America Aflame Read online

  The success of American forces, often outmanned, gave cause for more than children to burst into patriotic song. Mounting losses did not deter General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the target of children’s ditties and American artillery. President Polk recognized that nothing short of capturing Mexico City would put a satisfactory end to this military exercise. General Winfield Scott, as officious and resplendent as Taylor was casual and crumpled, took his crisp uniforms and giant ego to Vera Cruz. After taking the port with an amphibious landing, he marched overland with fewer than nine thousand troops, most of who were unaccustomed to military discipline. Scott defied conventional military wisdom, cut his supply line, lived off the land, and fought his way into a capital guarded by a hundred thousand able-bodied men. Scott had two advantages over the Mexicans: light artillery expertly positioned and aimed, and a junior officer corps, each member of which was capable of making decisions in the field, including future luminaries George G. Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, Joseph E. Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee. Despite spirited Mexican resistance, Scott prevailed, conquering the country in five months. At 7:00 A.M. on September 14, 1847, John Quitman, the president’s emissary, raised the American flag above the Plaza de Armas in Mexico City, the first time the Stars and Stripes had flown over the capital of a conquered nation.

  Now what? Immediately the cry of “All Mexico” went up, and President Polk began to rethink his modest objective of securing the Texas border and liberating New Mexico and California. Some southerners saw Scott’s dash to victory as an opportunity to extend the slave empire and thereby save slavery as well as the souls and society of the liberated Mexicans. South Carolina novelist and poet William Gilmore Simms wrote excitedly to his senator James Henry Hammond that “slavery will be the medium & great agent for rescuing and recovering to freedom and civilization all the vast tracts of Texas, Mexico &c., and our sons ought to be fitted out as fast as they are ready to take the field, with an adequate provision in slaves and find their way in the yet unopened regions.” Once the United States secured all of Mexico, it would ensure, Simms predicted, “the perpetuation of slavery for the next thousand years.” Though many Americans and Mexicans would dispute the proposition that a thousand-year slave empire was necessary for their salvation, the argument resonated well in the South.23

  As in Oregon, Polk settled for less. The high political risks and the idea of absorbing a large alien population persuaded the president to choose the more modest course. Modest was quite a bit. By the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico received $15 million in exchange for the Rio Grande boundary the Polk administration had claimed to begin with and the cession of both California and New Mexico. The Senate ratified the treaty 38 to 14 with four abstentions. The annexations of Texas and Oregon combined with the territories gained from the Mexican Cession comprised America’s greatest expansion ever, as the nation’s territory increased by 66 percent. The United States was now a continental empire, a status predicted, preached, and promoted for a generation. The Mexican and British obstacles dissolved. Only the Indians remained to challenge America’s continental ambitions. It would not be long before the United States recouped the monetary cost of the war at least a thousandfold. The moral accounting would follow, and a greater threat to America’s destiny would emerge. Quickly.

  Both Democrats and Whigs retained enough discipline to convince their supporters to steer clear of the Wilmot Proviso in the election year of 1848 and support the results of the war in a general way. Most Whigs backed General Zachary Taylor. His major qualification was that he was electable. His enormous popularity, they hoped, would overcome sectional differences and unite the country. Whig congressman Abraham Lincoln urged the general to put himself above politics like a rough-hewn Washington and delegate to Congress the role of formulating and implementing legislation. It was not difficult for Taylor to follow Lincoln’s advice. The general had never voted, and after forty years in the saddle, most of it out West, he was not a fount of erudition on the major issues of the day. Although he obviously had a stake in the debate as an owner of more than two hundred slaves, he made it clear that he would defer to Congress on that and other issues.

