The Xenophile Historian

1783 to 1861 (USA), 1783 to 1867 (Canada)

	Unfinished Business With the Tories
	Canada Reaches the Pacific
	The Articles of Confederation
	The Writing of the Constitution
	Ratification
	"First In the Hearts of His Countrymen"
	John Adams at the Helm
	Republicanism, Jeffersonian Style
	The Lewis & Clark and Pike Expeditions
	Aaron Burr Kills Hamilton

	The War of 1812
	Preliminary Activities
	Campaigns of 1812
	Campaigns of 1813
	The Creek War
	Campaigns of 1814
	The Battle of New Orleans
	The Era of Good Feelings
	Adams Redux
	Old Hickory's Democrats

	Deep in the Heart of Texas
	Old Kinderhook, Tippecanoe, and Tyler Too
	The Canadian Rebellions of 1837
	The Search for a Northwest Passage (revisited)
	Westward Ho!
	The Cheerful Forties
	"From the Halls of Montezuma"

	Mormons, Doughfaces, and the California Gold Rush
	The Free Soil Republicans
	A House Divided
	The Utah War and the Colorado Gold Rush
	Meanwhile, North of the 49th Parallel
	Early American Demographics
	Go to Page Navigator

The 1848 presidential election showed how flexible the Whigs could be; after spending two years attacking the Mexican War in every way they knew how, they turned around and nominated General Zachary Taylor for president. After he found out he was the Whig candidate⁽⁵⁹⁾, Taylor said nothing worth remembering, and the Whigs didn't bother to present a party platform. In short, the Whigs simply repeated the campaign strategy that had worked in 1840, with "Old Rough and Ready" instead of "Old Tippecanoe" as the candidate for the ordinary man. The Democrats thought they had the perfect candidate in Lewis Cass of Michigan; not only did he have the war-hero credentials that were so desirable in those days, but he also struck a balance between the northern and southern parts of the country by being a Northerner with a southern attitude concerning slavery. A generation earlier, John Randolph coined a word for such a politician: "doughface."

For the Abolitionists, the Liberty Party attracted several Whigs and Democrats who opposed slavery; they renamed themselves the Free Soil Party, and nominated former President Van Buren.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, became his running mate; their slogan was "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Man." Although they did not win in any states, they got ten percent of the vote, which is better than average for third parties, and elected two senators and fourteen representatives to Congress. They may have also decided the election in Taylor's favor, as the Liberty Party had done for Polk.

The Whigs were able to reverse their stand on the recently concluded war because the latest news from the west coast convinced critics that the war wasn't a mistake after all. Near Sacramento, John Sutter had built a sawmill on the American River, and on January 24, 1848, one of his workers, James Marshall, came to him with a wet rag containing shiny dust and some shiny flakes he had found. It was gold all right, and Sutter wanted to keep it a secret, because he still was more interested in farming than in mining; word got out anyway, and much of the world went wild when it heard the news. Soon more Americans were heading west than had marched on Mexico, using both ships and wagons; they were joined by Russians, Hawaiians, Australians and Chinese from their own native lands. In just one year San Francisco went from being Yerba Buena, a village of 50 adobe huts, to a rowdy boom town with makeshift houses, a harbor full of abandoned ships, and a floating, mostly male population of 20,000 (I say "floating" because every able-bodied man went to Sacramento, to try his luck at prospecting), where ham and eggs cost $3 a plate and a gambling tent on the Plaza was rented for $40,000 a year. Settlers who had just arrived in Oregon now reloaded their wagons and headed south; Mexicans who were supposed to be leaving California turned around and went back. By the end of 1848 $3.7 million worth of gold had been recovered.

Most of those who had caught the gold fever didn't arrive until 1849, so they were known as "Forty-Niners." The easiest pickings were gone by then, and as with other gold rushes, most of the participants did not strike it rich (James Marshall, the one who found the first bit of gold, died poor and crazy). And whether you dig for gold or pan for it in streams, you are doing hard work--it's not really nature's lottery, as so many believe--so the typical "Forty-Niner" would sell or give up his claim after a few unhappy months in the mining camps. Finally, large companies are better equipped to find and get valuable minerals than individual prospectors, so they took over most of the mining within a few years. Still, all the new arrivals made California a roaring success.⁽⁶¹⁾ By the end of 1849, 96,000 had made the journey to California; by 1855 it was 300,000. This allowed California to do without the usual period of time as a territory before statehood; once military rule ended in 1849, the locals elected a governor and legislature, adopted a constitution that banned slavery, and announced they were ready to become a free state.⁽⁶²⁾

Earlier we saw Northerners protest when Missouri and Texas applied to join the Union as slave states; now it was the South's turn to feel dismayed. Not only would California's entry upset the slave-free balance between the states again, but much of California was south of the 36° 30' line which had been agreed to in the Missouri Compromise. Of course the Compromise had only applied to the Louisiana Purchase, but as the United States expanded westward, continuing the 36° 30' line to the Pacific was the least that Southerners expected; some called for moving the line between slave and free states farther north, while others insisted that throughout the West, there should be no restrictions on slavery at all. Now California had taken away the only part of the west coast the South could claim. If everybody stuck with the 36° 30' line, the only territories left for future slave states were Oklahoma and New Mexico (which then included Arizona)--not exactly the most desirable places to live! As had been the case twenty years earlier, South Carolina was the most outraged state of all, and again its leaders talked about seceding from the Union. Northerners weren't as intransigent, but some of them declared it was time to bring back and enforce the Wilmot Proviso (see footnote #57).

Most politicians were horrified at the thought of the nation coming apart, of course, and they rushed to reach an agreement, which became known as the Compromise of 1850. This was the last meeting of the men who dominated Congress in the early nineteenth century: John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. Much of the Compromise was Clay's work, as you might expect, but because he was 72 years old and ailing, it was a Democrat senator from Illinois, Stephen Arnold Douglas, who got it into the form that was finally voted on. This took until September 1850, meaning that Congress stayed in session five months later than usual for that year. President Taylor opposed it (he wanted to see California, New Mexico and Utah all declared free states immediately), so if he hadn't died that summer, it probably wouldn't have been passed. In a nutshell, it was package deal that called for the following:

1. California would enter as a free state.
2. Slaves would be allowed into New Mexico and Utah.
3. Texas would give up the Rio Grande valley north of El Paso, in exchange for $10 million to pay the state's debts.⁽⁶³⁾
4. The slave trade (but not slavery) would be banned in the District of Columbia. This was something the Abolitionists had been demanding for a long time.
5. The Fugitive Slave Act was introduced, ordering that all runaway slaves be returned to their owners, no matter where they were captured.

Folks in both the North and the South breathed a sigh of relief when the Compromise was passed; this had been too close for comfort. The nation was saved, and tempers did calm down afterwards, at least until the Kansas-Nebraska Act came along. Still, extremists on both sides refused to accept the results, and that promised a future rematch. Many Northerners felt they hadn't gotten the better part of the deal; the Fugitive Slave Act forced them to become accomplices in an institution they would rather do away with, and while the western territories could always vote to become free states, once slaves were introduced there it would be twice as hard to kick the slavery habit. On the other side, Calhoun was in silent fury; he died of tuberculosis in March 1850, and had lost his voice in the weeks before his death (his final speech was read by Senator James Mason of Virginia, while he simply glared at everybody listening).⁽⁶⁴⁾ His place was taken by another hardliner, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.

