1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [251]
22. Early in his career, Benton always placed “Southern rights” ahead of antislavery principles, but by the end of his life, his views shifted to the point where he wrote to Charles Sumner congratulating him on his inflammatory “Crime Against Kansas” speech. William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West (New York, 1970), p. 419.
23. Allan Nevins, Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (New York, 1928), pp. 387–89; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 180–81; Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007) pp. 57–59, 102–3.
24. David Grant, “ ‘Our Nation’s Hope is She’: The Cult of Jessie Frémont in the Republican Campaign Poetry of 1856,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 187–213; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 243–48; Ruth Painter Randall, I Jessie (Boston, 1963), pp. 176–78. Colonel Frémont was such a popular figure that Southern Democratic leaders had previously offered to make him their party’s standard bearer, on the condition that he pledge not to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This he refused to do—after a long discussion with Jessie—even though he knew that whomever the Democrats nominated that year would be almost certain to win the presidency. Nevins, Frémont, pp. 424–25.
25. Richards, California Gold Rush, pp. 93ff.; Robert J. Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need: Republicans and Black Civil Rights in California During the Civil War,” Arizona and the West, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 319–21; Imogene Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,” Historical Society of Southern California Publications, vol. 9 (1912–13), p. 106.
26. See Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 105.
27. See Joseph Ellison, “Designs for a Pacific Republic, 1843–62,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (Dec. 1930), pp. 319–42.
28. Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 108; San Francisco Herald, Jan. 3, 1861.
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: