1848

Date uncertain: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s baby daughter dies after a short illness. He and his wife will have three more daughters, and he will commemorate them, as James Marcus notes “in ‘The Children’s Hour,’ thereby introducing ‘the patter of little feet’ into the sentimental lexicon.)” 

The poem “Resignation” is Longfellow’s response to the baby’s death.

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January 3:  By a strict party vote, and a majority of one, the U.S. House of Representatives adopts a resolution stating that the war with Mexico was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.”

 

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January 12: Rep. Abraham Lincoln asks again, after his resolutions (see: 12/22/1847) have been tabled in Congress, if Polk 

can show that the soil was ours where the first blood of the war was shed – that it was not within an inhabited country, or if within such, that the inhabitants had submitted themselves to the civil authority of Texas or of the United States, and that the same is true of Fort Brown – then I am with him for his justification.  (5/131-132)

 

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January 24: James Marshall lets the water run all night, to clean debris out of the millrace of the sawmill John Sutter has asked him to build. In the morning, he spots specks of gold. He and his men continued their regular work, panning for gold only on Sundays, until the mill was finished in March. 

The first nugget, found by Marshall was about the size of a dime. 

The people of San Francisco, then a town of about 900, did not much believe early reports that gold had been found. A group of Mormons began digging about twenty-five miles from the sawmill, what became known as “Mormon Diggings.” 

Sam Brannan, a store owner with a place in Sutterville, near Sutter’s Fort, headed for San Francisco in May. With him he brought a vial of gold dust. It is said he walked the streets shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” and waving his vial. This sparked the first local rush. Within two days boats were leaving San Francisco, and headed for the diggings. There they found Brannan’s store stocked with supplies and equipment needed to go prospecting. By June it is estimated only a hundred people remained in San Francisco. According to the alcalde, workers constructing a schoolhouse in Monterey, California, heard the news, “threw down their saws and planes, shouldered their picks, and are off for the Yuba [River]. Three seamen ran off from the Warren, forfeiting their four years’ pay; and a whole platoon of soldiers left their colors behind.”

Sutter's Mill sat on the point of land center, marked by the monument.
(American River.)

 

The stories continued to get better and better; there were said to be streams “paved with gold.” The diggings, said one authority, exceeded “all the dreams of romance and all the golden marvels of the wand of Midas.” 

A miner later wrote his wife, “I do not like to be apacking a thousand dollars [in gold] about in my coat pockets for it has toar my pockets and puld the Coat to pieces.” 

William M. Thayer, in Marvels of the New West, describes the discovery of gold and the aftermath this way: 

The discovery of gold in the New West, in 1848, came about in this way. John A. Sutter, a Swede, drifted to this country, and settled in California in 1839. He was a very enterprising, industrious, and successful pioneer; and, in 1848, he was the owner of a flour mill, saw-mill, tannery, and a large tract of land on which his many thousand cattle, horses, and sheep grazed.

 

In his employ was one James W. Marshall, in whose imagination floated visions of gold. He believed that there was a plenty of it in that country waiting to be discovered. He was a mechanic, and built Sutter’s saw-mill, which commenced running in January, 1848. On the second day of February [Thayer is in error] Marshall shut the water off, when he discovered particles of shining dust in the race-way. “Gold! gold!” he said within himself under great excitement, and at once instituted an examination, the result of which was an ounce of gold picked up in the race-way and dug from the crevices of rocks. He was almost beside himself with excitement. Mounting a horse, he dashed away to report to Captain Sutter, who was at his home-fort, forty miles distance. It was late in the evening when he reached the fort, and rain was descending in torrents.

 

Leaping from his horse, he said to Captain Sutter, hurriedly and excitedly, – 

 

“Captain, I want to see you alone.”

 

Sutter conducted him into a vacant apartment, and closed the door.

 

“Are you sure no one will intrude? Lock the door,” continued Marshall, so excited as to awaken Sutter’s suspicion that he was crazy.

 

Sutter locked the door, and assured his friend that no one could hear or see them.

 

Stepping up to the table, Marshall poured from a pouch his ounce of gold.

 

“Gold! gold! That is gold!” he exclaimed, scarcely realizing whether he was in the flesh or out.

 

“Where did you get that?” inquired Sutter.