We mentioned above that Zachary Taylor had died while the debates over California were going on. Old Rough and Ready may have been able to survive battles where bullets ripped his shirt and coat lining, but a series of speeches made in the middle of a Washington, D.C. summer was too much for him. He fell ill after Fourth of July celebrations, and five days later he was dead. To this day we aren't sure what brought him down. His doctors diagnosed him as having cholera morbus, while more recent historians have suggested it was regular cholera, typhoid fever, a heat stroke, or even food poisoning, brought about by the snack of iced milk, cherries and pickles that he had on Independence Day.⁽⁶⁵⁾ His vice president, Millard Fillmore, took over for the remaining two years and eight months of his term.

Fillmore regarded slavery as evil, but felt that if he did something about it, the Whigs would lose too many members and never win another election. Consequently, when the Fugitive Slave Act arrived on his desk, many northern Whigs wanted him to veto it, but he signed it into law instead. This marked him as the first of the three doughface presidents, who ran the United States ineffectively during the 1850s.

To Northerners, the Fugitive Slave Act was simply immoral. Under it a black person could be arrested anywhere, could not have a trial by jury, could not testify or summon witnesses to speak on his behalf, and could be shipped to his master even if he had been free for years. Many local governments ignored the law, and some small towns even passed laws making it a crime to enforce the act.⁽⁶⁶⁾ In fact, the act had been passed to stop those Northerners who were helping slaves escape. As early as 1810 a network of Abolitionists had been smuggling slaves to the north side of the Mason & Dixon Line. Called the Underground Railroad, this network did not have tracks like a real railroad, nor did it use trains much, but to keep with the railroad terminology, it did have its own set of "stations," "conductors," signals and timetables.⁽⁶⁷⁾ It is believed that as many as 30,000 slaves gained their freedom this way. At first most slaves were free as soon as they made it to a free state, but after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, they (and many ex-slaves who already lived in the North) found it safer to keep going until they reached Canada.

The 1852 presidential election was one of the worst managed in American history. Whereas in a typical election one, and hopefully both of the major parties, puts forth a candidate who will make a suitable president if elected, in 1852 both the Whigs and the Democrats nominated individuals who were lousy campaigners, and probably couldn't have served competently, either. Among the Whigs, the Compromise of 1850 left them deeply divided between pro- and anti-slavery factions, and the anti-slavery Whigs had enough votes to keep Fillmore from being nominated for a second term. They went with yet another war hero, General Winfield Scott, because running war heroes had worked so well for them in 1840 and 1848. Although Scott was a Northerner, his party platform endorsed the 1850 Compromise, which currently was more popular in the South; this was the first of several paradoxes that marked the 1852 campaign. As for the Democrats, they were deadlocked when they tried to nominate one of their better-known members, so they settled on a dark horse candidate, New Hampshire Governor Franklin Pierce, nominating him on the 49^th ballot. Pierce, like Fillmore, felt that the less he said about the slave question, the better, so he seemed like the kind of candidate who could heal the political wounds of recent years. He also had been a general in the Mexican War, but unlike Scott, Pierce didn't have a service record to be proud of. On the two occasions during the war when he was supposed to lead a cavalry charge, Pierce fell off his horse and got left behind by his own men. Then, when the army was marching on Mexico City, Pierce was immobilized in his tent with diarrhea, and to top it off, he had a drinking problem, causing some to laugh at him as the "Hero of Many a Well-Fought Bottle."

In a campaign like this, where all the candidates were weak and uninspiring, victory was likely to go to the major party which fumbled the least. That turned out to be the Democrats. Scott had not resigned his commission when nominated, so when President Fillmore sent him on a minor military assignment in Kentucky, he went there by way of Pennsylvania and Ohio, so he could make some campaign stops in those states. Both states contained quite a few immigrants who had arrived in the late 1840s, and they would be voting for the first time. Unfortunately, Scott's only useful talent was his ability to win battles; Old Fuss and Feathers proved to be a pompous windbag on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania and Ohio he started his speeches with the standard "My fellow Americans," and then explained at great length that naturalized immigrants are Americans, too. This offended native-born Americans, who tended to view immigrants as a threat to the very essence of what it meant to be "American." What bothered them was the fact that the latest wave of immigrants came from Ireland and southern Germany, meaning that they were hard-drinking, prone to start fights, and worst of all, Catholic.

Anyway, from there, Scott had nowhere to go but down. At one stop a man with an Irish accent yelled a question at Scott, and instead of answering, Scott exclaimed "Oh, the Irish brogue!" and went into a speech about how he loved the sound of the Irish brogue, that he had "heard it many times upon the field of battle," hoped to hear it many more times, and how much he admired the "brave men of Eire." Whig leaders slapped their heads in disbelief when they read a transcript of the speech, immigrant voters were left unimpressed by this performance, and it alienated the "Conscience Whigs" who claimed the high moral ground; the latter threatened to leave in droves.

The two most prominent Whig leaders, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, died before election day, leaving the Whigs leaderless and divided. The final vote was an overwhelming victory for Pierce. Scott only carried four states, two northern (Vermont and Massachusetts) and two southern (Kentucky and Tennessee), which shows that both the North and South felt much the same way about the candidates. Even the Free Soilers did badly in this campaign; their candidate, John Parker Hale, got 5 percent of the popular vote, only half of what the Free Soil Party had gotten last time. For the Whigs, the results were so devastating that their party disintegrated over the next two years; after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, those Whigs who hadn't left to join other parties were simply known as the "Opposition Party."

The Free Soil Republicans

When looking for ways to spread their "peculiar institution," Southerners had no shortage of ideas. A campaign to bring back the trans-Atlantic slave trade got nowhere; that was too obviously a step in the wrong direction. Others talked about expanding southward into Latin America, because the Mexican War had been such a success. Indeed, President Polk probably had this in mind in 1848, when he sent a diplomat to Spain with an offer to buy Cuba for $100 million. It was rejected, but even if it had been accepted, Northerners made it clear they would oppose any efforts to purchase or conquer more land, if it was going to become new slave states.⁽⁶⁸⁾

One Southern proposal did have a permanent effect on the US--the building of a transcontinental railroad, to connect the east and west coasts. Folks back then did not imagine that the day would come when railroads would run through every western state, so it was felt that when a transcontinental railroad was built, the state on the eastern end of it would earn great profits from commerce. Northerners and Southerners began lobbying for railroads that began in the North and South respectively, and President Pierce, in an effort to keep Southerners happy, endorsed a southern route, which would start in Memphis, and run through Arkansas, Texas and New Mexico to reach California. The problem was that New Mexico was the home of the fierce Apache tribes. To go around the Apache, a railroad would have to be built south of the Gila River, which was then Mexican Territory. Pierce sent his minister to Mexico, James Gadsden, to find a solution; Gadsden offered Santa Anna $15 million for the Mexican state of Sonora. In the final treaty, known as the Gadsden Purchase (signed in 1853, ratified in 1854), the price was reduced to $10 million, and the land in question was reduced from all of Sonora to just a strip below the Gila, which became the southernmost part of present-day Arizona and New Mexico. With that agreement, the borders of the continental United States reached the positions they have held ever since.

Into the picture now stepped Stephen Douglas, the bold, tobacco-chewing Illinois senator who was called the "Little Giant" by his admirers. Now that Henry Clay was gone, Douglas became the great compromiser in Congress. His biggest dream was to have the transcontinental railroad begin in his home state, so as a compromise between Northerners and Southerners, he called for a central route, of which the first leg would run from Chicago to Council Bluffs, Iowa. The only obstacle here was that no part of the Great Plains north of Texas had been developed yet; the first step in developing the Plains would be to organize it into one or more territories. He spent the early 1850s lobbying for this, the result being the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Under this, the Great Plains would have two territorial governments, Kansas in the south, and Nebraska in the north. To deal with the slavery question, Douglas called for "popular sovereignty"; let each territory vote on whether it would be slave or free, and let those results be accepted by everyone. He spoke for those who took a moderate point of view on slavery, those who wanted to put the issue behind them and move on to something else. "I do not care whether slavery is voted up or voted down," he once said.

