1861 (n.p., 1893), p. 4.
36. William T. Sherman, Memoirs, 2nd ed. (New York, 1887), vol. 1, pp. 196–97; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981), pp. 74–75; John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 2: April-September 1861 (Carbondale, Ill., 1969), pp. 25–28.
37. Christopher Phillips, Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (Baton Rouge, La., 1996), p. 134.
38. See Jeffrey C. Stone, Slavery, Southern Culture, and Education in Little Dixie, Missouri, 1820–1860 (New York, 2006); Louis Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence, Kans., 2001), pp. 37–38.
39. Charles Dickens, passing through in 1842, described the old French buildings “lop-sided with age” that “hold their heads askew besides, as if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American Improvements.” American Notes, quoted in Arenson, Great Heart, p. 15.
40. Galusha Anderson, A Border City in the Civil War (Boston, 1908), pp. 1–3, 9.
41. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, Ind., 2006), pp. 235–36.
42. Arenson, Great Heart, pp. 19–20; Steven Rowan and James Neal Primm, eds., Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857–1862 (Columbia, Mo., 1983), p. 88; Don Heinrich Tolzmann, ed., and William G. Bek, trans., The German Element in St. Louis: A Translation of Ernst D. Kargau’s “St. Louis in Former Years: A Commemorative History of the German Element” (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 42, 179–80.
43. Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 3–4; Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (New York, 2009), pp. 320, 424.
44. Hans Christian Adamson, Rebellion in Missouri: 1861 (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 72; Aron, American Confluence, p. 241.
45. Arenson, Great Heart, p. 111; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 79; Walter Harrington Ryle, Missouri: Union or Secession (Nashville, 1931), pp. 179–80; Anderson, Border City, pp. 41–42; James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980 (St. Louis, 1998), p. 233.
46. A. A. Dunson, “Notes on the Missouri Germans on Slavery,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (April 1965), pp. 355–58; Walter B. Stevens, St. Louis: The Fourth City, 1764–1911 (St. Louis, 1911), vol. 1, p. 165.
47. Ella Lonn, “The Forty-Eighters in the Civil War,” in A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 (New York, 1967), pp. 186–87; Stephen D. Engle, Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Fayetteville, Ark., 1993), chaps. 1–2; Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (Philadelphia, 1952), p. 88; Lawrence O. Christensen et al., eds., Dictionary of Missouri Biography (Columbia, Mo., 1999), pp. 138–40; Henry Boernstein, ed., Steven Rowan and James Neal Primm, Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical (St. Louis, 1997), pp. 4–6; Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 35–43; Ernest Kirschten, Catfish and Crystal (St. Louis, 1989), pp. 247–48.
48. Anzeiger des Westens, Dec. 17, 1860, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 147; Kirschten, Catfish and Crystal, p. 245; Missouri Republican [St. Louis], Nov. 4, 1860. Confusingly, St. Louis’s leading Democratic newspaper was called the Missouri Republican, while its leading Republican paper was called the Missouri Democrat.
49. Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 27–28; Anzeiger des Westens, May 24, 1860, in ibid., p. 113.
50. James Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, and Missouri in 1861 (New York, 1866), p. xiii.
51. Anzeiger des Westens, Oct. 29, 1860, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 136; San Francisco Bulletin, Oct. 19, 1860; Bruce Levine, “Immigrants, Class, and Politics: German-American Working People and the Fight Against Slavery,” in Charlotte L. Brancaforte, ed., The German Forty-Eighters in the United States (New York, 1989), p. 131.
52. Elbert B. Smith, Francis Preston Blair (New York, 1980), pp. 245–47; Speech of Hon. Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, on the Acquisition of Central America (Washington, D.C., 1858).
53. Missouri Republican, Dec. 25, 1860, Feb. 13 and 25, Mar. 2, 1861; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, pp. 79–80; Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 136–37; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 275–76; Engle, Yankee Dutchman, p. 52; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 36–38.
54. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 85; Basil W. Duke, The Civil War Reminiscences of General Basil W. Duke, C.S.A. (New York, 2001), pp. 37–38; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, p. 269.
55. Missouri Republican, Nov. 4, 1860 and Jan. 20 and Feb. 13, 1861.
56. Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 312.
57. Ibid., pp. 310–15; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 484–85; Nevins, Pathmarker, p. 468; JBF to Elizabeth Blair Lee, June 14, 1860, in Herr and Spence, Letters, pp. 229–31; JBF, “A Home Found, and Lost.”
58. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2 (Baltimore, 2002), pp. 449–50; Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (Norman, Okla., 2000), pp. 16–20; JBF to Thomas Starr King, Jan. 16, 1861, in Herr and Spence, Letters, pp. 233–34; Catherine Coffin Phillips, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Woman Who Made History (San Francisco, 1935), pp. 231–32; JBF, Souvenirs, pp. 204–05; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 280–81; Elizabeth B. Frémont, Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont, Daughter of the Pathfinder John C. Frémont and Jessie Benton Frémont His Wife (New York, 1912), p. 119.
