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History of the 1848-1853 California Gold Rush (2003) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

History of the 1848-1853 California Gold Rush (2003) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 20, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2003 and published in six parts on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 43,500 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  ***
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 20, 2014
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Background History of the California Gold Rush

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The real story of the California Gold Rush has to be traced back to the Mexican War, which was fought from 1846 to 1848. The war started out as a dispute over Texas. However, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, America ended up not only with Texas, but also Nevada, Utah, Arizona and California.

During this time period, the country was expanding and its transportation improving. Once gold was discovered in California, waves of fortune-seekers, also known as 49ers (because they came during 1849), came from all over the world to California, thus drastically impacting both the economy and social life of California, which in turn impacted the rest of the nation. Even though few of the 49ers actually made a fortune from mining gold, many found other ways to earn a living, especially once the gold became scarce and xenophobia emerged. Nonetheless the incredible number and diversity of people who came to California seeking an easy fortune influenced Californian and American life.

John Sutter, on whose lands the gold discovery had occurred, moved to California from Switzerland in 1830 and obtained a property charter from the Mexican government. During this time, he established a fort at New Helvetia, at the junction of the American and Sacramento rivers. He strove to build an agricultural empire, but the gold discovery was the beginning of the downfall of his dream. Along with James Marshall, Sutter located gold at his mill in 1848.

It may seem odd that James Marshall and John Sutter were quite displeased upon testing the gold and confirming its identity. But Sutter was barely interested in profits to be made from the discovery; his original plan was to establish an agricultural powerhouse, and he stuck to it. He was afraid, however, that if news of the discovery leaked, his workers would abandon him and try to make a profit of their own from the gold fields. He also feared the competition over land and resources that would ensue if a massive rush of immigrants came to California to seek gold. Thus, he and Marshall agreed to keep the discovery secret until the mill’s completion, so that Sutter would retain the manpower necessary for the job.

Stories circulated the countryside within weeks. However, they were all too often dismissed as wild rumors, until they caught the ears of a new and ambitious Mormon immigrant, Samuel Brannan. Brannan immediately sensed immense riches in store from the potential gold boom, and keenly bought most of the picks, pans, and shovels in California at extremely low prices. Then, after he established a colossal stockpile, he ran through the streets of San Francisco, holding up gold, and shouting “Gold, gold in the American River!” He provided enough empirical evidence to be believed and trigger a massive inflow of immigrants as the news spread east. In just the next nine weeks, by selling mining equipment at prices far higher than his costs, he made $36,000.

Gold Seekers’ Journey Westward During the 1849 California Gold Rush

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The journey westward during the 1849 California Gold Rush was an arduous ordeal for many. As news of the 1848 discovery at Sutter’s Mill spread, people all over the United States were allured by the prospect of gold, but the pathways from the population centers of the East Coast to California were few and arduous. Two essential choices for forty-niners, the first wave of Gold Rush immigration in 1849 were an overland journey across the 2000 mile stretch of yet unsettled land in between, or a sea route around Cape Horn in South America.

The sea route, preferred by gold seekers from the Eastern states, would often take about six months. It was not a pleasant journey, either. Seasickness and spoilage of food and water were omnipresent.

Some time later, a third route was thought up, though not any less perilous than the other two. Migrants sailed as far south as Panama, disembarked, then made 3-day trip by mule and canoe across land to the Pacific side, where they boarded another ship. Tropical diseases in that part of the world were devastating. Malaria and cholera claimed many lives. Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, when journeying to California in 1852, wrote that a third of his regiment was killed or incapacitated by these afflictions. To add to the problems, ships to ferry the immigrants up to San Francisco were rare, and the travelers would often end up being stranded in Panama for months.

Over land, a favorite route of immigrants from the Central states was the Oregon-California Trail, a well-worn path carved out several years earlier by fur trappers. This overland road much shorter than the sea route, but not faster. Its travelers would go for six months by covered wagon through desolate landscapes with scarce supplies of water. The Native Americans along the way, whom many xenophobic settlers initially feared, actually turned out to be helpful, providing supplies, information, and guides. The occasional entrepreneur in the area would also capitalize on the scarcity of water by selling it at prices as high as $100 per drink. Supply and demand worked even in the desert.

