Memoirs of Elisha Oscar Crosby; reminiscences of California and Guatemala from 1849 to 1864. Edited by Charles Albro Barker ELISHA OSCAR CROSBY Memoirs OF ELISHA OSCAR CROSBY REMINISCENCES OF CALIFORNIA AND GUATEMALA FROM 1849 TO 1864 Edited by Charles Albro Barker The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 1945 Copyright, 1945 By the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery Printed by ANDERSON & RITCHIE: THE WARD RITCHIE PRESS Los Angeles Contents Memoirs of Elisha Oscar Crosby; reminiscences of California and Guatemala from 1849 to 1864. Edited by Charles Albro Barker http:// www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.071 Page INTRODUCTION ix BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON THE CROSBY PAPERS xxiii REMINISCENCES OF CALIFORNIA AND GUATEMALA Beginnings in New York State and City 3 An Argonaut by Way of Panama 9 California No Humbug 17 The State Constitution of 1849 33 Launching the State Government 51 United States Commission to Settle Mexican Titles 65 Guatemala in Civil War Diplomacy 75 APPENDIX: “ANECDOTAL SCRAPS” 107 INDEX 117 vii List of Illustrations ELISHA OSCAR CROSBY Frontispiece Photograph by E. Graybiel, Alameda FACING PAGE STEAMSHIP “CALIFORNIA” 23 The first steamship tp enter San francisco Bay. Photograph, by Bradley and Fulofson, made Feb. 28, 1874, on the 25th annimversary of her first entrance to the Bay, all the surviving passengers of the first trip being aboard. COLTON HALL, MONTEREY 39 Meeting place of the Constitutional Convention of 1849. Photograph (made about 1889) from the C. C. Pierce Collection of the Huntington Library. ix Introduction THE manuscript “Memoirs and Reminiscences” of Elisha Oscar Crosby, forty-niner, California lawyer and public figure, and United States diplomat in Central America, are here published for the first time. The original copy has been the property of the Huntington Library for twenty-two years. Comparison with other Crosby manuscripts in and out of the Library suggests to the point of certainty that this is a parent document, a source or literary depository, in which Crosby first put down the reminiscences of forty-five years, and from which he and others have since drawn and redone fragments of California history.* Only one of these fragments has found its way to available publication entire,* and that, an account of the adoption of the state constitution of 1849, represents Memoirs of Elisha Oscar Crosby; reminiscences of California and Guatemala from 1849 to 1864. Edited by Charles Albro Barker http:// www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.071 but one of the several areas of public interest in Crosby's life. Thus the Reminiscences tell a new story, almost from first to last. The “Memoirs and Reminiscences” were purchased from Mr. Boutwell Dunlap of San Francisco, in 1922. They are listed in the Library's collections as HM 284. See the Bibliographical Note below (p. xxiii) regarding the character and location of other Crosby items. The printed memoir is “The First State Election in California,” Quarterly of the Society of California Pioneers (San Francisco), V (1928), 65-75. The writer has very little to say directly about himself. From his silences, a reader would never know that he was a family man, responsible not only for his own but also for his dead brother's dependents. Yet he does reveal himself indirectly. He could hardly have lived differently from the way in which he wrote about his life—with zest, with intelligence, with sufficient detachment to appreciate men and events quite foreign to his earlier experience, and with sufficient earnestness to make and to defend large judgments of public morality and policy. He made his observations in important places—in New York, in California during and after the gold rush, and, as minister of the United States commissioned by Lincoln, in Guatemala City. x Although at no time a man of great prominence or power, he was for at least thirteen or fourteen years very active in affairs, and his Reminiscences open new views into the life of California, into state-making, into land policy, into the conditions and politics of Central America, and into the Negro and Caribbean policies of the United States at the crucial moment of the first Republican victory and descent into Civil War. The Reminiscences below have many of the virtues of autobiography: they are concise, they have movement, definiteness, and organization. Their principal faults are a lack of completeness and a lack of finish, and occasionally they are inaccurate in detail. A rewriting would have raised them into a higher literary class, and a checking would have made them a better historical source. But these deficiencies are easy to forgive: Crosby wrote and was assisted in writing when, at about the age of sixty, he had almost lost the use of his eyes. He knew that he could not do a perfect job, but he wrote anyway.