312 Chapter 11 Westward Expansion
by violence to keep them from mining for gold. Even
the local Californians (now American citizens) were
discriminated against. The few free blacks in
California and the several thousand more who came
in search of gold were treated no better. As for the
far larger Indian population, it was almost wiped out.
There were about 150,000 Indians in California in
the mid-1840s but only 35,000 in 1860.
The ethnic conflict was only part of the prob-
lem. Rough, hard men, separated from women,
lusted for gold in a strange, wild country where
fortunes could be made in a day, gambled away in
an hour, or stolen in an instant. The situation
demanded the establishment of a territorial govern-
ment. President Taylor appreciated this, and in his
gruff, simple-hearted way he suggested an uncom-
plicated answer: Admit California directly as a state,
letting the Californians decide for themselves about
slavery. The rest of the Mexican cession could be
formed into another state. No need for Congress,
with its angry rivalries, to meddle at all, he
believed. In this way the nation could avoid the
divisive effects of sectional debate.
The Californians reacted favorably to Taylor’s
proposal. They were overwhelmingly opposed to
slavery, though not for humanitarian reasons. On the
contrary, they tended to look on blacks as they did
Mexicans and feared that if slavery were permitted,
white gold seekers would be disadvantaged. “They
would be unable,” one delegate to the California
constitutional convention predicted, “to compete
with the bands of negroes who would
be set to work under the direction of
capitalists. It would become a monop-
oly.” By October 1849 they had drawn
up a constitution that outlawed slav-
ery, and by December the new state
government was functioning.
Taylor was the owner of a large
plantation and more than 100 slaves;
Southerners had assumed (without
bothering to ask) that he would fight to
keep the territories open to slavery. But
being a military man, he was above all a
nationalist; he disliked the divisiveness
that partisan discussion of the issue was
producing. Southerners were horrified
by the president’s reasoning. To admit
California would destroy the balance
between free and slave states in the
Senate; to allow all the new land to
become free would doom the South to
wither in a corner of the country, sur-
rounded by hostile free states. Should
that happen, how long could slavery sustain itself,
even in South Carolina? Radicals were already saying
that the South would have to choose between seces-
sion and surrender. Taylor’s plan played into the
hands of extremists.Burrum, from Six Months in the Gold Mines
atwww.myhistorylab.comThe Compromise of 1850
This was no longer a squabble over territorial gov-
ernments. With the Union itself at stake, Henry
Clay rose to save the day. He had been as angry and
frustrated when the Whigs nominated Taylor as he
had been when they passed him over for Harrison.
Now, well beyond age seventy and in ill health, he
put away his ambition and his resentment and for
the last time concentrated his remarkable vision on
a great, multifaceted national problem. California
must be free and soon admitted to the Union, but
the South must have some compensation. For that
matter, why not seize the opportunity to settle
every outstanding sectional conflict related to slav-
ery? Clay wondered long and hard, drew up a plan,
then consulted his old Whig rival Webster and
obtained his general approval. On January 29,
1850, he laid his proposal, “founded upon mutual
forbearance,” before the Senate. A few days later he
defended it on the floor of the Senate in the last
great speech of his life.ReadtheDocumentGold prospectors used a “long Tom” to wash gold from gravel in a stream. The
California gold rush brought mostly men—along with a few women—west in search of
their fortunes.