Because travelers reached California successfully did not imply that their journey was over. Gold was further inland near Placerville, far from the port of San Francisco where the ships docked. Some travelers were also repulsed upon reaching San Francisco by the sight of numerous bars, gambling places, and saloons, all sites of licentious life that had been taboo in the East. Additionally, many immigrants explored the Sacramento River and its delta for new gold sites to mine.

Key Figures in the California Gold Rush: John Sutter, Richard Barnes Mason, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant

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The 1849 California Gold Rush was a magnet for ambitious personalities: individuals who would later rise to extraordinary heights in American politics, military, and economic life. The Gold Rush ruined the great landowner John Sutter but served as a testing ground for Richard Barnes Mason, Ulysses S. Grant, and William T. Sherman.

John Sutter was, as he had predicted, economically destroyed by the inpouring of gold seekers into California. His ambitions for an expansive enterprise were ruined by the desertion of his laborers and by squatters overrunning his lands after the discovery of gold. Sutter never extensively attempted to benefit from the Gold Rush, except for one half-hearted expedition which he abandoned almost upon arriving at the gold fields. His losses were never officially compensated.

Another key person in Gold Rush history was Colonel, later General, Richard Barnes Mason, who served as the fifth military governor of California from 1847 to 1849. Governors were changed with extreme rapidity during that time period, but Mason served on his post the longest. He was an astute observer who toured the gold fields with his assistant, Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, and reported to Washington first-hand observations of the social and economic conditions in the state. His writings are an excellent primary source for understanding the Gold Rush phenomenon.

Sherman, the Sherman who would become an infamous Civil War general, wrote down his observations in his memoirs. Quite unexpectedly, he became a banker for Lucas, Turner & Co. in September of 1853, and oversaw construction of “Sherman’s Bank,” a building so durable and finely engineered that it still stands in California today.

The California Gold Rush seemed to be a magnet for future great generals. Ulysses Grant, upon arriving in California, also wrote detailed notes for his memoirs. His own experiences however, were not to be as glorious as his later life. Grant struck a deal with his troops to start a potato growing business, which failed miserably.

Grant’s financial failure happened because hundreds of other entrepreneurs got the same idea at the same time. So many potatoes were grown that season that everybody had enough for themselves, and no one wanted to buy any. So Grant and his troops ended up eating a lot of what they grew and letting the rest rot away. As for Grant himself, put simply, he had a drinking problem, which would notoriously feature in his later life. In 1853, he was discharged from his regiment and sent home, though he conveniently omits this fact from his accounts.

Economic and Cultural Leaders During the 1849 California Gold Rush

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A number of America’s future economic and cultural leaders began their rise to prominence during the 1849 California Gold Rush. Among them were such individuals as Mark Twain, Sam Brannan, Levi Strauss, Phillip Armour, John Studebaker, Henry Wells, and William Fargo.

The Gold Rush was the proving ground for Samuel Clemens, the future Mark Twain. He came to California as an absolute unknown and took a job at the San Francisco Call, one of the two newspapers in the city at the time. He distinguished himself before the world in a rather unorthodox manner, writing a story about a local frog-jumping contest.

As for Sam Brannan, the great businessman who first spread news of gold’s discovery in California, he became the richest man in California without once mining the gold himself. He outmaneuvered the market many times through his publicity skills and adept purchases, eventually owning much of downtown San Francisco and even printing his own currency. Brannan was also disgusted with some of the racist, nativist miners’ oppression of foreigners and new arrivals in the state. He often broke up ethnic clashes and defended the rights of immigrants against the typically racist-slanted legislature. Why did Brannan care about the plight of working immigrants? The simplest answer is that foreigners were a large portion of his customer base, and the more miners were in the business, the more Brannan would profit. The market, and its most skilled representatives, are blind to irrational prejudices of race and nationality.