59. John D. Baltz, Hon. Edward D. Baker, U.S. Senator from Oregon (Lancaster, Pa., 1888), pp. 9–10.
60. San Francisco Bulletin, Oct.
18 and 27, 1860.
61. Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 316; Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, pp. 17–18. Scharnhorst also says that Harte was “waving the Stars and Stripes” during his outburst, although the newspaper account does not mention this.
62. Mrs. Frémont herself said as much in an 1864 letter, though many attributed the original quotation to Winfield Scott; others to Lincoln himself. It might not have been literally true (and if either Scott or Lincoln ever made the remark, no written evidence of it survives). See Edwin P. Whipple, Substance and Show, and Other Lectures, by Thomas Starr King, p. xviii, etc. (Lincoln); Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Nov. 6, 1876 (Scott).
63. Robert Monzingo, Thomas Starr King: Eminent Californian, Civil War Statesman, Unitarian Minister (Pacific Grove, Calif., 1991), pp. 32–33, 58; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, pp. 314–15; JBF, “A Home Found, and Lost.”
64. Charles Wendte, Thomas Starr King, Patriot and Preacher (Boston, 1921), pp. 1–10; William Day Simonds, Starr King in California (San Francisco, n.d.), pp. 5–8.
65. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, passim; Richard Peterson, “Thomas Starr King in California, 1860–64: Forgotten Naturalist of the Civil War Years,” California History, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 12–21; Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York, 1986), pp. 97–105. King read Walden in an advance proof in 1855; he praised its concluding section for “being more weird and winding further into the awful vitalities of nature than any writing I have yet seen” (Wendte, p. 46).
66. King did not entirely leave New England behind: he crossed the steaming Isthmus of Panama laden with a monstrous baggage train that contained, among other things, overcoats, shawls, bottles of cider, pots of pickled oysters, and bundles of sermons. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 78.
67. Ibid., p. 69.
68. Shortly after his arrival in California, he wrote: “Early in May, in New England, people hunt for flowers. A bunch of violets, or a sprig or two of brilliant color, intermixed with green, is a sufficient trophy of a tramp that chills you, damps your feet, and possibly leaves the seed of consumption. Here they have flowers in May, not shy, but rampant, as if nothing else had the right to be; flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile, flowers as the visible carpet of an immense mountain wall. You can gather them in clumps, a dozen varieties at a pull. You can fill a bushel basket in five minutes.” TSK, “Picture of California in Spring-Time—Around the Bay,” in Oscar T. Shuck, comp., The California Scrap-Book (San Francisco, 1869), pp. 47–50.
69. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, pp. 84–85; TSK, “A Vacation Among the Sierras—No. 2,” in John Adam Hussey, ed., A Vacation Among the Sierras: Yosemite in 1860 (San Francisco, 1962); Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 282. Oliver Wendell Holmes and John G. Whittier both wrote to King in California to praise his Transcript letters.
70. JBF, “A Home Found, and Lost”; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 231; Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 282.
71. TSK, “Selections from a Lecture-Sermon After Visiting Yosemite Valley, Delivered in San Francisco, July 29, 1860,” in The California Scrap-Book, p. 457.
72. See, e.g., TSK, The Organization of Liberty on the Western Continent, an Oration Delivered … July 5th, 1852 (Boston, 1892), pp. 10–12; also Wendt, pp. 25–26.
73. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 185; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 316; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King,” New York Ledger, Mar. 6, 1875.
74. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Feb. 23, 1861.
75. Sacramento Union, Feb. 25, 1861; Monzingo, pp. 71–74; Wendte, Thomas Starr King, pp. 159–60.
76. TSK to Randolph Ryer, Mar. 10, 1861, in TSK Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California; Herr, p. 317.
77. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, p. 103; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Monzingo, Thomas Starr King, p. 74.
78. TSK, “Daniel Webster,” in Whipple, Substance and Show, p. 302; Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 162; New York Times, May 13, 1861.
79. Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics (Austin, Tex., 1964), pp. 245–46; Wilkins, The Great Diamond Hoax, p. 24.
80. JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 319.
81. Chaffin, Pathfinder, p. 453.
82. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, p. 99.
83. In their private correspondence as published by Herr and Spence, the two continued to address one another as “Mrs. Frémont” and “Mr. King.” On the other hand, when Jessie—during her husband’s lifetime—published an article about her friendship with King, she quoted a letter to her that he signed, “Believe me to be to the brim and overflowingly, Yours, T.S.K.” Could the worldly Mrs. Frémont possibly have failed to consider what some readers might make of this? Was she flaunting his devotion in the faces of her husband, King’s family, and the general public, perversely daring them to accuse her and the sainted clergyman of adultery? Or was this, in a sense, her own tribute to the chastity they had maintained despite the confluence of attraction and opportunity? We may never know. Herr and Spence, Letters, passim; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King.”
84. Edwin P. Whipple, ed., Christianity and Humanity: A Series of Sermons by Thomas Starr King (Boston, 1877), p. xlv; JBF to William Armstrong, June 10, 1861, Anderson Family Papers, Kansas State Historical Society; JBF to the Editors of the Alta California, Feb. 26, 1861, in Herr and Spence, eds., Letters, pp. 235–37.
85. JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Ralph Waldo Emerson to TSK, Nov. 7, 1862, quoted in J. A. Wagner, “The Oratory of Thomas Starr King,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3 (Sept. 1954), p. 225.
86. Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 291.
87. San Francisco Bulletin, Apr. 20, 1861; Sacramento Union, May 4, 1861.
88. White, A Yankee Trader, pp. 187–88.
89. JBF to William Armstrong, June 10, 1861, in Anderson Family Papers, Kansas State Historical Society; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 290–91.
90. Duke, Civil War Reminiscences, p. 39.
91. William C. Winter, Civil War in St. Louis: A Guided Tour (St. Louis, 1994), pp. 31–32.
92. Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 82–83; Winter, Civil War in St. Louis, p. 33; Duke, Civil War Reminiscences, p. 41.
93. Ryle, Missouri, p. 175; Journal of the Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention, Held at Jefferson City and St. Louis, March, 1861 (St. Louis, 1861), p. 244; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 148.
94. The full rationale is revealed in Duke’s Civil War Reminiscences, pp. 37–42. Duke was among the secessionist leaders inside the mansion.
95. Winter, Civil War in St. Louis, pp. 38–9; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, pp. 82ff.; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 138.
96. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 88–89; Last Political Writings of Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, U.S.A. (New York, 1861), p. 192; Stephen B. Oates, “Nathaniel Lyon: A Personality Profile,” Civil War Illustrated, vol. 6, no. 10 (Feb. 1968), pp. 15ff.; Franklin A. Dick, “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861,” Franklin A. Dick Papers, LC.
97. William A. Hammond, “Brigadier-General Nathaniel Lyon, U.S.A.—Personal Recollections,” Magazine of American History, vol. 12, no. 3 (March 1885), pp. 240–48; Oates, “Nathaniel Lyon,” p. 15; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 133.
98. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 87.
99. Frank P. Blair to Simon Cameron, Mar. 11, 1861; War Department Special Orders No. 74, Mar. 13, 1861; both in OR I, pp. 656–58; Missouri Democrat, Mar. 31, 1861.
100. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 268–72; Missouri Democrat, Apr. 15, 1861; Arenson, Great Heart, pp. 113–15.
101. Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 179.
102. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 132, 156; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 93.
103. Mark Twain, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”; Susan Staker Lehr, ed., As the Mo
ckingbird Sang: The Civil War Diary of Pvt. Robert Caldwell Dunlap, C.S.A. (St. Joseph, Mo., 2005), p. 19.
104. Susannah Ural Bruce, “ ‘Remember Your Country and Keep Its Credit’: Irish Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865,” Journal of Military History, vol. 69, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 332, 338; “Excerpts from The Autobiography of August Bondi (1833–1907),” Yearbook for German-American Studies, vol. 40 (2005), p. 152.
105. “Die Fahnenwacht” was also the title of a song popular during the 1848 revolution. It was sung at the flag presentation in St. Louis: “Der Sanger hält im Feld die Fahnenwacht, / Im seinem Arme ruht das Schwert, das scharfe” (“The singer is the color guard in the field, / In his arms rests the sword, the sharp sword”).
106. Engle, Yankee Dutchman, pp. 56–57; Westliche Post, May 8, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 195–7; Missouri Democrat, May 4, 1861.
107. Cyrus B. Plattenburg, “In St. Louis During the ‘Crisis,’ ” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 13, no. 1 (April 1920), p. 19.
108. Francis Preston Blair, Jr., to Simon Cameron, Apr. 18, 1861, Blair Family Papers, LC; Simon Cameron to Nathaniel Lyon, Apr. 30, 1861, OR I, vol. 1, p. 675.
109. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 94; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, p. 139; Arenson, Great Heart, p. 114; Missouri Democrat, April 27, 1861; Boernstein, pp. 284–85; Winter, Civil War St. Louis, p. 40.
110. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 166–67; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 286–88; Franklin A. Dick to Benson Lossing, July 6, 1865, Franklin A. Dick Papers, LC; Anderson, A Border City, pp. 78–79. About 5,000 of the guns soon ended up in the hands of Ohio state troops—thanks to the efforts of a newly appointed officer who was sent to procure them, Colonel James A. Garfield.
111. Sherman, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 201.
112. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 181–82.
113. Some later historians have questioned whether the story of Lyon’s cross-dressing mission was a myth, like similar stories of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis disguising themselves in women’s clothing at other points in the war. But while the Lincoln and Davis rumors were concocted in each case by enemies trying to make them look ridiculous, the Lyon story was attested to in two separate and detailed accounts by two of Lyon’s own co-conspirators. One of these was James Peckham (in his 1866 book Gen. Nathaniel Lyon and Missouri in 1861, op. cit., pp. 139–40), and the other was Franklin A. Dick (in his 1865 manuscript “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861,” LC).
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