Peter Hardeman Burnett
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| Peter Burnett | |
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| In office December 20, 1849 – January 9, 1851 |
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| Lieutenant(s) | John McDougall |
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| Preceded by | Bennet Riley |
| Succeeded by | John McDougall |
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| Born | November 15, 1807 Nashville, Tennessee |
| Died | May 17, 1895 San Francisco, California |
| Political party | Independent Democrat |
| Spouse | Harriet Rogers |
| Profession | Politician, Writer |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
Peter Hardeman Burnett (November 15, 1807 – May 17, 1895) was the first state Governor of California, serving from December 20, 1849 to January 9, 1851. He was also the first California governor to resign from office. Burnett previously served briefly (during December 1849) as the territorial civilian governor of California.
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[edit] Personal background
Born in Nashville, Tennessee but raised in rural Missouri to a lower-class family, Burnett received no formal education in his youth, but self educated himself regarding law and government. After owning a general store, Burnett turned to a career in law. During his career as a lawyer, Burnett defended a group of Mormons – including Joseph Smith – who were accused of treason, arson and robbery. During the trial, Burnett requested a change of venue for the court proceedings, where during transportation to the next venue, the accused Mormons escaped. In 1843, Burnett became part of the exodus of Easterners moving Westward, moving his family to the Oregon Country (now modern-day Oregon) to take up farming in order to solve growing debts in Missouri, an agricultural endeavour that failed. While in the Oregon Country, Burnett began his forays into politics, getting elected to the Oregon Territorial Legislature between 1844 to 1848. It was during this time that Burnett, a traditional Southern Protestant, began to question the practices of his faith, drifting his relgious views more to Roman Catholicism. By 1846, Burnett and his family had switched their sectarian beliefs to become Catholics.[1]
While in the Legislature, and later in the Oregon Territorial Supreme Court, Burnett proposed and openly advocated one of Oregon's first exclusion laws, barring African-Americans from moving to the territory. Blacks that did remain were to be arrested and flogged every six months until they did leave.[2] The measure successfully passed, with similar exclusion laws adopted by the Legislature over the next several decades. Oregon's Black exclusion laws would remain in effect until 1926 when referendums removed the clause from the Oregon Constitution. The barring of Blacks from voting remained until 1927.[3]
Upon news of the discovery of gold in Coloma, California on January 24, 1848, Burnett and his family moved south to take part in the rush. After modest success in getting gold, Burnett envisioned a career in law in San Francisco, a rapidly-growing boomtown thanks largely to the Gold Rush. On the way to the Bay Area, Burnett met Swiss immigrant John Sutter, who offered Burnett a job in selling land plots for the new town of Sacramento. Over the next year, Burnett made nearly $50,000 in land sales in Sacramento, a city ideally suited due to its closeness to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the neighboring Sacramento River's navigability for large ships.[4]
[edit] Governorship
In 1849, Burnett announced his intentions to return to politics. 1849 saw the first California Constitutional Convention in Monterey, where territorial politicians drafted documents suitable to admit California as a state in the United States. During the 1849 referendum to adopt the California Constitution, Burnett, now with name recognition in Sacramento and San Francisco, and a resume that included the Oregon Territorial Legislature, decided to run for the new territory's first civilian governor, replacing the string of military governors and bureaucracy from the U.S. military. Burnett easily won the election over four other candidates, and was sworn in as California's first elected civilian governor on December 20, 1849 in San Jose in front of the California State Legislature.
