In 1842 Commodore T.A.C. Jones (1789-1858) of the United States navy,
believing that war had broken out between his country and Mexico and
that a British force was about to seize California, raised the American
flag over Monterey (October 21st), but finding that he had acted on
misinformation he lowered the flag next day with due ceremony and warm
apology. In California this incident served only to open up agreeable
personal relations and social courtesies, but it did not tend to clarify
the diplomatic atmosphere. It showed the ease of seizing the country,
the indifference of the natives, and the resolution of the United States
government. Mexico sought to prevent American immigration, but the local
authorities would not enforce such orders, however positive. Between
1843 and 1845, Great Britain, the United States, and France opened
consulates. By 1845 there was certainly an agreement in opinion among
all American residents (then not 700 in number) as regards the future of
the country. The policy of France and Great Britain in these years is
unknown. That of the United States is fully known. In 1845 the American
consul at Monterey, Thomas O. Larkin (1802-1858), was instructed to work
for the secession of California from Mexico, without overt aid from the
United States, but with their good-will and sympathy. He very soon
gained from leading officers assurances of such a movement before 1848.
At the same time American naval officers were instructed to occupy the
ports in case of war with Mexico, but first and last to work for the
good-will of the natives. In 1845 Captain J.C. Fremont,--whose doings in
California in the next two years were among the main assets in a
life-long reputation and an unsuccessful presidential campaign,--while
engaged in a government surveying expedition, aroused the apprehensions
of the Californian authorities by suspicious and very possibly
intentionally provocative movements, and there was a show of military
force by both parties. Fremont had information beyond that of ordinary
men that made him believe early hostilities between the United States
and Mexico to be inevitable; he was also officially informed of Larkin's
secret task and in no way authorized to hamper it. Resentment, however,
incited him to personal revenge on the Californian government, and an
ambition that clearly saw the gravity of the crisis prompted him to
improve it unscrupulously for his own advancement, leaving his
government to support or disavow him according as war should come or
not. In violation therefore of international amities, and practically in
disobedience of orders, he broke the peace, caused a band of Mexican
cavalry mounts to be seized, and prompted some American settlers to
occupy Sonoma (14th June 1846). This episode is known as the "Bear Flag
War," inasmuch as there was short-lived talk of making California an
independent state, and a flag with a bear as an emblem (California is
still popularly known as the Bear Flag State) flew for a few days at
Sonoma. It was a very small, very disingenuous, inevitably an anomalous,
and in the vanity of proclamations and other concomitant incidents
rather a ridiculous affair; and fortunately for the dignity of
history--and for Fremont--it was quickly merged in a larger question,
when Commodore John Drake Sloat (1780-1867) on the 7th of July raised
the flag of the United States over Monterey, proclaiming California a
part of the United States. The opening hostilities of the Mexican War
had occurred on the Rio Grande. The excuses and explanations later given
by Fremont--military preparations by the Californian authorities, the
imminence of their attack, ripening British schemes for the seizure of
the province, etc.--made up the stock account of historians until the
whole truth came out in 1886 (in Royce's _California_). Californians had
been very friendly to Americans, but Larkin's intimates thought they had
been tricked, and the people resented the stealthy and unprovoked
breaking of peace, and unfortunately the Americans did not known how to
treat them except inconsiderately and somewhat contemptuously. The
result was a feeble rising in the south. The country was fully pacified
by January 1847. The aftermath of Fremont's filibustering acts, followed
as they were by wholly needless hostilities and by some injustice then
and later in the attitude of Americans toward the natives, was a growing
misunderstanding and estrangement, regrettable in Californian history.
Thus there was an end to the "lotos-land society" of California. Another
society, less hospitable, less happy, less contented, but also less
mild, better tempered for building states, and more "progressive," took
the place of the old.
California ceded to the United States.
The rush for gold.
By the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 Mexico ceded California to
the United States. It was just at this time that gold was discovered,
and the new territory took on great national importance. The discussion
as to what should be done with it began in Congress in 1846, immediately
involving the question of slavery. A furious conflict developed, so that
nothing was accomplished in two successive sessions; even at the end of
a third, in March 1849, the only progress made toward creating a
government for the territory was that the national revenue laws had been
extended over it and San Francisco had been made a port of entry.
