Mrs. Sherman returned in the latter part of November of the same
year, when Mr. and Mrs. Bowman, who meantime had bought a lot next
to us and erected a house thereon, removed to it, and we thus
continued close neighbors and friends until we left the country for
good in 1857.
During the summer of 1856, in San Francisco, occurred one of those
unhappy events, too common to new countries, in which I became
involved in spite of myself.
William Neely Johnson was Governor of California, and resided at
Sacramento City; General John E. Wool commanded the Department of
California, having succeeded General Hitchcock, and had his
headquarters at Benicia; and a Mr. Van Ness was mayor of the city.
Politics had become a regular and profitable business, and
politicians were more than suspected of being corrupt. It was
reported and currently believed that the sheriff (Scannell) had
been required to pay the Democratic Central Committee a hundred
thousand dollars for his nomination, which was equivalent to an
election, for an office of the nominal salary of twelve thousand
dollars a year for four years. In the election all sorts of
dishonesty were charged and believed, especially of "ballot-box
stuffing," and too generally the better classes avoided the
elections and dodged jury-duty, so that the affairs of the city
government necessarily passed into the hands of a low set of
professional politicians.
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