The Age of Gold (52 page)
Authors: H.W. Brands
Life for some of the prostitutes was as hard and hazardous in California as anywhere else. Certain of the Chinese women, for example, were little more than sex slaves for their pimps. (Whether Yee Ah Tye became directly involved in the sex trade is unclear, but in his role as association leader he certainly benefited indirectly.) Yet other women did well, at least financially. At a time when a Paris streetwalker might make the equivalent of two dollars a night, some of the Frenchwomen in San Francisco made $400. Others moved into semipermanent arrangements with men who were willing and able to keep them in style.
And then there were the madams, entrepreneurs like Belle Cora. (Belle wasn’t married to Charles Cora but adopted his last name for protection and a semblance of respectability.) How much money Belle made is impossible to know, yet her house on Dupont Street was renowned for the sumptuousness of its furnishings, the quality of its food and wines, the talent of its musicians, and the beauty of its women. Men with lust in their hearts—or merely a desire for the warmth of a woman’s touch—and gold in their pockets beat a path through the muddy streets to her door, where she made sure they wiped their feet before entering.
In the early wild days, Belle conducted her business unmolested. Some of the most distinguished men in San Francisco patronized her establishment, and no one thought the worse of them for it. But as the city settled down, and as mothers and families came to figure more prominently in civic life, Belle encountered increasing disapproval. Sarah Royce lamented the coarsening effect of the general idea that men should pay for feminine favors. Girls from respectable families, performing in school plays or musical recitals, discovered that strange men would throw them money and other gifts. “They commonly accepted them, often with looks of exultation,” Sarah explained. “And still worse, there were mothers who not
merely countenanced the thing but even boasted of the amount their daughters had thus received. It must indeed be an obtuse moral sense that could not perceive the corrupting tendency of such customs; and I have since seen some sad falls into positive vice of those whose downward course appeared to begin in these and similar practices.”
If the women who made a business of accepting men’s favors had kept to themselves, they might have suffered less obloquy. Yet this wasn’t really an option, for San Francisco had grown so fast, and so haphazardly, that the prostitutes—and their customers—shared neighborhoods and even sidewalks with the most pious members of the community. “Is it not wonderful,” declared one indignant matron, “that young men should nightly spend their evenings, like dogs, smelling out all these vile excrescences, peeking through the cracks and crevices of doors, windows and blinds in our crowded thoroughfares, in the full face of ladies and gentlemen going and returning from church?” Another woman complained of the prostitutes: “As I passed up the streets these creatures attracted my attention by giggling, laughing and making impertinent remarks to each other, looking me in the face and passing, and then allowing me to repass them under their licentious stare and meaningless giggle.”
Belle was more discreet, but ran into trouble anyway. One evening she and Charles Cora attended a performance at the American Theater. Federal marshal William Richardson and his wife were seated nearby, and Mrs. Richardson complained of the presence of the notorious madam. At his wife’s urging, Richardson insisted that the theater manager eject Belle and Cora. The manager refused, causing the Richardsons to leave, although not before they insulted Belle and Cora. The gambler and the madam stayed till the end of the performance, but the next day Cora defended Belle’s honor by calling on Richardson and returning the insult. One thing led to another, and Cora shot Richardson dead.
Cora was charged with murder and brought to trial. Belle enlisted the best and most expensive counsel—she reportedly paid $15,000 to lead attorney Edward Baker—on her lover’s behalf. Baker cast Cora as a gentleman among gamblers, and Belle as a good-hearted woman merely giving the city what it wanted. Baker’s version didn’t sufficiently move the jury to
acquit, but it did produce a deadlock. Cora was awaiting retrial when the Vigilance Committee stepped in.
Belle realized that neither her money nor her capacity for blackmail— the idea evidently occurred to her—could stay the march of popular justice. (The possibility of being blackmailed, or at least embarrassed by Belle’s testimony, may well have influenced the calculations of those who could have kept Cora out of the Vigilance Committee’s hands but declined to do so.) Yet she did manage to shame the committee into granting a final request. At the eleventh hour, in the very shadow of the noose, she married Charles Cora. For a moment she was his wife—and then became his widow.