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act should have been one of Douglas' finest moments, but it turned out to be a disaster. In the name of popular sovereignty, Douglas had voided all the compromises made over the past 34 years. Now any territory west of the Mississippi that had once been declared free could become a slave state. After this the controversy over slavery and states' rights got louder, instead of being temporarily silenced; many in the South came to believe that war was the only way to settle the matter, while many in the North lost their patience both with the South and with the existing political parties.⁽⁶⁹⁾

The disappearance of the Whigs left a political vacuum, and because of it, this was the only time in American history that a minor party grew to become one of the two major parties. Most ex-Whigs either became Democrats if they were neutral or pro-slavery, or joined the Free Soil Party if they were against it. Others, like former President Fillmore, became Know-Nothings (see the next section). The Free Soil Party grew so big and so fast that many felt it needed a new name, and Alvan Bovay, a young lawyer in Ripon, Wisconsin, provided the name by digging up one that no major party had used in twenty years. In February 1854 he wrote a letter to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, asking for help in organizing all opponents of slavery into a new party: "Urge them to forget previous political names and organizations, and to band together under the name I suggested to you in 1852. I mean the name REPUBLICAN." Greeley said yes, but reluctantly: "I am a beaten, broken-down, used-up politician, and have the soreness of many defeats in my bones. However, I am ready to follow any lead that promises to hasten the day of Northern emancipation."⁽⁷⁰⁾

The Republican Party's first meeting was held in the Ripon schoolhouse, one month after that exchange of letters. The leaders chosen were a committee that consisted of three Conscience Whigs, one Barnburner Democrat, and one Free Soiler. Similar groups formed all over the North. In May 1854 thirty congressmen in Washington declared themselves "Republicans," replacing the nickname of "Anti-Nebraska men" that they had used while debating the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In February 1856 the party scored its first victory by electing a former Free Soiler, Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, as speaker of the House of Representatives. The election had been a bitter one, requiring 133 ballots and keeping Congress too deadlocked to do anything else for nine weeks. As a child, Banks had worked in a cotton mill, so some called him "Bobbin Boy Banks"; he actually was a member of the Know-Nothing Party when he got to be speaker, and had to become a Republican before the next election. His opponent, William Aiken of South Carolina, owned 1,100 slaves.

The Ripon schoolhouse today.

Of course the settlers from free states wouldn't stand for this, and in August 1855 they met at Topeka to form their own government. President Pierce refused to recognize the free-state government, calling it a "revolution" against the rightful leaders of Kansas. On May 21, 1856, an invading force of Missourians plundered and burned Lawrence, the free capital. This prompted John Brown, an Abolitionist fanatic, to lead seven men, four of his sons and three others, in an attack on the pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek; they dragged five men from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords (the "Pottawatomie Massacre"). In the tit-for-tat violence that followed, the objective of each group switched from bringing in voters who were on their side, to decreasing the number of live voters on the other side. Outsiders called the conflict "Bleeding Kansas," and while only 55 people were killed altogether, most realized that it was a rehearsal for something bigger.

One of the battles of Bleeding Kansas took place right on Capitol Hill. When the fighting started, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, one of the most outspoken of the new Republicans, delivered a powerful speech on "the crime against Kansas," in which he blamed the whole crisis on the South. Three days later, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Sumner with a cane, beating him on the head until the cane broke. Sumner was knocked unconscious, and so badly injured that it took him three years to recover. "Bully" Brooks got off with only a $300 fine, and admirers in the South sent him dozens of new canes and a gold-handled whip.

A House Divided

The 1856 election saw the Republicans make their first attempt to capture the White House. They nominated John C. Frémont, the glamorous hero of California. He was only 43 years old, and his young wife, Jessie, also figured prominently in the campaigns, because they made an attractive couple. This was the first time sex appeal was used to elect a president. Republican ads usually showed John and Jessie together, ignoring the vice-presidential candidate completely, and the ads contrasted them with Buchanan, who was a 65-year-old bachelor. And since the party was made up of fiery Abolitionists at this stage, the Republican campaign became a crusade against slavery:

"Arise, arise ye braves,
And let our war cry be,
Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men,
Frémont and Victory!"

Slavery and Kansas, however, weren't the only issues concerning Northerners. In recent years there had been considerable fear of immigrants, especially Catholic ones; many Protestants saw them as agents of Pope Pius IX, a known enemy of liberty and Protestantism. In 1843 an anti-Catholic party called the "American Republicans" formed, and one year later it managed to elect mayors in New York City and Philadelphia, and provoke a series of riots in the latter; twenty-four people were killed and two old Catholic churches were burned before order was restored. Their platform called for two reforms: the banning of all naturalized Americans from public office, and an increase in the waiting time for citizenship to 21 years. Then it changed its name to the Native American Party (an alternate name was the Order of the Star Spangled Banner), and spread to other states. It was organized as a secret society; no central leadership existed, members pledged to vote the way their leaders told them to vote, and they were supposed to answer any question about their organization with "I know nothing," so among outsiders they were better known as the Know-Nothings. They peaked in the mid-1850s when hundreds of thousands of ex-Whigs joined them; they elected governors in seven states, as well as several mayors. One of those mayors was in Louisville, Kentucky, and that led to "Bloody Monday," a riot the Know-Nothings staged on Election Day in 1855 to keep naturalized Americans from voting; 22 people were killed and many more injured. For 1856, they nominated Millard Fillmore as their presidential candidate, under the slogan "I know nothing but my Country, my whole Country, and nothing but my Country." Fillmore got 22 percent of the popular vote and carried the state of Maryland, but that still left him in third place. Having lost the race to replace the Whigs, the Know-Nothings faded away quickly; most joined other parties by the end of the decade.

The Republicans were too radical for much of the eastern establishment; bankers, leaders of industry and Wall Street were frightened by the idea that the South might secede if Frémont got elected. They poured in money until the Democrats could outspend the Republicans ten to one. The Know-Nothings spread a false rumor that Frémont was a practicing Catholic, while Democrats declared that Frémont wasn't fit to be president because of his illegitimate birth. Still others portrayed the Republicans as a party for "n*gg*r-lovers," "red" extremists, prohibitionists, cigar-smoking women and free-lovers. Even Jessie's father, the prominent senator Thomas Hart Benton, supported the Democratic campaign instead. On Election Day, Frémont got 33 percent of the popular vote and won in eleven northern states, not bad for a political party full of beginners. Still, the north was divided three ways, while the rest of the country was solidly Democratic, so Buchanan became the next president. When the Frémonts heard the news, Jessie joked that her father was responsible: "Colonel Benton, I perceive, has the best of the family argument."

