1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [135]
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