  The Whigs resurrected some of their ribald campaign tactics from the Log Cabin and Hard Cider contest of 1840. They published a series of “Rough and Ready Songs” touting their candidate’s innocence of politics and party: “The country’s tired of party striving, / Which so retards our Nation’s thriving, / And hence she calls on Zachary Taylor, / Since nothing else can now avail her. / Get out of the way for Zachariar, / He’s the White House purifier.” The lyrics probably worked better with a musical accompaniment.24

  The Democratic nominee for president, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, a War of 1812 veteran, hoped to unite both northern and southern wings of the party with his own solution to the deadlock over slavery in the territories. Cass advocated removing the federal government entirely from the slavery issue and handing responsibility for that decision to the territory’s residents. Known as “popular sovereignty,” it had the attraction of resolving the territorial issue in a democratic manner. But the term meant different things to northerners and southerners, and Cass was not about to disabuse anyone of whatever interpretation he might make. To northerners, popular sovereignty meant that territorial residents could ban slavery whenever they wanted to. Southerners believed that popular sovereignty gave settlers the right to abolish slavery only at the time the territory was about to become a state. Until that moment, the territorial government would protect slave property just as it would any other property.

  For the third presidential election in a row, an anti-slavery party joined the field. The Free Soil Party cast a broader net than its predecessor, the Liberty Party. Free Soilers said little about slavery where it existed. Instead, they stood on the Wilmot Proviso and its prohibition of slavery in the territories. This position allowed the party to present itself as anti-slavery but not abolitionist, a white man’s party, an organization dedicated to preserving the West for white men, a friend of the workingman who sought a better life in the territories. The new party’s slogan, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” perfectly captured its platform and appeal.

  Like the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers tapped into the still-strong evangelical spirit in the North, staging a revival-style convention in Buffalo in August 1848. Speakers called for a “great moral revolution” founded on “the idea of right and justice and the truth of God.” They entreated listeners to experience a spiritual rebirth, “to be baptized in the Free Soil principle,” comparing David Wilmot to David of the Bible whom “God raised up … to slay the giant of Goth.” The themes of spiritual rebirth and national rededication resonated throughout the hall. “God had determined to make the convention,” one speaker assured the assemblage, “the medium of reviving … throughout this great … Nation, the pure principles of Free Government …; and by founding here a real … Republic, to diffuse its light and truth to all Nations, until every member of the great human family shall know and rejoice in this great Salvation.”

  The Free Soil convention anointed former president Martin Van Buren with the nomination, after which they concluded their revival, joining hands to sing: “DAUGHTER OF ZION! from the dust, / Exalt thy fallen head; / Again in thy Redeemer trust, / He calls thee from the dead. / Awake! Awake!! put on thy strength / Thy beautiful array; / The day of Freedom dawns at length— / The Lord’s appointed day!” The “freedom” in the hymn referred to the white man’s freedom to pursue his personal manifest destiny. The born-again nation extolled in song was a White Republic. The enemy was less slavery than the slaveholder extending his evil institution to the Edenic West.25

  Frederick Douglass attended the gathering in Buffalo and recognized both its limitations and its possibilities. He was realistic enough to understand that a straight-out abolition party would never make a political impact. Slavery, constricted to where it already existed,
would eventually atrophy and die. Douglass and many others believed the Free Soil movement was a potential means to an end.

  Zachary Taylor was enough of a slaveholder to triumph over the Democrats in the South and enough of a nonpartisan hero to overcome the Democrats in the North, some of who defected to the Free Soil movement. For all their revivalist fervor, Free Soilers polled only 14 percent of the vote in the North and probably did not sway the outcome in any one state. However, the party polled four times the vote of the Liberty Party in 1844. As long as the major parties remained mostly intact and as long as northern voters were leery of any party that attracted abolitionists, an anti-slavery political movement would remain on the political fringes.

  Frederick Douglass reached this conclusion in the days after Taylor’s victory, pouring out his despair in his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star. He scorned the religious and political hypocrisy of white voters who held selective views on freedom: “As a people you claim for yourselves a higher civilization—a purer morality—a deeper religious faith—a larger love of liberty, and a broader philanthropy, than any other nation on the globe.” Yet Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder, won the presidency. “While Gen. Taylor is the well-known robber of three hundred human beings of all their hard earnings, and is coining their hard earnings into gold, you have conferred upon him an office worth twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and the highest honor within your power.”26

  What Douglass failed to understand was that Americans did indeed vote their ideals, both personal and national. General Taylor, the hero of a war that secured a continental empire, embodied the voters’ faith in the nation’s special mission and the imperative of routing those forces that stood in the way of its fulfillment. Because a man held slaves did not mean that he would elevate economic self-interest above the national weal. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had pursued national ideals, not interest group politics; so would Zachary Taylor.

