The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War

From award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards, an authoritative and revealing portrait of an overlooked harbinger of the terrible battle yet to come. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Americans of all stripes saw the potential for both wealth and power. Among the more calculating were Southern slave owners. By making California a slave state, they could increase the value of their slavesby 50 percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain additional influence in Congress and expand Southern economic clout, abetted by a new transcontinental railroad that would run through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, California entered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would agitate for even more slave territory, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to the Civil War itself. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Leonard L. Richards, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, took his degrees at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis. He has also taught at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii. His Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America won the 1970 American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780—1860 took the second-place 2001 Lincoln Prize. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.


From the Hardcover edition.