Buchanan's victory did nothing to ease North-South tensions, and the election was close enough that Frémont could have won, had he carried Indiana and Pennsylvania. Thus, Buchanan looked even older and more depressed than usual when he was sworn in. Meanwhile in Kansas, the pro-slavery government established its capital at Lecompton, only twelve miles from Lawrence, and drafted what was called the "Lecompton Constitution"; Southerners demanded that Buchanan approve it immediately--or else. As the last doughface president, Buchanan was fearful of what might happen to the Union if he did otherwise, so he gave the document his blessing and sent it to Congress. The Senate approved it, but because it wasn't clear who was in charge in Kansas, the House ordered a new, fair election before it voted. By 1857 anti-slavery Kansans were clearly in the majority, so when the election was held, pro-slavery advocates boycotted it, and the Lecompton Constitution was voted down by more than six to one. Even the South could not dispute this result, and in 1859 Kansas wrote a new constitution, the Wyandotte Constitution, which reflected the Abolitionist point of view. Kansas would enter the Union as a free state, in January 1861.

In his inaugural address, Buchanan hinted that he had advance notice of a Supreme Court ruling that would settle the slavery question once and for all. That was the Dred Scott Decision, which was announced two days later (March 6, 1857). Dred Scott was a 61-year-old slave who had traveled a lot over the years because his master, John Emerson, was in the army and often got transferred from one place to another. Four of those years had been spent in Illinois and Wisconsin, where slavery was illegal, so after Emerson died in 1843, Scott went to court to seek freedom for himself and his wife. The case was appealed from court to court, until it finally reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 7-2 that a slave does not become a free man if he happens to set foot in a free state or territory.

The chief justice of the Supreme Court at this time was Roger Taney, a decrepit 79-year-old Democrat and slaveholder from Maryland, who had held the job since Andrew Jackson appointed him to replace John Marshall, 24 years earlier. He could have refused to hear Dred Scott's case, but instead decided that this was his chance to throw the weight of the courts on the southern side of the slavery issue. He declared that the great words in the Declaration of Independence were never meant to include blacks, and that no slave had the right to become a citizen or sue in court, because, above all else, he was the property of his owner. And because all free men had property rights, Congress never should have legislated against slavery; this made laws like the Missouri Compromise, and even the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, null and void.

For Dred Scott himself, the ruling did not really matter; he was freed by his current owner shortly after the decision, and died of tuberculosis a year later. However, it was a political blunder in that it got many people who hadn't cared much about the issue off the fence. To those in the North and West, it now appeared that slavery had been made legal again in every free state, and judges like Taney were going to force it down their throats. Thus, the Dred Scott Decision was the most important event that made the American Civil War inevitable.

The Republicans made significant gains in the 1858 congressional elections, as a reaction to the Dred Scott Decision, giving them a plurality, but not a majority of the seats. In Illinois, Stephen Douglas was up for reelection, and Abraham Lincoln, a country lawyer whose political experience was limited to the single term he had served as a representative in the 1840s, decided that in order to stop the spread of slavery, he must go back into politics and run against Douglas. He threw his hat in the ring with his "House Divided" speech, which paraphrased what a Biblical verse, Matthew 12:25, said about disunity:

"'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

Lincoln's debates with Douglas attracted national attention, because they were seen as a debate on the issue of slavery. Whereas Douglas had presented the idea of letting the people decide everywhere, Lincoln declared that the time for compromises in the territories had ended, and expressed the Abolitionist viewpoint with words that could not be misunderstood by anyone. In the end, Douglas won the election, but Republican leaders did not forget Lincoln.

While politicians were trying to keep the situation from spiraling into a war, others were trying to get the war started. Among Northerners, the foremost example of a war-starter was John Brown, the guerrilla fighter who had gotten his experience in Kansas. Since the Pottawatomie Massacre, he had been a wanted man; at Osawatomie, he fought like a maniac against a larger party of attacking Missourians, and prevailed against the odds, earning him the nickname "Old Brown of Osawatomie." He was also accused of some raids in Missouri in which several slaves and horses were stolen, and at least one slaveowner was murdered. President Buchanan put a price on Brown's head, and the governments of Kansas and Missouri talked about apprehending him, but paradoxically, nobody wanted to take the first step and arrest Brown. He was too popular in the North, and if the authorities on either the federal or state level tried to stop him, they ran the risk of provoking riots by other Abolitionists. Therefore Brown was able to travel, though he had to use an alias, made speeches for the Abolitionist cause, and even raised funds for his ultimate project, the launching of a general uprising that would free all the slaves of the South. In 1858 he crossed the border into Canada, and at Chatham, Ontario, a town where one third of the people were escaped slaves, he had a constitution written for a revolutionary government that he planned to establish in the South, with himself as its commander in chief.

On October 16, 1859, John Brown put his plan into action. The idea at this point was to begin the revolution in the mountains of western Virginia, by capturing an arsenal and giving its weapons to the slaves when they rose up; in the mountains the slaves would also have plenty of places to hide or establish a refuge, should they be forced to defend themselves. Accordingly, he rode into Harpers Ferry, Virginia with a wagonload of pikes and an "army" of eighteen men. They killed two locals, captured the United States armory and barricaded themselves in there. However, the slaves in the area did not flock to join him; instead the local militia and a company of marines, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee, surrounded the building. In the resulting battle, ten of Brown's followers were killed, including two of Brown's sons, and Brown gave himself up after he was wounded. A trial soon followed, where Brown was convicted after he made an eloquent defense on how everything he did was to help the slaves, and he was hanged on December 2. During the Civil War, Southerners saw John Brown as a terrorist, while Northerners saw him as a martyr to the Abolitionist cause; a century later, civil rights activists also viewed him in the latter category.

The controversy over the John Brown affair showed how split the nation had become. The divisions also showed at that time in Congress, because it had to elect another Speaker of the House. The first ballot was held on December 5, 1859; sixteen candidates put forth their names, so nobody got more than a small fraction of the votes. To weed out some of the candidates, a Missouri congressman proposed disqualifying anyone who liked The Impending Crisis, an anti-slavery work. The next day a North Carolina representative proposed bringing back the gag rule, with a resolution that required every candidate to be against raising the slavery question. Both proposals were rejected, of course.

Ballot followed ballot for the next two months. The House was hopelessly divided into pro- and anti-slavery factions, each of which would only vote for one of its own. Finally on February 1, 1860, they elected William Pennington of New Jersey. Pennington got the job because he had no enemies on Capitol Hill, and he had no enemies because he wasn't even a member of Congress at the time of the first ballot. To get out of gridlock, the House of Representatives elected a freshman as its speaker!

In 1860 Lincoln and Douglas were opponents again, this time in the race for president of the United States. Because the Democratic Party was now as pro-southern as it could get and still win elections, all the South had to do to preserve its way of life was make sure Democrats stayed in control of the White House and Congress. Instead, they foolishly split the party over who would be its presidential candidate. The Democrats had originally decided to hold their convention in Charleston, as a concession to the South. When they met in April, Douglas enjoyed widespread support among Northerners, enough to keep Buchanan from running again, but many Southerners considered him a traitor, because he accepted the election that made Kansas free, and did not accept the Dred Scott Decision. 50 southern delegates walked out over a platform dispute, and Douglas couldn't get the two-thirds vote required for the nomination. After 57 ballots failed to unite the party behind a candidate, the Democrats gave up and adjourned.