Levi Strauss, the future inventor of blue jeans, was known during the Gold Rush as a dry goods salesman and tent maker. In 1853, he made what he called “canvas pants” out of tent fabric especially for miners. These gained widespread popularity and earned Strauss a fortune.

Another great businessman who got started during the Gold Rush was Phillip Armour, who came to Placerville, California and opened a meat market there. Later, he moved back to Indiana with his profits and founded the gargantuan Armour Meat Packing Company.

Moreover, John Studebaker, a wagon manufacturer, established a firm in California to provide transportation to Oregon pioneers. It would expand to become a major car producer during the first half of the twentieth century.

Finally, Henry Wells and William Fargo offered a stable, honest banking, transportation, and mail delivery system to miners, something that the uncertainty-faced miners desperately needed. Their venture would also soon expand to a nationwide level.

California’s Colossal Economic Growth During the 1849 Gold Rush

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The economy of California grew at a phenomenal rate during the days of the 1849 Gold Rush. Much of this growth was made possible by the laissez-faire economic policies of Governor Richard Barnes Mason.

Prices rose dramatically as more people found gold and gold became widely circulated on the market. Seeing that customers would afford it, merchants raised their fees on all sorts of commodities, from real estate to food to transportation. A miner in California may have made about six to ten times as much as his eastern counterpart, but he also had to pay about that many times more for his upkeep.

The following concrete illustration of this trend is useful: a plot of San Francisco real estate that cost $16 in 1847, sold for $45,000 just 18 months later. Imagine investing in real estate during that time period.

The city of San Francisco grew from an isolated village to a thriving city in the five or so years of the Gold Rush. Its population rose from 1000 in 1848 to 35000 in 1850. This contributed dramatically to California’s admission to the Union as a state in 1850. 30 new houses and 2 new murders came about every day. Theaters and newspapers were built and prospered, and eventually only London would have more newspapers than San Francisco. Wages rose with the general standard of living, and great economic expansion and demand for jobs made employment readily available.

The California agricultural boom was another significant economic result of the Gold Rush. Many of the forty-niners and later immigrants contributed to the growing demand for food. Initially, this was satisfied by imports from merchants as far away as Chile or as nearby as Oregon. However, gradually the capacity was developed to grow the food in California itself. Machines were imported into the country to equip an efficient farming industry, and eventually wheat was exported from California to other parts of the U.S.

This phenomenal economic growth was made possible by Governor Richard Barnes Mason’s laissez-faire approach to the economy. Mason recalled of his administration: “I resolved not to interfere, but permit all to work freely, unless broils and crimes should call for interference.”

During the military period, when California’s future within the United States was still uncertain, as it was not yet a state, and governments changed with great frequency, no political factions could emerge to attempt to regulate and restrict the economy. The courts were based on the Anglo-Saxon model, which stressed property rights and the rights of the accused, though occasional acts of “vigilante justice” did occur. The government was highly limited and mainly acted as a second line of defense against crime. People fended for themselves mostly, and did surprisingly well. Unlike the cities, in the mining camps, crime rates were extremely low, lower than even in the relatively peaceful Eastern cities, mainly because almost every miner owned a gun. The principle of “more guns, less crime” was clearly demonstrated there.

Immigration to California During the 1849 Gold Rush

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The Gold Rush resulted in massive foreign immigration to California from virtually every area of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. At first, immigrants were accepted by almost everyone, as land, gold, and other resources were plentiful. As those resources became less abundant, however, a minority of white racists played on miners’ fears of foreign competition and came to dominate the legislature, setting up barriers to foreign immigrants. While some immigrants left, many others persisted, and set the stage for the vast cultural diversity seen in California today.

During the 1849 Gold Rush, California’s government was tolerant toward all immigrants under the laissez-faire military administration of Richard Barnes Mason. But as soon as the civilian legislature came along in 1850, a minority of racist white miners, who feared competition with foreign immigrants, influenced the government to abandon laissez-faire and institute the Foreign Miners Tax.

This $20 monthly fee from every foreign miner was intended to “protect” American miners from foreign competition. It was a disaster and was repealed a year later, as many foreign miners quit their careers and crowded the cities, jobless and penniless. Some did not give up and spread into other fields of business, having thus defended their individual rights against the bigoted government.

