The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (12 page)

None of the sections that the select committee reported to the convention, however, barred slavery. So on Monday, September 10, Shannon moved to include another section in the California Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in the State.”

Promptly seconding Shannon’s motion was William Gwin, the owner of two hundred Mississippi slaves. That surprised Elisha Crosby, who had “expected very considerable opposition from the Southern element.” He also thought that the constitution that Gwin had in his pocket called for opening the southern half of California to slavery. He concluded that Gwin had probably just counted noses and realized that he was outnumbered by men from “New England and New York and Pennsylvania.” In any event, noted Crosby, “Gwin with great good grace, advocated the adoption of the clause prohibiting slavery.”
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Actually, Gwin had already counted noses earlier that summer. In his pursuit of a Senate seat, he had traveled north to the gold fields to take the political pulse of the region. He saw immediately that the gold diggings could be worked efficiently by slave labor. But he also quickly learned that the miners would have none of it. A year later, when cornered by some pro-slavery men at an evening function, he summed up the prevailing attitude:

I can satisfy you in a few words. In California, labor is respectable. In our mines are to be found men of the highest intelligence and respectability performing daily labor, and they do not wish to see the slaves of some wealthy planter brought there and put in competition with their labor, side by side. It is from the very fact that labor is respectable that we wish to keep it so by excluding slavery from our state.
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Shannon’s motion thus had Gwin’s blessing. But it did not satisfy Morton M. McCarver, a forty-two-year-old Kentucky-born Democrat. McCarver had bounced around from one frontier to another, having lived in Louisiana, Texas, Iowa, and Oregon before coming to California. In the Deep South, he had developed a fierce hatred for both blacks and their masters.
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To Shannon’s motion, McCarver thus added an amendment: “Nor shall the introduction of free negroes under indentures or otherwise, be allowed.”

Several delegates then pointed out that McCarver’s amendment was out of order. Shannon’s motion, they contended, had to be decided first. After a short debate, McCarver withdrew his amendment, and Shannon’s proposal to outlaw slavery in California passed by a unanimous vote.

But McCarver wasn’t to be put off. He raised the issue time and again. Shannon opposed it on principle; others feared that it violated the U.S. Constitution and thus would block statehood. McCarver then added a proviso to his original proposal, taken directly from the Missouri Constitution: “The legislature shall, at its first session, pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this State, and to effectually prevent owners of slaves from bringing them into this State for the purpose of setting them free…. Provided, That nothing in this constitution shall be construed to conflict with the provisions of the first clause of the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution of the United States.”

In one form or another, McCarver’s desire to ban free blacks as well as slaves from the state was hotly debated for two entire days.
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Said McCarver in defense of his proposal: “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. 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.”

In making this argument, McCarver insisted that slaveholders planned to bring blacks into California as indentured servants, work them for a short time in the mines, and then set them free. He claimed to know several men with such plans. He also said that other delegates had “received letters from the States” that confirmed his assessment. The result, said McCarver, would be disastrous. “Do the delegates suppose the white population of this country will permit these negroes to compete with them in working the mines? Sir, you will see the most fearful collisions that have ever been presented in any country…. The evil would be greater than slavery itself.”
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Echoing this argument was James McHall Jones, a twenty-five-year-old lawyer from Louisiana. What made California the “epitome of free society,” contended Jones, was that in the mines the individual white miner enjoyed a “vast advantage…over capital.” But once slaveholders brought in their black indentured servants, that would no longer be the case. The servants would “enter into competition with and degrade the white labor of the miners.” And would slaveholders bring in black servants? There was no doubt about it. It “had been made manifest to members of this House by private letters.”
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Also supporting McCarver was Jacob Snyder, the onetime Pennsylvanian who had mocked Gwin’s high-handedness. Snyder had lived in Missouri before coming to California. From that experience, he was convinced that a typical Missouri slave would net for his owner over a period of thirty-five years no more than $6,800. But suppose the owner made a contract with his slave, eventual freedom after four years of work in the California mines. At $4,000 a year in gold dust, the slave owner would net $16,000. “Do you suppose this will not be tried? It will, sir, and depend on it, you will find the country flooded with a population of free negroes—the greatest calamity that could befall California.”
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To McCarver’s fellow Kentuckian “Long Bob” Semple, the danger was even “greater” than most delegates imagined. He was certain that without a ban on black migration, the Southern states would dump unwanted slaves 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.”
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This brought a sharp retort from Shannon. Semple’s claim that California would become a dumping ground for eastern slaves, he said, was sheer nonsense. Why would eastern slaveholders go to the trouble and expense of sending their slaves to California? Why not simply ship them north across the Ohio River? More fundamentally, said Shannon, banning free blacks from the state was ethically repugnant. “Free men of color have just as good a right, and ought to have, to emigrate here as white men.”
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Henry Tefft, a twenty-six-year-old New Yorker, then weighed in. He took Shannon to task for not having his priorities straight. Shannon, said Tefft, should be concerned with the thousands of intelligent, able, young white men now working in the diggings. “No new State in the Union has ever had a population so enterprising and intelligent in character. They are working willingly, and they do not consider it a degradation to engage in any department of industry which will afford an adequate remuneration. But will this state of things continue—will this class of population continue to work cheerfully and willingly if you place them side by side with the negro? They would be unable, even if willing, to compete with the bands of negroes who would be set to work under the direction of capitalists. It would become a monopoly of the worst character. The profits of the mines would go into the pockets of single individuals.”
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Edward Gilbert, the editor of the
Alta California
who had also been one of Stevenson’s Volunteers, then rallied to Shannon’s defense. He first ridiculed the horror stories put forth by McCarver and his supporters. “We are told that slaveholders will manumit their slaves and bring them to this country to mine gold; that they will give up their plantations, however lucrative may be their business, and sacrifice their property to accomplish this object; that they will do all this, when they see staring them in the face, in the Constitution of California, that no slavery shall exist here. I do not believe this; it is not credible.”

