Colorado: A Significant Contributing Cause of Secession and the War of Southern Aggression

James Lutzweiler

Sergeant Major
Joined
Mar 14, 2018
Dear Fellow Posters,

Colorado was a significant cause of Secession and The War of Southern Aggression (TWSA). Though I do not know of a single instance where the word "Colorado" actually appears even one time in any of the 1860-61 Secession documents, it is certainly included in words like "territories" and "western territories" that show up either in them or else in speeches of the fire-eaters in search of Independence from the United States.

This being said, the only question that remains is to try to determine what kind of a percentage Colorado represented in the recipe for Rebellion. Was it 5%? 10%? 20%? The answer, of course, is purely subjective. But the quest for a correct answer is certainly instructive.

My own best guess is somewhere between 5-10%, as we must also assign some percentage of causation of TWSA to New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. I could easily settle for 5% for Colorado alone. As a factor at all, I would rate it higher than tariffs, as the possession of Colorado alone blew the comparative significance of tariffs right out of the water.

In making my judgment I take into consideration things like the Colorado Gold Rush, a/k/a the "Pike's Peak Gold Rush." It began in 1858 when Colorado was still part of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories. It continued into 1859 and beyond, when those in 1859 rhymed California's 49ers as Colorado's "59ers." The "Pike's Peak Gold Rush" has received for too little attention in the study of TWSA. Denver and the Denver Mint alone owe their existence to this Rush.

In addition to Colorado's Gold Rush one must also take into account a book written by William Gilpin. Gilpin became the Territorial Governor of Colorado in 1861. But in 1860 he published a book entitled The Central Gold Region (See https://books.google.com/books?id=uVDDTyS7mWEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+central+gold+regions+gilpin&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiHusnO5azhAhWQmuAKHQtuDEoQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=the central gold regions gilpin&f=false). This book, like practically everything else antebellum, has been generally blotted from living memory by a combination of the Ghost of Harriet Beecher Stowe and all the real life Civil War historians who do not even note it or seemingly don't even know of it (McPherson? Freehling? et al.) In short, Gilpin viewed Denver as the commercial center of the universe, ultimately connecting with Russia via a railroad across the Bering Straits for trade with China and India. It is no wonder that Lincoln appointed him the Territorial Governor of Colorado, especially after the major discovery of that state's gold was by a Georgian named William Green Russell (about whose slavery inclinations I know nothing). Gilpin was also the one who saved Colorado from Sibley and his Southern Aggressors at Glorieta Pass, a battle about which Single Causers seem to know very little. A great sketch of Gilpin and his vision can be found at this link: https://www.classicsofstrategy.com/2009/ 05/the-central-gold-region.html. Therein one can read about Gilpin's vision of a trans-Bering Straits Railroad to Russia. Here is one quote from it:

Probably there are fewer opportunities for disagreements and jealousies than may be found among any other of the first class power. … Both are among the largest and strongest among the civilized powers, both in territory and population, and both are growing larger and stronger while the other powers of Christendom are falling into decay. Build this railway between them, and America and Russia may join hand against all the rest of the world on any issue, military, commercial, and industrial. Then indeed this back way to India of which Columbus had dreamed … will become the chief highway of the nations, the front and finishing line of progress, circling round the warm and hospitable Pacific, whose shores are pregnant with limitless undeveloped resources, leaving the cold Atlantic to those who choose to navigate it…

All of this is to say nothing of the explorations of John C. Fremont to cross Colorado with a transcontinental railroad, ending with his cannibalistic Christmas Camp of 1848. We must not forget that Fremont, who was raised in Charleston, was not only the Republican Presidential candidate in 1856 but was also the son-in-law of Thomas Hart Benton of transcontinental railroad fame. Fremont's antebellum acquisition of golden property all over California screamed non-verbally to his old neighbors in South Carolina that the future was on the Pacific, not in Planting.

No better illustration of Colorado's wealth that could be had by any Southern Planter who would emigrate there than Pennsylvania's James Joseph Brown who struck it rich in Leadville. There with his wealth he married the later "Unsinkable Molly Brown" and built for her a magnificent home in Denver that one can visit today to catch a glimpse of what anyone with the eyes to see it could have seen in 1859 by reading Gilpin's book instead of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Speaking of Leadville, one of the most powerful analyses of the trans-Mississippi West, once foolishly considered to be "The Great American Desert," was made one day in Leadville by a British traveler and performer in the local opera house. It was the poet and author, Oscar Wilde. He was en route to California on what was by then the first transcontinental railroad. Wilde was impressed by all the railroad towns through which he had passed to get to Leadville. He expressed the view, a correct and mind-blowing view, that the railroad had made each place the train stopped and where there was a depot the equivalent of not just a city but a seaport city. In the early days of America, it was seaport cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston and Savannah, near which most of the population lived. Either that or in or near river cities. But the new East/West iron equivalent of the Mississippi River made every inland town, village, hamlet, the equivalent of a seaport city because of its ability to be a center of trade. No doubt many Southerners and Northerners in the antebellum had this same vision of Oscar Wilde; and that is in part what made Colorado and every other sandy square mile of the trans-Mississippi West from St. Louis to Seattle or San Francisco or San Diego the same as a beachfront seaport city. Antebellum dreamers who envisioned wealth by selling city lots salivated like Pavlovian dogs at the prospects.

The purpose of this thread is to invite posters to contribute thoughts and anecdotes about Southern visions --or even Northern visions-- of Colorado in the antebellum. E.g., Do we know who in South Carolina or Mississippi --or Massachusetts-- might have read Glipin's book? It does appear that William Seward read it up in New York. Do we know whom Fremont was inflaming back in his old home town of Charleston with his reports about California and how to get there through Colorado by railroad? Etc.

I invite any and all posters to contribute to this OP. I am not seeking a rehash or debate with Single Causers to protest that Colorado had nothing to do with South Carolina's Secession or Mississippi's Secession and that Secession and War were all about slavery. We are all familiar with that viewpoint. Those who subscribe to it have stated their point, even if they have not made their case for my liking. It does not need to be repeated here. There are numerous other threads where that might be debated and I encourage those who wish to debate it further to find one of those threads. Please fixate on Colorado here and its role in the coming of TWSA.

Sincerely,

James Lutzweiler
Archivist (1999-2013), Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, North Carolina
 
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