Meanwhile conditions grew intolerable for the inhabitants. Before the
end of the war Mexican laws not incompatible with United States laws
were by international law supposed to be in force; but nobody knew what
they were, and the uncertainties of vague and variable alcalde
jurisdictions were increased when Americans began to be alcaldes and
grafted English common-law principles, like the jury, on Californian
practice. Never was a population more in need of clear laws than the
motley Californian people of 1848-1849, yet they had none when, with
peace, military rule and Mexican law technically ended. There was a
curious extra-legal fusion of laws, a half-breed legal system, and no
definite basis for either law or government. Even the acts and theories
of the officials were very inconsistent. Early in 1849 temporary local
governments were set up in various towns, and in September a convention
framed a free-state constitution and applied for admission to the Union.
On the 7th of September 1850 a bill finally passed Congress admitting
California as a free state. This was one of the bargains in the
"Compromise Measures of 1850" that were intended to dispose of the
question of slavery in the Territories. Meanwhile the gold discoveries
culminated and surpassed "three centuries of wild talk about gold in
California." For three months there was little excitement, then a wild
rush. Settlements were completely deserted; homes, farms and stores
abandoned. Ships deserted by their sailors crowded the bay at San
Francisco--there were 500 of them in July 1850; soldiers deserted
wholesale, churches were emptied, town councils ceased to sit,
merchants, clerks, lawyers and judges and criminals, everybody, flocked
to the foothills. Soon, from Hawaii, Oregon and Sonora, from the Eastern
states, the South Seas, Australia, South America and China came an
extraordinary flow of the hopeful and adventurous. In the winter of '48
the rush began from the states to Panama, and in the spring across the
plains. It is estimated that 80,000 men reached the coast in 1849, about
half of them coming overland; three-fourths were Americans. Rapid
settlement, excessive prices, reckless waste of money, and wild
commercial ventures that glutted San Francisco with all objects usable
and unusable made the following years astounding from an economic point
of view; but not less bizarre was the social development, nor less
extraordinary the problems of state-building in a society "morally and
socially tried as no other American community ever has been tried"
(Royce). There was of course no home life in early California. In 1850
women numbered 8% of the population, but only 2% in the mining
counties. The miners were an energetic, covetous, wandering, abnormally
excitable body of men. Occasionally a kind of frenzy even would seem to
seize on them, and lured by the hope of new deposits of unheard-of
richness thousands would flock on unfounded rumours to new and perhaps
distant localities, where many might perish from disease and starvation,
the rest returning in poverty and rags. Such were the Kern River fever
of 1855 and the greater "Fraser River rush" of 1858, the latter, which
took perhaps 20,000 men out of the state, causing a terrible amount of
suffering. Many interior towns lost half their population and some
virtually all their population as a result of this emigration; and it
precipitated a real estate crash in San Francisco that threatened
temporary ruin. Mining times in California brought out some of the most
ignoble and some of the best traits of American character. Professor
Josiah Royce has pictured the social-moral process by which society
finally impressed its "claims on wayward and blind individuals" who
"sought wealth and not a social order," and so long as possible shirked
all social obligations. Through varied instruments--lynch law, popular
courts, vigilance committees--order was, however, enforced, better as
times went on, until there was a stable condition of things. In the
economic life and social character of California to-day the legacies of
1848 are plain.
Disputed land grants.
The slavery question was not settled for California in 1850. Until the
Civil War the division between the Whig and Democratic parties, whose
organization in California preceded statehood, was essentially based on
slavery. The struggle fused with the personal contests of two men,
rivals for the United States Senate, William McKendree Gwin (1805-85,
U.S. senator, 1850-55 and 1857-61), the leader of the pro-slavery party,
and David Colbreth Broderick (1819-1859), formerly a leader of Tammany
in New York, and after 1857 a member from California of the United
States Senate, the champion of free labour, who declared in 1860 for the
policy of the Republican party. Broderick's undoing was resolved upon by
the slavery party, and he was killed in a duel. The Gwin party hoped to
divide California into two states and hand the southern over to slavery;
on the eve of the Civil War it considered the scheme of a Pacific coast
republic. The decade 1850-1860 was also marked by the activity of
filibusters against Sonora and Central America. Two of these--a French
adventurer, one Gaston Raoux, comte de Raousset-Boulbon (1817-1854), and
William Walker, had very picturesque careers. The state was thoroughly
loyal when war came. The later 'fifties are characterized by H.H.
