History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.
-Mark Twain
Introduction
California has always been a frontier for European settlers and remains so to this day. While indigenous people had been brilliant stewards of the land for at least 10,000 years (and likely longer than that), it wasn't until the mid-16th century that the Spanish--having recently steamrolled across South America--turned their gaze Northward in search of fabled cities of gold and a Northwest Passage. Starting with Vizcaino's seafaring expedition, they would eventually make it as far North as Cape Mendocino or possibly Southern Oregon before being turned back by perennial bad weather. They would sail right past San Francisco bay several times, the inlet camouflaged as ever by fog. Sailing close to the towering coastline, taking advantage of near-shore ocean currents, always on the lookout for "smokes", the indigenous campfires. It would be two hundred years more until the Presidio was "discovered" and established by the Spanish Missionaries traveling overland. Fur trappers would be some of the first Europeans to establish continuing relations with indigenous tribes.
I've been perusing the University of California at Riversides' historical newspaper archives in search of some insight into the societal issues of today; racial inequality, housing availability, education, environmental concerns and the like. California newspapers first went into print in 1846, poised to serve the world's voracious appetite for any news of gold on the frontier. In those early days before the advent of the telegraph, before the completion of the Transcontinental rail line, news traveled with the steamers bound from Panama and the overland parties making for San Francisco and Sacramento from points Eastward.
With this blog I will highlight news items from the early days of California that may help to inform some of the struggles we face today. How did we deal with these problems 175 years ago? California has long been a melting-pot of emigrant and indigenous populations, and equitably portraying the sentiment of every community is complicated by the fact that these newspapers were written, edited and owned primarily by Caucasian men. In my commentary around each article snippet, I will attempt to provide some context that highlights the struggles of under-represented communities, and some global context as well.
Weekly Alta California(San Francisco), 12 July 1849
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=WAC18490712
. . . THE TOWN OF SANTA CRUZ. The survey of this Pueblo, one of the oldest in California, has recently been corrected and mapped by Lt. Williamson, U. S. A. It is situated in the Bay of Monterey, and presents more advantages for an agreeable residence than any other in California, for it is well known that at no part of the whole country is the climate purer, water better, soil more fertile, and where so unlimited a supply of lumber and timber for building and fencing purposes can be procured at prices nearly as low as in the United States. The town and planting grounds are laid out in lots of 50 varas square, a large number of which are now offered for sale at very moderate prices by the subscribers. SAN FRANCISCO. Some of the most desirable locations for private residences or business purposes in this town, can be purchased or leased of the subscribers. Maps of the City of New York of the Pacific, the Towns of Sutter, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco can be seen at the Land Office of the subscribers, on Clay street, south side Portsmouth square. 27tf STEVENSON, PARKER & CO.
The Spanish Missionaries had set up shop in Monterey about 100 years prior to this survey, with intent to make Monterey Bay a shipping hub. The bay proved to be poorly-suited to this task though, being too shallow for many ships to make port. Still, the Missionaries set about their work of converting and subjugating the native population and doling out land-grants to Mexican comrades, many of whom had already been there for a generation. The article snippet above shows the first formalization of the pueblo of Santa Cruz--you could now officially buy property there. While the first newspaper in California had been published in Monterey in August of 1846(in both English and Spanish), it would be another sixteen years before Santa Cruz would have its own newspaper, at a time when the novelty of the Gold Rush was replaced by the existential crisis of the Civil War.
The following was the headline article for the second weekly edition of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, a copy of a lengthy July 4th speech given by a reverend in Watsonville. The speech eloquently makes the case for the Union against the secessionist Confederate Army, and ends with an observation that difficult times are in fact opportunities to temper one's resolve and virtue. I've added emphases to prescient anecdotes, but a thorough reading would be worth the reader's time. The Civil War was ramping up with no clear end in sight. The audience for this speech were almost to a person themselves recent emigrants to California, hailing from all parts of the United States and beyond. If there was one thing in common amongst the populace, it may have been a willingness to take on risk. California itself had legitimate grievances with the Union, as an expansive frontier outpost Federal law was difficult to enforce and people had concerns about Federal efficacy, to include fair representation for the State in the halls of Congress.
