When most people think about the American Civil War, California is not the first place that comes to mind: it was far from the main scenes of military action, and its remoteness in the era before the completion of a transcontinental railroad makes it seem peripheral to the war's outcome. Yet Abraham Lincoln cared enough about it that in 1863, he appointed a Californian, Stephen J. Field, to the U.S. Supreme Court, a choice suggesting that Lincoln himself believed the state's loyalty to the Union to be important. In fact, California gold played a valuable role in the Northern war effort, as Lincoln well knew. Furthermore, California's electoral votes were useful for Republicans, particularly in a state that had been solidly Democratic until Lincoln's narrow victory there in 1860. And the struggle in the state between Union supporters and Confederate sympathizers, replete with civil liberties issues that are still relevant today, echoes the better-known struggles in other states with a significant Southern-born population – a population that in California in 1860 constituted about 20 percent of the native born.