Too often, California is left out of discussions of the Civil War. That neglect makes a certain amount of sense, since no major battles took place in the Golden State. Yet, as scholars such as Glenna Matthews, Stacey Smith, and Leonard Richards have shown in recent years, Californians struggled with issues of slavery, racial and ethnic discrimination, and federal relations, the same issues over which Americans fought and killed one another from 1861 to 1865.
A new book by attorney and author Brian McGinty brings additional attention to California during the nation’s greatest crisis. McGinty came to this project with sound credentials. He is the author of several important books dealing with legal aspects of the Civil War era, including one on John Brown’s trial and another about Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of his work has focused specifically on California during the period, such as a book on Archy Lee, an African American man who fought for his freedom in the state’s courts in 1858, and an article on future Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston’s stint as the top U.S. army commander in San Francisco in early 1861.
Lincoln in California, despite its title, is less about Lincoln’s relationship with the state and more about the various roles California and Californians played during the Civil War. (Lincoln, as McGinty notes, never set foot in California, although he apparently toyed with the idea of residing there following his presidency.) The book, aimed at a popular audience, is a virtual catalog of numerous ways the war affected California and vice versa; readers, whether amateur or professional historians, are likely to discover some new facts from McGinty’s work.
After a brief introduction, the next six largely chronological chapters discuss the importance of California in the nation’s increasingly sectionalized politics of the late antebellum period. Here McGinty makes a case for Lincoln’s early interest in the Golden State and delves into the politics of slavery in the supposedly free state of California. With the exception of Chapter 12, which provides a military narrative from 1861 to 1865 with special attention to Californians in the Union army, the remaining chapters are thematic. Chapter 10, for example, details how California gold helped to finance the Union war effort; Chapter 11 focuses on Lincoln’s lamentable Native American policies (including those affecting some non-Californian tribes); and Chapter 13 recounts the life of journalist and Lincoln friend Noah Brooks, who resided in California in the late 1850s but spent the war in the nation’s capital. This combination of chronological and thematic chapters mostly works well. One exception is the very brief (four-page) chapter on the death of Edward Baker, Lincoln’s friend who served simultaneously as a U.S. senator from Oregon and a U.S. army colonel, at the October 1861 Battle of Ball’s Bluff in Virginia. The book’s penultimate chapter, it comes after a review of various wartime events, including Lincoln’s own death in 1865. It would have been less jarring had McGinty dealt with Baker’s death earlier, when he discusses Baker’s life and his close relationship with Lincoln.
Occasionally, the book includes seemingly unnecessary detail. For instance, one wonders whether a book ostensibly about Lincoln and California needs to provide so many biographical sketches of military officers fighting back East, complete with their West Point class ranks. To take another example, it’s unclear why it’s important for this book to discuss Salmon Chase’s appointment as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (88–89), as there’s no apparent California connection. In other places, readers would likely appreciate more detail and analysis. For example, McGinty states that the Thirteenth Amendment “weakened Native American servitude in California, but it did not end legal peonage or kidnapping” (126). There he leaves the matter, and one wishes he had fleshed out that important observation.
More concerning are the unfortunate factual errors, which careful editing should have corrected. For example, contrary to McGinty’s assertion, the Kansas–Nebraska Act did not “effectively repeal the Compromise of 1850” (13); it effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of three decades earlier. Furthermore, Jefferson Davis did not serve as secretary of war in the Buchanan administration as McGinty declares on pages 23 and 140; he held that post in President Franklin Pierce’s cabinet. Neither was Davis from Alabama, as stated on page 50 (in other spots, McGinty properly identifies Mississippi as the state Davis represented in Congress).
McGinty reports, too, correctly in this case, that the 1860 Republican platform condemned the “recent reopening of the African slave trade” (22). Yet Congress had not reopened the slave trade, banned since 1808. The Republican charge likely referred to the then well-known illegal importation of approximately four hundred enslaved individuals to Jekyll Island, Georgia, aboard the Wanderer in 1859. Without an explanation from the author—in a footnote, if not the text—a reader might take the Republican platform at face value and believe that Congress had, in fact, repealed the ban.
As a final example, McGinty erroneously suggests on page 126 that the U.S. House passed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1864. It’s true, as the author states, that the Senate approved the amendment that year, but the House failed to provide the necessary two-thirds support when it considered the amendment in 1864. Instead, following the November 1864 election, a lame-duck House in January 1865, with arm twisting from Lincoln, gave the amendment final congressional approval and sent it on to the states for ratification. (Fans of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln will remember this series of events.) Speaking of the Thirteenth Amendment, the book refers to it as the Fifth Amendment on page 139.
Still, no single error, or collection of them, can totally eclipse the positive qualities of this book. McGinty’s welcome examination of California during the Civil War era reminds us that no part of the nation escaped the scourge of that transformative conflict.
University of California Press