* We are lucky to have the Reminiscences at all, to know the important things he had to say, and to enjoy the stories which he plainly loved to tell. Not the least informing section of the manuscript, indeed, is that marked “Anecdotal Scraps,” at the end. Here the writer treats us to a collection of California yarns from the early years of his residence. As they have to do with the Memoirs of Elisha Oscar Crosby; reminiscences of California and Guatemala from 1849 to 1864. Edited by Charles Albro Barker http:// www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.071 women of San Francisco and the mining country and with the law courts, some of them are from the agreeable borderland between stories which are always tellable and those which are sometimes tellable. This section is a sort of autobiographical dessert to top off the heavier, seasoned fare of the body of the Reminiscences. He says nothing of this in the Reminiscences. But in a letter of April, 1880, he described his method of writing. He himself managed to do a rough, pencil draft, and then others copied it in ink. He recognized that he could not prevent the occurrence of little errors. In this letter he attributed the impairment of his vision to overwork, and dated the occurrence of the trouble in 1877. (Manuscript copy, letter to Mrs. Caroline M. Roberts, California Historical Society.) See the biographical sketches in M. W. Wood and S. P. Munro-Fraser, History of Alameda County, California (Oakland, 1883), pp. 869-71; and The Bay of San Francisco (Chicago, 1892), II, 108-112. Crosby was born a York State Yankee, in 1818. His home lay xi on the south-central edge of the Finger Lake country, not far from Ithaca and Cortland. This beautiful land prospered in the years of his childhood, as settlement increased and as it profited from the boom traffic of the country's main avenue west, along the Erie Canal. Yet Crosby was one of seven farm children, and his family's “moderate circumstances” did well to afford for him an academy education, and a start in legal training in the offices of attorneys of the state. This training he completed with his uncle, in the city of Buffalo, in 1843. At twenty-five he had been fully admitted to the practice of law, and he was ready for whatever career might come. His own account of these beginnings is very brief; there is only a little about his family, his activities, and his interests. Even so, the Reminiscences are suggestive. One visualizes a young man of a century ago, who has had the energy and character to take advantage of the good resources of democratic, rural, central New York. He has seen something also of life in a rising commercial and industrial city, and has found professional advantage there. His father and uncle have helped him but not made him, and he has somewhat self-consciously taken the “first plunge into the great world to begin the battle of life.” The picture is a conventional one, and it is thoroughly attractive. The next stage is less clear. For reasons and under circumstances which he does not bother to explain, Crosby went to New York. He simply says that in the fall of 1843 he “formed a connection with Abner Benedict in the practice of law.” Benedict was an elderly man with an office on Wall Street; in five years of association with Crosby he let the burden of work fall on the young man; Memoirs of Elisha Oscar Crosby; reminiscences of California and Guatemala from 1849 to 1864. Edited by Charles Albro Barker http:// www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.071 his clients included Aspinwall and Howland, partners at the head of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which in 1848 opened by way of Panama the only fast and easy transportation to California and Oregon prior to the building of the transcontinental railroad. Whether by the development of marked professional ability, or by the luck of his position as the young partner of a retiring Wall Street lawyer, or by some other reason or a combination of reasons, Crosby's xii years between twenty-five and thirty in New York measure the difference between a greenhorn in his profession and a young lawyer with connections, recognition, and preference. The plain signpost of the spread of his activities and importance is to be found in his departure from New York to California, on Christmas Day, 1848. At this point, the Reminiscences become more leisurely and less compact, and Crosby takes a dozen pages to describe the two-month, two-ocean trip which brought him into San Francisco on the first steam vessel to enter the port. In 1887, addressing an audience of California patriots, Crosby was to say bluntly that, “I took the California fever bad.”* But in the Reminiscences the event is more complicated than that, and his story becomes an unusually informing case study of the causes and conditions of a professional man's emigration.