Santa Cruz Sentinel, 11 July 1862
(emphasis added)
ORATION: Delivered at Watsonville, July 4th.
BY REV. W. C. BARTLETT.
FELLOW-CITIZENS:--In days like these, it does not become any public man to ignore the summons which calls him to speak for country, for home and for an undivided Republic. I remember that in this time of trial, men are not only called upon to speak, but to fight, for the country. Half a million of men are but the advance guard of that armed host--every one of whom is ready to bare his breast to the assaults of public conspirators, and to confront them with all the power which God shall put into his hands.
What are the events, and what are the causes, which give such significance to this day? Not a single foreign foe is in arms against us. Their ships do not cannonade, nor do their armies camp around beleagered cities. Their animosities, nursed by generations of hostile precepts, are all under restraint, and they come and go in peace. The despots--the absolutists--the enemies of democracy, bear no thunder in their hands against us. They are only spectators of a gigantic conspiracy, nursed in our midst by thirty years of false teaching, until it has at last burst forth a blasting, desolating, accursed thing.
But tell me why a rebellion is raging in the land to-day. Have any principles of the Constitution been subverted?--any organic law rendered void?--any abuse in the public administration been felt which could not be corrected without violence? Not of these things are more than the baldest pretense for treason. But at a time when the latest trial of democratic liberty was working out the grandest results ever witnessed on the globe--securing more of personal exemption from public burdens--the most unlimited field for private enterprises--and enfranchising our own children, and the poor of all nations, with the best civil endowment ever bestowed upon man--then, in such an hour, a faction of her apostate children, like serpents, rise up and strike their fangs into the mother that bore them. Whence is this enmity? It is not because free institutions are a failure; but it is because these re-errant men have learned to despise them. Let us place this contest on the right grounds: It is not a war of sections--for the friends and the enemies of the Government live in every State of the Union: they live in the same town or hamlet. The public enemy at the North strikes hands with the public enemy at the South. The patriot at the South stands by the loyal men of the North. It is a struggle of principles; and if you will go to the foundation of this rebellion, you will find the moving spring of it to be hatred for democratic liberty. It is the outcropping of the same feeling which is more of less demonstrative against us among the aristocracies of Europe. It is not because free institutions are a failure, but because they have been a grand success; because they give to the individual a personal significance, and invest him with prerogatives distasteful to those who cling to the accidents of birth and the arbitrary power of caste. It is the spirit of semi-barbarous caste hating labor and political equality on the one side, arrayed against an intelligent democracy, loving freedom and labor, on the other--which is the normal condition of the race--sooner or later an issue is made which is either to be settled by peaceful rivalry or by the sword. That social and political condition which is least untrammeled, which gathers to itself the greatest elements of power, will provoke the enmity of the other. There can be no even race. The stronger will outrun the weaker. Legislative checks and balances are but so many frauds in disguise. Each is entitled to an open field for its practical working; and the world measures the results, and renders judgment from which there is no rightful appeal. Thus new territories will be occupied, The Merchant Marine, the great Center of Commerce, the manufacturers, will preponderate on one side, by no unlawful encroachment, but by the inherent force and germinating power of one system over the other. It is the free practical working of democracy which is constantly over leaping the limitations of the few and compassing the interests of the many. But is this good cause for such Rebellion as is now Rife in the land? Is this a good reason for destroying a government, by a small minority, clinging tenaciously not to the nobility but to the mere excrescences of an impudent aristocracy? This is no new struggle: it is an eruption from an old feudal taint. The conflict of these principles has been raging in one form or another for more than a thousand years, with intervening periods of rest, and in every close contest democracy has come out uppermost, shaking it's brawny fists in triumphs in the face of its enemies. Brain, muscle and common schools on one side; and cotton, Ebony and mint juleps on the other; and brain and muscle will win the day. For I believe they have God and all true humanity to back them. I say the rebellion resulted in an apostacy from the cardinal principles of the Union, and that defection from a true democratic faith has been progressing for a whole generation. Had the