for the South. He fretted that California’s congressional representatives — two senators and two representatives — would consistently side with their fellow free-state representatives to advance a national anti-slavery agenda.
Yet nothing of the sort came to pass. California’s lawmakers aligned themselves with Southern slaveholders, not free-soil Northerners, on most of the major issues of the day. Although migrants from the South accounted for no more than 30% of California’s voting population, they prevailed in election after election. Once in power, these transplanted Southerners endorsed numerous proposals to extend slavery into the Western territories.
in the West. The Republican Party — founded on an explicitly anti-slavery platform — failed to win a single major election in California that decade. In 1859, California’s beleaguered anti-slavery politicians suffered their gravest loss not at the polls, but on a remote field near Lake Merced. There, U.S. Sen. David Broderick — a Democrat and one of the few influential anti-slavery Californians — was
opinion I support reparations to anyone who was a slave
opinion Gross