The Fight for Slavery in California

Jean Lowry50587

Fight for Slavery

Three months into the Mexican War, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot introduced his famous “Proviso” stipulating that in any territory acquired from Mexico “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory”

It was a surprise to discover that the territories of Utah and New Mexico legalized slavery in 1852 and 1859

In early 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe hidalgo transferred California from Mexico to the United States

Workers building a sawmill on the American River near Sacramento discovered flecks of gold in the riverbed

By Spring of 1849 tens of thousands of men from all over were on their way to California

These men in San Francisco and the mining camps needed law and order, courts, land and water laws, mail services and other institutions of government

Fight for Slavery

In October 1849 they drew up a state constitution and petitioned Congress for admission

The Problem was that the proposed state constitution banned slavery

Most of the Forty-Niners wanted to keep that institution out of California because they did not want to compete with slave labor

The exclusion of Slavery from California was described as an unconstitutional violation of Southern property rights and political equity that would justify a drastic response

The democratic Party was dominated by a coalition of Southern-born politicians that became known as the “Chivalry”

In 1859 a political mudslinging match between Broderick and David Terry, A Texan who had arrived in California in 1849 and became a prominent Chiv, led to a duel

Fight for Slavery

Terry resigned from his post as chief justice of the California Supreme Court in order to challenge Broderick

Terry selected pistols, whereupon Terry took careful aim and shot Broderick dead

This was the third duel in California during the 1850s in which a Chiv Democrat Killed a member of the anti-Chiv faction Party

California’s admission as a free state had given an impetus to one of the most bizarre phenomena of the 1850s –”Filibustering”, a freebooter or pirate

All of the filibuster efforts to organize another slave state in order to offset California came to grief

The discovery of gold in California produced a mass migration there in which settlers who wanted to exclude slavery prevailed

Fight for Slavery

Within California itself, perhaps the first shot of the Civil War came from David Terry’s pistol that killed David Broderick in September 1859

The backlash against what many Californians saw as a political assassination weakened the Chivs and rebounded to the advantage of the state Republican Party

During the Civil War most Californians remained loyal to the United States, and the state’s shipment of gold helped finance the union war effort

Terry became embroiled in a dispute with another California political rival Stephen J. Field

Field jailed Terry and his wife for contempt, Terry vowed revenge

Terry encountered Field in a railroad station near Stockton and slapped him across the face, Field’s bodyguard shot Terry Dead

Perhaps this was truly the last shot of the Civil War

In 1889, Neagle shot and killed David Terry, who had attacked Supreme Court Justice Stephen Fields.  Arrested for murder, the Supreme Court ordered Neagle released in a landmark case that set precedents for the power of the executive branch of our government.

Source

The Fight for Slavery in California article by: James M. McPherson