Bancroft as a period of "moral, political and financial night." National
politics were put first, to the complete ignoring of excessive taxation,
financial extravagance, ignorant legislation and corruption in
California. The public was exploited for many years with impunity for
the benefit of private interests. One legacy that ought to be briefly
noted here is that of disputed land grants. Under the Mexican regime
such grants were generous and common, and the complicated formalities
theoretically essential to their validity were very often, if not
usually, only in part attended to. Titles thus gained would never have
been questioned under continued Mexican government, but Americans were
unaccustomed to such riches in land and to such laxity. From the very
first hundreds "squatted" on large claims, contesting the title. Instead
of confirming all claims existing when the country passed to the United
States, and so ensuring an immediate settlement of the matter, which was
really the most important thing for the peace and purse of the
community, the United States government undertook through a land
commission and courts to sift the valid from the fraudulent. Claims of
enormous aggregate value were thus considered and a large part of those
dating from the last years of Mexican dominion (many probably artfully
concocted and fraudulently antedated after the commission was at work)
were finally rejected. This litigation filled the state and federal
courts for many years. The high value of realty in San Francisco
naturally offered extraordinary inducements to fraud, and the largest
part of the city was for years involved in fraudulent claims, and its
peace broken by "squatter"-troubles. Twenty or thirty years of the
state's life were disturbed by these controversies. Land monopoly is an
evil of large proportions in California to-day, but it is due to the
laxness of the United States government in enabling speculators to
accumulate holdings and not to the original extent of Mexican grants.
In state gubernatorial elections after the Civil War the Democrats won
in 1867, 1875, 1882, 1886, 1894; the Republicans in 1871, 1879, 1890,
1898, 1902, 1906, 1910. Features of political life and of legislation
after 1876 were a strong labour agitation, the struggle for the
exclusion of the Chinese, for the control of hydraulic mining,
irrigation, and the advancement by state-aid of the fruit interests; the
last three of which have already been referred to above. Labour
conditions were peculiar in the decade following 1870. Mining, war times
and the building of the Central Pacific had up to then inflated prices
and prosperity. Then there came a slump; probably the truth was rather
that money was becoming less unnaturally abundant than that there was
any over-supply of labour. The turning off of some 15,000 Chinese
(principally in 1869-1870) from the Central Pacific lines who flocked to
San Francisco, augmented the discontent of incompetents, of disappointed
late immigrants, and the reaction from flush times. Labour unions became
strong and demonstrative. In 1877-1878 Denis Kearney (1847-1907), an
Irish drayman and demagogue of considerable force and daring, headed the
discontented. This is called the "sand-lots agitation" from the
favourite meeting-place (in San Francisco) of the agitators.
The outcome of these years was the Constitution of 1879, already
described, and the exclusion of Chinese by national law. In 1879
California voted against further immigration of Chinese by 154,638 to
883. Congress re-enacted exclusion legislation in 1902. All authorities
agree that the Chinese in early years were often abused in the mining
country and their rights most unjustly neglected by the law and its
officers. Men among the most respected in California (Joaquin Miller,
H.H. Bancroft and others) have said most in praise and defence of the
Chinaman. From railroad making to cooking he has proved his abilities
and trustworthiness. He is found to-day in the mines and fisheries, in
various lines of manufacture, in small farming, and in all branches of
domestic service. The question of the economic development of the state,
and of trade to the Orient, the views of the mercenary labour-contractor
and of the philanthropist, the factor of "upper-race" repugnance, the
"economic-leech" argument, the "rat-rice-filth-and-opium" argument, have
all entered into the problem. Certain it is that though the unprejudiced
must admit that exclusion has not been at all an unmixed blessing, yet
the consensus of opinion is that a large population, non-citizen and
non-assimilable, sending--it is said--most of their earnings to China,
living in the main meanly at best, and practically without wives,
children or homes, is socially and economically a menace outweighing the
undoubted convenience of cheaper (and frequently more trustworthy)
menial labour than the other population affords. The exclusion had much
to do with making the huge single crop ranches unprofitable and in
leading to their replacement by small farms and varied crops. Many of
the Chinese now in the state are wealthy. Race feeling against them has
become much less marked.
One outcome of early mission history, the "Pious Fund of the
Californias," claimed in 1902 the attention of the Hague Tribunal. (See
ARBITRATION, INTERNATIONAL, Hague cases section.) In 1906-1907 there was
throughout the state a remarkable anti-Japanese agitation, centring in
San Francisco (q.v.) and affecting international relations and national
politics.