Thomas Starr King’s statue was in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Unfortunately, in 2006 State Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, a Republican from Murrieta, Calif. passed a resolution asking that Starr King’s statue be replaced by a statue of Ronald Reagan. Although Starr King helped defeat secession-minded Californians in the 1860s, the State Senator said that he did not even know who Starr King was. Hollingsworth told the San Francisco Chronicle that “To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure who Thomas Starr King was…And I think there’s probably a lot of Californians like me.” King, like Hollingsworth, was a Republican. There is a long established memorial to him in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and a street in the same city named for him. There are several schools named in his honor. But, with historical memory fading among Boomers, Hollingsworth did not even know about this key figure in his own state’s history who helped establish his state’s Republican Party!.
Hollingsworth said that he also wanted to remove Starr King because he was not a California native. I note that Reagan was not a California native either. The former president was born in Illinois.
Luckily after the statue was removed from Statuary Hall, a place was found next to the Civil War Grove near the California Capitol Building. While Starr King is not placed at the highest level of attention in Washington, the statue is in a prominent place near the state Capitol.
The Capitol at Sacramento was built during the Civil War, with work beginning on it in 1861. It was finished in 1874. As you can see by the photo below, it was designed in imitation of the nation’s Capitol in Washington.
The path to the Starr King monument is lined with trees and bushes, many of which were in bloom when I visited during the Fourth of July Holiday.
The statue of Starr King is the same statue that was removed from the nation’s Capitol eighteen years ago. It was sculpted by Haig Patigian in 1931. During the early 20th Century, Patigian was the preeminent historical sculptor of California.
The transplanted statue has its original plinth saying that it represents the State of California.
Thomas Starr King was a Unitarian minister who was born to Universalist minister in New York on December 17, 1824. He studied theology and became a minister and a frequent lecturer in New England. In the East, he became friends with people like Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Hedge, Whittier, Bryant, and Wendell Phillips from the New England and New York intellectual elite. Starr King, in his younger days, advocated some fairly radical positions in august company.
Shortly before the Civil War he moved to San Francisco. After his arrival, he became a popular lecturer in California. His lecture tours took him to many parts of the state and he used these trips to explore the natural wonders there. After a tour of Yosemite he helped begin the movement to protect that natural wonder with Frederick Law Olmstead.
In 1860, Lincoln won the state in 1860 by a margin of 734 votes in California. About 40% of the people in the state came from the South and some Northern transplants also voted against Lincoln. Lincoln was helped to his razor-thin victory by Starr King.
Southern sympathizers gravitated to the Knights of the Golden Circle, a clandestine paramilitary organization. Northern sympathizers turned to Starr King to aggressively organize those who did not want to leave the Union to found its own republic. In February of 1861 he began a tour for adherence to the United States. On February 20th of that year his life was threatened for his political opinions.
Even before this crisis, Starr King was involved in controversial issues. He took the side of the common worker against what he called “the oppressive influence of capital,” He began to focus on the rights of the slave when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. He publicly denounced the Supreme Court for its Dred Scott decision in 1857 saying “it sweeps a race outside the privileges of national law.” [Matthews (p. 62)]. Unlike other anti-slavery men, Starr King believed that racial diversity had promises for America’s future. In a speech in Oswego, New York, in 1855 he told his audience “I would detain you too long were I to unfold all my belief with regard to the broad purposes of Providential good suggested by the diversity of race in our country.” [Matthews (p. 62)].
In 1860, when King was in California, he spoke in front of a Black audience on the anniversary of when Great Britain outlawed slavery. King told the audience that “the greatest day of the last hundred years was not when Adams and Jefferson were first fired with the spirit of liberty, nor when our heroes met in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence; but that day when the British nation laid its millions of money on the table of the House of Commons, in reverence for a principle that had been only taught before as an abstract truth.” [Matthews,(p. 77)]
He told the audience; “Wherever we find many races brought together, there God has his greatest work to do – there is room for the noblest labor of Christianity. The greatest work that was ever wrought by the early Christians was when the disciples went beyond the borders of Judea, and controverted the current doctrine that the Gentiles had no rights that a Jew was bound to respect [the newspaper account says that there were cheers and laughter at this point; in fact, the audience would have recognized that he was using the language of the Dred Scott decision to deride it] and taught that Christianity had no respect for rank, color or sect. The Almighty had a great mission for this nation. Here the Church was to proclaim the equality of the races. Wherever the oppressed were congregated, there Christ was present, and not on the side of power. Into such a presence…I always come with reverence.”