The Republican convention of 1860 was held in Chicago in May, and at first the leading candidate was Senator William Seward of New York. Other candidates were Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and two favorite sons, Abraham Lincoln and Pennsylvania's Simon Cameron. Seward, however, had been the chief Abolitionist in Congress for the past decade, as thus was considered too radical by some. Chase and Cameron had alienated folks as well; both had been Democrats before becoming Republicans, and thus were not fully trusted, and Cameron had little support outside his home state. Lincoln's friends used these liabilities to his advantage, pointing out that because Lincoln was not as well known as the other candidates, he had made the fewest enemies; in addition, he was the only candidate who was sure to win in the West, being a Westerner himself, and his moderate stand on slavery appealed to those who thought a peaceful resolution of the issue was still possible.⁽⁷¹⁾ Over the next few days they persuaded the delegates to ignore Lincoln's shortcomings; sure, he came from humble origins (unlike previous presidential candidates, he really was born in a log cabin!), had a homely face⁽⁷²⁾, and hadn't been very successful at anything besides practicing law, but his performance in the 1858 Senate debates showed he was the man they wanted. On the third ballot, Lincoln won the nomination.⁽⁷³⁾

In June the Democrats convened again, this time in Baltimore, for the purpose of nominating a candidate. 110 southern Democrats walked out in the middle of the convention, because the other delegates would not adopt a resolution supporting slavery in the territories, but the rest stayed and picked Stephen Douglas. Refusing to accept this, the southern Democrats reconvened in Richmond and nominated Buchanan's vice president, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, as their candidate.⁽⁷⁴⁾

On top of that, there were still a few Whigs and Know-Nothings around, a diehard remnant that couldn't bear to join either the Democrats or the Republicans. They formed the Constitutional Union Party, which had only one issue on its platform--reach whatever compromise was needed to save the nation and the Constitution. John Bell of Tennessee became their presidential candidate, and Edward Everett of Massachusetts was the vice-presidential candidate.⁽⁷⁵⁾ Because of their moderate attitude, they ended up winning three states in the middle of the country: Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.

The results for the 1860 election were the opposite of what they had been in 1856; the North was united, while the South was divided three ways. Some states voted in October, to beat November snowstorms, and the way those states voted convinced Douglas that he wasn't going to win, so he spent the rest of the campaign trying to reunite the Democrats. Lincoln got less than 40 percent of the popular vote (he wasn't even on the ballot in nine southern states), but because Northerners were fed up with southern intransigence, he won in every free state except New Jersey, and that gave him a solid electoral majority.

The final attempt to keep the nation from splitting in two was the Crittenden Compromise. Proposed in December 1860 by John Crittenden, a Kentucky senator, it offered six constitutional amendments and four congressional resolutions, designed to placate the South. The compromise's main feature was that it brought back the 36 30' line of the Missouri Compromise, permanently banning slavery north of the line and guaranteeing it south of the line; moreover, none of the changes, once accepted, could be repealed or amended later. Lincoln rejected it immediately, because he had been elected on an anti-slavery platform, and this compromise offered no hope of freedom for the slaves. Now both the North and the South prepared for the war they knew was coming. Buchanan knew it too, because he had done so little to prevent the Union's breakup, feeling he could not legally stop a state from seceding.⁽⁷⁶⁾ On his last day as president, Buchanan told Lincoln, "If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man."

The Utah War and the Colorado Gold Rush

The Utah War convinced the federal goverment that the Utah Territory was still too large. Because of that, and because a majority of settlers in the western third of the territory were not Mormons, the western area was separated from Utah in 1861; that became the Nevada Territory. On the other side of Utah, the easternmost part of the territory was removed and merged with the westernmost part of the Kansas Territory, to form the Colorado Territory.

Colorado owes its existence to the 1858 discovery of gold in the heart of the Rockies. The resulting gold rush wasn't as big as the California one, but it still attracted 40,000 people, enough to found the mining town of Denver in 1859. It also caused trouble with the Indians, because prospectors crossed the hunting grounds of the Cheyenne tribe to reach the Rockies. For these reasons, the federal government decided that the Rockies had a large enough population to administer them separately from Kansas, and by giving Colorado part of Utah, both the eastern and western foothills of the Rockies were put under one administration.

Besides Kansas, two other free states were created during the Buchanan administration: Minnesota (1858) and Oregon (1859). Today both states have a reputation for being very liberal politically, the kind of places that tolerate everything but intolerance. However, racism was a factor when Minnesota (specifically Minneapolis) and Oregon got started, and this is a good place to point out that forgotten bit of history.

A lot of people in present-day Minnesota trace their ancestry to Europe's northernmost countries, no surprise since the state's climate is so cold. You wouldn't think an effort would be made to keep out non-Nordic people, but as far back as 1882 we have records from the Twin Cities area of Jews being kicked off streetcars and attacked by youth gangs. The anti-Semitic trend got worse with the isolationism of the 1920s and the Great Depression; groups that favored fascism, like the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts, also found fertile ground for their activities in Minnesota. In the early 1940s, while the Holocaust was raging in Europe, newspapers like the Minneapolis Morning Tribune could run ads for apartments or jobs that included the words "Gentiles only." When a 1946 article declared Minneapolis "the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States," the mayor, Hubert Humphrey, ordered a study which confirmed this attitude, and only then did the government and civil rights groups get together to do something about it; laws banning discrimination in housing finally went into effect in 1968.

When Oregon became a free state, it did not outlaw slavery like you would expect. Instead, the state constitution made slavery impossible by saying that the people most likely to become slaves -- blacks and mulattoes -- could not live there. The clause which declared Oregon a whites-only state is shown below:

We have reached the point where the American Civil War is about to begin, so we shall stop our narrative of US history for now, and go north to see what Canada was doing, in the last generation before independence. Now that you've seen how the United States grew, the next chapter will cover how it came of age. Tune in to read it there, same time, same channel!

Meanwhile, North of the 49^th Parallel

The same trend toward "responsible government" was going on in the Atlantic colonies at the same time. Joseph's Howe's Reform Party achieved it for Nova Scotia in 1848, and similar governments were established in Prince Edward Island in 1851, New Brunswick in 1854, and Newfoundland in 1855. Britain still appointed the governors and controlled foreign policy and defense, but all over British North America, local affairs were now handled by the people living there, and unlike the British Isles, all men could vote if they owned enough property (most did at this stage).

Both Canada West and Canada East produced several political parties in the last twenty years before independence, but because the new system favored just two parties, as in the United States and Britain, they formed two broad coalitions in each half of Canada. Reformers, or liberals, were nicknamed Grits in Canada West and Rouges in Canada East; they were in favor of universal education, individual rights, and the interests of farmers and small-business owners. Conservatives were called Tories in Canada West and Bleus in Canada East, and their platform emphasized loyalty to Britain, respect for tradition, and a willingness to have the government cooperate with business, the way the HBC did.

The most important achievement in foreign policy was the signing in 1854 of the Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty, which abolished US tariffs on Canadian products, in return for fishing rights for American ships near Canada's Atlantic coast. The treaty was only in effect for twelve years (the Americans voided it in 1866 because they no longer felt they were getting anything out of it), but it set a precedent for the negotiation of more free-trade agreements in the twentieth century. Most important, however, was the way it defused lingering tensions. After the treaty was signed, Americans stopped talking about another war to avenge the defeats of 1775 and 1812, and since then, the US-Canadian border has been called the longest unfortified frontier in the world.

Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island, as its Pacific headquarters, in 1843. Three years later, the southern half of the Oregon country was ceded to the United States, meaning it was now time to organize the territory that remained in British hands.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Most of the British citizens who had been living south of latitude 49^o N were relocated to Vancouver Island, and while they were greatly outnumbered by the natives (500 British vs. about 30,000 Indians), the move justified making the island into a new colony (1849). James Douglas, the HBC's senior officer at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, became the Company's director over all operations west of the Rockies, and in 1851, governor of Vancouver Island as well.

