Authors: H.W. Brands
Outside the courtroom, Brannan and Sutter were bitter enemies. Actually, the bitterness was mostly Sutter’s, who had to watch as Brannan became the grandee Sutter had lately been. Sutter was convinced that Brannan was the one who ruined Sutterville. “Brannan moved his store from the fort to the river, where Sacramento now is,” Sutter recalled. “That was the reason he wanted the town there. The merchants of Sutterville were his rivals…. Jealousy built Sacramento.” (Yet envy—Sutter’s envy—got in a couple of licks. Sutter seems to have been the source of a story that initially revealed Brannan’s Mormonism as the conversion-ofconvenience it proved to be. When Brigham Young heard that Brannan had been tithing the miners at the Mormon Diggings, he sent an envoy to
fetch the church’s money. In the version circulated by Sutter, Brannan replied, “You go back and tell Brigham Young that I’ll give up the Lord’s money when he sends me a receipt signed by the Lord.”)
Brannan’s success transcended his dealings with Sutter. As the rush to the mines continued, Brannan’s Sacramento store did a huge business, as much as $5,000 per day. With the proceeds he opened additional stores throughout the gold country and constructed hotels, warehouses, and other buildings in Sacramento and San Francisco. In San Francisco he organized the consortium that built the city’s first large wharf. Costing $200,000, it quickly repaid its owners and greatly augmented Brannan’s wealth. It was Brannan who initiated the first overland mail service to the East, and Brannan who brought the first steam locomotive to California (by ship around Cape Horn). Brannan was probably California’s first millionaire, which fact alone made him, in the opinion of many of his fellow Californians, worthy of the highest regard.
And so he regarded himself. He insisted on the finest tailored clothing, now that he could afford it, and he had his barber trim his whiskers in the “imperial” fashion of the courts of central Europe: long side-whiskers and a neat tuft beneath the mouth. His heavy-lidded, almost lazy, dark eyes had sometimes seemed out of place on one as quick to get ahead as he; but now that he had outpaced the pack, their careless arrogance suited a man who had every reason for self-satisfaction.
Y
ET SUTTER HAD
a final hurrah. By the summer of 1849 the Swiss native had lost control of everything but a farm on the Feather River, to which he retreated from the swirl of swindle and confusion. He emerged only on the call of the acting governor of California, General Bennett Riley, for a convention to write a constitution for the state. Riley’s action was irregular, in that California wasn’t a state, or even a territory. The federal Congress, accustomed to the slow pace of settlement of the regions previously acquired from foreign countries, and consumed by matters it considered more important, had adjourned without organizing a territorial government for California. But already California contained more people
than were required for statehood, and thousands more were arriving every week. The institutions left over from the Mexican era were clearly inadequate to the task of governing this rambunctious group, besides being distasteful to Americans reared on more democratic forms. So Riley, without authorization, summoned a constitutional convention, hoping the end would justify the means. “As Congress has failed to organize a new Territorial Government, it becomes our imperative duty to take some active measures to provide for the existing wants of the country,” he explained. The goal of the project being “a more perfect political organization,” the governor expressed his earnest desire “that all good citizens will unite in carrying it into execution.”
Forty-eight delegates gathered at Monterey in early September 1849. As a group they summarized much of the diversity of the current population of California. Seven were native-born Californians; these included one Indian (Manuel Domínguez of Los Angeles). One delegate had been born in Spain, one in France, one in England, one in Scotland, one in Ireland, one (Sutter) in Switzerland. Thirty-five were born in the United States, with their time of residence in California ranging from four months to twenty years. The Americans from free states outnumbered those from slave states twenty-one to fourteen. By occupation, there were fourteen lawyers, twelve farmers (a few of the Americans preferred the label “agriculturist,” while San Francisco–born José Antonio Carrillo, at fifty-three the oldest delegate, identified himself as a “
labrador
”), eight merchants, five military officers, two printers, one physician, one banker, one “negotiant” (this was Pedro Sansevaine, originally of Bordeaux), and one person (Benjamin Moore of Florida) who listed his occupation as “elegant leisure.” (The degree of elegance of Moore’s leisure was a matter of interpretation. He brandished a Bowie knife the size of a small sword and was typically at least semi-inebriated.) That none of the delegates identified themselves as miners, despite the fact that many of them had been in the mines, reflected the feeling almost universal in California that mining was a temporary occupation, a source of wealth rather than identity.
As in most such gatherings, assorted motives inspired the delegates. Tennessee-born William Gwin had been a congressman from Mississippi
before traveling west; he wanted to become California’s first senator and judged the constitutional convention the appropriate place to begin campaigning. (“Dr. Gwin laid before me his whole plan, which is this,” recorded J. Ross Browne, the convention’s note-taker, here acting unofficially. “He came out to California to form a constitution and identify himself with the political interests of the country. After forming a constitution he will undoubtedly be made Senator of the United States from California.”) The native Californians present hoped to place a check on the enthusiasms of the Americans, preserving as much of the old system as possible, and in particular preserving their landholdings against the newcomers. (In their daydreams some of them may have hoped for more. José Carrillo, who had been an influential official under the Mexican regime, consorted regularly with former General Castro, now returned from exile. “I was gravely informed by a Californian who sat opposite me that he [Castro] meditated the reconquest of the country!” reported Bayard Taylor, attending the convention as an observer.)
The delegates gathered in Colton Hall, named for a former alcalde of Monterey who paid for the building with funds from the sale of town lots. It had two stories and was constructed of the same yellow sandstone that characterized the best buildings in Monterey. The sessions were held in a large meeting room that filled the second story. The delegates sat at four long tables, a dozen per table, and were cordoned off from spectators by a rail that ran the width of the room. Two American flags hung down behind a rostrum at the delegates’ end of the room; these flanked an unusual portrait of George Washington, rendered by a local artist working chiefly—to judge by the visual evidence—from imagination. A door at the center of the room opened onto a balcony, which overlooked Monterey Bay. Delegates weary of sitting, or of listening, could step outside to enjoy the ocean air and the seaside sunsets.