I
N A FEW YEARS
the world would discover how William Sherman felt about armed resistance to constitutional authority. Those who knew him in San Francisco in 1856 got a preview, as well as a reminder of how close to the frontier the city remained, with everything such proximity implied in terms of lawlessness and lack of stable political institutions.
The hanging of Cora and Casey might have ended the rule of the revived Vigilance Committee if Thomas King, the brother of the murdered reform editor, hadn’t taken up the fallen quill. The second King demanded that his brother’s mission continue. In an editorial entitled “What the People Expect of the Vigilance Committee,” he declared, “The people look to them for reform—a radical reorganization in spirit if not in fact—of our city government.” The larger conspiracy behind his brother’s murder must be rooted out and the plotters punished, King said. Beyond this, the political corruption that allowed such conspiracies to flourish must be extirpated. “If we would have order hereafter, an example must now be made of the ballot-box stuffers.” King minced no words in explaining what he meant. “Let the men who have insulted our community, disgraced our State, and sown the seeds of which we have been lately reaping the fruits, meet their due fate, DEATH BY HANGING…. Hang one ballot-box stuffer, and we shall have no more of them.”
Not all the Vigilance men considered vote-tampering a capital offense, but most believed that some additional housecleaning was required. A few
wanted to extend the forcible reforms beyond the city government to the state. A committee headquarters was established on Stockton Street (called “Fort Gunnybags” after the sandbags that afforded protection from sniper fire; bunkered cannon added an offensive threat). The committee leadership met behind the sandbags, while armed Vigilance squads roamed the city.
Such open sedition compelled Governor Johnson to respond. He summoned Sherman to Benicia, where the local commander of federal troops, General John Wool, was stationed. By Sherman’s recollection, Wool agreed to supply Sherman with federal arms and ammunition, which Sherman, as the commander of the California militia, would use to suppress the insurrection at San Francisco.
The governor then prevailed on the chief justice of the California supreme court, David Terry, for a writ of habeas corpus against the Vigilance Committee, to require the committee to hand back another prisoner they had seized from jail. When the committee rejected the writ, the governor issued a proclamation declaring the Vigilance Committee in violation of state law and commanding General Sherman to move against it. Sherman responded by publishing an order to his militiamen, summoning them to service in defense of the state.
Alarmed, several Vigilance leaders visited Sherman. If he carried out his order, they said, blood would flow on San Francisco’s streets.
Sherman, perhaps recalling the insubordination of John Frémont and the troubles it caused during the American occupation, had no sympathy for the rebels. Fixing them with his cold blue eyes, he declared that if they wanted to avert bloodshed, they would have to get out of the way. “Remove your fort; cease your midnight councils; and prevent your armed bodies from patrolling the streets,” he said.
The rebels asked Sherman where he was going to get arms for his men. He declined to answer, except to say that he would certainly get them. Some while later, a second Vigilance delegation—“a class of the most intelligent and wealthiest men of the city, who earnestly and honestly desired to prevent bloodshed,” Sherman thought—approached him. He gave them the same answer he had given the others. “I told them that our men were
enrolling very fast, and that, when I deemed the right moment had come, the Vigilance Committee must disperse, else bloodshed and destruction of property would inevitably follow.”
Sherman prepared for battle and began to devise his strategy. But suddenly General Wool flinched. The army commander decided not to get involved in a state squabble without express authorization from Washington. Awaiting this, he declined to release the weapons from the federal arsenal to Sherman.
Wool’s reversal outraged Sherman. He believed he had Wool’s promise to supply the weapons necessary to uphold the law and preserve order; without such a promise Sherman never would have agreed to call out the state troops. But now that Wool refused to cooperate, Sherman was made to appear an impotent fool, a general without arms. He angrily resigned his commission in the militia.
Sherman’s resignation marked the beginning of a reign of uncontested power on the part of the Vigilance Committee. For many weeks the committee issued orders from Fort Gunnybags, directing the arrest of prominent malefactors. These were tried, usually in secret, and punished. Besides Casey and Cora, two other men were executed, both for murder. Another man committed suicide while in detention. (Later generations would greet jailhouse “suicides” with rightful skepticism, but considering the readiness of the Vigilance men to conduct executions openly, there is little reason to think they resorted to this ruse.) The committee declined Thomas King’s advice to hang vote-tamperers, but it banished those convicted of ballot irregularities, under penalty of death for return.
