Antebellum and Civil War San Francisco: A Western Theater for Northern & Southern Politics

Introduction

From the era of the British colonies to the emergence of the American states, the eastern seaboard had been both slave and free. As the country grew westward, that trend continued but became increasingly more and more complicated. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the size of the country and created new debates over the westward expansion of slavery. As Northerners and Southerners began slowly moving into the vast Louisiana Territory, merging with the longtime French, Spanish and tribal residents, it would take congressional acts and compromises to maintain the increasingly shaky equilibrium. Forty-five years later, American acquisition of Mexican Alta California and the simultaneous discovery of gold created an unprecedented rush to the West, raising new questions about the expansion of slavery. The current state of California would be carved out of that acquisition amid congressional arguments both in favor of and against extending slavery to the West.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Southern interests in Congress, which represented slaveholding aristocrats, appeared to be paralleling the British Parliament of the eighteenth century. Parliament had imposed controls and restrictions on its thirteen colonies in North America, the very same colonies that would emerge as the East Coast states of the North and the South. But did Congress want to risk driving Americans to rebellion, as had happened in 1776, resulting in a long, drawn-out war? A civil war would be even worse than a revolution. Americans would be fighting one another during emotionally charged, passion-filled, bloody battles that would ravage the landscape and its residents. Many Americans could see the similarities between the United States of the 1850s and the British colonies in the 1770s. Some could see only the economics of the increasingly worn-out fields in the East as decades of plantation-style farming took its toll. To them, the need to continue extending slavery farther and farther west was obvious and justified. A good number, however, believed that each individual state should decide the question for itself. While Congress debated back and forth, those already in California in 1849 took matters into their own hands and did just that.

More than two thousand miles separated California from the political, social and economic dynamics of the states that comprised the North and the South. It would attract those dynamics to the West as thousands of highly motivated individuals steadily poured into San Francisco from regions east of the Mississippi River, destined for the nearby gold fields. The antebellum era in the eastern states coincided with the gold rush era in California, and the social order that developed out of this gold rush migration in many ways represented a microcosm of the United States in the 1850s. These American gold seekers brought with them their respective politics and their attitudes reflecting the economic and social realities of either the industrial, money-oriented North or the social status consciousness and chivalry of the agricultural South. Their migration would introduce both the New York– and Southern-style of politics to San Francisco beginning in 1849. This divergence would play out in interesting ways over the coming decade, i.e., through feuds, duels and the loss and gain of political control. These American newcomers would join the very diverse collection of individuals already in California who had arrived the prior year, during previous decades or over the course of many centuries.

San Francisco became the new El Dorado. What had been a small town of fewer than one thousand residents in 1848 would burst into a booming city of thirty thousand within two years; an instant city, it was called. While a significant number of its transient residents were foreigners from various continents, the Americans from the Atlantic states would dominate. If East Coasters thought they had moved away from the heated slavery question by going west, they were wrong, as it followed them to the shores of the Pacific. The rush for California’s mineral riches of gold and, later, silver during the antebellum period would force some Argonauts to choose between the wealth of the West and loyalty to the South. It also forced Congress and the nation to confront the future of the South’s peculiar institution and its application in the West. These issues pushed the United States toward its second American revolution, the Civil War.

The West would prove to be more than a distant relative to the squabbling siblings of the North and the South. Following the war, it would be where the flagging, puritanical American work ethic of the East would be reborn as the energized, entrepreneurial California dream of the West. San Francisco would become the Queen City of America’s West, and California would emerge as the Empire State of the Pacific.

One important point that readers should bear in mind is with respect to political parties as they are discussed in this book. In both platform and philosophy, the Democrats and Republicans of the mid-nineteenth century were dramatically different from the parties bearing the same names in the modern era.

The idea for this book came about because of my continued interest in San Francisco’s early years, my longtime love of the theater and my wanting to know more about the impact of the Civil War in the West. What brought it all together for me was my reading about the Booth acting family and how antebellum issues affected them. In many respects, the Booths are the bookends for the story in this book.

In the interest of the past meeting with the present, I have sought to connect San Francisco’s antebellum and Civil War days with present-day life in the city by highlighting the remnants from those decisive, unsettling decades of the mid-nineteenth century. I do much the same through a walking tour that I have developed in conjunction with this book. More information on that tour may be found on my website: www.sanfranciscojourneys.com.

Monika Trobits

San Francisco, California

October 2014

An 1861 map of San Francisco annotated by the author. Courtesy Rather Press Collection, Sanoian Special Collections Library, California State University, Fresno.

