This Day on September 9, 1850: California Joins the Union

Grand Admission Celebration, Portsmouth Square, October 29, 1850

California Historical Society

In our high-speed information age, celebrations are instantaneous. But the celebrants in the image above were 50 days late to the party. Only 11 days earlier, on October 18, 1850, news of California’s admission to the Union had arrived in San Francisco with the Pacific Mail steamship Oregon. It had taken 40 days for the news to travel from Washington, D.C., where, on September 9, 1850, President Millard Fillmore signed a bill into law proclaiming California the Union’s 31st state.

View of San Francisco, 1850

Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

The celebrations on October 29 formalized those held earlier. As the 1855 Annals of San Francisco described:

When, on the 18th instant, the mail steamer “Oregon” was entering the bay, she fired repeated preconcerted signal guns which warned the citizens of the glorious news. Immediately the whole of the inhabitants were afoot, and grew half wild with excitement until they heard definitely that the tidings were as they had expected. Business of almost every description was instantly suspended, the courts adjourned in the midst of their work, and men rushed from every house into the streets and towards the wharves, to hail the harbinger of the welcome news. When the steamer rounded Clark’s Point and came in front of the city, her masts literally covered with flags and signals, a universal shout arose from ten thousand voices on the wharves, in the streets, upon the hills, house-tops, and the world of shipping in the bay. . . . Flags of every nation were run up on a thousand masts and peaks and staffs, and a couple of large guns placed upon the plaza [Portsmouth Square] were constantly discharged. At night every public thoroughfare was crowded with the rejoicing populace. Almost every large building, all the public saloons and places of amusement were brilliantly illuminated—music from a hundred bands assisted the excitement—numerous balls and parties were hastily got up—bonfires blazed upon the hills, and rockets were incessantly thrown into the air, until the dawn of the following day.

California Learns It’s the 31st State, October 18, 1850

Courtesy of Friends of the California Archives 

The official celebration of statehood followed two weeks later. As the Annals reported:

For the past fifteen days the papers have been full of announcements and notices and the walls have been plastered with enormous posters. . . . No effort has been spared to make it a success and two thousand persons have subscribed for the dinner and ball at one hundred francs each. At sunrise the cannon was fired off, and the celebration inaugurated. Shouts and noises were heard from every quarter of the city, interspersed with shots from guns and pistols. While this was going on the various organizations assembled, banners in hand, and formed a large procession which was to parade the streets.

At the end of the procession rode a chariot, drawn by six horses, with 30 children wearing bonnets, including 6-year-old Mary Eliza Davis (1845–1929), the “Queen of the 1850 Admission Day Parade,” the first Anglo-American child born in San Francisco.

Francis Marryatt (artist), Admission Day in San Francisco, 1850

Courtesy of Library of Congress

Child’s Cap Worn by Mary Eliza Davis on October 29, 1850

California Historical Society

At the celebration, the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote, “a new star was added to the flag which floated from the mast in the center of the plaza, and every species of amusement and parade was made to attest the satisfaction of the citizens of the first American state on the Pacific coast.” There were a number of designs for the 31-star flag, which became the official United States flag on July 4, 1851.

U.S. 31 Stars Flag Commemorating California's Admission into the Union, September 9, 1850

Courtesy of Zaricor Flag Collection

Of special note at the celebration was an ode written for the occasion by Elizabeth Maria Bonney Wills, whose family came from New England to San Francisco earlier that year. Distributed among other printed pieces to the crowds from a typographical press mounted on a float, it was sung in Portsmouth Square as part of the ceremonies.

Ode Sung at San Francisco October 29, 1850, at the Celebration on Hearing of the Admission of California into the Union as a State, 1850

California Historical Society; photo by Cheryl Maslin

Wills’s inspiring ode closed with her sentiment:

In the Band of the Union, oh, long may it be

The hope of th’ oppressed, and the shield of the free.

Hers was a sentiment that remained contested for hundreds of year. As the black journalist Delilah Beasely chronicled:

Was this to be a free State in every sense of the word? . . . . At first, it was not, for a good many slaves were brought in to the State. On April 1, 1850, an advertisement appeared in the Jackson Mississippian referring to California, the Southern Slave Colony and inviting citizens of slave-holding States, wishing to go to California, to send their names, number of slaves, time of contemplate departure, etc., to the Southern Slave Colony, of Jackson, Mississippi. The design was to settle in the richest parts of the State and to secure an uninterrupted enjoyment of slave property. The colony was to comprise about 5,000 white persons and 10,000 slaves. 

In 1852 Peachy of San Joaquin introduced a resolution to allow fifty southern families to immigrate in to California with their slaves. Some of them came without permission but on finding that they could not legally hold their slaves, they sent a part of them back while others became free.

Nevertheless, admittance to the Union was undeniably a cornerstone in the state’s growth and prosperity. Today Admission Day is a legal state holiday.

