The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (11 page)

Three months later, Thomas Jefferson Green and his fellow Texans arrived. Ignoring the local rules, they took over about one-third of a mile on the left bank of the Yuba and established grandiose claims of their own measurement in their own names and the names of their fifteen slaves. The miners immediately sent a committee to inform them of the “law.” Green and his friends refused to back down and threatened to fight if necessary. The miners then called a general meeting at Rose’s Bar, for Sunday, July 29. There, they voted “that no slave or negro should own claims or even work in the mines.” A new committee, with some younger members, was then sent to Green’s camp. Although unarmed, they “made clear their errand.” The slaves were to be out of the district by the next morning. That night the slaves fled, followed the next morning by Green and his fellow Texans.

The code that the Yuba miners passed that July applied not only to Thomas Jefferson Green and his slaves. It applied to any combination of masters and slaves, and it was enforced. Three months after the Green incident, a majordomo from Chile arrived with a gang of peons to work under his authority. The miners told him to get out. He ignored the warning. They hanged him. Weeks later, another Chilean entrepreneur showed up. He, too, failed to heed their warning. They cut off his ears.
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Map of the gold country. The Yuba River, where Thomas Jefferson Green tried to establish slavery, is in the northern third.

Three days after passing their code, on Wednesday, August 1, the Yuba miners had the opportunity to elect someone to represent them at the state constitutional convention. They had been urged to do so first by General Bennet Riley, then by the president of the United States.

Riley had arrived in California in April 1849 to replace Colonel Richard B. Mason as military governor. A large “grim old fellow” and “fine free swearer” in his mid-fifties, Riley realized immediately that he was in no position to actually govern California. He also learned that San Franciscans for some time had been clamoring for a provisional civilian government. Rather than oppose this groundswell, Riley decided to give Congress a bit more time and then lead it. In late May he learned that there was little hope that Congress would do anything. Five days later, on June 3, Riley issued a call for an election on the first day of August to select delegates for a convention to meet in Monterey. There, the delegates would write a state constitution—or, if they wished, organize a territorial government, elect superior court judges, prefects, and sub-prefects, and fill all vacancies for alcaldes, justices of the peace, and other offices that had once existed under Mexican law.
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The day after Riley issued his call for a convention, T. Butler King arrived in San Francisco. He came on the
Panama,
the same ship as William Gwin and Jessie Benton Frémont. He had been sent by the new president, General Zachary Taylor, under the guise of studying the need for mail steamship lines and survey routes for a Panama railroad. In fact, King, a slaveholding congressman from Georgia, had been sent on a secret mission to encourage Californians to form a state so that Congress would have “no territory to legislate upon.”

President Zachary Taylor, also a major slaveholder with at least 127 slaves in Louisiana and Mississippi, had concluded even before taking office that the long-winded congressional debate about slavery in the territories was both dangerous and unnecessary. His logic was simple. Since Mexico had abolished slavery, the institution could not be revived in territories taken from Mexico. Thus men like David Wilmot, John C. Calhoun, and Robert Barnwell Rhett were just causing trouble, just playing with fire. And since everyone agreed that states could make their own decisions regarding slavery, the solution was to make California into a state as soon as possible and get the issue off the political agenda. So in April 1849, Taylor dispatched King to California, never dreaming that the process would be well on its way by the time King got there.
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The Yuba miners knew exactly the type of delegate they wanted. They wanted someone who would use his influence to forever prohibit slavery in California. For that task they chose a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer, William Shannon.

At first glance, Shannon didn’t appear to be up to the task. He was a man “of moderate proportions, a florid, open countenance, with a laughing devil in his eye.” He was also a prankster, “ever full of fun and frolic,” but never “malicious, a current of good humor ran through all his acts.”
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At the same time, however, the miners knew that they could count on Shannon. He was tougher than he looked. He was also an antislavery man.

Born in county Mayo, Ireland, Shannon had moved to Steuben, New York, at age seven. He had been admitted to the New York bar in 1846. That same year he had joined Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson’s New York Volunteers, been elected captain of Company I, and sailed around the Horn to California on the
Susan Drew.
Stationed first in Monterey, then in San Diego, he had been discharged from the army in September 1848. He had then formed a partnership with two of his fellow officers, hired ten of his enlisted men, and sent them to Coloma to mine gold. Meanwhile, he went to Monterey to see Colonel Mason, the military governor of California, and secured an appointment as alcalde of Coloma, a position that essentially made him the region’s chief legal officer—mayor, sheriff, judge, all rolled into one.