 

Marshall rehearsed the events of the day, and his discovery of gold in the race-way, enjoining profound secrecy upon the captain.

 

“But you do not know that is gold,” suggested Sutter. “I have my doubts about it.”

 

After some discussion, however, Captain Sutter settled the matter by the application of aqua fortis. The test showed it to be gold.

 

Now Marshall’s excitement reached its climax, and in vain did Captain Sutter entreat him to stop overnight. He must return immediately, and insisted that Sutter should accompany him. The latter peremptorily declined to go with him in the driving rain, but promised to go in the morning. Marshall started back, and Sutter went to bed, though not to sleep.

 

Early in the morning, the storm having passed away, Captain Sutter hurried away to the mill-race. When within ten miles of it, he met Marshall on foot.

 

“That you, Marshall?” exclaimed Sutter. “What are you here for?”

 

“I was so impatient to see you that I walked this distance to meet you,” – a reply which showed how great was the excitement under which he was laboring.

 

On arriving at the mill-race, they found all the men engaged in gathering gold. Realizing that the gold find might create so much excitement as to compel the stoppage of his flour and saw mills and tannery, as well as all labor upon his immense ranch, he called the men together, and exacted a promise of secrecy for six weeks, during which time they should faithfully attend to their laborers in the mills, tannery, and on the farm. But such a secret could not be kept. In a few days the news was on the wings of the wind, and the rush to this El Dorado was without a parallel. Sutter’s men forsook his mills and ranch to search for gold; and all his interests were left to neglect and ruin. Gold-seekers struck anywhere upon his ranch they pleased, and it was almost literally dug up. Without leave or license, they appropriated any part of his wide domain to their own use. They even stole, killed, and ate his flocks and herds, helped themselves to his large crop of wheat, corn, and potatoes, spoiled his fur trade with the Indians, and his hide and leather traffic with the East, and left everything a wreck. Sutter was forced to resort to the law to re-establish his claims, in which litigation he spent his last dollar, and finally, after some years of hard struggle with poverty, he died.

 

Marshall was no more fortunate. He gathered some gold, but it slipped out of his hands, so that, in the end, he derived no pecuniary profit from his valuable discovery. Hence it has been said that the discovery of gold on the Pacific slope ruined both the discoverer and the owner of the land on which it was found.

 

General Sutter, whose name the mill bears, settled here over fifty years ago, under a grant from the Russian government.

 

According to Thayer, there were two thousand men living in San Francisco in January 1848. All but five, he says, “left for the gold-field.” (Again, he’s off by quite a bit.) By the end of the year, 5,000 men were at work in the mines, and produced, on average, $1,000 per man. “Two ounces per day was but an ordinary yield for each man, and many did better than that. As the value of gold was twelve dollars per ounce in cash and sixteen dollars in trade, their hard labor was very remunerative.” (6/429-431)

 

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March 31: Two young sisters, Maggie Fox, 14, and Kate, 11 (later joined by Leah, a third) launch a career in spiritualism, after telling a neighbor they can communicate with the dead. Smithsonian sets the scene: 

Every night around bedtime, they said, they heard a series of raps on the walls and furniture – raps that seemed to manifest with a peculiar, otherworldly intelligence. The neighbor, skeptical, came to see for herself, joining the girls in the small chamber they shared with their parents. While Maggie and Kate huddled together on their bed, their mother, Margaret, began the demonstration.

 

“Now count five,” she ordered, and the room shook with the sound of five heavy thuds.

 

“Count fifteen,” she commanded, and the mysterious presence obeyed. Next, she asked it to tell the neighbor’s age; thirty-three distinct raps followed.

 

“If you are an injured spirit,” she continued, “manifest it by three raps.” And it did.

 

With that a career as spiritualists, lasting many years, was launched. The three sisters, Leah being the oldest, went on tour. Charging $1 admission for a performance in New York City, they held three sessions daily in the lobby of the hotel where they were staying. Distinguished guests included James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, and William Lloyd Garrison. 

The Fox sisters became a phenomenon. They later traveled to Europe to perform. Only decades later, in October 1888, did Maggie reveal how the sisters’ careers had been launched and sustained. 

