CHAPTER VIII To Arthur's administration belongs the credit of having practically settled the Chinese question. It was one that Arthur could not evade. Brewing for a long while, it came to a point where the nation must act. As it was a vital question for California and Oregon, these States prevailed over enough senators and representatives from the States east of the Rocky Mountains to compel the national Congress to do their bidding. As California was the head and centre of the movement against the Chinese our attention must be directed to that magnificent domain. With the Chinese question before the Civil War we need have no concern. There were mutterings portending a great storm, there was hostile legislation, for the most part neutralized by Court decisions; but if there had been a wall erected in 1865 around the Pacific States as there had been around China, the Chinese question would not have loomed large enough to attract the historian's attention. And toward the end of the decade, 1860-1870, California, so to speak, shook hands with the Orient across the Pacific. Anson Burlingame, who had been sent as minister to China, had, with the consent of both countries, become Chinese envoy to the United States and in 1868 he, with a Chinese deputation, arrived with power to negotiate a treaty. The Burlingame treaty, one of the eventful steps, opened the door of the United States to the Chinese, as it permitted their voluntary immigration and declared that they should enjoy the same privileges in respect to residence as "the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation." Burlingame and his associates were received with great enthusiasm and their treaty was ratified with hearty assent [1868]. There is room for a million Chinese laborers on the Pacific coast, Burlingame told the Chinese in Peking. True enough, but little did he suspect that the arrival of a tithe of that number would create a political and social problem of considerable importance. If the "good times" had continued, the absorbing power of California for the Chinese might, in some degree, have equalled that of the eastern part of the country for the horde of Europeans seeking better conditions than prevailed at home; but the throwing out of employment of a number of laborers due to the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869 proved for California the forerunner of adversity. The Union Pacific ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to Ogden, Utah: the Central Pacific thence to San Francisco. The building of both was done at high speed and the efficient work on the Central Pacific was performed in great part by Chinese laborers who had been brought to California by the Pacific Mail steamers. The Central Pacific and the Pacific Mail Company were the creatures of California capitalists and the working of the two, together with their adjuncts and other investments made these men immensely rich. Before the Pacific railway was completed, San Fran 1 Treaties and Conventions, 181. 2 Matteson suggests that in this statement I have ignored the racial aspect of the matter. cisco was nearly as far from New York in distance as Liverpool and much farther in time. Even in the early railroad days, when James Bryce visited California, he spoke of it as "cut off from the more populous parts of the Mississippi Valley by an almost continuous desert of twelve hundred miles, across which the two daily trains move like ships across the ocean.' California remained on a specie basis during the Civil War and the troublous years that followed it, and looked down upon the paper money of the East with good-natured contempt. For a while fortune attended her material development. The lessened demand for labor consequent on the completion of the Central Pacific should have given her a taste of the evil of over-population, but as if to ward off this misfortune so familiar to other communities, the development of the bonanza mines of the Comstock lode and good wheat harvests occurred, so that prosperity was rampant while the East suffered from the commercial crisis of 1873. Such good luck however could not last. Although not feeling it at first, California could not forever escape the commercial disturbance ushered in by the panic of 1873, especially as, within her borders, this disturbance was accompanied by disastrous local conditions. In 1876, there was a drought causing the failure of the wheat crop; cattle died for lack of pasturage; mines operated then by the hydraulic process shut down for the want of water. Contemporaneously silver declined in value; the production of the mines of the Comstock lode (which were of silver situated in Nevada) decreased in amount. Dividends stopped; values fell. 1 The community had been given over to a wild speculation. Capitalists, bankers, merchants and shop-keepers neglected their proper occupations to buy and "boom" or eagerly watch mining stocks. Mechanics, laborers, men and maid servants, all took a "flyer." All were bulls in the market. Early in 1877, the collapse came and, to a large part of the community, the collapse meant ruin. The bottom seemed to have dropped out of everything. Elation gave way to despair. Suffering such as comes from the rapid transitions of fortune was the lot of most citizens of San Francisco; and the city overflowed with unemployed men. Political demagogues were on hand to direct the irritation at the loss of money against the unoffending Chinese. Attracted by the lure of gold, as were many other peoples, they had at first worked in the mines, where, as in all other places, they were successful in earning money and getting ahead. As conditions altered they left the mines for domestic service and laundry work, then took to railroad building, agriculture and other out-of-door labor and finally to manufacturing. The negotiation of the Burlingame treaty gave a fresh impetus to the immigration. In California their numbers in 1870, 1880, 1882 (when the maximum was reached) were respectively 55,000, 77,000, 93,000; on the entire Pacific coast 71,000, 105,000, 132,000.1 Exacting the The Chinese had a passion for labor. utmost cent by bargaining, they did not strike, so that their labor was continuous; this joined to cheap living and frugality made them desirable working men for the 1 Chinese Immigration, Mary A. Coolidge, 425. Pacific coast. "In the early settlement of the State, wrote Samuel Gompers in 1901, "there is a general agreement that the labor of the Chinese was a blessing."1 And this remained true down to the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869. As one regards their attitude during these days one comes to understand the virtue of patience although in their case exercised to the point of craven submission. "For rent, etc.," wrote Henry George in 1869, then a resident of San Francisco, "they must always pay more than the whites. They are fair game for all sorts of rascals. To rob these timid people . is comparatively safe; nor unless a white man happens to witness the operation is there any danger of subsequent punishment, for in the courts of California the testimony of a Chinaman cannot be received against a white." 2 Nevertheless the Chinese felt that they had "a nation and a history far superior, far higher and far beyond all others on the earth." 3 As they thought of their own overcrowded country, they must have regarded with contempt the 567,247 people who, owning a territory that could support at least thirty million Chinese, complained of "hard times." From the American point of view, the year 1877 was intensified "hard times," and in California the Chinese was the scape-goat. Their number was exaggerated, which was hardly surprising inasmuch as a few Chinamen because of their yellow complexion and peculiar dress seemed omnipresent in an American community. The 1 Coolidge, 337. 2 New York Tribune, May 1, 1869. 3 San Francisco Alta California, March 4, 1882. 4" The ordinary blue cotton blouse and white drawers." Bret Harte, Stories in Light and Shadow, 94. |