Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin

Author:Gray Brechin [Brechin, Gray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, San Francisco, State & Local, United States
ISBN: 9780520933484
Google: WUiTK9NX65AC
Amazon: 0520250087
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2006-10-02T23:00:00+00:00

THE FILIBUSTERS

Polk was not the only person displeased by the terms of the treaty that left so much land and so many mines south of a border drawn by a diplomat the president thoroughly disliked. His secretary of state and successor wanted more as well. James Buchanan wrote shortly after moving to the White House in 1857, “It is beyond question the destiny of our race to spread themselves over the continent of North America . . . should events be permitted to take their natural course. The tide of emigrants will flow to the South, and nothing can eventually arrest its progress.”13

Prominent among San Francisco’s earliest leaders were men who had entered the Golden Gate with money accumulated in Texas and other regions of Latin America. Chief among them was John Parrott, who had established himself as the leading American merchant and U.S. consul in the west coast port of Mazatlán. Getting in on the ground floor in San Francisco real estate with three hundred thousand dollars in capital made in Mexico, Parrott quickly multiplied his assets many times through investments in land, mines, banking, sealing, and a myriad of other activities that extended throughout the Pacific Basin and back into Latin America. By 1864, Parrott was the city’s wealthiest citizen.14

Parrott and his wife, Abby, formed the core of San Francisco’s primordial aristocracy—slave-owning Southerners drawn to California by the opportunities offered by a land newly freed for enterprise and a plantation culture of vast estates. They counted as friends, associates, and neighbors on fashionable Rincon Hill such members of the so-called Chivalry as the McAllisters, Gwins, Lathams, Tevises, Hagginses, and Hammonds. San Francisco became a base of operations for acquiring still more lands. Those who actively attempted to play the Texas game became known as filibusters, a word derived from the Dutch term for “plunder.”

The gold rush, said the city’s first historians, had made San Franciscans racially restless and easily bored: “At whatever hazard, most persons here must have occasional excitement.” Few places offered more excitement than the mineral-rich lands south of the border that had been drawn by Nicholas Trist. Those who came to San Francisco were never content with what they found, but were forever in search of more somewhere else. “Thus, a new land, where hope and fancy see all things is to them a charmed land.”15 Prior to the Civil War, filibustering expeditions sailed from San Francisco to liberate and redeem for slavery various states of Mexico, Central and South America, Hawaii, and even Borneo. Chief among such soldiers of fortune was the lawyer and newspaper editor William Walker. Failing to free Baja California and the rich mining region of Sonora, Walker proved more successful in Nicaragua, where, with the backing of San Francisco Mayor Cornelius Garrison, the self-styled general established himself as dictator. His two-year reign gave Walker enough time to reestablish slavery and to draft a constitution that assured speedy transfer of land to those who spoke English.

“General” Walker imagined a Central American empire for the white race, but ultimately succeeded only in uniting his neighbors against himself.

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