“My sister Katie and myself were very young children when this horrible deception began,” Maggie said [in an interview with reporters]. “At night when we went to bed, we used to tie an apple on a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound.” The sisters graduated from apple dropping to manipulating their knuckles, joints and toes to make rapping sounds. “A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them,” she explained. “It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: ‘I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder.’ Of course that was pure imagination.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: The article in Smithsonian goes into much greater detail on the career of the three women and might interest students.

 

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“We should do more and talk less.”      

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 25, writes to The North Star, in response to Frederick Douglass’s request for suggestions from readers. How could life for black people in America be improved? 

Cary replied: “We have been holding conventions for years – we have been assembling and whining over our difficulties and afflictions, passing resolutions on resolutions to any extent. But it does seem we have made but little progress considering our resolves.” 

“We should do more and talk less,” she added. Douglass printed the letter, which could be seen as implied criticism of even his work. 

Shadd Cary was born in 1823, in Wilmington, Delaware, the eldest of 13 children. Black children could not be educated in the state. So her parents moved to Pennsylvania when she was ten. With passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, with its heavy penalties, she and others in the family moved to Canada. In 1853, she founded The Provincial Freeman, a paper, “Devoted to antislavery, temperance and general literature,” according to its motto. She attacked other abolitionists who feared to fight for total equality, instead supporting segregated schools and communities. She suggested that associations that collected funds to help runaways should also help poor free blacks. 

A rival at another paper responded once, “Miss Shadd has said and written many things which we think will add nothing to her credit as a lady.” 

Her paper failed in 1859; she then taught at an integrated school in Chatham. With the start of the Civil War she returned to the United States and worked to recruit blacks to fight for the Union. Later she started a school for the children of former slaves in Washington D.C. In 1870 she graduated from Howard University with a law degree. Four years later she was one of a group of women who petitioned the House Judiciary Committee for the right of suffrage. “I am not vain enough to suppose for a moment that words of mine could add one iota of weight to the arguments from these learned and earnest women,” she admitted. Yet, as “a colored woman” and “a resident of this district, a taxpayer,” she wondered on what basis she was denied equal rights.

 

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July 19-20: The first Women’s Rights Convention is held at Seneca Falls. In discussing the topic of equality with my classes, I used this questionnaire to start a discussion. Since I started teaching in 1975, and retired in 2008, it would need to be updated with a few more recent examples. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I’ll leave that to you. And I apologize. I retired before the matter of transgender individuals became an issue society would have to face. 

 One delegate at Seneca Falls was the Quaker, Lucretia Mott.

 

Are Men and Women Equal? 

1. It is okay for a girl to call a boy and ask him to a movie.

2. A woman would make as good a president as a man.

3. If I <the student> had a teenage daughter someday, I would encourage her to play football or wrestle.

 

4. If I <the student> had a teenage son someday, I would encourage him to try out for cheerleading.

5. Females who have joined the U.S. military should be sent into combat.

6. It is normal for a teenage boy to cry at a sad movie.

 

7. Housework should be split evenly if both the husband and wife have full-time jobs.

8. It is the woman’s job to do the sewing.

9. It is the man’s job to change the oil in the car.

 

10. A husband and wife make exactly the same salary at their jobs. The couple has a baby. One must stay home. It should be the mother.

11. It is okay for a nine-year-old girl to play with toy guns and trains.

12. It is okay for a nine-year-old boy to play with dolls.

 

13. A woman should have the final say if she wants an abortion. This is true even if her husband disagrees.

14. The man is the head of the family.

15. I <the student> would have as much confidence in a female police officer as a man.

 

16. Sports for girls should receive as much money, time, and emphasis as boys’ sports.

17. It is normal for a man to marry a woman fifteen years older.

18. Caring for a sick child is naturally done better by a mother.

 

19. If a woman makes much more than her husband she should have the final say if they disagree about what car to buy.

20. On a date the guy should drive.

21. In cases of divorce the children will usually be better off living with their mother.

 

22. A teenage boy should be allowed to stay out later than a girl of the same age.

23. Collecting garbage, if it pays more, would be a better job for a woman than being a secretary.

24. More men should go into nursing.

25. More women should become plumbers and electricians.

 

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The Free-soil Party platform of 1848 declares: 

1.     That Congress has no more power to make a slave than to make a king.

 

2.     That there must be “free soil for a free people.”

 

3.     That there must be “no more slave states, no more slave territories.”

 

4.     That “we inscribe on our banner, ‘free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.’” (97/323)

 

Calhoun claimed that “a Southerner had as good a right to carry his slave with him into the Federal domain as a Northern man had to take his sheep or his oxen.” (56/372)

 

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If Godey’s was not entirely sympathetic to women’s rights, as conceived by suffragists, it at least indulged in none of the ridicule so popular in those times. 