Growing up in upstate New York, Shannon had no experience with black bondage. But he had seen it firsthand on his trip around the Horn. The stopover at Rio de Janeiro had appalled him. It was bad enough, wrote Shannon, that Brazil was a “priest-ridden society.” Its effects could be seen everywhere—“utter ignorance, superstition, and indolence…the absence of all energy and enterprise.” But what made Brazil truly “loathsome” and “revolting” was slavery. “Here are not the descendents of negroes who were brought perhaps more than a century ago from their land, but the African himself, bearing all the marks of country and tribe as well in the sometimes frightful tattooing perhaps over most of the body, as well as the features. And horrible as the practice is, you almost lose your pity, in the disgust which their appearance excites.”
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If General Riley had his way, Shannon and the other delegates were to begin work on the first day of September. That didn’t happen, as some of the delegates were slow getting to Monterey. But by Monday, September 3, enough had arrived to meet the quorum requirement and officially organize for business.

It was a young group, with only four of the forty-eight delegates over age fifty and nine under age thirty. Twenty-two hailed from the free states, fifteen from the slave states, seven from California, and four from overseas.
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The most cohesive group were the seven Californians. They already knew one another and were led by Abel Stearns, who had been born in Massachusetts but had married a Spanish woman and had lived in California for twenty years.
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Shannon was not the only member of Colonel Stevenson’s New York Volunteers at the convention. Ten of the forty-eight delegates were New Yorkers, and seven had come to California as part of Stevenson’s regiment. Of these the best known was Edward Gilbert, a thirty-year-old printer who had once been the associate editor of the
Albany Argus,
the leading Democratic newspaper in New York. Like Shannon, he had been an officer under Stevenson. Upon his discharge, he had founded the
Alta California,
now San Francisco’s leading newspaper. A staunch advocate for statehood, Gilbert had run a series of editorials belittling the impotence and arbitrariness of the military regime in Monterey and helped push General Riley into calling a constitutional convention.
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Among the slaveholding delegates was William Gwin. On disembarking from the steamship
Panama
on June 4, he immediately launched his campaign to become a U.S. senator. On June 12, he spoke at a San Francisco meeting. There was no need, he said, for California to become a territory first and then a state at a later date. California already had more than enough people to qualify for statehood. It should immediately become a state. Later that summer, Gwin made the same pitch to meetings in Sacramento and Stockton. On August 1, he was chosen to be one of San Francisco’s eight delegates.
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Gwin expected to be in charge. On a steamer from San Francisco to Monterey, he told a fellow delegate, Elisha Crosby, that he was the logical choice for president of the convention. He also “assumed a very haughty and dictatorial attitude,” noted Crosby, and “affected that air of superiority that to the average American is offensive.” Everyone “knew,” moreover, that he had “in his pocket, a combination of the State Constitutions of Ohio and Iowa.”
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At the convention, another delegate, Jacob Snyder, a thirty-four-year-old Pennsylvanian who had gained renown for his role in the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846, mocked Gwin for expecting to be president and for bringing along a constitution that he expected to have adopted. Did he think the rest of the delegates were there as “merely dummies to represent numbers and sections”? Snyder then nominated for president “Long Bob” Semple, a forty-two-year-old Kentuckian who had also partaken in the Bear Flag Revolt and was now a Monterey printer. The grizzly six-foot eight-inch redhead won easily. To Gwin’s dismay, four-fifths of the delegates voted against him, even though Semple acknowledged that “he had never seen the inside of a legislative hall and knew no more about the rules of proceedings than a child does in learning the ABCs.”
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Once Semple was elected, the delegates got to work writing a constitution. General Riley had left open the question of whether they were to create a territorial government or a state. So Gwin, who could not become a senator from a territory, moved that they form a state. Only the southern California delegates objected. Fearing that they would be saddled with heavy land taxes and have little say in the new state government, they preferred to be under the federal government. One delegate, José Antonio Carrillo of Los Angeles, floated the idea of splitting California in two, creating a state north of San Luis Obispo and letting southern California become a territory, but this proposal never got off the ground. The southern Californians were hopelessly outnumbered, and thus Gwin’s motion passed easily.

The actual writing of the state constitution was largely a clerical task. Gwin was not the only one who had a copy of the Iowa Constitution in his pocket. So did others, and for those who didn’t Gwin had extra copies to spare. That document had just been written in 1846. Some delegates also had the New York Constitution, which had been revised in 1846. Using those two documents and others as guides, a select committee scissored and pasted together a constitution for the other delegates to consider. Of 136 sections, at least 66 were taken out of the Iowa Constitution, 19 out of the New York.
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