1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [147]
Needless to say, Mrs. Frémont’s protégé did not get a Senate seat that winter. But at a San Francisco theater on the evening of February 22, 1861—at the very hour when, three thousand miles away, President-Elect Lincoln was pulling a shawl over his face and slipping aboard the night train to Baltimore—the Reverend Mr. King stepped up to a lectern draped with an American flag.
It was Washington’s Birthday, and San Francisco was celebrating the holiday as never before: schools and businesses were closed, people filled the streets, and, as the Bulletin reported, “there were as many stars aloft as a cloudless night displays—as many stripes as the traitors who plot to despoil the country of its unity and glory are entitled to.” In the afternoon, more than ten thousand had gathered for a mass meeting and adopted, by acclamation, a series of resolutions professing their loyalty to the Union—as well as their willingness to “cheerfully acquiesce” in any honorable compromise that might keep the South in the fold. King’s oration, before an overflow crowd at the Music Academy, was to be the climax of the day, the crowning expression of unconditional love for the united country.74
But his message was one his listeners were unprepared for. What would George Washington do today if he were in the White House, he asked? And then with a ferocity such as the audience had never seen, came the surprising answer: “Nothing. He would have acted four months ago. He would have purged his Cabinet of treason. He would have awed out of it conspirators and thieves. He would not have been a lump of shilly-shally incarnate.”
Then he tore into the would-be compromisers—into the very ideas that San Francisco’s Unionists had unanimously embraced earlier that day: “Change the Constitution in order to save it!” This was not politics but suicide. And King spoke powerfully of the American continent’s geography, how it bound together East and West, North and South:
[Washington] believed that God created this country to be one. The Creator placed no Mason and Dixon’s line upon it; that was the work of foolish men. He marked no boundaries for rival civilizations in the immense basins of the West.… The Mississippi, like a great national tree, has its root in the hot Gulf, and spreads its top in the far icy North, a glorious tree, with boughs in different latitudes, and branches binding the Rocky Mountains and the lakes together, its great trunk the central artery of a national unity.75
Afterward, in a letter to a close friend (a black New Yorker named Randolph Ryer), King exulted like a warrior returning from the field of victory. “I pitched into Secession, Concession, and Calhoun, right and left,” he wrote, “and made [even] Southerners applaud. I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to ‘a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp,’ and the audience came down with thunder.” When the oration was all over, Mrs. Frémont made her way to King through the pressing throng, and told him, he said, that “she would like to hear it forty nights in succession.… [I] am urged to give it all over the State, and help kill the Pacific-Republic folly. It was the occasion, thus far, of my existence.”76
He did not offer it for quite forty solid nights. But in the weeks ahead, King gave that speech again and again, to one packed house of Californians after another—not just in San Francisco, but in Marysville, Stockton, Sacramento. He spoke in gold-mining camps, and standing on saloon porches or tree stumps in towns with names like Deadwood, Rough and Ready, and Mad Mule—places where Southerners hissed him, or worse. He had never known the true exhilaration of public speaking, he told Mrs. Frémont, until he had to encounter a front row bristling with revolvers and bowie knives. Far better to face these, somehow, than the supercilious front pews