[In honor of this once-in-four-years phenomenon, I wanted to highlight and AmericanStudy a few interesting leap years from American history.]
On how
three distinct events within a 10-day period helped change America and the
world.
On January 24th,
1848, James
Wilson Marshall found gold on the property of Johann/John
Sutter’s in-construction sawmill on the American River near the small
town of Coloma, California. Marshall had been gradually migrating West from his
New Jersey birthplace since 1834, and in 1845 reached the settlement of Sutter’s Fort, a cross-cultural
outpost in the Mexican territory of Alta California. Sutter, the town founder
and alcalde, employed Marshall to help run his businesses, although that work
was interrupted by Marshall’s 1846-1847 service in John C.
Frémont’s California Battalion during the Mexican American War (the
end of which, on which more in a moment, brought California into the United
States). When Marshall returned he began work helping construct a new sawmill
for Sutter, and in the process he found gold in the river nearby. Over the next
two years the resulting Gold Rush would
bring hundreds of thousands of settlers to California, both from elsewhere in
the US and from around the world, and forever change the arc of American and
world history.
Just a
week after Marshall’s earth-shattering find, his former military commander
received far less positive news. Frémont, whose Mexican American War activities
were controversial
to say the least, had been undergoing a military trial for
charges of mutiny, disobedience of orders, and other related offenses since his
August 1847 arrest at Fort Leavenworth, and on January 31st,
1848 he was court-martialed on the charges of disobedience toward a
superior officer and military misconduct. President James Polk, who had
been president and thus commander-in-chief throughout the war and Frémont’s
activities, granted him a partial pardon, commuting his dishonorable discharge
and reinstating him into the army. But Frémont found that outcome
unsatisfactory and resigned his commission, moving back to California and
continuing to lead exploratory excursions there (while also profiting
from the Gold Rush, natch). In 1850 he became one of the first
two Senators from California, running as a Free Soil Democrat—and that splinter
party’s evolution into the Republican Party took Frémont with it, and in 1856
he became the Republican
Party’s first presidential candidate, a vital step toward 1860, Abraham
Lincoln, and the coming of the Civil War.
The Gold
Rush and the Civil War were without question two of the most prominent American
historical events of the mid-19th century; but just two days after
Frémont’s court-martial, another, equally influential historical event took
place: the February 2nd,
1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I’ve
written about that treaty and its pernicious (and ironic, given that the treaty
itself guaranteed citizenship and rights for Mexican Americans who remained in
the new US territories) effects for Mexican Americans many times, including in
this Saturday Evening Post Considering
History column and this blog
post (as well as this
HuffPost piece on the best literary representation of the treaty and its
effects, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don [1885]). But of course the treaty did
not just affect those American communities—it also fundamentally reshaped the
nation, not only through all the territories (and very quickly, in California’s case, states)
it added to the US, but also through all the new communities (including Mexican
Americans but also numerous native nations and Chinese Americans among others)
it likewise made part of the expanding US. Few, if any, individual American
days have had more lasting national significance.
Next leap
year studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts on this year or other leap years that stand out to you?
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