While California entered the Union as a free state, white racism was sufficiently strong to make life very difficult for its small African American population, numbering about 1,000
In 1850. During the next three decades their numbers grew slowly, still constituting only 1 percent of the total people in residence.
In the 1850s the state legislature passed a series of laws that threatened some presumptively free blacks with a return to bondage, and prohibited African Americans from voting, testifying in state courts, serving on juries, and marrying whites. Besides facilitating reenslavement, these measures prevented blacks from being able to defend their property holdings and other assets in a court of law. Additionally, racially based legal obstacles made it nearly impossible for their children to attend white public schools.
State lawmakers enacted a fugitive slave statute in 1852, reminiscent of the measure that was part of the federal Omnibus Bill that brought California into the Union two years earlier. The 1852 state law was not so much aimed at returning fugitive slaves, for there were practically none in California, given its distance from Dixie. Instead, that law became a weapon of Southern masters who had brought slaves into the state to mine gold and afterward intended to return to the South with their human “property" Ordinarily, slaves brought to California, where they resided, would thereby gain their freedom since the state had outlawed servitude. To get around this, masters claimed that in accordance with California’s fugitive slave law they had the legal right to round up their “fugitive slaves” and take them back to the South.
Slave masters also were helped by California’s judiciary. In an 1858 case involving African American slave Archie Lee, the state supreme court ruled that despite the fact that Lee would ordinarily have been freed by residing in California, he should remain in bondage because his master was ill and needed help. Fortunately for Lee, a U. S. commissioner intervened and secured his freedom.
Bridget “Biddy” Mason’s rise from bondage exemplified just how successful some African Americans became in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Arriving in southern California in 1851 as a slave, she gained her freedom five years later. Afterward, Mason worked as a nurse in Los Angeles for $2.50 a day. She saved enough money to buy several pieces of real estate, which she eventually parlayed into a fortune. As a wealthy landowner, Mason turned to philanthropy, founding a nursery school and a rest home for poor blacks. Her success, and that of a few others, was the exception for African Americans. Still, it exemplified what was possible in a society permeated with white racism and undergoing rapid socio-economic change on the eve of the railroad-building era.
SUMMARY
Because of the chaos of the gold rush in 1849, Californians hastily framed a state government before attaining statehood itself the following year. They drafted a constitution requiring that all laws be published in English and Spanish, outlawing slavery, extending citizenship to whites only (including Californios), setting the eastern boundary, and recognizing the property rights of married women. California’s constitution is unique in that it is the only state charter that guarantees the rights of “pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness.”
Figure 5.4 Bridget "Biddy” Mason. Courtesy of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. Records, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Legal battles and lawlessness pervaded the times. Californio rancheros struggled to retain their huge land tracts but lost much of their holdings through lengthy and costly court proceedings. Amid the chaos in the diggings and the violence that spilled over into San Francisco, powerful vigilante movements in 1851 and 1856 attempted to provide law and order in the Far West’s largest, wealthiest port city. California politics, particularly the Broderick-Gwin feud, both reflected and fueled the state’s untamed political landscape. Meanwhile, San Francisco-spawned filibustering ventures in Hawai’i, Mexico, and parts of Central and South America, demonstrated California’s aggressive reach in the Pacific Basin.
California’s Pacific maritime importance was underscored by huge Civil War-time gold shipments by sea to the Union government, and the ocean crossings of Chinese immigrants to the Golden State. During the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, the San Francisco-based Pacific Mail Steamship Company transported tens of thousands of these immigrants, who became a major force in agriculture, fishing, mining, and railroadbuilding. Some, like Norman Asing, became leading merchants in San Francisco, home to America’s oldest and largest Chinatown.
The Chinese, like other non-Anglos, suffered discrimination in housing, jobs, and the administration of justice, as these ethnic minorities could not bear witness against a white person in a court of law. All of these minorities fought back, often by forming self-help associations, taking advantage of the few opportunities open to them, or turning to crime. Indians fared the worst as their population declined substantially due to disease and treatment at the hands of whites that approached genocide.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• In what sense was bilingualism established as a principle in the California constitution of 1849?
• What forms did public disorder and violence take in the 1850s? To what extent was Anglo racism a factor leading to these social problems?
• Where throughout the Pacific Basin were California filibusterers active?
• What evidence supports the view that California’s involvement in the Civil War was mainly maritime in nature?
• How well did Californios and other Spanish-speakers fare in California during the first decade of statehood? Who were their leaders and how did they deal with the American takeover of the former Mexican province?
FURTHER READINGS
Robert R. Alvarez, Jr., Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1800-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). The author treats the Baja peninsula and California to the north as one region based on strong historical and familial links.
John F. Burns and Richard J. Orsi, eds., Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). This work is strong on the details of establishing a governmental framework for the new state.
Tom Chaffin, Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006). The Pacific exploits of this much-feared Confederate war vessel are treated in this engaging account.
Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). The author provides a detailed social and cultural history of America’s oldest and largest Chinatown.
Thomas W. Chinn, ed., A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969). This thin volume offers invaluable, documented information on California’s Chinese.
Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). This book is part of a new genre of scholarly works addressing the role of the Pacific world in shaping American history.
William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). The author shows how Los Angeles, ever America’s “city of the future,” came of age by appropriating and at times obliterating its Mexican past.
Richard A. Garcia, ed., “Turning Points: Mexican Americans in California History,” California History, 74 (Fall 1995), 226-339. The entire issue is devoted to Mexican Americans in the state.
Benjamin F. Gilbert, “California and the Civil War, a Bibliographic Essay,” California Historical Society Quarterly, 40 (December 1961), 289-307. Though dated, this article introduces investigators to the earlier literature on the subject matter.
Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The complex process of identity-formation among Indians and Californios, especially in the southern part of the state, is treated with sophistication in this work.
Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1997). In multiple essays, each of which is devoted to a separate theme, six authors address the political, diplomatic, military, artistic, and other aspects of the Manifest Destiny movement that brought California into the Union.
Robert F. Heizer and Alan J. Almquist, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). This early study of racism in California is distinctive for its presentation of minority voices, reflective of the more than 50 pages of pertinent documents at the end of the book.
Corinne K. Hoexter, From Canton to California: The Epic Chinese Immigration (New York: Four Winds Press, 1976). This sympathetic account of Chinese immigration to California chronicles the racism and other hardships they encountered along with their contributions and spread into communities from San Francisco to New York City.
Aurora Hunt, The Army of the Pacific, 1860-1866 (Mechan-icsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2004). This study focuses largely on California’s military role in the Civil War.
Rudolph M. Lapp, Afro-Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1987). Like the author’s other works, only broader in scope, this book provides a reliable guide to the experiences of African Americans in the Golden State.
Glenna Matthews, The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date study on Civil War California in print.
Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, ed., “African Americans in California,” California History, 75 (Fall 1996), 194-283. An indispensable resource, this issue provides a “state-of-the-field” assessment of the African American experience in California.
Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). The pioneering work on the subject, it treats the factions within Californio ranks and their expedient partnerships with American merchants, while analyzing the fall of this elite Spanish-speaking cohort from power.
Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). This study traces the impact of antebellum America’s growing sectional divide on the politics of gold rush California, while touching on the state’s military role in the Civil War.
Andrew F. Rolle, “California Filibustering and the Hawaiian Kingdom,” Pacific Historical Review, 19 (1950), 251-64. This article focuses on an often marginalized episode in the history of California filibustering.
Robert J. Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations between China and the United States, 1850-1915 (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore Press, 1988). The hardships suffered by Chinese laborers aboard California-bound American ships are detailed in this authoritative book.
World History
