Richards, who writes well for a professor, retells the rather familiar story of the California Gold Rush’s aftermath, but he tells it from an interesting point of view. Despite the fact that Mexican California forbade slavery and the American 49ers banned Negro slavery in the constitution of their new (1850) state, Southerners in and out of Congress dreamed and plotted to make California a slave state. Some, like James Gadsden (of Gadsden Purchase fame), even hoped to split off southern Cal


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