In the first days of the Burnett Administration, the governor and the California Legislature set out to create the organs of a state government, creating state cabinet posts, archives, executive posts and departments, subdividing the state into 27 counties and appointing John C. Fremont and William M. Gwin as California's senators to the federal U.S. Senate. Despite home proclamations and bureaucratic reorganizations that recognized California now as a U.S. state, the U.S. Congress and President Zachary Taylor had in fact not even signed authorization of statehood for California. Part of this miscommunication was due to California's relative remoteness to the rest of the U.S. during the time, but also to over-enthusiastic attitudes by politicians and the public alike to get California into the Union as quickly as possible. Following long contentious debates in the U.S. Senate, California was admitted as a state on September 9, 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850. Californians did not learn of their official statehood until one month later, when on October 18, the steamer Oregon entered San Francisco Bay, with a banner strapped to her rigging reading "California Is Now A State."[5]
During these advancements into statehood, Governor Burnett's popularity among the State Legislature, the press and the public plummeted. Relations between the Legislature and Burnett began to immediately sour in early 1850, when bills pressing for the incorporation of Sacramento and Los Angeles as city municipalities, with Los Angeles being a special incorporation due to its earlier pueblo status during the previous Spanish and Mexican rule, passed the State Assembly and Senate. Burnett vetoed both bills, citing special incorporation bills as unconstitutional, and that reviews for municipal incorporation were best left to county courts. While the Legislature failed to override Burnett's veto of the Los Angeles bill, it did however successfully override the Sacramento bill, making Sacramento California's first incorporated city.[6]
As in Oregon, Burnett pushed for the exclusion of Blacks from California, raising the ire of pro-slavery supporters who wanted to import the Southern slave system to the West Coast. His proposals were defeated in the Legislature. Similarly, Burnett also pushed for heavy taxation on foregin immigrants. An 1850 Foreign Miners Tax Act, signed into law by Burnett, required every miner of non-American origin to pay $20. In addition to these proposals and laws, Burnett also argued heavily for increased taxation and for the expansion of capital punishment to include larceny.[7]
Protrayed as an aloof politician with little support from the Legislature by the San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles press, Burnett grew frustrated as his agenda was ground to a halt, and his governance style increasingly criticized. He became a regular fixture of ridicule in the state's newspapers and on the floor of the Legislature. With little over a year in office, Burnett, the first governor of the state, became the first to resign, announcing his resignation in January 1851. Burnett cited personal matters for his departure. Lieutenant Governor John McDougall replaced Burnett as the Governor of California on January 9.
[edit] Post governorship
One year after leaving the governorship, Burnett was finally able to repay the heavy debts he had incurred in Missouri nearly two decades before. He entered a number of careers, serving briefly as a justice in the California Supreme Court between 1857 to 1858, the Sacramento City Council, as well as becoming a San Jose-based lawyer, a noted proponent of Catholicism during the Victorian period, and then the president of the Pacific Bank of San Francisco. Although never venturing into politics much after the 1860s, Burnett was an active supporter of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He died in 1895 at the age of 88 in San Francisco.
[edit] Legacy
Peter Burnett's legacy is largely mixed. While regarded as one of the fathers of modern California in the state's early days, Burnett's openly racist attitudes towards Blacks, Chinese, and Native Americans have blackened his name today. Burnett's period in the Oregon Territorial Legislature helped facilitate the exclusion of Blacks from the state until 1926. Also, his open hostility to foreign laborers influenced a number of federal and state Califronia legislators to push future xenophobic legislation, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act thirty years after his departure from the governorship. Burnett was also an open advocate of exterminating local California Indian tribes, a policy that continued with successive state governmental administrations for several decades, where the state offered $25 to $50 dollars for evidence of dead Natives.[8]
San Francisco's Burnett Avenue near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood is named after him.
[edit] Quotes
From Burnett's Inaugural Address, December 20, 1849[9]:
| “ | For some years past I have given this subject [slavery] my most serious and candid attention; and I most cheerfully lay before you the result of my own reflections. There is, in my opinion, but one of two consistent courses to take in reference to this class of population; either to admit [Blacks] to the full and free enjoyment of all the privileges guaranteed by the Constitution to others, or exclude them from the State. If we permit them to settle in our State, under existing circumstances, we consign them, by our own institutions, and the usages of our own society, to a subordinate and degraded position, which is in itself but a species of slavery. They would be placed in a situation where they would have no efficient motives for moral or intellectual improvement, but must remain in our midst, sensible of their degradation, unhappy themselves, enemies to the institutions and the society whose usages have placed them there, and for ever fit teachers in all the schools of ignorance, vice, and idleness. | ” |
| “ | We have certainly the right to prevent any class of population from settling in our State, that we may deem injurious to our society. | ” |
[edit] References
- ^ Peter Hardeman Burnett - Catholic Encyclopedia article
- ^ Biography and Inaugural address - From the Government of California
- ^ Slavery in the Oregon Country
- ^ Peter Burnett - Gold Rush Profile
- ^ [1]
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ [4]
- ^ Inaugural Address, December 20, 1849
| Preceded by Military Governor of California Bennet Riley |
Governor of California 1849–1851 |
Succeeded by John McDougall |
| Governors of California | ||
|---|---|---|
| Burnett • McDougall • Bigler • J. Johnson • Weller • Latham • Downey • Stanford • Low • Haight • Booth • Pacheco • Irwin • Perkins • Stoneman • Bartlett • Waterman • Markham • Budd • Gage • Pardee • Gillett • H. Johnson • Stephens • Richardson • Young • Rolph • Merriam • Olson • Warren • Knight • P. Brown • Reagan • J. Brown • Deukmejian • Wilson • Davis • Schwarzenegger |  |
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