Mexicans had comprised much of California’s population before the Mexican War. The war unseated them from a dominant social position and many came to the mines, seeking to regain lost wealth and status. Tensions between Mexican miners and racist/nativist interests escalated into the 1850s. An example would be the attempt by racist miners, supported by politicians from the East, to drive Mexicans out of the Calaveras and Tuolumne counties where the Mexican miners had claimed land.

The Chinese migrants to California would shape the state extensively. Once again, the Chinese encountered animosity from racist miners and the legislature. Nevertheless, their industry and persistence enabled them to find jobs as cooks, cigar makers, restaurateurs, vegetable farmers, fortune tellers, and merchants, found temples, gambling halls, theaters, and laundries, and become key contributors to the agricultural boom. Many of them planted crops or built levees.

Women and African Americans also found a new home and opportunities in Gold Rush California. In both conventional and unconventional economic roles, they defied constricting Eastern stereotypes and met with great financial success. As for African-Americans, though many came as slaves, they bought freedom with gold and those already free used gold to free families, fight discrimination and start newspapers, schools, and churches. Upon its admission to the Union, so many were free and economically active that slavery was prohibited in the state.

Sources Used

Chevez, Ken. Part Three: State’s Latinos Lost in the Rush. 1/18/98. Sacramento Bee. October 2003 <http://www.calgoldrush.com/part3/03mexicans.html>

Discovery Of Gold By John A. Sutter. 2003. Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Fransisco. October 2003 <http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist2/gold.html>

Discovery Of Gold Report Of Colonell Mason. 2003. Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Fransisco. October 2003 < http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist6/masonrpt.html>

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. 2003. Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Fransisco. October 2003 <http://www.sfmuseum.net/bio/sherman.html>

Gold Fever Discovery. 1998. Oakland Museum of California. October 2003
<http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/fever05.html>

Gold Fever Entertainment. 1998. Oakland Museum of California. October 2003
<http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/fever18.html>

Gold Rush And Anti-Chinese Race Hatred. 2003. Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Fransisco. October 2003 <http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist6/chinhate.html>

Gold Rush: Gold Country. 2003. Idaho State University.
October 2003 <http://www.isu.edu/~trinmich/goldcountry.html>

Hoge, Patrick. Part Three: Justice Wasn’t Pretty- But It Was Quick. 1/18/98. Sacramento Bee. October 2003 <http://www.calgoldrush.com/part3/03justice.html>

Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant And The Gold Rush. 2003. Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Fransisco. October 2003 < http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist6/shermgold.html>

Magagnini, Steven. Part Three: Chinese Transformed
Gold Mountain. 1/18/98. Sacramento Bee. October 2003
<http://www.calgoldrush.com/part3/03asians.html>

Magagnini, Steven. Part Three: Fortune Smiled on Many Black Miners. 1/18/98. Sacramento Bee. October 2003 <http://www.calgoldrush.com/part3/03blacks.html>

Magagnini, Steven. Part Three: Indian’s Misfortune Was Stamped In Gold. 1/18/98. Sacramento Bee. October 2003 <http://www.calgoldrush.com/part3/03native.html>

Perkins, Kathryn Doré. Part Three: ‘Real Women’ Who Defied Stereotype. 1/18/98. Sacramento Bee. October 2003 <http://www.calgoldrush.com/part3/03women.html>

The Gold Rush: Collision Of Cultures. 2003. PBS. October 2003 <http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/collision.html>

The Gold Rush: Journey. 2003. PBS. October 2003 <http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/journey.html>

William T. Sherman And The Gold Rush. 2003. Virtual Museum Of The City Of San Fransisco. October 2003 <http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist6/shermgold.html>

America: Gone West. Cooke, Alistair. BBC/Time-Life Television, 1973.