The illicit authority of the committee met its severest test when Chief Justice Terry, a vicious scrapper besides being a vocal critic of the vigilance movement, got into a fight with one of the committee’s constables. In the fight Terry stabbed the constable, who for several days lingered between life and death. The committee arrested Terry and held him at Fort Gunny- bags.
Besides revealing the shocking anarchy into which San Francisco and now California were falling—when the Founding Fathers had established the principle of checks and balances between the branches of government,
they certainly didn’t have daggers in mind—Terry’s arrest put the committee in a quandary. To try the judge would be to raise the flag of rebellion even higher, but to let him go would mock the principles for which the committee stood. If the victim died, the committee’s dilemma would grow still more acute; consequently the committee leaders prayed for his survival. As it happened, the man did pull through, and Terry was quietly released.
The experience with Terry sobered many of the Vigilance men, and the committee began looking for a graceful way to terminate its business. Sherman wasn’t a neutral observer but probably an accurate one when he told his brother, “I think the community is getting sick and disgusted with their secrecy, their street fools, and parades, and mock trials.” Anyway, the committee could reasonably claim that its work was done. The example of those brought before the committee had, as anticipated, encouraged many others to leave the city. One tally placed the departures at about 800, in addition to the 25 formally banished.
Accordingly, in August 1856 the Vigilance Committee voted to adjourn. With medals struck for the occasion (showing the All-Seeing Eye on the obverse, the Goddess of Justice on the reverse), the committee authorized a final parade, in which the popular forces of order appeared one last time before marching off—as it turned out, into history.
The sunburnt immigrant, walking with his wife and little ones beside his gaunt and weary oxen in mid-continent; the sea-traveller pining on shipboard, tortured with mal de mer; the homesick bride whose wedding trip had included a passage of the Isthmus; the merchant whose stock needed replenishing; and the miner fortunate enough to be able to return home— everyone, except of course the men of the Pacific Mail Steamship company, prayed for a Pacific railroad.
—Hubert Howe Bancroft
In conceptualizing America’s past, historians often draw a dividing line at 1865, which is accounted a critical moment in the nation’s political evolution. And so it was, for in finally settling the dual controversies of slavery and states’ rights that had vexed American politics since the founding of the republic, the Confederate defeat finished the work the framers of the Constitution had commenced in 1787.
Yet, from another vantage, the turning point can be detected earlier, in 1848 at Coloma. In political terms, the gold discovery can be seen as the beginning of the end of the antebellum era, as the catalyst for the transforming reactions of the decade that followed. By peopling the West far faster than anyone imagined, the Gold Rush compelled Congress to confront the contradictions it had long preferred to avoid. Had the territory taken from Mexico in 1848 filled up as slowly as the territory acquired from France in 1803, the likelihood of a peaceful resolution of the sectional controversy almost certainly would have been much greater. It is impossible to know whether war might have been averted; history never tells us what would have happened, only what did happen. But the gold discovery collapsed the calendar, demanding an answer to the
crucial question of slavery in the territories before the collective wisdom of national politics could devise an answer that didn’t fatally antagonize powerful constituencies on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. In pounding on the Union’s door in 1850, California awakened the dogs of division and set them howling all at once. From the Compromise of 1850 ran a straight, if tortured, path to southern secession and civil war. And Californians, beginning with John Frémont but including such other striking characters as William Walker and Asbury Harpending, did their full part in propelling America down that path.
Beyond politics, the Gold Rush helped initiate the modern era of American economic development. The Industrial Revolution had begun in America before James Marshall struck gold, but the new wealth of the new West accelerated the revolution. The gold of California, and the gold and silver of California’s nephew Nevada, poured liquidity east, lubricating the gears of the nation’s industrial machinery (and in the process underwriting the Union’s victory in the Civil War). More important, California demanded, and received, a transcontinental railroad. The construction of the Pacific railroad was a huge project, the largest construction job of the age; its effects on American capital, commodity, and labor markets were felt from coast to coast (and beyond the coasts to Europe and Asia). But the true significance of the railroad emerged only upon its completion. By tying the coasts together, the Pacific railroad created the largest unified market in the world, the market that allowed the American economy to grow into the colossus it became by the beginning of the twentieth century.