The name usually given to the large numbers of men (and women) who went to Calieornia in 1849 in response to the discovery of gold was Forty-niners. In January 1848,
James W. Marshall first identified gold in the race of the mill that he was constructing for John Sutter. News of the discoveries spread slowly, in part because Sutter wished to keep it secret and in part because it was disbelieved almost everywhere. However, after the presence of gold was confirmed in an address President James K. Polk gave to the Congress on December 5, 1848, enthusiasm reached a mania. Editors called it an epidemic of gold fever, an analogy that captured its capacity to infect families and entire communities.
The first great immigration from the East Coast to California was by sea and occurred during the winter of 1848-49. The Forty-niners left in companies composed of their friends and relatives. One or more companies would charter a ship, and individual members would share the cost. An important advantage for the seagoing Forty-niner was the opportunity to carry a substantial amount of cargo, including items for personal use or things to be sold in the magic market of San Francisco and the gold camps. Already newspapers were filled with stories of the high prices for basic goods (tools, food, and shelter) and services (medical, legal, and transportation). The disadvantage of the seagoing route to California was the long voyage around Cape Horn, perhaps as much as nine months in duration. When the vessel rounded the cape and emerged from the Straits of Magellan, it encountered strong headwinds up the coast, making the voyage up to California one of endless course adjustments. Alternatively, the company of Forty-niners might go to the port of Chagres in Panama, cross the isthmus by way of dugout and mule, and emerge on the Pacific shore to join hundreds and eventually thousands of other argonauts in the search for passage up the coast to San Francisco. Over the winter of 1848-49, some 25,000 Forty-niners (most of them men but not exclusively so) left
This 1849 print, The Way They Co to California, lampoons the rush to California by gold seekers, many of whom went to outlandish lengths to get there and stake a claim before the next person. (Library of Congress)
The ports of Portland, Boston, Nantucket, New York, and Philadelphia on the East Coast; and, farther to the South, from Wilmington, Charleston, and New Orleans, bound for the goldfields of the new El Dorado in California.
With the coming of spring in 1849, a great body of Forty-niners assembled in the staging towns of Independence and St. Joseph in Missouri. There, they organized into companies, bought mules and broke them to the harness, acquired wagons, elected officers, and drew up constitutions. They also packed and repacked their supplies in order to conform to the general rule that with four men to a wagon, each could not exceed 250 pounds. The overland Forty-niners, using mules or oxen, would travel to California by traditional means, using the same wagons that had carried their grandparents to Ohio and Kentucky and parents to Wisconsin and Missouri and Mississippi. Overland Forty-niners expected to make the trip for a cost of about $250. The wagon trains would follow the Oregon Trail through South Pass, where they would turn west and then south for California. The distance of some 2,000 miles had to be covered by late September, when the snows would close the passes of the Sierra Nevada. Furthermore, the many wagon trains would become competitors for the same grass and water. Because grass would not appear on the prairies in sufficient growth to support draft animals until the end of May, all parties of overland Forty-niners had to leave at about the same time.
The overland Forty-niners left with strong feelings about the search for gold and the enterprise on which they were about to embark. They believed, first, that they were going to become rich, or so the stories from California indicated; the sober, hard-working miner must invariably make a fortune. Second, they were convinced that this wealth could be used for the benefit of the family as a whole. In this sense, the venture was not selfish but something for the advantage of many. Third, they supposed that they were doing both God’s will and the national will. After all, part of the issue in the enterprise was to assist in the transformation of California (recently acquired through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) from a Mexican to an American cultural identity. The Forty-niners saw themselves as embodying the ideas associated with Manifest Destiny. Finally, the Forty-niners had a strong sense of history and the significance of their overland enterprise. They were part of a long line of heroic pioneers who opened the West for the benefit of the nation. Part of the evidence of this strong belief was the number of journal keepers on the overland voyage to California. Some 400 diaries and journals of Forty-niners survive for the summer of 1849 alone, and many others must have been lost. Their entries, taken in conjunction with the letters that the argonauts sent to their families, confirm their sense of a national destiny of which they were a part.
The Forty-niners had to cross 2,000 miles in five months. To assist them, they had companies of friends and relatives, constitutions that identified the responsibilities of every member, and elected officers. They were well equipped—although many had packed more weight than the livestock could carry over the journey—and they were heavily armed. Indeed, accidents with firearms would become one of the major sources of casualties. Another was the cholera epidemic of that summer, which reached the departure towns of St. Joseph and Independence and often went west with the Forty-niners. Dangers from Indians, of which all Forty-niners were conscious, turned out to be limited to occasional theft.
