A MULTIFACETED SET OF CHALLENGES

In a war that cost a combined total of 620,000 Northern and Southern lives and mobilized hundreds of thousands more, it was a challenge for both sides to come up with the manpower to sustain their armed forces. Here California could only help the Union cause on the margins because of its remoteness, but in two of the other major challenges, finance and providing medical care for the men in arms, California's gold played a significant – and now largely underappreciated – role in helping the Union prevail. This is not to say that the state united around such aims. Indeed, there was widespread opposition in California to some of the financial actions taken by the federal government, especially the establishment of greenback dollars as legal tender. Moreover, even during the brief period of Republican ascendancy, there were many Democrats who were holdouts and who were philosophically opposed to a vigorous federal government. Finally, some Californians had moved west to get away from military service or any other obligations to Washington that they deemed to be onerous. Thus they were reluctant to have the government impinge on their daily lives in any serious way – as in interfering with their currency. Despite this, a state composed in large part of people who had arrived to seek riches in the gold fields or in some ancillary activity and for whom gold symbolized individual gain nonetheless managed to employ its wealth quite substantially for public purposes.

Dealing with the financial questions became a big issue in California's politics. Hence this chapter also deals with Governor Leland Stanford's leadership in this regard. Moreover, as politicians wrangled over greenback dollars, they were also wrangling over emancipation, which entered the arena of the state's politics during the same period. This issue, too, will receive attention as this chapter focuses on the tug-of-war between the national and the local, which, along with race, was at the heart of reactions to emancipation.