“Make to-day right,” Sarah Hale often said, “and to-morrow may be right of itself.” 

She convinced her friend A.T. Stewart, the great merchant philanthropist, “to try  the experiment of employing sales women as well as sales men in his New York store. Stewarts was the shop then. Women’s success with him assured her of openings elsewhere.” Hale was also one of the first to see that waiting on tables in public places was work women could do well. (113/238)

 

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December 5: President Polk, in his annual message, gives official blessing to accounts of gold discoveries in California. There are reports of rich veins, he says, as “would scarcely command belief.” 

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“Born enslaved to her own father.” 

December 24: Ellen and William Craft embark on one of the most daring escapes from slavery in all American history. 

In a book review in The New York Times, we get the basics: 

A few days before Christmas in 1848, an enslaved woman named Ellen Craft donned a stovepipe hat in Macon, Ga. The hat completed a daring costume that Craft used to disguise herself as a white man and book travel all the way to Pennsylvania on a series of trains, steamboats and carriages. Ellen told fellow travelers that she was a planter going north to seek medical care. Her enslaved husband, William, came with her, pretending to be her property.

 

… [The plan of escape began with ] Ellen, who was born enslaved to her own father, James Smith, a white planter who also enslaved Ellen’s 18-year-old mother, Maria. The laws of slavery offered Maria no protection from rape by her owner, and in 1837, no doubt because of Ellen’s light complexion and physical resemblance to Smith, his wife gave Ellen to their daughter Eliza, as a wedding present upon her marriage to Robert Collins of Macon.

 

In Macon, while legally owned by her half sister, Ellen met and fell in love with William Craft, an enslaved cabinetmaker in town. They shared traumatic memories of separation from family members. In Ellen’s case, her transfer from Smith’s plantation to Collins’s house wrenched her away from her mother. William had been permanently torn from a beloved sister, who was sold at a public auction when the siblings were children. Determined not to be separated from each other or to have children who might be sold away from them, the Crafts decided to act on their plan for escape as 1848 came to a close.

 

…A key part of the plan was Ellen’s costume, which included dark green glasses, a sling for her right arm, a black cravat and that “double-story” silk hat, “befitting how high it rises, and the fiction it covers.” As they boarded train cars and entered dining rooms filled with white travelers, Ellen also wore bandages on her face and hand to convince any observers that she was the ailing young scion of a wealthy family, traveling across the Mason-Dixon line with a loyal manservant to consult with a physician. Her injured hand also served as a ready explanation for why she couldn’t sign travel documents at several stops, concealing the fact that she had never been allowed to learn how to write her name.

 

…Ellen’s skill as a seamstress surely aided her in altering the clothes she wore. William had purchased pieces of her costume with money he had managed to save by doing carpentry work for customers willing to pay token wages to an enslaved man. But of even greater value to the fugitives was Ellen’s hard-won knowledge of the mannerisms of young white men, gleaned from her work within the intimate spaces of the Collins’s home. Likewise, William knew how to perform the role that white Southerners expected of him on the trip: that of an obsequious attendant rushing to anticipate his sickly master’s every need.

 

The couple first made a new home in Boston. But after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, they were never really safe. Robert Collins sent two agents to the city, in an effort to reclaim his “property.”

 

…In the battles that ensued in Boston’s courtrooms and streets, the couple determined to fight re-enslavement by any means necessary; William brandished a pistol on more than one occasion and made clear he would use it. In the end, Collins’s agents left empty-handed, stymied in part by confusion among officials over the new Fugitive Slave Law. But it was clear that the slave catchers would be back.

 

Eventually, the couple moved to England, for their safety. They eventually had six children together and wrote a book about their escape – authorship of which was credited solely to William Craft. While Ellen’s role was clearly the more difficult to pull off, William claimed he came up with the  plan itself, and in the book referred to Ellen only as “my wife.” He and others also referred to her, during abolitionist meetings, as a “white slave,” which Ellen took issue with. 

They did return to the United States after the war; but little is apparently known about them during those years.