In 1857 rumors came from the west coast that gold had been found in the valley of the Thompson River, a tributary of the Fraser. Over the next year, the "Fraser Canyon Gold Rush" brought in between 10,000 and 20,000 prospectors, merchants, and speculators, many of them not British citizens. Though Douglas was not in charge on the mainland, he tried to impose British authority by stationing a gunboat at the mouth of the Fraser River, and forcing every boat that tried to go upstream to pay for a license; he also felt it was his duty to try to prevent violence between the newcomers and local Indian tribes. The official British response was to create a new colony, British Columbia, in 1858 (previously the HBC had called the land west of the Rockies "New Caledonia"). Douglas was offered the governorship on condition that he resign from the HBC. He agreed, and also accepted a knighthood; from 1858 until his retirement in 1864, he was governor of both Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Then in 1866, Vancouver Island was merged with British Columbia to create a single colony/province.

Though the American Civil War was fought over issues that had nothing to do with Canada, it threatened to spill across the border. This convinced Canadians that they needed to unite under a stronger government, to stay out of the US orbit. The first incident was the St. Albans Raid, a Confederate attempt to gain funds and create a diversion by attacking the Yankees from an unexpected direction. Twenty-one Confederate soldiers had managed to escape from Union captivity by fleeing to Canada, and on October 19, 1864, they struck across the border, into the town of St. Albans, Vermont. They killed one townsperson and stole $208,000 from three banks, but when they returned, a Union posse chased them and caught several on the Canadian side of the border. The captured raiders were turned over to Canadian authorities, and because Canada had been neutral throughout the Civil War, they were subsequently released without punishment; the stolen money found on them ($88,000) was returned, though. Afterwards there was talk in the northern United States about starting a war with Canada and Britain, prompting the stationing of 2,000 Canadian militiamen along the US border in early 1865.

The other incident was a series of raids staged by the Fenian Brotherhood, a radical Irish nationalist movement that had been founded in the United States in 1858. After the Civil War ended, the Fenians, their ranks swollen by Irish-American veterans from the war, split into two factions; one faction concentrated its efforts on raising funds for anti-British rebels in Ireland, while the other wanted to open a new front against the British by attacking targets in Canada. The first of the Fenian Raids, an attempt to capture New Brunswick's Campobello Island by at least 700 members of the movement, was quickly dispersed (April 1866), but in June an even larger group, numbering between 1,500 and 3,000, invaded Canada West from Buffalo, New York.⁽⁷⁹⁾ They met the Canadian militia at Ridgeway, just west of Fort Erie, and the resulting battle was decided by the lack of combat experience among the Canadians; nine Canadians were killed and thirty-seven were wounded. For the Fenians, it was the first time Irishmen had beaten the British since the battle of Fontenoy, fought more than a century earlier in the War of the Austrian Succession. Then the Fenians occupied Fort Erie, but when they realized that no reinforcements would be able to join them, they returned to Buffalo, just five days after the invasion started, and were arrested by American naval personnel. A third raid, called the Pigeon Hill Raid, was staged from Vermont into Canada East (also in June 1866); it failed as well. US President Andrew Johnson sent two Civil War generals, Ulysses Grant and George Meade, to Buffalo to crack down on the offenders and make sure no more border violations took place; after two minor raids from Vermont and New Hampshire (1870 and 1871 respectively), the Fenian scare was over.

Meanwhile, the first meeting to discuss a plan of union was held at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in 1864. The conference started with delegates from just three colonies (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island), until delegates from Canada unexpectedly joined them. They felt the need to get involved because of the issue of representation: Canada West and Canada East still had the same number of seats in their Legislative Assembly, but Canada West had grown until it had a much greater population. The Grits, led by journalist George Brown, wanted more representatives for Canada West, but French Canadians in Canada East, still fearing assimilation, wanted to keep the existing system. Brown's solution was to split Canada back into two provinces, with possible union in a federation with the rest of British North America. Before sending delegates to Charlottetown, Brown formed a three-party coalition with the Tories, led by John MacDonald, and the Bleus, led by Georges-Etienne Cartier, and they proposed to the Maritime colonies that all of British North America should be united under one government. Other delegates were quickly won over, leading to a second conference in Quebec City before 1864 was over. Here they agreed that a confederation would be the type of government most likely to protect the individual character of each colony, and they drafted a constitution, which they called the Seventy-Two Resolutions, for their confederation. This sounds a lot like the process that created the US Constitution, but unlike the American Founding Fathers, their Canadian counterparts did not want to make a complete break with the mother country. Consequently, Queen Victoria and her appointed governor-general would remain at the top of the government hierarchy (albeit as figureheads, the most powerful executive would be an elected prime minister).

The "Confederation Fathers," Canada's founders, meeting in Quebec City. John MacDonald is standing in the middle.

On July 1, 1867, London passed the British North America Act, which created an autonomous state within the British Empire, and Canada as we know it was born. The original four Canadian provinces were Quebec (formerly Canada East), Ontario (formerly Canada West), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Queen Victoria chose Ottawa, a lumber milling town in eastern Ontario, as the site for Canada's capital, and in August John MacDonald was elected as the first prime minister. MacDonald talked about "founding a great British monarchy" and wanted to call his new nation the "Kingdom of Canada," but London did not want to give the United States any more reasons to be mad at Britain or her former colonies (the British had rooted for a Confederate victory during the US Civil War), so they went with an official name that wasn't so provocative: the Dominion of Canada. Later on, when Canada began to succeed under the dominion system, it became the model for how to turn other colonies loose, like Australia and New Zealand, and eventually led to the establishment of a future partnership between the United Kingdom and those colonies, the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Early American Demographics

The growth of the young United States is all the more impressive when one considers how it was achieved. Most of it came from natural fertility. The average American woman in those days had seven children. Of course, with doctors only beginning to understand how germs and infectious diseases work, some of those children didn't survive, but their chances of survival were quite good by eighteenth-century standards. What's more, they probably ate better than their counterparts in Europe; for the typical European, bread was the staff of life (potatoes in the case of Ireland), while Americans were already hearty consumers of meat. In other papers on this website, I discuss how industrialization can slow down birthrates, but most of the United States remained untouched by the Industrial Revolution until about 1850, so this braking effect wasn't a factor yet.⁽⁸⁰⁾ Finally, there was the attitude created by having a largely empty territory within the nation's borders; as long as they had new places to explore and settle, Americans would be optimistic about the future, and not too concerned about becoming overcrowded (that's why we don't see too many environmentalists before the twentieth century).

Immigration is the main reason why the United States continues to grow today, but for most of the period covered by this chapter, it wasn't very important. Until the 1840s, immigration never brought in more than 79,000 new citizens a year, and in some years as few as 6,000 arrived. Then came the Irish Potato Famine, and hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees crossed the Atlantic, because America was more hospitable to them than most of Europe was. They were soon followed by a wave of refugees from continental Europe, after the revolutions of 1848 failed; these included rebel leaders like Louis Kossuth of Hungary, and Giuseppe Garibaldi of Italy. As a result, between 1847 and 1857, 3.3 million immigrants--16 percent of the previous US population--arrived on America's shores. This helps to explain the anti-immigration backlash that produced the Know-Nothings.

Most of the immigrants mentioned in the above paragraph were Nordic Europeans who looked a lot like the whites already settled in the United States. However, in the mid-nineteenth century came signs that immigration wouldn't always follow that pattern; we noted that the California gold rush attracted Asian immigrants from across the Pacific. In the nineteenth century the Chinese were a small but noticeable part of west coast communities, performing menial labor and treated little better than slaves, but as they grew more numerous, Asian-Americans also became more successful, so it's good to point out when they first got established. Japanese immigrants started coming over after 1854, when Commodore Matthew Perry opened up Japan to the rest of the world.