French Cartoon. 2003. Oakland Museum of California. October 2003 <http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/curriculum/4g/42103011.html>

Libertarian Democrat: When New York Produced Giants for Liberty – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

Libertarian Democrat: When New York Produced Giants for Liberty – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

The New Renaissance Hat
Lawrence W. Reed
August 18, 2013
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The idea pervades the bill that severe penalties will secure enforcement; but all experience shows that undue severity of laws defeats their execution … [N]o law can be sustained which goes beyond public feeling and sentiment. All experience shows that temperance, like other virtues, is not produced by lawmakers, but by the influences of education, morality and religion. Men may be persuaded—they cannot be compelled—to adopt habits of temperance.

—Horatio Seymour, 1854

This essay is about a long-forgotten New Yorker who served in his state’s legislature and twice as governor, then nearly became President of the United States. Much respected, even beloved by many in his day, his name was Horatio Seymour. He deserves to be dusted off and appreciated now, almost 130 years since his death. But first, some context.

The Democratic Party in the state of New York these days is about as “liberal” (in the twentieth-century, American sense of the term) as it gets. On economic issues in particular, it is reliably statist, meaning it rarely deviates from the “more government is the answer” mentality, no matter how strongly logic or evidence point elsewhere. But not so long ago, New York’s Democrats were largely of the opposite persuasion. They were often what we now would call “classical liberals,” ardent skeptics of the concentration of power. Classical liberals really believed in liberty; today’s liberals really don’t.

Local and national Democratic Party organizations today host “Jefferson-Jackson Day” dinners in honor of two of the party’s early representatives. If Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson could stop in for a drink, it’s not likely that either one of them would recognize their party after all these years. Arguably, they’d be horrified enough to resign their memberships. My guess is that Jackson would become an Independent while Jefferson would bolt for the Libertarians.

New York City in the 1830s was the birthplace of the Locofocos, the most principled libertarians the Democratic Party ever produced. Their opposition to subsidies, high tariffs, special favors, fiat money, and interventionist government helped keep the state and national party on the right side of liberty until the silver-tongued currency crank William Jennings Bryan came along in 1896.

Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor, was a New York Democrat. Economist and historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel argues that Van Buren may be the most libertarian of all the American presidents.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Democrats fought the Whigs, who stood for a Hamiltonian big government that would dispense privilege and corporate welfare, jack up tariffs, and centralize banking. When the Republicans picked up the mantle of the Whigs in the late 1850s, Democrats opposed them for the same reasons. With the exception of Horace Greeley, the most pro-liberty presidential candidates in the thirty years after the Civil War were the Democratic nominees who didn’t win (Seymour, Tilden, and Hancock). The only Democrat to actually capture the White House between 1865 and 1912—Grover Cleveland, born in New Jersey but a New Yorker most of his life and governor of the state—was arguably one of the very best and most pro-liberty presidents of the 44 we’ve had.

New York was home also to eight-term congressman Bourke Cockran, who emerged in the 1890s as one of the staunchest and most eloquent defenders of Jeffersonian liberty Americans ever sent to Washington from anywhere.

But something happened to the Democratic Party in the years between Cleveland and the next Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson—my personal choice for the worst of all presidents. That sad turn of events is a story for another day. Allow me now to return to my primary subject, Horatio Seymour.

Seymour wrote those words at the top of this essay. They were part of his 1854 veto of one of the earliest alcohol prohibition measures that made it to a governor’s desk. If the wisdom of that veto message had been heeded 65 years later, America would have been spared the imbecility of Prohibition. So, too, it could have saved us from compounding that destructive error with a futile, expensive, and tyrannical War on Drugs in more recent decades. His view on Prohibition was indicative of his general perspective on the role of government in our lives. He was no friend of the meddlesome nanny state.

Seymour was born in 1810 in Onondaga County, New York, early in the presidency of another Jeffersonian Democrat (from Virginia), James Madison. At the age of 23, he went to Albany, where he labored for six years as military secretary to the state’s Democratic governor, William L. Marcy. There, he gained detailed knowledge of the state’s politics. In 1841 he won election to the New York State Assembly and served simultaneously as mayor of Utica from 1842 to 1843. He was elected speaker of the assembly in 1845, then governor of the state in 1852. His veto of the Prohibition bill cost him in his reelection bid, which he lost by a mere 309 votes statewide.