Perhaps because all were sensitive to the irregularity of the proceedings, and perhaps by deliberate contrast to the anarchic state of affairs in California at large, the delegates adhered—at least at first—to strict protocol. They swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. They appointed clerks, translators, and sergeants-at-arms. They elected Robert
Semple as president of the convention and William Marcy as secretary. They appointed local clergymen to open the sessions with a prayer: Padre Antonio Ramírez for the Catholic Californians, and the Reverend S. H. Willey for the predominantly Protestant Americans.
As their initial order of substantive business, the delegates adopted a bill of rights, based on the federal Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. (Perhaps to prevent Californians’ suffering the common American misconception that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are guaranteed under the federal Constitution, the California convention incorporated Jefferson’s formula as the first section of the first article of their state constitution.) The California bill of rights also included a ban on slavery. “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State,” asserted the pertinent section.
The inclusion of this section was a bit of a surprise. The drafting committee had refrained from mentioning slavery, out of concern that the large southern-born contingent would object and perhaps tie up the convention at the outset. But when William Shannon, of Ireland via New York, offered the antislavery clause as an amendment to an initial draft of the constitution, the convention adopted it unanimously. For some of the southerners this may have been a tactical maneuver, a concession for which they hoped to be repaid later in the convention. For others it represented an acknowledgment that California was inhospitable to slavery. Where so many free men worked the mines, very few of them wished to incur the stigma slavery placed on manual labor. (Alternatively, as one veteran of the mines put it: “In a country where every white man makes a slave of himself, there is no use in keeping niggers.”) Editorial opinion in California was strongly against slavery, and a recent mass meeting in Sacramento had resoundingly condemned the institution.
Yet the racial question, as distinct from slavery, wasn’t so easily dismissed, and in fact became a central focus of the convention’s debates. Even before the convention could vote on the Shannon amendment, M. M. McCarver, from Kentucky via Oregon, moved to amend the amendment, proposing to add, “Nor shall the introduction of free negroes, under
indentures or otherwise, be allowed.” McCarver’s motion was ruled out of order until the convention voted on the Shannon amendment. The next day McCarver offered a reworded substitute; again he was put off, this time with the understanding that his views would be considered later. On September 19 he tried again, and succeeded in sparking a heated discussion. “No population that could be brought within the limits of our territory could be more repugnant to the feelings of the people, or injurious to the prosperity of the community, than free negroes,” McCarver asserted. “They are idle in their habits, difficult to be governed by the laws, thriftless, and uneducated. It is a species of population that this country should be particularly guarded against.”
Robert Semple—also from Kentucky, via Missouri—concurred. Saying he had canvassed opinion regarding such a measure, the convention president declared, “I found no man in my district who did not approve of it.” Semple suggested that in the absence of a ban on blacks, the southern states would dump their unwanted Negroes on California. “I can assure you, sir, thousands will be introduced into this country before long, if you do not insert a positive prohibition against them in your Constitution—an immense and overwhelming population of negroes, who have never been freemen, who have never been accustomed to provide for themselves. What would be the state of things in a few years? The whole country would be filled with emancipated slaves—the worst species of population—prepared to do nothing but steal, or live upon our means as paupers.” As president of the convention, Semple felt particular responsibility for ensuring ratification of the document it produced; he suggested that an anti-Negro clause would be very popular. “It will be a strong recommendation to the Constitution, and give it many votes in the community which may not otherwise be cast for it.”
Shannon differed strenuously. In the first place, he said, Semple deluded himself to think eastern slaveholders would go to the trouble and expense of sending their slaves clear to California to emancipate them. Why not simply ship them across the Ohio River? More fundamentally, the proposed ban was ethically repugnant. “Free men of color have just as good a
right, and ought to have, to emigrate here as white men.” The ban would deprive the Negroes of their right to make a living in California, and it would deprive California of the value of their labor.
William Wozencraft, born in Ohio but lately of Louisiana, thought Shannon naïvely mistaken in contending that Negroes could bring anything of value to California. “Why, sir, of all the states that I have any knowledge of, whether free or slave states, it is admitted by all, whether philanthropists for blacks or for all mankind, that the free negro is one of the greatest evils that society can be afflicted with.” As to the matter of rights, Shannon should consider the rights of white workingmen, and of the people of California generally. “We should protect them against a class of society that would degrade labor, and thereby arrest the progress of enterprise and greatly impair the prosperity of the state.”
Kimball Dimmick of New York rallied to Shannon’s defense. Whatever the experience of other states, Dimmick said, California was different. “We occupy a peculiar position. We are forming a constitution for the first state of the American Union on the shores of the Pacific. The eyes of the world are turned toward us. The constitution which emanates from our hands is to be subjected to the scrutiny of all the civilized nations of the earth.” The recent revolutions in Europe, and the rumblings in several American states against slavery, revealed that the spirit of liberty was alive and advancing. “Let it not be said that we, the first great republican state on the borders of the Pacific, who have it within our power to spread the blessings of free institutions even to the remotest shore of the Eastern world—let it not be said that we have attempted to arrest the progress of human freedom. Let this constitution go forth from this convention, and from the new state, a model instrument of liberal and enlightened principles.”
The debate continued for hours, with additional speakers joining in and the original speakers reiterating and reformulating their arguments. In the end, the convention, sitting as a committee of the whole, approved McCarver’s anti-Negro proposition. But the vote was close, and when the convention, as the convention, ultimately passed judgment on the work of the committee of the whole, the provision was dropped.