Once arrived in California, most Forty-niners ceased to keep a journal and dispersed to the mining camps to dig for gold or to the numerous and growing towns of California’s gold-rush country, where they sought other ways to profit from the search for gold. Yet each one had been welcomed to that mystical club of Forty-niners that would become so significant in later life, in recounting the travels and deeds that made them a part of America’s westward march of empire. The annual migrations to California continued for the next decade, increasingly by sea as steam connections joined the Atlantic Coast ports to Panama and the steamers on the West Coast side carried cargoes of later Forty-niners to California.
Within a few years, many Forty-niners returned to their homes. Their arrival was celebrated by their families if not always by their creditors. They resumed their lives in their communities, although some later moved elsewhere. Others remained in California to make their lives on the West Coast. Some simply disappeared from view, forever lost to their families in the vast landscape of the West. For those who returned or even those who remained in California, their years as a Forty-niner were almost certainly the most memorable of their otherwise routine lives. Forty-niners began to remember and celebrate those years as pioneers, individually and collectively. Some joined in family celebrations, perhaps on the date that the absent argonaut had returned. Others came together in groups, with annual dinners, speeches, and list of members.
The term Forty-niner came to have a general application to all those who went to California in search of gold over a decade, but the nation’s true Forty-niners were forever enshrined in a special category. Not even the Civil War and its half-century of remembrance could diminish the permanent identification associated with the Forty-niner. Songs, speeches, poems, stories, and stage plays about Forty-niners served as a reminder of the time when America went west to California in search of gold.
Further reading: Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginnings of Mining in the Far West (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1947); Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Foster, Abigail Kelley (1811-1887) activist Abigail Kelley Foster was a prominent abolitionist and advocate of women’s status and rights. Abby Kelley was born January 15, 1811, in Pelham in west-central Massachusetts. She was the fifth of Wing Kelley’s seven children by his second wife, Diana Daniels. Abby spent her childhood in the rural districts of Worcester, Massachusetts, where her family moved in 1811. Reared in the Quaker faith, she early developed a spirit of independence and moral commitment, after completing her education, which according to her daughter included several years at the Providence Friends School. She then became a teacher in the Friends school at Lynn, Massachusetts. While there, she was converted to the abolition movement through reading William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. As secretary of the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society, she circulated petitions, distributed literature, and raised funds. Also an officer of the Lynn Female Peach Society, she was among the first to accept Garrison’s radical doctrine of nonresistance, and in 1838 she joined him in founding the New England Non-Resistant Society.
In 1837 Kelley attended the first national woman’s antislavery convention in New York, where she met Angelina and Sarah Grimke. When these abolitionist sisters lectured in Massachusetts that summer, the friendship deepened. Kelley shared with them the Quaker conviction that men and women were equally susceptible to the promptings of the “inner light,”) and by December 1837 she was convinced that to “improve mankind” was “the only object worth living for.”
Her deepening concern with both antislavery and the role of women in public life was demonstrated in May 1838, when she made her first public address before a “promiscuous,” or mixed, audience, at the second women’s antislavery convention. Held in Philadelphia at Pennsylvania Hall, the hall was burned to the ground by a proslavery mob after only one day. So effective was her speech that Theodore Dwight Weld begged her to become an abolitionist lecturer, exclaiming, “Abby, if you don’t, God will smite you!” Influenced by such appeals, she resigned her teaching post and returned to Millbury, Massachusetts, where her family had moved, for six months of soul-searching and studying in preparation for a reformer’s vocation. Encouragement from the Grimkes, reformist and abolitionist Henry Wright, feminist and abolitionist Lucretia Mott, and others helped counteract family efforts to dissuade her.
In May 1839 in Connecticut, Kelley began her long and tempestuous career as a lecturer and agitator. One village minister denounced her, taking as his text a Biblical reference to “that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess.” In Norfolk, where Kelley was forbidden to speak, a hotelkeeper explained that they believed her to be a bad woman, no better then the vilest of New York. Undaunted, she declared in the Connecticut Observer: “Whatever ways and men are right for men to adopt in reforming the world are right also for women to adopt in pursuing the same object.” Notoriety also had its rewards, as the spectacle of a woman addressing the public attracted listeners otherwise cool to the antislavery message.
The abolition movement at this time was deeply troubled by dissension between moderate and radical factions over nonresistance, the role of women, political action, abusive language, and anticlericalism. These were all matters on which Abby Kelley had firm views, and she played a part in the open break, which came at the 1840 convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. When a conservative attempt to block her appointment to the business committee was defeated by a vote of 560-450, a large block of delegates left the conference and organized a new antislavery group.