  Two events, far apart in space but occurring close in time, would soon test Taylor and the nation. Neither event had anything to do with slavery, at least initially. The first was an offshoot of good old American entrepreneurial spirit, though its engine, John Sutter, was a Swiss immigrant. He had escaped his native land to avoid jail on a bankruptcy charge. Alighting in New York in 1834, he conned several merchants with tales of a noble background to secure letters of introduction enabling him to join the Santa Fe trade. Sutter made his way to California, where he used the letters to snag a huge land grant in the Sacramento Valley from the Mexican government. In 1843, he built an imposing fort to enclose a village of shops, homes, and small manufacturing enterprises. Sutter’s Fort stood astride the terminus of the California Trail. From that advantageous location, Sutter earned a nice living selling supplies.27

  As emigration grew, Sutter decided to erect a sawmill on his property to supply the newcomers with lumber to build their communities. With the rapidly flowing American River less than forty miles from his fort, Sutter had an ideal site for a water-powered sawmill, and he instructed another immigrant, James W. Marshall, to supervise the erection of a twelve-foot water wheel on a millrace carved from the riverbed. On the morning of January 24, 1848, Marshall noticed a glint of yellow in the millrace. He could not keep the secret. Sam Brannon, a prominent San Francisco merchant, heard the rumors and came out to see for himself. Hastening back to the city, he ran through its streets shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River.” Few would have paid much attention—men howling in the streets of the frontier town were not unknown—were it not for the fact that Brannon carried a bottle filled with gold dust in his hands. By mid-June, San Francisco was a ghost town. Signs proclaiming GONE TO THE DIGGINGS or OFF TO THE MINES adorned the shops and houses of the forlorn city.

  Wild stories of instant riches accompanied the frenzy. Some were true. Two men prospecting in one canyon came away with $17,000 in gold dust and nuggets. A newspaper editor, touring the mining camps looking for stories, dipped his pan into a stream every now and then and earned $100 a day for his casual efforts. On average, miners in 1848 garnered about $20 worth of gold per day. The average daily wage back east was $1.

  Back east, though, not many paid much attention when the news finally reached readers of the New York Herald in August. There were already so many outrageous claims about California floating about. Only when President Polk made a brief comment about the gold strike in his annual message to Congress in December 1848 did easterners realize the Golden West was more than a metaphor. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory,” Polk related, “are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.” The arrival two days later of a tea caddy sent by the California territorial governor to the president convinced the remaining skeptics. More than 230 ounces of pure gold crammed the caddy.28

  The gold rush lured several hundred thousand fortune hunters to California, with eighty thousand coming during the first full year (1849) alone. The future suddenly seemed truly golden. The tale of a man who discovered an 839-pound gold nugget and who was so afraid to leave his find that he offered $27,000 to a colleague to fetch him a plate of pork and beans sounded perfectly plausible. The West was the culmination of the American dream and the prophecy of greatness, and the gold rush was proof.

  Western fever, which had never really broken, now reached an unprecedented pitch. Entrepreneurs, anxious to transport gold rushers to the fields quickly, concocted imaginative if unworkable vehicles. Rufus Porter, the founder of Scientific American magazine, devised a thousand-foot-long propeller-driven balloon airship powered by two steam engines to whisk eastern passengers on a swift three-day journey to San Francisco for a mere fifty dollars, “wines included.” Porter never built his airship. Most forty-niners trekked west by covered wagon, though an increasing proportion came by the sea route over Panama. Since most gold rushers were single men with relatively few possessions, the sea route, despite delays and greater exposure to disease, was nearly as popular as the wagon route.

