The question of slavery in the territories could no longer be deferred. The discovery of gold had brought an army of prospectors into California. By the summer of 1848 San Francisco had become almost a ghost town, and an estimated two-thirds of the adult males of Oregon had hastened south to the gold fields. After President Polk confirmed the “extraordinary character” of the strike in his annual message of December 1848, there was no containing the gold seekers. During 1849, some 25,000 Americans made their way to California from the East by ship; more than 55,000 others crossed the continent by overland routes. About 8,000 Mexicans, 5,000 South Americans, and numbers of Europeans joined the rush.
The rough limits of the gold country had been quickly marked out. For 150 miles and more along the western slope of the Sierra stretched the great mother lode. Along the expanse any stream or canyon, or any ancient gravel bed might conceal a treasure in nuggets, flakes, or dust. Armed with pickaxes and shovels, with washing pans, even with knives and spoons, eager prospectors hacked and dug and sifted, each accumulating a hoard (some great, some small) of gleaming yellow metal.
The impact on the region was enormous. Between 1849 and 1860 about 200,000 people, nearly all of them males, crossed the Rockies to California and thousands more reached California by ship via Cape Horn. Almost overnight the Spanish American population was reduced to the status of a minority. Disregarding justice and reason alike, the newcomers from the East, as one observer noted, “regarded every man but a native [North] American as an interloper.” They referred to people of Latin American origin as “greasers” and sought by law and
Gold prospectors used a "long Tom” to wash gold from gravel in a stream. The California gold rush brought mostly men—along with a few women—west in search of their fortunes.
By violence to keep them from mining for gold. Even the local Californians (now American citizens) were
Discriminated against. The few free blacks in
California and the several thousand more who came in search of gold were treated no better. As for the far larger Indian population, it was almost wiped out. There were about 150,000 Indians in California in the mid-1840s but only 35,000 in 1860.
The ethnic conflict was only part of the problem. Rough, hard men, separated from women, lusted for gold in a strange, wild country where fortunes could be made in a day, gambled away in an hour, or stolen in an instant. The situation demanded the establishment of a territorial government. President Taylor appreciated this, and in his gruff, simple-hearted way he suggested an uncomplicated answer: Admit California directly as a state, letting the Californians decide for themselves about slavery. The rest of the Mexican cession could be formed into another state. No need for Congress, with its angry rivalries, to meddle at all, he believed. In this way the nation could avoid the divisive effects of sectional debate.
The Californians reacted favorably to Taylor’s proposal. They were overwhelmingly opposed to slavery, though not for humanitarian reasons. On the contrary, they tended to look on blacks as they did Mexicans and feared that if slavery were permitted, white gold seekers would be disadvantaged. “They would be unable,” one delegate to the California constitutional convention predicted, “to compete with the bands of negroes who would be set to work under the direction of capitalists. It would become a monopoly.” By October 1849 they had drawn up a constitution that outlawed slavery, and by December the new state government was functioning.
Taylor was the owner of a large plantation and more than 100 slaves; Southerners had assumed (without bothering to ask) that he would fight to keep the territories open to slavery. But being a military man, he was above all a nationalist; he disliked the divisiveness that partisan discussion of the issue was producing. Southerners were horrified by the president’s reasoning. To admit California would destroy the balance between free and slave states in the Senate; to allow all the new land to become free would doom the South to wither in a corner of the country, surrounded by hostile free states. Should that happen, how long could slavery sustain itself, even in South Carolina? Radicals were already saying that the South would have to choose between secession and surrender. Taylor’s plan played into the hands of extremists.
•••-[Read the Document Burrum, from Six Months in the Gold Mines at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