During the next 15 years Abby Kelley traveled great distances, carrying her message throughout New England and into New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Preaching Garrison’s doctrine of “No Union with Slaveholders” and his denunciation of the constitution as “a covenant with death,” she also helped to advance the feminist cause by opening public platforms to women. In March 1841, she resigned from the Society of Friends because of its equivocal position on slavery. She then joined a small band of radicals who disclaimed allegiance to both church and state. One of these companions in the early 1840s was Stephen Symonds Foster, a New Hampshire radical who, after leaving Dartmouth with the intention of studying theology, had rejected all clerical institutions as proslavery and set out to topple them. He often interrupted religious services to denounce slavery. In 1843, he published the ”Brotherhood of Thieves, or, A True Picture Of The American Clergy and Church.”
In Foster, Abby Kelley found a man thoroughly in sympathy with her beliefs and practices. Their courtship extended for four years as their desire to wed conflicted with their devotion to abolition. Finally married on December 21, 1845, in Pennsylvania, they thereafter often traveled as a lecture team. A noteworthy example of their effectiveness together occurred early in 1846 when they visited Oberlin College during a religious revival. In a series of meetings that drew much interest, they attacked preachers, politicians, and the government. The faculty, including the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, denounced them as infidels. Nevertheless, they returned in the fall, at which time Stephen conducted a brawling debate with Oberlin’s president, Asa Mahan. At least one Oberlin student, Lucy Stone, was as deeply moved by the Fosters’ visit as the faculty was dismayed.
An acrimonious break with Garrison, under whose strict regime the Fosters became increasingly restive during the 1850s, pushed Foster further to the margins of the movement. By 1856, the Fosters had become convinced that abolitionists must organize politically, or the growing Republican Party would win over their supporters with halfway measures. Their demand for an abolitionist third party was too extreme for Garrison, who saw some good in the rise of the Republicans. In 1859, at the annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison publicly accused Foster of dishonesty in collecting funds. Although tempers cooled after the Civil War, the rift was never fully healed.
With the exception of a final fund-raising tour of New England in 1870, poor health and a failing voice generally limited Abby Kelley Foster, postwar activities to local affairs. She died on January 14, 1887.
Further reading: Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Ti-me: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Anti-Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
Fourier, Charles (1772-1837) socialist philosopher A French philosopher whose ideas influenced several American utopian movements, Charles Fourier was born at Besanyon in 1772, the son of a businessman. Largely self-educated, he had hoped to join the military as an engineer but instead joined the family business, working as a tradesman in Marseilles. His lack of interest and skill in the business world, coupled with the family firm’s financial difficulties, led him to abandon the trade in 1799 and take a job as a civil servant in Lyons. He wrote his first book, The Social Destiny of Man: Or, Theory of the Four Movements, in 1808. Little else is known about his life until 1816, when he inherited money from his mother and began spending all of his time writing. In 1823, he moved to Paris, where he would live and write until his death in 1837.
While Fourier’s theories contained singular and peculiar interpretations of the cosmos, he also analyzed the burgeoning capitalist society around him. It is for these ideas about the social order that he is remembered today. Troubled by the chaos and volatile imbalances he saw in capitalist societies, Fourier proposed to reorganize them into balanced structures that would create social harmony. These new organizing units would be called phalanxes, agricultural groupings in which people worked on the tasks for which they were most suited, thus shedding the confines of industrial life and cultivating their whole selves.
Each phalanx would live in a community dwelling called a phalanstery, where all residents could live in the apartments that best fit their budgets (Fourier even planned the dimensions of the rooms). Each phalanstery would operate efficiently and profitably by centralizing daily activities such as eating and cleaning and by assigning all other kinds of work to the people most interested in doing them. Fourier predicted that people would compete in a friendly way, thus producing good products without creating conflicts. All profits would be community property, divided among members of each phalanx along these lines: five-twelfths to labor, four-twelfths to capital, three-twelfths to ability.
Phalanxes would thus be cooperative organizations, where workers would ideally become part-owners as well. Once the entire world had been divided into phalanxes, human society would become more ordered and harmonious. Capitalist impulses would not be abandoned, but rather redirected. In Fourier’s utopian vision, humankind would be able to cultivate the positive aspects of industrial capitalism (such as productivity and ingenuity) while eliminating the venality and despair that he saw in the industrial societies of his time.
Despite the bizarre aspects of Fourier’s world view, his theories attracted numerous followers, most notably in France and the United States. His utopian notions about human perfectability corresponded well with some of the ideas being expressed by transcendentalists and religious reformers in America. The most famous American community to adopt Fourierist principles was Brook Farm, which operated in Massachusetts from 1841 to 1847. Other Fourierist phalansteries were founded during these years, but none lasted long.
While Fourier’s ideas seem impractical and naive today, he and other utopian socialists are historically significant because they criticized a capitalist system that was creating enormous social change, anxiety, and financial insecurity, and proposed to reorganize society through rational planning and humane working conditions.
See also TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT.
Further reading: Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 7th ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
—Eleanor H. McConnell
World History
