March 4, 1864: “The Saint of the Pacific Coast” Lays Down His Burdens

That’s what contemporaries call Universalist and Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King, who  lies on his San Francisco deathbed, 160 years ago.  According to Charles Wendte’s 1921 biography of Starr King, the resonant orator — whose passionate sermons are instrumental in keeping California in the Union during the Civil War — tells his wife, Julia:

“Don’t weep for me. I know it’s all right. I wish I could make you feel so; I wish I could describe my feelings. It’s strange. I see all the privileges and greatness of the future. It already looks grand, beautiful. Tell them at home I went lovingly, trustfully, peacefully.”

Starr King who has an audience of 1,000 or more for his Sunday morning sermons and slightly less in the evening, considers slavery an abomination.  The Union — a united America – is sacrosanct. “What a privilege it is to be an American,” he often says. There is no separation of church and state in his sermons or his oratory:

“The Rebellion—it is the cause of Wrong against Right. It is not only an unjustifiable revolution but a geographical wrong, a moral wrong, a religious wrong, a war against the Constitution, against the New Testament, against God.”

Besieged with speaking invitations, Starr King accepts them all, whether major cities or mining camps. He barnstorms California, speaking from a podium draped with an American flag, defending the Union and supporting Abraham Lincoln. At one mass rally in san Francisco, 40,000 gather to hear him speak. HIs friend, His friend, Edward Everett Hale, author of “The Man Without a Country,” says “Starr King was an orator no one could silence and no one could answer.” 

Starr King calls for an “emancipation proclamation” nearly two years before Lincoln issues one:

“O’ that the President would soon speak that electric sentence —inspiration to the loyal North, doom to the traitorous aristocracy whose cup of guilt is full! Let him say that it is a war of mass against class, of America against feudalism, of the schoolmaster against the slave-master, of workmen against the barons, of the ballot box against the barracoon. This is what the struggle means. Proclaim it so, and what a light breaks through our leaden sky! The war-wave rolls then with the impetus and weight of an idea.”

Lincoln ekes out a win in California with 32.3 percent of the vote – just 724 votes more than the 37,999 cast for the closest of his three opponents, Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas. But the secessionist spirit doesn’t abate.  On July 4, 1861, a Confederate flag waves over Los Angeles. Gen. E.V. Sumner, named commander of U.S. troops on the Pacific Coast in March 1861, tells Lincoln’s War Department: “The disaffection in the southern part of the state is increasing and is becoming dangerous and it is indispensably necessary to throw reinforcements into that section immediately.”

Starr King continues his speeches and sermons, in praise of patriotism and the Union and his parishioner, Leland Stanford, who is elected California first Republican governor September 4, 1861. Humor is major part of Starr King’s oral arsenal.  Edwin P. Whipple, one of Starr King’s earliest biographers and author of the introduction to the 1877 collection, Substance and Show and Other Lectures By Thoms Starr King describes the preacher as “gifted with an exquisite, a delicious sense of the ludicrous, and given to bursts of uncontrollable merriment, happy as childhood and as innocent.”

Towards the end of his life, Starr King says, “Though I weigh only 120 pounds, when I’m mad, I weigh a ton.”  Told he is being mentioned as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Starr King replies: “I would swim to Australia before taking a political post. A dandy lives from one necktie to another, a fashionable woman from one wrinkle to another and a politician from one election to another.”

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“I PLEDGED CALIFORNIA TO A NORTHERN REPUBLIC AND TO A FLAG THAT SHOULD HAVE NO TREACHEROUS THREADS OF COTTON IN ITS WARP, AND THE AUDIENCE CAME DOWN IN THUNDER.”

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Sarcasm also plays a role:

“There are those who say that they are Union men, and in favor of the Government, and yet they are bitterly opposed to the administration, and cannot support its policy. But in a war for self existence, this divorce is impossible. One might as well say at a fire, while his house is beginning to crackle in the flames, ‘I am in favor of this engine, I go for this water; the hose meets my endorsement. Certainly, I am for putting out the fire, but don’t ask me to help man the brakes, for I am conscientiously opposed to the hose pipe. Its nozzle isn’t handsome. It wasn’t made by a Democrat.'”

Satisfied that a Republican governor will hold any secessionist efforts in check, Starr King turns his energies to improving the appalling care of wounded soldiers, who often lacked sheets and blankets. Medical staff was small and usually poorly trained. Hospitals are unsanitary and inadequate. Rev. H.W. Bellows of New York creates the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the American Red Cross, in 1861. Starr King is the Sanitary Commission in California. To aid Union soldiers, the commission raises $4.8 million nationwide. Of that, Starr King convinces California to give $1.25 million,  $200,000 from San Francisco.

Simonds notes that this generosity comes despite an 1862 flood in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys that destroys $50 million in property and a drought the following year that wipes out the state wheat crop. On the day of his death, the San Francisco Bulletin writes:

“The announcement of the death of Rev. Thomas Starr King startles the community, and shocks it like the loss of a great battle or tidings of a sudden and undreamed of public calamity. Certainly no other man on the Pacific Coast would be missed so much. San Francisco has lost one of her chief attractions; the State, its noblest orator; the country one of her ablest defenders.”

One of the sequoias in the Mariposa Grove is named Starr King, as is a 9,096-foot granite dome in Yosemite.  

In 1913, Starr King is judged one of California’s two greatest heroes. Money is raised to cast a bronze statute of him that will stand in the National Statuary Hall Collection of the U.S. Capitol. It takes awhile: Starr King’s statue is donated to the hall in 1931. 

Seventy-five years later, the state Legislature approves — with only one dissenting vote — Senate Joint Resolution 3 to bounce Starr King’s statue from the National Statuary Hall and replace it with one of Ronald Reagan. 

The resolution is authored by Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, a Murieta Republican, who admits to the San Francisco Chronicle that he doesn’t know who Starr King is, adding “I think there’s probably a lot of Californians like me.” 

Hollingsworth tells the Chronicle that Starr King also wasn’t born in California although that criteria isn’t applied to Reagan, born in Illinois, or the other statue California has in the national hall — Father Junipero Serra, born in Majorca Spain. The only “no” vote on the resolution comes from then Sen. Debra Bowen, later California’s Secretary of State from 2006 to 2014, who apparently is aware of Starr King’s contributions to the state.

In November 2009, Starr King’s statute is placed in Civil War Memorial Grove in Sacramento’s Capitol Park.