  Though briefly emptied by the initial gold mania, San Francisco became an instant city, the Manhattan of the West. Prior to the gold rush, emigration had been steady enough for city fathers to call upon Jasper O’Farrell, a civil engineer, to lay out a town as quickly as possible, which he did, merely imposing the grid and some of the street names of Philadelphia (such as Market Street) on the California boom town. By fastening a grid on a very hilly site, O’Farrell unwittingly created breathtaking vistas and breathless climbs for pedestrians and horses alike and forever confined the business district to the base of the hills around Market Street.

  The second test was much less redolent of manifest destiny. The year 1849 was also the time of cholera. One child among the many who succumbed during that summer of death would leave a lasting legacy. His name was Charley. He was a healthy baby, and therein lay the tragedy. The scourge of cholera swept through Cincinnati, Charley’s home. The city’s inattention to sanitation, even by the standards of the time, allowed the disease to flourish. The booming Ohio River port city thought more of commerce than cleanliness. In this, Cincinnatians resembled their colleagues in other western cities, where people moved in and out at dizzying rates and urban services were lax, if they existed at all. Dirty water was a price of progress.29

  Daguerreotype of San Francisco Harbor, 1850 or 1851. It was just a small village only a few years earlier; the Gold Rush created a boomtown, the first great western city. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  But what a price. The cholera epidemic that summer carried off more than 8 percent of Cincinnati’s population, and the city ran out of coffins. The disease showed no respect for class or civic eminence. Cholera dispatched the weak quickly, sometimes within hours of onset. The particular cruelty of the disease was its slow, painful progress in strong and healthy bodies—the persistent diarrhea and vomiting, the excruciating pain of leg and stomach cramps, a
nd then the gradual failure of liver and kidneys. Young Charley suffered immensely. His tiny body convulsed in pain; his cries pierced the hearts of his parents, who were helpless to relieve his distress. The peace that often accompanies the last breaths of life eluded Charley, who lingered for two weeks.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe bore six other children, but Charley was special to her. She had gone through bouts of uncertainty and loneliness, yet Charley, baby though he was, provided solace for her troubled soul. She poured out her grief in a letter to her husband, Calvin. “Never was he anything to me but a comfort. He has been my pride and joy. Many a heartache has he cured for me. Many an anxious night have I held him to my bosom and felt the sorrow and loneliness pass out of me with the touch of his little warm hands. Yet I have just seen him in his death agony, looked on his imploring face when I could not help nor soothe nor do one thing, not one, to mitigate his cruel suffering, do nothing but pray in my anguish that he might die soon.”30

  In the past, Harriet had worked through sorrows by writing. But her grief for Charley was so great that another short story or letter would hardly mend her broken heart. What could, what should she write that would restore her faith in God’s ultimate goodness?

  The sweep of evangelical religion and evangelical democracy had brought Americans to the shining sea. Yet their hold on both the continent and their system of government was tenuous. One million Irish Catholics were flooding into America. Slaveholders clamored for access to the new territorial bounty. Universal white male suffrage was becoming the norm rather than the exception. Evangelicals pursued politics as faithfully as eternal salvation and with equal righteousness. The nation had grown far beyond the borders of the original thirteen states. Would a continental America survive? Would the Revolutionary legacy remain secure?

  Most second-generation Americans would have answered these questions affirmatively in 1849. They had brushed aside the Mexicans and stared down the British. They had gained a golden West. Americans were confident, yet wary. Their Revolutionary experiment was incomplete and constantly tested. Their government was a unique outpost in a hostile world. Historian George Bancroft had written of a God-blessed nation. The past and the future would be one. But history is not a compass. A gold rush and a mother’s grief would converge in unforeseen ways. Americans would soon discover that they would need to plot a course through some very complex terrain over the next decade. They would lose their way. Only a bloody war would enable them to carve out a new path to a new nation. A Chosen Nation would confront its Revolutionary legacy and determine whether it would fulfill or destroy that sacred trust.