FEE’s senior historian, Dr. Burton Folsom (author of The Myth of the Robber Barons, New Deal or Raw Deal, and other great works) reminds me that Seymour wasn’t as solid on economic issues as New York’s Locofocos: “Seymour was from Utica, and because that town was right on the Erie Canal, he favored state-funded construction of the Erie Canal.  He also favored (though with less enthusiasm) the state funding of the eight branch canals, all of which lost money.” Indeed, Seymour should have seen the logical inconsistency of canal subsidies and small government, but such are the blemishes of politics, which is why when we grade its practitioners, we have to do so “on the curve” or most would flunk. I still see greatness in Seymour on other counts.

The country drifted inexorably toward sectional conflict for the rest of the 1850s. Out of office but an influential former governor of the most populous state, Seymour made headlines whenever he spoke. Prominent party leaders promoted him for the presidential nomination in 1856 and 1860 but he declined to run. He opposed slavery but was reluctant to go to war over either it or the question of secession. When war came in 1861, he staked out a definitive position on the Lincoln administration’s suppression of civil liberties and questionable constitutional ventures such as suspension of habeas corpus:  “Government is not strengthened by the exercise of doubtful powers, but by a wise and energetic exertion of those which are incontestable. The former course never fails to produce discord, suspicion and distrust, while the latter inspires respect and confidence.”

As the war groaned on, Seymour chastised Lincoln and the Republicans for imprisoning (without trial) thousands of dissenters who questioned the war or its conduct. He demanded to know why citizens of the North had to be warred upon by their own government. “Liberty is born in war,” he declared. “It does not die in war! I denounce the doctrine that Civil War in the South takes away from the loyal North the benefits of one principle of civil liberty!”

Defending civil liberties in the midst of a major war was a courageous stand in the 1860s. Even among the large and vocal cadre of Lincoln apologists today, it’s not kosher to bring up the seamy side of our 16th President’s policies. But in the day, some very patriotic Americans like Seymour raised serious questions that deserve attention now as they did then.

In 1862, Seymour was again elected governor of New York and was embroiled the very next year in a vigorous battle with the Lincoln administration over the military draft. He strongly opposed it as unconstitutional. He refused to pay the state’s foreign creditors in paper greenbacks, insisting instead on payment in the medium specified in the terms of the debt—gold. Defeated narrowly for reelection in 1864, Seymour resumed his prominent role as a respected elder statesman and spokesman for Democratic principles. He might have taken the presidential nomination away from George McClellan in 1864 but, as in the past, he declined many demands that he be a candidate.

With no strong Democratic contender for the presidential nomination in 1868, Seymour’s name bubbled to the top again. I’ve written elsewhere about Republican James A. Garfield as the most reluctant man ever to be elected President of the United States. Horatio Seymour is easily the most reluctant man ever to be nominated and not get elected, though he came close. Leading up to the Democratic Party convention in 1868, he declared numerous times that he would not be a candidate. He even accepted the role as permanent chairman of the convention because the very position would make it impossible to also be a candidate, but after 21 deadlocked ballots the conventioneers violated party rules and nominated Seymour anyway. He ran against Republican Ulysses S. Grant out of a sense of obligation to his party, not any lust for the job. Democrats made Francis P. Blair of Missouri his vice presidential running mate.

Almost immediately, Republicans waved “the bloody shirt,” accusing Seymour and the Democrats of treason. The Democratic nominee was a “traitor” because he had once supported secession, though he took that position purely (and in the view of this author, correctly) because the Constitution neither addressed nor forbade it. Like it or not, the notion that secession was a right of any state was a widely held perspective in both the North and the South in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Republicans vilified it for reasons of power and politics, but it was not for many decades a “radical” or unsupportable view in America, even among Northern newspaper editors.