California Counties Maps, c. 1850 and c. 1880

Courtesy of California State Association of Counties

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Projects Manager

skale@calhist.org

Sources

• Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of the Pacific States of North America, vol. VI, California, 1848–1859 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1888)

• Delilah L. Beasley, The Journal of Negro History 3, no. 1 (Jan., 1918)

• California in Time: The Fight over Slavery through the Civil War. California Department of Parks and Recreation; http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=27748  

• Katherine H. Chandler, “San Francisco at Statehood,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 1900

• Ernest de Massey, A Frenchman in the Gold Rush; the Journal of Ernest de Massey, Argonaut of 1849, trans. Marguerite Eyer Wilbur (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1927)

• H. R. 5419, “State Admission Day Recognition Act of 2006,” The Lincoln Highway

• National Museum & Archives; http://www.lincoln-highway-museum.org/HR-5419/HR-5419-Index.html

• Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, M.D., and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York/San Francisco/London: D. Appleton & Company, 1855)

Admission without Compromise: William H. Seward Stands against Slavery

 Seal of California

Courtesy of Department of Education, Sacramento, California

Tomorrow we celebrate the 166th anniversary of California’s admission to the Union as the 31st state. California was admitted at a time of controversy—when territories and states were either for or against slavery. To many, its admission came with a price—with passage of the Compromise of 1850, a package of legislative bills that designated California a free state while also mollifying an increasingly rebellious South.

Map of Free, Slave, and “Open to Slavery” States and Territories, c. 1856

Courtesy of Library of Congress

In the collections held by CHS is an original copy of the passionate argument made against the Compromise by then-New York Senator William H. Seward. Often called the “Higher Law” speech, it was Seward’s first speech to the U.S. Senate. Senator Robert Byrd has describe it as one of the most “significant ‘maiden’ speeches in the history of the Senate,” and it established Seward as a leading opponent of slavery.

Speech of the Hon. W. H. Seward on the Admission of California,

and the Subject of Slavery, 1850

California Historical Society

William H. Seward (1801–1872)

Courtesy of Library of Congress

Seward, who had been the governor of New York and later became Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, was not an abolitionist, per se. But he was known for seeking legislation establishing rights for African Americans, and he and his wife, Frances, aided escaping slaves via the Underground Railroad at their home in Auburn, New York.

Charles T. Webber, The Underground Railroad, c.1893

Courtesy of Library of Congress

About one of the provisions of the Compromise of 1850, a Fugitive Slave Law, Seward wrote:  “We deem the principle of the law for the recapture of fugitives, as thus expounded, therefore, unjust, unconstitutional and immoral; and thus, while patriotism withholds its approbation, the consciences of our people condemn it.”

Although not an attention-grabber at the outset, within weeks of its writing 100,000 copies of the speech were printed and widely distributed. In it, Seward noted all of California’s advantages to the Union—its rapidly growing population, recent discovery of gold, abandonment of its military government and its new constitution. He strongly encouraged its admission as a state. He said:

“To-day, California is a State, more populous than the least and richer than several of the greatest of our thirty States. This same California, thus rich and populous, is here asking admission into the Union, and finds us debating the dissolution of the Union itself.”

Effects of the Fugitive-Slave-Law, 1850

Courtesy of Library of Congress

According to Robert Byrd, “Seward acknowledged that the Constitution’s framers had recognized the existence of slavery and protected it where it existed, but the new territory was governed by a ‘higher law than the Constitution’—a moral law established by “the Creator of the universe.” The New York senator, opposing all legislative compromise as ‘radically wrong and essentially vicious,’ demanded the unconditional admission of California as a free state. He warned the South that slavery was doomed and that secession from the Union would be futile.”

Trusting implicitly in the strength of the Union, however, Seward felt that slavery would “gradually give way, to the salutary instructions of economy, and to the ripening influences of humanity.”

Five Generations on Smith's Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862 (printed later)

Courtesy of Library of Congress

“Let, then, those who distrust the Union make compromises to save it,” Seward wrote, “I shall not impeach their wisdom, as I certainly cannot their patriotism; but indulging no such apprehensions myself, I shall vote for the admission of California directly, without conditions, without qualifications, and without compromise.”

At the conclusion of his speech, Seward urged his fellow Senators to vote against compromise and to return the American ground to its pre-slavery state: “You found it free, and conquered it to extend a better and surer freedom over it. Whatever choice you have made for yourselves, let us have no partial freedom; let us all be free; let the reversion of your broad domain descend to us unencumbered, and free from the calamities and the sorrows of human bondage.”

Historic Stagville Plantation, Durham, North Carolina 2016

Courtesy of Alison Moore

In the end, the Compromise was enacted, California was admitted to the Union and civil war was forestalled for a decade more. At the same time, continued concessions to the Southern states consigned enslaved Americans to ten more years of government sanctioned hardship, torture, and injustice.

African American Family Portrait, 1870

Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library

Alison Moore

Strategic Initiatives Liaison

amoore@calhist.org

Sources

Robert C. Byrd, The Senate, 1789-1989: Classic Speeches, 1830-1993. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994. http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Speeches_Seward_NewTerritories.htm

The Compromise of 1850

http://www.ushistory.org/us/30d.asp; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1850

William H. Seward, Speech of William H. Seward on the Admission of California delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 11, 1850 (Washington: Buell & Blanchard, 1850) https://archive.org/details/williamhspeech00sewarich

William H. Seward

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Seward