In this revelatory study, award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards makes clear the links between the Gold Rush and the Civil War.
Richards explains how Southerners envisioned California as a new market for slaves for digging for gold, schemed to tie California to the South via railroad, and imagined splitting off the state’s southern half for a slave state. We see how the Gold Rush influenced other regional and national squabbles, and we meet renegade New York Democrat David Broderick, who became a force in San Francisco politics in 1849, and his archrival, William Gwin, a major Mississippi slaveholder.
Richards recounts the political battles alongside the fiery California feuds, duels, and, perhaps, outright murders as the state came shockingly close to being divided in two.
Leonard L. Richards, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, earned degrees at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis. His books have won numerous awards and honors, including the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1970, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1987, and the second-place Lincoln Prize in 2001. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