same maxims and principles now asserted by the enemies of the Constitution been set forth at the time of its formation a Union would have been impossible. Suppose that a large delegation of the legislators of that time had said: We agree upon this Federal compact; but we give you notice that whenever we consider ourselves aggrieved by any enactment of the people in Congress assembled, we will walk out of the Union; we consent to become a pillar in the democratic temple, but if you don't modify it hereafter to suit us we will walk off with this support and let the whole thing down on the heads of your children. Such a declaration would have been scouted as monstrous. And yet this is the very doctrine which the conspirators against the Constitution have set themselves to enforce, and which their sympathizing friends in the North approve. I tell you that twenty years and ten thousand millions of treasure are not too great a sacrifice to scatter to the winds such a monstrosity as that. A man might just as well scatter strychnine in his neighbor's yard as to go about stealthily preaching such principles. Know you not that the men who entertain these ideas came near plunging this State in the vortex of this rebellion? It was not will which was lacking--it was only numbers. How much would you give for real estate here if California had gone over to secession? It would be worth about as much as it was in Sodom the morning Lot left it. Why secession bonds are worth by the pound about as much as a poor article of paper rags--and as the brokers say, with a downward tendency. And the time will come when a boy couldn't buy a whistle with a wheelbarrow load of them. Men have no faith in the faction who are trying to destroy one government and set up another on its ruins. This so-called Confederacy has been begging for a recognition for more than a year. If there is any faith among the nations that it will be a success, why don't they own it? There is not a mendicant scion of royalty in all Europe, even though he may be so poor as hardly to get his pipes and beer, that will own or accept the position of ruler over it. I know there are men among us who as between right and wrong are always sure to take the wrong side of every question, who still affirm their faith in it and forego no good opportunity to calumniate the Government.
The man who talks treason will act treason. And he who does either has no just right to claim the protection of that government which he secretly seeks to destroy. There is a blind obstinancy about some of the enemies of the Union which reminds me of an old buck once owned by a western farmer, and which had the vicious habit of butting everything. After a while a railroad was located through the farm, and seeing a locomotive coming up the track one day, he sprang out and butted that. The farmer saw the catastrophe, and went out to pick up the horns--which were about all that was left. "Well," said he, "old fellow, I thought that butting habit would bring you to this at last. Now, I like your spunk--but confound your judgement." And so we say of these obstinate men who blindly pitch into the Union: Great spunk, neighbor--but confound your judgement. If a man will do this, there is no use in calling a coroner's jury to inquire what killed him. I cannot but think charitably of a man whose kindred and all his early associations are of the South, if he is tender and sensitive and less empathic in his loyalty. But a man, without these associations, if he is a rebel, is so because treason is in his blood--which, like scrofula, may have been transmitted from generation to generation.
The Hindoos[sic] have a proverb which well illustrates this secession kink. It reads thus: "If you mollify a dog's tail in oil, and do it up in splinters, yet you cannot get the crook out." And though you oil one of these secessionists, and put good Union splinters on him, the moment you take them off there is the crook. He is crooked all over. And there is this remarkable difference: that whereas a good Union man is willing to accept all the consequences of his position, a dis-union man among us acts as though he had found a hornets nest. Surely if a man is on the right ground he ought to be in a more comfortable state of mind than that. You have, perhaps, all read of a celebrated naturalist, who, if you would give him a bone of any of the dead monsters dug out of the earth, would describe and mark out every other bone accurately in the whole organization. Now it don't require that amount of skill to tell who are enemies of the Union. There are a couple of bones which they are continually gnawing--one is "This Abolition war," and the other is "the Lincoln Government." When you hear them rattle these bones, you can chalk out the whole size and form of a secessionist. I do not say these things out of any bitterness-for I sympathize with a dis-unionist, so far as to tell him that I think the great misfortune of his life has overtaken him. But I do not think there is any more wisdom in such an attitude than an ostrich shows when she makes her dinner out of cut nails and then is there is any danger, runs and hides her head in the sand.
