The Reverend Thomas Starr King left the amenities of bookish and comfortable Boston, where he was lionized as a charismatic and courageous preacher, to take a struggling Unitarian pulpit in a San Francisco that in the 1850s was hardly the sophisticated city that it is today. He soon found himself involved in the desperate fight to keep California in the Union and slave free. Not coincidentally, he became Grand Chaplain of the Masonic Grand Lodge of California, joining brother freemasons in the struggle against succession.