The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War: Vintage Civil War Library

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

When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Americans of all stripes saw the potential for both wealth and power. Among the more calculating were Southern slave owners. By making California a slave state, they could increase the value of their slaves-by 50 percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain additional influence in Congress and expand Southern economic clout, abetted by a new transcontinental railroad that would run through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, California entered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would agitate for even more slave territory, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to the Civil War itself.

Leonard L. Richards, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, grew up in California, and earned his AB, MA, and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis. He has also taught at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii. His Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1970. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 took the second-place Lincoln Prize in 2001. He is also the author, with William Graebner, of The American Record (1981, 1987, 1995, 2000, 2005) and of Shay's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (2002). He and his wife live in Amherst, Massachusetts.

About Leonard L. Richards