Let us not underrate the importance of this struggle. It involves the whole question of national existence. If you dissolve the Union--if you break up this confederation of States, bound together by a solemn covenant, what union or confederation will you guarantee in the future? If the men of this day will not keep the faith, but, without any good reason before God or man, are left to destroy the Republic, what are you to accept in its place? Are you to consent that a small minority shall follow a few traitors into the grandest temple of Democratic faiththe world ever saw, and hew down and demolish the whole fabric, and on its ruins erect an unsightly hut--a thing to become the derision of the world? Twenty thousand men and six million of treasure are a light sacrifice to prevent such a disaster. No--by the blood of our sons--by the memory of their sires--by all the precious things gathered into this store-house of freedom--by the hopes of the generations yet to come, let us strike hands together, and say that this last experiment of Democratic liberty shall not be a failure. That as God shall help, there shall be no spectacle of a dismembered Republic broken into petty provinces, helpless, dishonored, wretched at home, and despised abroad. As god shall help us, there shall spring up here no libel on free institutions--no fungus of aristocracy to brand with dishonor the sweat on the brow of any man. Five millions of disaffected citizens thunder away at the gates of the Republic, displeased at the very breath and magnificence of these franchises, and demand that twenty-five millions shall be uncrowned. When in a thousand years was ever such an issue moved up by the wheels of God's providence to challenge the devotion: the unswerving fidelity of every citizen. In great armories there are trial days--when every cannon and sabre is tried. These are God's great proving days--when He comes to try every man. Grand, fearful, are those times; searching every man's soul as with a lighted candle. If a man's patriotism is a dead thing now, when he is called upon to give the ring and response of a true citizen, patriotism is a dead thing with him forever. You can no more touch his soul hereafter with holy sentiments of love, than you can touch the soul of an Egyptian mummy.
I said these institutions had been assailed in an hour when they were a magnificent success. There had been no perversion and no failure: peace, law, order, personal-security; absolute freedom of conscience--the blended rights of ruler and subject--protection without feeling the weight of the hand that protected; fostering care without one arbitrary exaction in return; a great domain carved into homes for the homeless. These were the precious gifs woven into the garland of citizenship, and let down like a crown of glory upon the head of the humblest citizen of the land. This is the quality of that governmental polity now assailed. These are the interests which challenge your fidelity. Freedom and undivided nationality on one side--anarchy subversion and despotism on the other.
The greatness of these issues will press all neutrality out of a man. He is either a friend or an enemy of the country. Parties have sunk out of sight--except the party for the country and the party against it. Such issues lift up the true man to do, and dare and suffer--and they sink the false man down among the rubbish to dig up some old bone and flourish that as the only issue he can recognize.
What an eventful year has just passed! A quarter of a million of hostile men have been in arms against the Republic--and these have only served to strengthen and consolidate the whole framework of the government. Out of the seeming disasters of the hour have come gains greater than the losses--gains for this day and gains for coming ages. Behind the clouds I believe that God is moving the figures in this historic drama so that the madness of men shall praise Him. The men and power are in His hands to silence this revolt; and already it has only the bad preeminence of a failing insurrection. Twenty thousand new made graves of patriots, and the scars on a hundred thousand veterans, and the beating accord of twenty-five millions of hearts with new devotion to one Constitution and one country--these are the earnest of the final victory. Let us welcome, therefore, these days of trial--of heroism and sacrifice. Only once in a great cycle do such interests culminate and tremble for a time, as in a balance. We shall not live to see the like thing again. Our children who come after us may see nothing like it. Already the wheels of God's providence are like the sound of chariots on the tops of the mountains going before the host in this march of humanity. Nothing has been lost in this struggle. Out of fierce heat and disruption of the globe flows the molten incorruptible gold which enriches the world: So out of this violent and fiery disruption in the bosom of the Republic, will come forth great principles more precious than gold, tried as by fire and vindicated forever.
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