The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War-Fast Shipping

Description

Award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards gives us an authoritative and revealingportrait of an overlooked harbinger of the terrible battle that was to come.

When goldwas discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, Americans of all stripes saw the potentialfor both wealth and power. Among the more calculating were Southern slave making California a slave state, they could increase the value of their slaves—by50 percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain additional influencein Congress and expand Southern economic clout, abetted by a new transcontinentalrailroad that would run through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, Californiaentered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would agitate for evenmore slave territory, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to theCivil War itself.