Preface and Acknowledgments

This book owes its existence to an exhibit I curated in 1996 on the history of San Francisco. As a historian of women, I was stepping outside my comfort zone to undertake such a project, but my love for the city trumped my anxiety, so I took a deep breath and proceeded. The San Francisco Public Library was mounting the exhibit to celebrate the opening of its new main branch, and thus it was especially important to do a good job.

The challenge was to explore “The Dimensions of Diversity,” the title chosen for the project. One such dimension, not surprisingly, was religion. I decided to display a letter from the most celebrated clergyman in the city's history, the Reverend Thomas Starr King – a letter written to his best friend on the eve of the Civil War. The letter had captured my imagination because it was so impassioned about the writer's Unionist sentiments. In it King described a speech he had given to a large crowd in the city – an oration in which he wholeheartedly denounced secession – as well as the enthusiastic response the speech received. I had never thought much about what happened in my home state during the war, but the letter alerted me to the possibility that it might have been very interesting. I was then involved in completing other projects, but I promised myself that I would return to the subject of the letter when life permitted me to do so. This book is the result.