In San Francisco, Starr King met Jessie Benton Frémont, the wife of Colonel John C. Frémont the 1856 Republican presidential candidate. She encouraged him to speak out for Lincoln and against secession. Starr King also called for Lincoln to end slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation saying “Let him say that this a war of mass against class, of America against feudalism, of the schoolmaster against the slavemaster…” [Wendte p. 181] King was diminutive, standing only five feet tall, but he said “But, though I weigh only 120 pounds, when I am mad I weigh a ton!”
After the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, many Democrats were Peace Men. Starr King noted the hypocrisy of these formerly war-mongering Democrats saying “a cry for peace from filibusters or friends of William Walker. A cry for the sacredness of human life from men who have plotted to overrun Mexico and Central America in order to lay the black foundation of a slave empire.…” [Matthews (p. 91)]
When we think of State Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth condemnation of the Starr King statue at the Capitol as dedicated to a person no one has heard of it is easy to dismiss him as ignorant of Civil War history, but I will bet that 90% of people reading this article likely have never heard of the man. While there are two streets named for him, schools and seminaries named for him also, and there are three statues of him, his memory has faded in the second half of the 20th Century. This was not always so. When California was asked to nominate two people for Statuary Hall, this did not take place right after the Civil War. It occurred more than half a century after Starr King died. In the early 20th Century he was still viewed as one of the two most important people in California history.
During the Civil War, Thomas Starr King kept up his heavy speaking schedule. In July of 1861 the California “Peace Democrats” approved a resolution calling for the recognition of the independence of the Confederate states. With the victory of the Confederates at Bull Run in that same month, many Southerners in the state were encouraged that soon the war would be over. While this may have strengthened pro-Confederate sentiment, it weakened the Democratic Party. Many of the Stephen Douglas voters shifted over, at least temporarily, to the Republican Party. In the gubernatorial election that year, 46 percent voted for the Republican Leland Stanford, 27 percent went with the “Peace Democratic” candidate, and 26 percent voted with the “War Democrat.” In other words, the Democrats got the majority of the vote, but the Republican was elected governor.
General Edwin Sumner wrote to his superiors in Washington an assessment of the situation in California soon after Sumter was fired on:
There is a strong Union feeling with the majority of the people of this State, but the Secessionists are much the most active and zealous party, which gives them more influence than they ought to have from their numbers.
I have no doubt but there is some deep scheming to draw California into the secession movement; in the first place as the “Republic of the Pacific,” expecting afterwards to induce her to join the Southern Confederacy. The troops now here will hold their positions and all the Government property, but if there should be a general uprising of the people, they could not, of course, put it down.
While there was some danger that a pro-Confederate uprising could take place, the War Department removed troops and officers and transferred them to the East in 1861. At the same time, Confederate leaders in Texas began to look west to expand their “republic” by setting up the “Confederate Arizona Territory” with its capital in Mesilla. A Confederate officer in late 1861 wrote that “California is on the eve of a revolution. There are many Southern men there who would cheerfully join us if they could get to us.” [Matthews (p. 113)].
In 1862 the Confederacy launched an invasion of New Mexico. Before the attack on New Mexico took place, Starr King worked with the United States Army to enlist 16,000 California volunteers for three year service to defend the state and help defeat the Confederacy. These new recruits allowed the Army to transfer Regular Army soldiers back to the East. After Texas attacked New Mexico and captured Santa Fe, a “California Column” of volunteer troops went into Arizona to expel the Confederates.
Thomas Starr King became the primary operative of the United States Sanitary Commission in California. The money he raised was sent east to provide relief to Union troops fighting the Confederacy in Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri and other places so far from San Francisco.
King was also good at reinforcing United States nationalism in California. Most residents of the state had only been there for less than a decade and a half, and few had been born there. They did not come to California to build democracy there, they came to get rich by mining GOLD. Many had not even been U.S. citizens when they arrived in California. People came from China, Europe, and Latin America making it the most diverse state in the Union. King saw creating a United States identity as more important than creating a California identity.
While the war was raging, Thomas Starr King, exhausted from his work, died in 1864 at 39 years old.
Michele at the Thomas Starr King monument.
After visiting the statue, follow this path to the Civil War Grove.
The Starr King statue is adjacent to the Civil War Memorial Grove next to the Capitol.
All color photos taken by Pat Young.
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Sources:
The Golden State and the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California by Glenna Matthews published by Cambridge University Press (2012).
Thomas Starr King: Patriot and Preacher published by Charles Wendte published by Beacon Press (1921)
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