Speaking of slaves, the population of black Americans also grew during this period, but not as rapidly as whites--from 700,000 in 1790 to nearly 4 million in 1860. Slaves have a lower reproductive rate than free people, for several reasons: they do not live as long, they find it more difficult to raise children, and they have a strong incentive not to have any children at all, if the kids are condemned to wear chains like their parents. In the years before the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed (1808), most of the black population growth came from new slaves being brought over from Africa. Eventually the Afro-American community reached a point where it could maintain itself through domestic births, but it wasn't until after slavery was abolished that they were able to grow at a rate comparable to that of their former masters.

It is also worth noting that about 95 percent of the black population was concentrated in the southern states. After the northern states freed their slaves, they kept laws on the books that discriminated against blacks, so free blacks (probably one eighth of the total) found it easier to live in the same states as the slaves.

For Canada, we don't have census figures covering this period that are as thorough as the ones we have for the United States. Still we can state with confidence that the population was 166,000 in the 1780s, and 3,463,000 at the time of independence in 1867. Among those in the 1867 community, two million traced their ancestry to the British Isles, and one million had ancestors who came from continental Europe (still mostly France). Only 56,000 (1.6% of the total) were nonwhite, and they were almost evenly divided between Native Americans (Inuit as well as Indians) and ex-slaves from the United States.⁽⁸¹⁾ All this means that in terms of percentages, Canadians had a growth rate twice as high as the Yankees. In fact, if we go back just twenty more years, the growth rate becomes explosive, because Canada's population doubled between the French and Indian War and the 1783 Treaty of Paris. So at independence, population was roughly forty times what it had been a century earlier. And since France was no longer sending settlers, the portion of French-speakers in Canada's population had dropped from around 75 percent at the time of the French and Indian War, to less than 30 percent in the 1860s.

At the beginning of this chapter, we explained the doubling of Canada's population between 1763 and 1783--immigration from Britain, and "Tories" who chose to move north, rather than live in an independent United States. Later on Irish refugees from the Potato Famine would exceed the number of immigrants coming from England at the same time. Scottish immigration also increased in the mid-nineteenth century, when tenant farmers were evicted from their land in the Highlands of Scotland to allow large-scale sheep farming. Overall, immigration played a more important role in early Canadian growth than it did in US growth. Part of this was a British reaction to France's colonial policy when it ruled Canada; except for the fur trade, the French government largely neglected their North American settlements. After the British lost their colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, Canada was the most obvious substitute, and there seems to have been an effort to duplicate in late 18^th-early 19^th century Canada the successful development that had already taken place between Maine and Georgia. Finally, when the original population is small, an influx of new settlers is going to have more of an impact. That is why the "explosive" metaphor used in the previous paragraph is appropriate; in a real explosion, most of the action happens in the first second, and the objects being blown apart lose speed as they travel away from the point of the blast. Likewise, the population growth rate slowed down after it became self-sustaining; in 1867 Canada had between 1/9 and 1/10 the population of the United States, the same ratio that we see between Canadian and US populations today.

One group did not grow at all during this time--the American Indians. Their population had been declining since the white man first arrived, as we noted previously; in the period covered by this chapter, their numbers north of the Rio Grande probably shrank from 800,000 to 700,000. At the beginning of this chapter, more than half of eastern North America was still occupied by Indians, rather than by citizens of the governments that claimed the land, but by the end of the 1830s they had been almost completely cleared out; we won't hear from any eastern tribes in future chapters of this work.

The fate of the Indians in California is especially tragic. We noted in Chapter 1 that California used to be home to more tribes than any other state, province or territory in North America. However, in just over a decade after the US took over California in 1848, 80 percent of the Native Americans died. Exposure to the white man's diseases was a factor, as had been the case elsewhere, but it is now clear that the settlers also launched a genocidal campaign, with the local government's approval. As California governor Peter Burnett explained it in 1851, "A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct." The most notorious episode was the Bridge Gulch Massacre of 1852, which started when some Wintu Indians killed a settler named John Anderson and drove off his cattle. In response, a posse of 70 men, led by Sheriff William H. Dixon, located a Wintu camp and fired on it, killing 153 men, women and children. The only survivors of the massacre were two or three children that had been overlooked, and after the dirty deed was finished, it was discovered that the Indians killed were not the ones responsible for Mr. Anderson's death. For a while the local government even encouraged the decimation of the Indians by offering bounties: it paid $25 for bringing in a man's body or a male body part like a scalp or a hand, and $5 was paid for a child or a woman. Judging from the results, it looks like the Forty-Niners practiced bounty hunting as well as prospecting, especially when they did not find gold.

In the next chapter, we will hear about a battle between the red man and the white man that is called "Custer's Last Stand," but the real story will be about the Indians' last stand.

58. This was the most important, but not the only Mormon migration. Altogether 70,000 went west before the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. 3,000 of them came in the late 1850s pulling handcarts, with their belongings and children on the carts, because they couldn't afford a conventional wagon with horses or oxen; these are now remembered as the "handcart pioneers." And once Salt Lake City began to prosper, Brigham Young sent out scouting parties to found satellite communities, but because there weren't too many dependable water sources in Utah, they often ended up settling as far away as Arizona, California, Idaho, Wyoming, and even Canada and Mexico.

59. Most of the nation knew that Taylor was the Whig candidate, long before Taylor himself did. The letter announcing his nomination didn't have the required ten-cent stamp on it. Postage stamps had just been introduced a year earlier, so in those days, a letter without stamps was delivered anyway, and the recipient was expected to pay the cost. Many Americans sent fan letters to Taylor during the war, and he asked his post office not to deliver letters without postage, because he was getting more of those letters than he could afford. He finally learned what he had missed a month later, when somebody asked if he had gotten the nomination letter.

60. Democrats who opposed slavery were in the minority. The rest of the party sometimes called them "Barnburners," thinking of a farmer who burns down his own barn to get rid of the rats infesting it!

61. The gold rush also gave California a reputation as the state where dreams can come true, which has been perpetuated more recently by successes in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

62. In the 1830s, fur traders founded Fort Laramie in Wyoming, near the halfway point on the Oregon Trail. By 1849, enough people were moving west on the trail for the Plains Indians to get concerned, and they began raiding the wagon trains. This prompted the US Army to buy Fort Laramie, and they called on the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Shoshone, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes to send representatives for peace talks. The result was the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which defined the limits of the Indian hunting grounds; in return for promising safe passage to settlers on the trail, and allowing other roads and forts to be built nearby, the Indians would receive an annual pension of $50,000 for the next fifty years. Congress later cut the duration of the pension to ten years.

63. Like the United States in its early years, Texas spent quite a bit more than it earned during the first years after independence. The land handed over would later become part of the states of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming. Even without the upper Rio Grande, Texas was the largest state in the Union for more than a century, until Alaska became a state in 1959.
Texas has done very well economically since then, but in case the state ever feels it is under-represented politically, a forgotten part of the treaty of annexation with the Union gives Texas the right to divide into as many as five states. If such a split happens, it will give Texas eight additional senators, four new governors, and maybe a few more congressmen.
Most of the West is too dry for plantation agriculture, so there was no rush to bring slaves into the territories that the 1850 Compromise opened for slavery. According to the 1860 census, Utah only had twenty-nine slaves in the whole territory, and New Mexico had none at all.

