The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California by Glenna Matthews (review)

Glenna Matthews's new book offers an important reminder that the crisis of Union stretched beyond the battlefields in the East. As was the case in most of the North, the Union and Confederate armies never fought each other on California soil, but the political, economic, and cultural changes that accompanied the war affected the Golden State no less than they did the rest of the Union. Those transformations, Matthews argues, created "modern California" as the state became more integrated into the Union through the era's new nationalism and the construction of transportation and communication links between East and West.

In Matthews's telling, the Civil War history of California, usually noted simply as a free, Union state, becomes a complex narrative that will be familiar to historians knowledgeable about other Union states with substantial pro-Confederate populations. California may have been a free state by law, but several hundred black slaves labored in gold mines. In the 1850s, southern émigrés controlled state politics, and two of California's U.S. senators owned slaves in their home states, Mississippi and North Carolina, and sided with the Confederacy after the outbreak of the war. Even after the Republican victories in the election of 1860, the state's politicians tended to side with the conservative wing of the party, and many southern Californians became antiwar, anti-emancipation Copperheads as the war progressed. Still, California remained loyal to the Union, and the state offered irreplaceable support for the Union war effort, shipping $100 million in gold to northeastern banks and donating more money than any other state to the U.S. Sanitary Commission. As in much of the U.S. West, Californians' enthusiasm for the war was disastrous for Native peoples. With no rebels to fight, California militia and the state's nearly seventeen thousand Union army enlistees funneled their wartime patriotism into massacring Indians in California and neighboring territories.

Universalist minister Thomas Starr King plays a central role in Matthews's account of California's Civil War years. Born and educated in Massachusetts, King moved to San Francisco in 1860, arriving at a moment that proved crucial in shaping California's future. In that election year, the state's Republican party was growing in popularity, and King joined the campaign that handed Lincoln California's electoral votes. King's rise to prominence in California and his connections to leading writers and activists in the East gave him a central role in steering the state toward a pro-Union course. During the war, King used his oratorical skills to raise money for the Sanitary Commission, helping San Francisco procure $200,000 in donations in September 1862 alone. Just as significantly, in Matthews's view, King introduced northern cultural ideals to California while drawing New Englanders' interest to the state. Matthews interprets King as a cultural broker who linked the two coasts of the United States in "a transcontinental cultural system" (149).

While Matthews's focus on California breaks the usual geographic boundaries placed on the study of the Civil War, she adheres to an older chronology that proves detrimental to her work. Although her introduction acknowledges the close link between Reconstruction in the South and events in the West, she only briefly acknowledges the war's post-1865 denouement. As a result, The Golden State in the Civil War offers a cursory account of California's place in the post-war debates over race and citizenship. California's diverse population of Anglos, Californios, Asians, blacks, and Indians contrasted with the dichotomous race relations of the eastern United States, but the state experienced a similar postwar backlash against emancipation and the Republican party. More discussion of the years immediately following the war, including the failure of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in California, would...