The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (13 page)

The delegates, by and large, thought this was a splendid idea. One delegate, to be sure, vehemently opposed the measure, and another wanted it to be left up to the state legislature. But such grumbling had little impact. Henry Tefft, a fellow New Yorker, said the provision was necessary to stop the husband from squandering the wife’s money in California’s helter-skelter speculative economy. Another New Yorker, thirty-four-year-old Kimball Dimmick, pointed out that such a law might be revolutionary back east but it was hardly revolutionary in California. For under Mexican law, the wife already owned her own property. More persuasive yet was Henry Wager Halleck, a thirty-four-year-old West Point graduate who later became famous as a Civil War general. As a bachelor, he advised all bachelors to vote for the motion, as it would induce rich women to come to California.
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That was the clincher. Anxious to attract women to California, the delegates endorsed the proposal by a voice vote. The state legislature then went a step further and placed the state under the Spanish law of “community property,” whereby a wife jointly owns everything she and her husband acquire during marriage.

Shannon’s other victory came in the debate over California’s boundary. The debate was by far the most animated of the convention. It also raised the ugliest suspicions.

First, a committee decided that Mexican California, which consisted of nearly 450,000 square miles, was too vast for one state. It recommended a more manageable state with the eastern boundary at the 116th longitude line, roughly the eastern boundary of today’s Nevada. As soon as this proposal reached the convention floor, debate heated up. William Gwin then reminded the delegates that they were supposed to write a constitution for “all” of California. He argued that the eastern boundary should follow the map of Charles Preuss, Frémont’s cartographer, which would place it in the Rockies near the 112th degree line. Joining Gwin was Henry Halleck, who suggested that the delegates might also add a proviso authorizing Congress, if it so wished, to strip away the land east of the Sierras.
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California as envisioned by William Gwin and Henry Halleck

Both men pushed for a big California on the grounds that in one dramatic stroke the delegates could resolve the slavery question that had so paralyzed Congress. When Halleck made this argument, Charles Tyler Botts, a forty-year-old Virginian, had trouble restraining himself. Did Halleck, asked Botts, think Southern men in Congress were asleep? Why not settle the slavery question by extending the boundary to the Mississippi River? Why not include Cuba, “a future acquisition”? Yes, slavery was a great evil, and for that reason he wanted it excluded from California. But trying to do Congress’s job, trying to resolve the slavery question nationally, that was absurd and might cost California statehood.
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Gwin and Halleck also pushed for a big California on the grounds that in the long run, a larger domain would result in more power for the Pacific coast. Everyone knew that Texas had been admitted to the Union with the right to divide into five states. Why not the same for California? Said Gwin: “So far as I am concerned, I should like to see six states, fronting on the Pacific in California. I want the additional power in Congress…of twelve Senators instead of four; for it is notorious, sir, that the State of Delaware, smaller than our smallest district, has as much power in the Senate as the great State of New York…I want the power and the population.”
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On September 24, during an evening meeting when only half the delegates were present, Gwin moved to substitute the Gwin-Halleck proposal for the one submitted by the boundary committee. He had the votes and won easily, 19 to 4. The maneuver, however, bred distrust. What was Gwin up to? Halleck could be dismissed as a well-meaning neophyte. No one thought that about Gwin. He was clearly a seasoned political veteran.

John McDougal, a thirty-two-year-old Ohioan, said what others believed. He accused Gwin and some of his slaveholding associates of trying to add a poison pill to the final document. Said McDougal: “They want a constitution presented to Congress so objectionable that it will be thrown back on us for another convention, it leaves them the opportunity of bringing their slaves here. It is what they desire to do, to create some strongly objectionable feature in the constitution in order that they may bring their slaves here and work them three months.”
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Was this true? One of Gwin’s admirers, James McHall Jones of Louisiana, dismissed the charge as poppycock. He had heard the same argument during a convention break. A “gentleman,” he said, had told him that Gwin had orchestrated the extended boundary controversy to hamstring Congress and thus delay California’s admission to the Union “for some two or three years, and thereby give to the south a chance…to bring in their slaves.” The charge was “not worthy of consideration,” said Jones. Everyone knew, moreover, that Gwin wanted to become a U.S. senator, and this would delay that goal by two or three years.
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Once the Gwin-Halleck proposal gained the upper hand, William Shannon stepped in. He offered an amendment to make the eastern border of California the Sierra Nevada. In his corner were several men who had come to California by wagon train or by foot. They pointed out that the Sierra Nevada range formed a “great natural boundary.” They also brought up the “Mormon question.” They had been through Salt Lake. They had seen “with their own eyes” that the Mormons marched to a different drummer. Did the delegates actually think that they could impose statehood on twenty thousand Mormons without their consent? That would violate republican principles. It would also surely lead to trouble. Finally, they joined others in arguing that an extended boundary, far from settling the slavery question, would only further inflame congressional debate and deny California statehood.

That was decisive. In the end, Shannon’s motion prevailed. The final vote, recommending the Sierras, was 32 to 7.

In their effort to keep slavery out of California, Shannon and his fellow delegates championed the rights of labor. They had no choice. The state they hoped to create was now packed with miners and potential miners. In the Sierras, some forty thousand men now spent each and every day panning gold. In San Francisco, boatloads of gold seekers hoped to join them. Without question, the vast majority of these men did not want to compete with slave labor. Nor did they want to compete with peon labor or contract labor. But what about with wage labor? Men who worked for corporations?