In his superb 1938 biography, Horatio Seymour of New York, Stewart Mitchell writes that Seymour was on solid ground in arousing opposition to Republican duplicity, by which I mean claiming to be defenders of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while trampling on the rights upheld in both. “The fact was,” according to Stewart (quoting liberally from Seymour himself), “that within ten states of the Union any American citizen who dared to quote that declaration in his own defense ‘would be tried and punished by a military tribunal.’” Moreover, “If a citizen of the state where the ashes of Washington lay buried were to remind his rulers that ‘the military should ever be subordinate to the civil authority,’ he could be ‘dragged to prison’ even from the grave of the man who wrote the declaration.”

The Seymour-Blair platform assailed the party of Lincoln and Grant in certain if not grandiloquent terms, and largely from a pro-liberty perspective. It called for restoration of a sound, metallic currency and lower tariffs. It condemned the Republican Party thusly:

It has nullified there (in the ten states occupied by federal troops) the right of trial by jury; it has abolished habeas corpus, that most sacred writ of liberty; it has overthrown the freedom of speech and of the press; it has substituted arbitrary seizures and arrests, and military trials and secret star-chamber inquisitions, for the constitutional tribunals; it has disregarded in time of peace the right of the people to be free from searches and seizures; it has entered the post and telegraph offices, and even the private rooms of individuals, and seized their private papers and letters without any specific charge or notice of affidavit, as required by the organic law; it has converted the American capitol into a Bastille; it has established a system of spies and official espionage to which no constitutional monarchy of Europe would now dare to resort; it has abolished the right of appeal, on important constitutional questions, to the Supreme Judicial tribunal, and threatens to curtail, or destroy, its original jurisdiction, which is irrevocably vested by the Constitution; while the learned Chief Justice has been subjected to the most atrocious calumnies, merely because he would not prostitute his high office to the support of the false and partisan charges preferred against the President. Its corruption and extravagance have exceeded anything known in history, and by its frauds and monopolies it has nearly doubled the burden of the debt created by the war; it has stripped the President of his constitutional power of appointment, even of his own Cabinet. Under its repeated assaults the pillars of the government are rocking on their base, and should it succeed in November next and inaugurate its President, we will meet, as a subjected and conquered people, amid the ruins of liberty and the scattered fragments of the Constitution.
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Grant easily won the election in the Electoral College, 214 to 80, but the popular vote was a different story. There the margin was less than six points, as Grant bested Seymour 52.7 percent to 47.3 percent. With Grant’s troops occupying most Southern states, controlling many polling stations and actively disenfranchising significant numbers of Southern whites whose votes would likely have gone Democratic, Seymour’s 47.3 percent seems all the more remarkable.

In his 1944 book about losing presidential contenders, They Also Ran, Irving Stone described Seymour as “one of the most intelligent, high-minded and able statesmen produced in America since the creators of the Constitution.” He argued that Seymour’s gentle character likely would have made him an excellent president, “the most logical figure in the country to bind the wounds of the war and wipe out the bitterness.” But alas, he didn’t get the chance.

Seymour never ran for office again after 1868 and turned down a guaranteed seat in the U.S. Senate, two more likely nominations for governor, and even two strong efforts to nominate him for the presidency in both 1876 and 1880. He may hold the record in American history for turning down more opportunities for high office than anyone else. His last political activity was to campaign for Grover Cleveland in 1884. He lived long enough to see Cleveland elected as the first Democrat since James Buchanan. Seymour died in February 1886 at the age of 75 and is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica, New York.

Horatio Seymour, a significant figure and friend of liberty in his day, is remembered by few and appreciated by even fewer. We should not treat the good men of our past this way.

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The author wishes to thank Mr. John Chodes of New York, a longtime FEE supporter, for his tireless efforts to remind his state and nation of the important contributions of his fellow New Yorker, Horatio Seymour.

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2008. Prior to that, he was a founder and president for twenty years of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught Economics full-time and chaired the Department of Economics at Northwood University in Michigan from 1977 to 1984.

He holds a B.A. degree in Economics from Grove City College (1975) and an M.A. degree in History from Slippery Rock State University (1978), both in Pennsylvania. He holds two honorary doctorates, one from Central Michigan University (Public Administration—1993) and Northwood University (Laws—2008).

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.