Chapter 1

A Lightning Message from the East

The telegram arrived in San Francisco at 10:00 a.m.¹ It was an official bulletin, the first of several, and the operator on duty immediately posted it in the front window for all to read. The news it conveyed was astounding, almost unbelievable, and had rapidly traveled along wires that stretched from the nation’s capital to the western edge of the continent. Twenty-year-old Charles de Young listened to the taps of the telegraph’s vigorous rhythmic dance while he examined the already posted telegrams. He was looking for items to fill the pages of his fledgling afternoon paper, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle. As a co-founder of the three-month-old Chronicle, it was his practice to stop by the telegraph office on his way to his own nearby office. The telegraphic clicking of the incoming message continued and de Young, who knew Morse code, could scarcely believe his ears. The telegram announced that the president had been shot and, nine hours later, had died. The message went on to say that the shooting had taken place in a theater in Washington, D.C. Subsequent dispatches would reveal that the assassination had occurred the night before at Ford’s Theatre, during the third act of a popular play. Pushing his way through the growing crowd, Charles de Young rushed over to his Clay Street office a few blocks away, armed with the incredible news of Saturday, April 15, 1865.

Charles and Gustavus de Young had characterized their newspaper as The Abstract and Brief Chronicle of the Times: Local, Critical, Musical and Theatrical. That mission statement was noted on the front page of every edition. Unbeknownst to them, their pro-Union Chronicle was at the turning point of becoming much more, as on that mid-April day, it would be the first paper in San Francisco to print the dispatches about President Lincoln’s assassination. By the time those dispatches arrived, morning editions of the Daily Alta California and the Morning Call had already been published and distributed; their staffs had left for the day. The de Youngs realized they had been gifted with an extraordinary scoop and hurried to get the pages of their tabloid-style paper printed and into the hands of their readers. However, as important as the news was, it would be noted on page two. As usual, the front page was reserved for the paid listing of a playbill for the day’s featured theatrical performance. On opposite margins would be listings of related revenue-producing advertising. Advertising paid the bills and would not be moved off the front page, not even for a presidential assassination.

San Francisco’s booming and growing theater business encouraged the founding of the Daily Dramatic Chronicle on January 16, 1865. Within three months, its circulation had already grown to four thousand² in the city that boasted more than sixty thousand residents. The Lincoln assassination articles would rapidly boost circulation to five thousand. The de Youngs had established their theatrical daily in a city in which newspapers were as essential to everyday life as were its many saloons and theaters. On that April 15 day, their free theater daily would be distributed throughout the city in its saloons, gambling houses and restaurants; its boardinghouses and hotels; and, as the afternoon turned into evening, within its theaters. Subsequent telegraphed bulletins would necessitate extra editions.

The Daily Dramatic Chronicle’s Monday edition³ included a woodcut image of the alleged assassin himself: the strikingly handsome, popular and melodramatic actor John Wilkes Booth, who had immediately fled Ford’s Theatre and the city of Washington following his shooting of Lincoln. A known Southern sympathizer, Booth would be aggressively pursued by Federal troops as he escaped the nation’s capital, hurriedly riding south through Maryland and into rural northern Virginia. He would be found hiding in a tobacco barn on April 26. When he refused to surrender himself, the barn was set ablaze, and the twenty-six-year-old Booth was shot.

Masthead from the April 14, 1865 edition of the Daily Dramatic Chronicle. Courtesy San Francisco Public Library.

Chapter 2

The Booths in San Francisco

By the mid-1860s, the Booth theatrical family of Maryland was well known in San Francisco. John Wilkes’s eldest brother, Junius Brutus Booth Jr., nicknamed June, had arrived in San Francisco in 1851. He was about thirty and had traveled west with his then-mistress, Harriet Mace, a pretty, young actress from Boston. They moved into a cottage on Signal (now Telegraph) Hill and joined Tom Maguire’s stock theater company. Both appeared in the production of All That Glitters Is Not Gold at Maguire’s new Jenny Lind Theatre that October. The following spring, June and Harriet traveled to Baltimore for a visit with the Booth family. A few months later, they were on their way back to San Francisco, accompanied by June’s father, well-known actor Junius Brutus Booth Sr., and his younger brother Edwin, then nineteen. Edwin was a fledgling actor whose main job was to keep an eye on his aging, hard-drinking and sometimes mentally unstable father. June had encouraged them both to join him and Harriet in San Francisco, telling them it was a growing city of approximately fifty thousand residents, many of whom welcomed high-quality theatrical entertainment. He spoke of the potential for lucrative earnings, often paid in pure gold. June told his father that the whole world was heading to San Francisco, and so should he. Curious about the opportunities in San Francisco and in desperate need of money, Junius Sr. considered June’s words and saw the possibilities of profitable adventures in the West.

They set out on the long and arduous westward journey, finally sailing