“About one o’clock the convention met again. Mr. Semple was now present. First, salaries were voted; 10,000 dollars annually, and General Riley as governor of California, and 5,000 to Mr. Halleck as secretary of state, after which they affixed their names to the completed constitution. At this moment a signal was given; the American colours run up the flag-staff in front of the government buildings and streamed out on the air. The next moment the first gun boomed from the fort, and its stirring echoes came back from one hill after another till they were lost in the distance.

“All the native enthusiasm of Captain Sutter’s Swiss blood was aroused; he was the old soldier again. He sprang from his seat, and waving his hand round his head, as if swinging his sword, exclaimed, ‘Gentlemen, this the happiest day of my life. It makes me glad to hear those cannon; they remind me of the time when I was a soldier. Yes, I am glad to hear them! This is a great day for California!’ Then recollecting himself, he sat down, the tears streaming from his eyes. The members, with one accord, gave three tumultuous cheers, which were heard from one end of the town to the other. As the signing went on, gun followed gun from the fort, the echoes reverberating grandly around the bay, till finally, as the loud peal of the thirty-first was heard, there was a shout, ‘That’s for California!’ And everyone joined in giving three times three for the new star added to our Constitution.”

Thus was California, as was represented on her great seal of state, born full-grown, like Minerva, into the national confederacy.

The first Californian senators to congress were John C. Fremont and William M. Gwin. On February 13th, 1850, the constitution of California, together with her petition to be admitted into the Union, were sent to congress by the president.

The clause excluding slavery from the new state awoke all the old animosity of the slavery question, especially as the southern boundary of California lay south of the line of the Missouri compromise. Nor was this the only subject which agitated congress at this time. Texas claimed the whole country as far as the Rio Grande, thus embracing a portion of New Mexico, which the New Mexicans, of Santa Fe violently resisted, being determined not to come under the rule of Texas. Colonel Monroe was at this time American commandant of Santa Fe, and having received private instructions from Washington, a convention was called and a state constitution was framed, and while Texas was preparing to seize the disputed territory by force, New Mexico petitioned to be admitted into the Union. Again, on this very subject of disputed territory, the north and south came to issue, the southern states advocating the claim of Texas, which if established would extend the area of slavery, and the north opposing it for the very same cause.

At length, after the two hostile parties had waged war for some time without either gaining ground, Henry Clay brought in his Compromise Bill, the object of which he stated to be, “to settle and adjust amicably all existing questions of controversy between them, arising out of the institution of slavery, upon a fair, equitable and just basis.” The Compromise Bill was, in May, referred to a committee of thirteen, and in September its measures passed as mutual concessions and compromises for the sake of union, viz.: 1. California was admitted into the Union as a state, with her constitution excluding slavery, and her boundaries extending from Oregon to the Mexican possessions. 2. The Great Basin, east of California, containing the Mormon settlement near the Great Salt Lake, was erected, without mention of slavery, into a territory, by the Indian name of Utah. 3. New Mexico, with a boundary which satisfied her inhabitants, was also erected into a state without mention of slavery; congress giving to Texas, in relinquishment of her claims, ten millions of dollars, with which Texas was to pay former debts for which the United States had been in honour bound. 4. A law was passed abolishing the slave-trade, but not slavery, in the district of Columbia; and 5. The Fugitive Slave Law was passed, a law so cruel in its operations as to call forth, as it were, a universal groan from the non-slavery states, and to fan up afresh the otherwise cooling embers of hostility.

The census of 1850 reported the population of the United States to be 23,267,498, of which 3,197,589 were slaves. In the same year the amount of emigration from Europe to America exceeded 300,000.

We have thus brought down the history of the United States to the middle of the present century, and the reader cannot fail of having been impressed with a sense of the vitality which has ever marked the progress and development of the Anglo-American States, and which, from the smallest beginnings on the Atlantic shore, have now extended with an irresistible force to the far Pacific.

Politically and morally the Republic of the United States has been a grand, successful experiment. While the nation has grown with an unexampled rapidity, it has not overlooked the essential foundations of national greatness—the religious and social advancement of the people. The school-house and the place of worship have sprung up simultaneously with human dwellings in the wilderness. And though anomalies exist in the characters of her institutions, though the blot of slavery darkens the page of her history, and her abundant harvest fields have been watered by the blood of the Indian, still, even for the slave is there hope of the amelioration of his condition, and it may be of his redemption, through the growing enlightenment of the South. And as regards the Indian, missionary-labour is increasing among his people, and where they are capable of receiving the instruction and civilisation of the whites, it is given. In 1850, there were 570 missionaries, more than half of whom were women, labouring earnestly in the wilderness, together with 2,000 preachers and helpers among the natives themselves. A thousand churches, of various Christian denominations, have been erected, and the number of professing Christian Indians amounts at this time to 40,537. A great number of schools have been established, and are increasing daily, where the Indian children, to the number of 30,000, receive instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as in handicraft trades. The women easily acquire these latter. Printing presses have been introduced among them, and works in thirty different languages produced.[[86]]

While these facilities are given for education among the Indians, those which are afforded for society at large are on the most ample and liberal scale. Education is indispensable to the man and woman of the New World, and a system of school education is being universally established there, which shall make the enlightenment of the moral and intellectual being common to all, irrespective of creeds and parties, open alike to man and woman.