THE RUSH

An exploration of the California Gold Rush, linking it with attempts to join the state to the Confederacy.

It all began at Sutter’s Mill, the mini-empire of “a failed clothier who’d abandoned his wife and five children in Switzerland and sailed to America.” John Sutter went as far as he dared in the remoteness of Mexican California to found “a private kingdom in the wilderness,” one staffed by enslaved Indigenous peoples, their numbers augmented by vigilante raids on neighboring villages, with Sutter trafficking captured women and children. In this account by Phibrick (In the Heart of the Sea, 2000; Travels With George, 2021, etc.), this theme of enslavement and violence defined California up to the Civil War and beyond, with white supremacy a constant. Indeed, California legislators worked to pass laws banning Black people from entering the state, while later railroad magnates attempted unsuccessfully to restrict transcontinental travel to whites only. Against this backdrop, an early senator, William Gwin, attempted to unite Southern California with the Confederacy, complete with importing enslaved Black people, but, on realizing that the northern part of the state had all the gold, he suggested that “the state should declare its independence as part of a Pacific Republic extending all the way east to the Rocky Mountains.” To his credit, a senior military officer stationed in California, the future Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, told his officers that should they wish to join the secessionist cause, they should go home to do so, saying, “Strife here would be civil war—not North against South—but neighbor against neighbor; and no one can imagine the horrors that would ensue.” All the same, vigilante violence was so extensive that California provided a “dress rehearsal” for the dissolution of the Union, even if the statehood conferred on California in 1850 admitted it as a free state. As ever, Philbrick untangles this complex story and makes of it an elegant narrative.

A lucid, lively melding of economic and political history that casts new light on the Golden State.