IF COMMUNICATIONS HAD been faster in 1815, there never would have been a Battle of New Orleans. If they had been faster in 1848, the negotiations to end the war between the United States and Mexico might have taken a very different turn. Neither Nicholas Trist nor his Mexican counterparts knew, in ironing out the last details of the treaty, that three weeks earlier a discovery had been made in California that dramatically increased the value of that province. A carpenter named James Marshall, digging a channel for a sawmill on the American River above what would become Sacramento, stumbled across a gold nugget. Further investigation revealed that the area was littered with gold, which could be gathered from streambeds with ease and in large quantities.
But the news didn’t arrive in Mexico City before the treaty was signed, and it didn’t reach Washington until after the Senate ratified the pact. Indeed, though rumors drifted east during the summer of 1848, it wasn’t until months later that the rumors were sufficiently confirmed for James Polk to proclaim the discovery, in his December annual message.
By then the gold rush was on. America’s peculiar laws regarding natural resources meant that whoever first laid hands on the gold in California got to keep it. The laws didn’t distinguish between American citizens and foreigners; as a result, California almost overnight became the most cosmopolitan place on earth. Gold seekers poured north from Mexico, followed by Peruvians and Chileans. Hawaiians, Australians and Chinese churned the Pacific en route east to the goldfields. Countries and communities that bordered on the Atlantic Ocean were slower to react than those of the Pacific basin, being much farther away, especially as the ship sailed, but small armies of Europeans eventually joined the ranks of the argonauts, as the gold hunters called themselves.
Americans were the largest contingent, leaving every state for the goldfields. Some traveled by sailing ship around Cape Horn. Others took sailing craft or steamers to Panama; crossed the isthmus on foot, burro and dugout canoe; and sailed or steamed up the coast of Central America and Mexico to California. Still others—the greatest number—ventured overland. From jumping-off points on the Missouri River they struck out across the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada to the goldfields.
It was the swiftest mass migration in American history, one of the most rapid in world history. What had been a sparsely populated land was suddenly teeming with forty, sixty, eighty thousand souls, and more arriving constantly. Most cared little for politics, so obsessed were they with making their fortunes. But they discovered they couldn’t manage without government. Ad hoc committees lacked the authority to adjudicate competing claims to mining properties; vigilante groups punished wrongdoing haphazardly. In September 1849 a few dozen of the most civically minded gathered in Monterey to craft a constitution for a state of California. No one in Washington had given them permission; no one in Washington even knew what they were about. They themselves were often at a loss. What were the boundaries of the state they proposed? They couldn’t say. Should they model their state government on existing state governments, or create something new? They split the difference.
Certain things they agreed on without much debate. California must have a government at once. Life, liberty and property were precarious without it. Most had come to California as sojourners, intending to make their fortunes and return whence they had come. But many found California more appealing than their homes and decided to stay. Yet they couldn’t stay safely—and they couldn’t bring out their wives and children—without the security of a government. Without government, California would remain a mining camp. With government, it would become a place where decent people could live and thrive.
They also agreed that California would be a free state. Some Southern gold hunters brought slaves, who toiled beside them in the goldfields. But the experience reinforced the message of the terrain and the climate: that California could not support the plantation agriculture that made slavery profitable in the South. The constitution the Monterey convention drafted declared straightforwardly, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this state.”
The constitution was submitted to the people of California, who ratified it in November 1849. It was then dispatched to Washington, carrying the hopes and prayers of California’s new inhabitants that it be approved by Congress and they rescued from the legal limbo in which they would languish until it was.