The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 16, July 1912 - April, 1913 Page: 252
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The Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Royce, in his California (1886), says the men from southern
states formed a separate party under the leadership of Gwin.
"Their undoubted object was not so much to. give over any part of
California at once to slavery, since this hurrying life of the gold-
seekers wholly forbade any present consideration of such a plan,
but to prepare the way for a future overthrow of the now para-
mount Northern influence in the territory, and so to make possi-
ble an ultimate division of the State, in case the southern part
should prove to, be adapted to slave labor."
A similar opinion is expressed by Bancroft. Giving what he con-
siders to be the views of southern men in the Convention he says,
"Let Northern California be a free state; out of the remainder of
the territory acquired from Mexico half a dozen slave states might
be made."2 A little further on he quotes from McDougal's speech,:
the part given above,-and says what it "lacked in grammar and
rhetoric it supplied in facts."'
In 1890, the Century Magazine requested Francis Lippitt, who
had been a member of the Convention, to contribute any new infor-
mation he could on the organization of the state government in'
California. He wrote an article for the September number on
The California Boundary Question of 18:49. He was informed
after the Convention, he said, that the extreme eastern boundary
had been supported by men "from the southern states with the
view to a subsequent division of California by an east and west line
into two large states, each having its share of the Pacific coast; and
further, to the future organization of the southern of these two
states as a slave state-an event that would be quite certain, in as
much as most of the settlers in that part of California had come
and would continue to come from the South and Southwest. Thus
the new free state would be offset by a new slave state."
An article in the Overland Monthly for the same month and
year, on the Beginnings of California, by F. I. Vassault, contains
the following: "The fact behind this animated dispute about the
location of the eastern boundary was that the pro-slavery mem-
bers of the Convention hoped that by making the state so large as to
include the whole of the Mexican cession it would be necessary later
Royce, California, 262.
2Baneroft, History of California, VI, 291.
8Ibid., 293-294.
4'Ibid., 295.252
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 16, July 1912 - April, 1913, periodical, 1913; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101058/m1/260/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.