Then Gilbert attacked McCarver’s proposal on ethical grounds. “If you insert in your Constitution such a provision or anything like it, you will be guilty of a great injustice—you will do a great wrong, sir—a wrong to the principles of liberal and enlightened freedom…. Are we to attempt here to turn back the tide of human freedom which has rolled across from continent to continent? Are we to say that a free negro or Indian, or any other freeman, shall not enter the boundaries of California? I trust not, Sir.”
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Thus it went back and forth for two full days. Again and again, the same arguments were reiterated. Free blacks were bad members of society. Black competition would degrade white labor. Slave owners would find it advantageous to bring in manumitted slaves as contract laborers. And these laborers would earn for their former masters many times their worth. Yet at the same time, many delegates found McCarver’s motion troubling. A few said it was morally wrong. More feared that it might jeopardize California’s becoming a state.

Edward Gilbert, editor of the
Alta California
and spokesman for all “freemen.” Reprinted from Frank Soulé et al.,
The Annals of San Francisco
(New York, 1854), 773.

To this objection, McCarver insisted that his amended motion would suffice. It passed the committee of the whole. In the end, however, the convention voted it down, 8 to 31.

Shannon prevailed on two other occasions at the convention. One concerned the property rights of married women.

New York, his home state, had just reversed a long-standing legal practice, one that reigned supreme not only in New York but throughout the nation. Under this well-established system, a woman’s assets and debts became her husband’s on her wedding day. She no longer had any right to control property that had been hers the previous day. Nor did she have any right from that day forward to acquire property, make contracts, keep or control her own wages or any rents, transfer property, sell property, or file suit. On the plus side, she was no longer responsible for the debts she acquired before marriage or during marriage. All her rights and liabilities now belonged to her husband.
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The system had lent itself not only to endless debate over whether it was “divinely inspired” but also to two very different hard-luck stories. Reformers, on the one hand, liked to dredge up the sad tale of a rich widow with grown children who married a wastrel who frittered away the widow’s hard-earned wealth on one harebrained venture after another. In the end, the woman and her heirs were left with nothing, and there was nothing they could do about it. The traditionalists, in turn, preferred the story of a poor widow who was being hounded by creditors and was but one step away from the poorhouse. Upon her marriage, her assets went to her husband, but so, too, did her debts, and her new husband, like any good patriarch, kept her creditors at bay and paid off the debts, and she lived happily ever after.

As time passed, men and women who wanted to change the old system gained momentum. The long depression that began with the Panic of 1837 gave them more horror stories to tell. Wealthy New Yorkers, moreover, increasingly took steps to get around the law, setting up trusts whereby only some of a beloved daughter’s property fell into the hands of her husband. The various reform movements of the period—especially temperance and antislavery—provided many women with the training to agitate for change. The high point for the reformers probably came at the famous July 1848 women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, a gathering of some two hundred women and forty men at which one speaker after another called for a Married Women’s Property Act.

But passing such an act would have been all but impossible had Jacksonian Democrats continued to dominate the New York state legislature. While some reformers were Jacksonian Democrats, the most notable being Thomas Herttell of New York City, the vast majority were Whigs. Only the Whigs were likely to put such a measure through. The election of 1848 made that possible. It split the old Van Buren coalition, with some Democrats running as Free-Soilers and others as “regular” Democrats, and as a result the Whigs gained an overwhelming majority in the legislature. The upshot was “an act for the more effectual protection of the property of married women.” The act, passed in 1848 and amended in 1849, gave a married woman the same property rights she would have had if she had remained single.

Taking his cue from his fellow Whigs in New York, William Shannon moved to include such a provision in the California Constitution. It stated: “All property, both real and personal, of the wife, owned or claimed by her before marriage, and that acquired afterwards by gift, devise, or descent, shall be her separate property, and laws shall be passed more clearly defining the rights of the wife, in relation as well to her separate property as that held in common with her husband.”