The Gold Rush 311party was known as the Barnburners to call attention
to their radicalism. (Supposedly they would burn down
the barn to get rid of the rats.) The Barnburners could
not stomach Cass’s willingness to countenance the
extension of slavery into new territories. Combining
with the antislavery Liberty party, they formed the
Free Soil partyand nominated Van Buren.
Van Buren knew he could not be elected, but he
believed the time had come to take a stand. “The
minds of nearly all mankind have been penetrated by
a conviction of the evils of slavery,” the onetime
“Fox” and “Magician” declared. The Free Soil party
polled nearly 300,000 votes, about 10 percent of the
total, in a very dull campaign. Offered a choice
between the honest ignorance of Taylor and the cyni-
cal opportunism of Cass, the voters—by a narrow
margin—chose the former, Taylor receiv-
ing 1.36 million votes to Cass’s 1.22 mil-
lion. Taylor carried eight of the fifteen
slave states and seven of the fifteen free
states, proof that the sectional issue had
been avoided. The chief significance of
the election was the growing strength of
the antislavery forces; in the next decade,
this would bring about the collapse of
the second party system.The Gold Rush
The question of slavery in the territories
could no longer be deferred. The discov-
ery of gold had brought an army of
prospectors into California. By the sum-
mer 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 coun-
try 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 andAccording to this Democratic cartoon, the only qualification of General Zachary Taylor,
the Whig candidate for president in 1848, is that he killed many Mexicans.