How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

by Heather Cox Richardson

Westerners wholeheartedly endorsed those sentiments. A friend of William Sharon’s, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field, helped to write them into American law. A Forty-Niner like Sharon, Field rose quickly in legal circles in California, and Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1863 to represent the important new region. Field was a Democrat who shared the racism of his party. He was also an advocate for mining leaders like Sharon, who had once loaned him $25,000—Field never repaid it—and put him up in a fancy hotel for free whenever he came back to San Francisco. In his thirty-four years on the Court, Field wrote more opinions than almost any other Supreme Court justice in history, insisting that the primary law in America was not the promotion of equality but rather the protection of property.24