Broderick: The Life and Death of David C. Broderick
James Emmett Thompson
Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
2017
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More than any other man, United States Senator David Broderick was the man responsible for keeping California from seceding at the outbreak of the Civil War. Broderick was a political enigma, a contradiction. In New York in the 1840s, he was, in turn, an apprentice stonemason, a volunteer fireman, and the keeper of a saloon that was a meeting place for political radicals. Following the gold rush to San Francisco in 1849, Broderick became the first leader of the California state senate. He stood up for the rights of the common people, the city's Irish and German immigrants. With their support, he built a political machine powerful enough to topple William McKendree Gwin, the leader of the Chivalry, the aristocratic transplanted Southern gentlemen who dominated California politics in the years before the Civil War. As a politician, Broderick was thoroughly corrupt. He sold political offices, demanded kickbacks from aspiring candidates, and employed a gang of toughs to battle his opponents, enforce party discipline, and stuff ballot boxes. San Francisco's Committee of Vigilance of 1856 exiled his goons. However, in 1857, the resilient Broderick still had enough clout to convince the state legislature to elect him to the Senate of the United States. But David Broderick was much more than just another corrupt politician. He was also a man of courage and principle. Broderick was on the right side of the defining social issue of his day, human slavery, which he saw as an immoral, cruel anachronism. Things came to a head over the admission of Kansas in the late 1850s, when the President, James Buchanan, and his powerful supporters, tried to use the Lecompton constitution to force slavery down the throats of the unwilling settlers of Kansas Territory. Broderick was so outspoken in his opposition that by 1859, he found himself in the cross hairs of fire eaters, men like California's Chief Justice, David S. Terry, who were willing to gun down anybody who spoke out against the extension of slavery. These men came to believe that David Broderick had to be silenced if California were to follow their dream and secede from the Union.