On that question, too, there was little room for doubt. In the diggings, noted the miner Samuel Upham, labor was king. There were “no chartered institutions” that “monopolized the great avenues of wealth.” They weren’t tolerated. Instead, everyone had “an equal chance to rise.” Hard manual labor was not only respected. It was esteemed, so much so that to have any standing in the community, a man had to work his own claim with his own hands. “Neither business nor capital,” concluded Upham, “can oppress labor in California.”
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This attitude, moreover, was reflected in mining “law.” Since there were no established cities and towns in the Sierras, placer camps invariably found that they had to form their own rules and regulations. Some five hundred camps did so. Technically, these codes had no legal standing, but in fact they were the law of the land. The codes varied. Should a jury consist of six men, twelve men, or twenty men? There was no agreement. Two elements, however, were central to all of the codes. To have mineral rights, the man who “discovered” or “claimed” an area had to mark it and record the location. To retain these rights, he had to work the claim steadily, as many as twenty days a month in some camps. Most codes also limited the claim to what one man could mine alone, initially 100 to 150 square feet. The goal everywhere was to prevent absentee ownership and monopoly of mining claims.
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Shannon and his fellow delegates also embraced this attitude. Not one spoke in behalf of corporations. The only issue was to what extent the constitution needed to protect Californians
against
corporations. And here the delegates made a decision that was quite radical. They rejected the usual legal principle whereby a stockholder’s liability was limited to the value of his stock. They made a stockholder liable instead for his proportionate share of a corporation’s entire indebtedness. If he owned 10 percent of the stock, he was liable for 10 percent of all damages. If he owned 20 percent, then 20 percent of the damages. And so on.

Wouldn’t that make it much harder for corporations to attract investors? Yes, and that clearly was the intention. On this issue, moreover, there was complete accord.
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The only serious debate occurred over banks and paper money. Some delegates wanted to outlaw anything that even looked like a bank. Others wanted to permit “associations…for the deposit of gold and silver.” The convention finally decided on the latter, while prohibiting bank corporations altogether.
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Were the delegates, seventeen of whom were lawyers, sincere in their hostility toward banks and corporations? William Gwin, for one, never doubted their sincerity. Years later, he recalled how he finally gained the trust of his fellow delegates. At first, only one out of five trusted him. Most of the rest assumed that he had a pro-slavery agenda, that he wanted “to resist the insertion” of an antislavery clause in the bill of rights, and that he called for large boundaries so that California might be divided into several slave states. The turning point, wrote Gwin, came when he took a stand against corporations and state debts, when he argued that the legislature should be restricted in its powers to create corporations and to charter banks and that state debts should not exceed $300,000. Only then did his detractors realize that he, too, wanted to keep California a haven for the workingman.
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Nonetheless, the corporations soon came. Within months of the state constitutional convention, the nature of mining in California began to change radically. Today, all the towns along Route 49, the road that takes thousands of tourists each year through the gold country, tell much the same story. They all sell replicas of a grizzly old miner panning gold. They all sell books detailing the tools he used, the hard life he lived. They all pretend that he was the key to their existence. He was, wasn’t he? Yes, but only for a very short time. By late 1849, as the men in Monterey were singing his praises, he was on the way out. Despite all the delegates’ fine talk about keeping “capitalists out of the mines,” the capitalists came, and they came in a rush.

They especially came quickly to the two richest gold rush towns, Grass Valley and Nevada City. The two lie cheek by jowl, just four miles apart. The former was established in the summer of 1849 by two groups of overlanders. Following the Truckee route down the Sierras to Sacramento, the weary travelers stopped at the twenty-five-hundred-foot elevation to graze their animals in a small valley watered by Wolf Creek and known for its waist-tall grass. It was a beautiful place. To the east were tall pines, to the west oak trees. The animals for the first time in days were content. While they grazed, some of the men searched the gullies and streambeds. Discovering paying placers, they decided to stay. One of the two groups, men from Boston, later established a permanent camp of canvas shanties and log huts that they named Boston Ravine. That name eventually gave way to Grass Valley.
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Grass Valley was soon overshadowed by its northeastern neighbor, Nevada City. Rich placers were discovered there in the fall of 1849 by prospectors working their way up Deer Creek. These were “pound diggings,” places where a man could get twelve troy ounces of gold per day. The word spread, and a thousand men arrived before winter. Thousands more came in the spring. Up the hill from Little Deer Creek, A. B. Caldwell set up a store in a square tent. People called the place Caldwell’s Upper Store and the locality Deer Creek Dry Diggings. Later, another storekeeper, O. P. Blackman, proposed that the camp be given the permanent name of Nevada.
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Both Grass Valley and Nevada City began as placer camps, where individuals and small companies washed “loose” gold from riverbanks, streams, gulches, and sandbars. There were over five hundred such camps in the Sierras. The technology was simple. Placer miners relied mainly on moving water and the heaviness of gold, which caused it to settle to the bottom of whatever recovery device they used. Three devices were common. The simplest and best known was the pan. More complicated was a rocker, a wooden box with riffles on the bottom that was rocked back and forth. More sophisticated yet was a sluice, a long wooden box with cleats on the bottom that was placed in a running stream.