64. This late in life, Calhoun would not have been satisfied by anything less than total capitulation to what he demanded. Years earlier he stopped believing in the part of the Declaration of Independence that said all men are created equal, instead arguing that there had never been a "civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other." He also claimed that because slaves were cared for when they became too old or ill to work, they were better off than northern factory workers, who were subject to "wage slavery," strikes, and even starvation if they lost their jobs. Finally, because the North was growing faster than the South in terms of population and resources, he not only became convinced that the Union would break up soon, but that a breakup may be necessary to save the South. His proposal to prevent that was a constitutional amendment creating two presidents, one from the South and one from the North!

65. In 1991 Taylor's remains were exhumed and examined, because of a rumor that he might have been assassinated by poison. Traces of arsenic were found, but not enough to suggest that somebody killed him with it.

66. "This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God!"--Ralph Waldo Emerson

67. Oberlin College, an Abolitionist school in Ohio, was probably the most important stop on the Underground Railroad, where it was known as "Station 99." Founded in 1833, it was the first college to put men, women and blacks together in the same classes. Because of its role in rescuing a fugitive slave in 1858, which involved at least 37 local residents, one historian, Nathan Brandt, called Oberlin "the town that started the Civil War."
As for "conductors," the most famous one on the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, the African-American "Moses." An ex-slave, she made nineteen daring trips back into the South to rescue 300 other slaves.

68. The rejection of expansionist proposals in Washington didn't keep individual Southerners from taking matters into their own hands. The most notable of these was William Walker (1824-60) of Tennessee. His adventures, in Mexico and Central America, are covered in Chapter 4 of my Latin American history.

69. By this time, nearly every institution in the United States had split along North-South lines; even churches were forming northern and southern denominations. This turned the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act into a "theater of the absurd." At one point, North Carolina Senator George Badger lamented that if Northerners had their way, he would never be able to take his "old black mammy" to Nebraska. Then he exclaimed that he loved his "old black mammy" and she loved him, and turning to Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade, he asked, "Surely you will not prevent me from taking my old black mammy with me?" Wade's response was brutally sarcastic: "It is not that he cannot take his old black mammy with him that troubles the mind of the Senator, but that if we make the territories free, he cannot sell the old black mammy when he gets her there."

70. Horace Greeley played an interesting role in American history. Whereas most newspaper editors in the nineteenth century were conservatives, Greeley was the type of liberal who would try anything once. For a while he even had Karl Marx on the Tribune's payroll, as his European correspondent! Incidentally, Greeley never said the quote that is usually attributed to him ("Go west, young man"), though he was an enthusiastic supporter of efforts to settle the West.

71. At this point, Lincoln wanted to compensate owners who set their slaves free, and was willing to wait until 1899 for slavery to gradually die out.

72. When Southerners made fun of his appearance, joking that Lincoln looked like an African gorilla, one Republican answered, "We know old Abe does not look very handsome, but if all the ugly men in the United States vote for him, he will surely be elected!" After the election, an eleven-year-old girl wrote Lincoln a letter telling him he would look better with a beard, so in early 1861 he became the first president to grow one.

73. Lincoln saved the choicest Cabinet posts for his Republican rivals; after the election Seward became Secretary of State, Chase became Secretary of the Treasury, and Cameron became Secretary of War. In the nineteenth century it was expected that the winners of presidential elections would fill appointed positions with as many friends as possible. This was called the Spoils System, and today it is normally associated with Andrew Jackson, because when he cleaned house, it was justified with the slogan, "To the victors belong the spoils," but Lincoln was the greatest spoilsman of all. Whereas Old Hickory replaced 252 out of 612 officers in the federal government, Lincoln threw out 1,457 in his first year, leaving less than 200 appointees from previous administrations.

74. For Douglas it was a no-win situation; if he made a speech southern Democrats liked, northern Democrats would be offended, and vice-versa. Earlier in 1860 he made an emotional speech in the Senate, denouncing "n*gg*r-worshippers," and that evening, he walked home from the Capitol with Senator Seward. Knowing how badly Douglas wanted to be president, Seward gave him this advice: "Douglas, no man will ever be president of the United States who spells Negro with two g's."

75. I am mentioning Edward Everett because he was a direct ancestor of mine, eight generations back on my mother's side of the family. Later on, when Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address, Everett introduced him with a two-hour speech that nobody remembers today. In the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh made fun of Everett with a sound bite about the speech, as part of a series he called "Great Moments in Moderate History."
Incidentally, Everett briefly appeared on the fifty-dollar bill; $50 silver certificates bearing his portrait were printed in 1890 and 1891. They are still legal tender, but worth more than $3,000 today.

76. Buchanan was a career politician for sure. Before becoming president, he had served for ten years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia (see footnote #53), then served ten years in the Senate, then four years as Secretary of State (during the time when the nation gained the lands between the Rockies and the Pacific), and finally was minister to Britain. Despite all this, he was one of the worst presidents in American history. Nathan Miller, the author of Star-Spangled Men, declared that Buchanan "was on the government payroll for more than 40 years, but never had an original idea." Lincoln found it easy to do better, despite his lack of experience.

77. Papineau's second time in the political arena was especially short, because he had been in the US and France long enough to want a purely republican government, with no monarchy whatsoever. Thus, he supported the Montreal Annexation Manifesto; published in 1849, this controversial document actually called for the annexation of Canada by the United States, to avoid a disaster to the local economy if Great Britain abolished its laws guaranteeing preferential trade with the colonies. Reformers in both Canada East and Canada West strongly opposed the manifesto, Papineau lost a re-election bid in 1851 (though he managed to win another seat a year later), and the movement died out after the Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty was signed. And despite their talk in recent years about "Manifest Destiny," Americans weren't in the mood to annex Canada, either; an editorial in the New York Herald said to its Canadian readers, "The first thing for the people of Canada to do, however, is to obtain England's consent to dispose of themselves as they think proper."

78. The 1846 treaty said nothing about the San Juan Islands, a small archipelago located just east of Vancouver Island and south of the 49th parallel, so both American and British settlers moved there. Then in 1859, an American farmer shot a black boar that he caught eating his potatoes, only to find that the intruder belonged to a British farmer. The British farmer turned down a restitution offer of $10 for the pig, insisting on $100, tensions increased among both groups of settlers, the Americans called for military protection, and the British sent warships and men to counter the American soldiers that had just arrived. Most of the officers on both sides had been told to defend themselves, but do not fire the first shot. When Vancouver Island's Governor Douglas ordered British Rear Admiral Robert Baynes to land marines and engage the Americans, Baynes refused, declaring that it was foolish for two great nations to fight over a pig. For the next few days American and British soldiers and sailors traded insults, but they still did not shoot, so the only casualty of the so-called "Pig War" was the pig it was named after. After that both sides agreed to a joint miltary occupation of the San Juan Islands until a permanent settlement could be reached, and that happened in 1872, when a commission appointed by Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm I ruled in favor of giving the islands to the United States.

79. 800 of the invading Fenians called themselves the "Irish Republican Army," but this IRA had nothing to do with another group by the same name, which fought for the independence of Northern Ireland in the twentieth century.

80. The early American population was also definitely rural. In 1790, only 3 percent of them lived in the nation's largest cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston and Salem). All six cities earned their money as ports handling trade with Europe; they did very little manufacturing at this stage.

81. Before 1500, there were an estimated 300,000 people living in Canada, and more than half of these indigenous tribes were concentrated in two provinces: Ontario and British Columbia. Therefore by 1867, their numbers had been reduced by more than 90 percent; the Ontario communities were all but eliminated. Those who remained were guaranteed small reservations by treaty, like their counterparts in the United States, but the hunting rights and other agreements in the treaties were rarely respected.

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