Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  More than repression made French prostitutes in the late 1840s think about traveling thousands of miles in search of a living. Regulationism might be grim, but in good economic times it did allow women to support themselves through sexual commerce. These were not good times. At midcentury, prostitutes faced the same conditions that other French working people faced—the severe economic depression that preceded and precipitated the abortive revolution of 1848. Depression, in turn, begat emigration.

  Indeed, 1848 is one of those years that fascinate historians—a year during which a number of seemingly unconnected but nonetheless transformative events happened at once. In North America, the events included the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which so drastically altered the boundaries of the United States and Mexico; the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York; and the discovery of California gold. In Europe, the events included the series of revolutions that rumbled through Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Milan, along with the appearance of two works that would come to exert tremendous influence over ideas about economy and society—John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Taken together, the events of 1848 signaled the emergence of an expansive liberal capitalist order based on notions of civil equality, popular sovereignty, and the free play of market forces. At the same time, the events gave voice to critics of that system—from those who demanded extension of ideas about civic equality to those who rejected the capitalist trajectory of change.62

  In France, proponents and opponents of the new order joined forces to defy the reign of King Louis Philippe, who sought in vain to contain the revolutionary alliance of workers and bourgeois republicans. The revolution of 1848 was set in motion by the poor harvests of 1846, which led to social unrest among rural people and urban workers alike and which brought about a larger financial crisis as well. Louis Philippe ultimately abdicated and fled the country. Into the power vacuum created by abdication stepped a provisional government that included the socialist Louis Blanc. As that government tried to address the problems of the laboring poor by proclaiming the “right to work” and establishing national workshops, and as mass mobilization ensued, the infrastructure for profound social change emerged.63 Had that change occurred, perhaps emigration to California would not have looked so enticing. But the radical coalition quickly came apart. Beginning with the abolition of the national workshops and the bloody suppression of Parisian workers’ protests, the Second Republic devolved into a repressive regime that repudiated many of the revolutionary goals upon which it had been founded. By the end of 1848, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the former French emperor Napoléon Bonaparte, had been elected president, and over the next three years his government dismantled the opposition. In late 1851, when Louis Napoléon faced the refusal of the National Assembly to pass a constitutional revision that would allow him to serve a second term, he engineered a coup d’état. One year later, on the anniversary of the coup, France was once again proclaimed an empire.64

  Meanwhile, the economic crisis of 1846–47 that had set the stage for revolution continued to plague the French. Some signs of recovery appeared in 1850 and 1851, no doubt aiding Louis Napoleon in his imperial designs. But until then unemployment and underemployment left workers scrambling to eke out a living. To make matters worse, the bad harvests had brought about food shortages and exorbitant prices.65 Imagine the excitement, then, when official news of the California gold discovery reached France in December 1848. Struggling urban workers and rural peasants were not the first to respond, but rather men with capital who could finance their own voyage or join with others in entrepreneurial plans to transport people or goods to the mines and markets of California. Speculators and promoters, in fact, went wild with the news, announcing their schemes to would-be shareholders and emigrants in half- and full-page newspaper advertisements and broadsides posted all over Paris. Between 1849 and 1850, French men established eighty-three companies and societies devoted to exploiting California’s newfound wealth, some of them offering inducements to “associated workers” such as inexpensive shares and three-year labor contracts (during which, as shareholders, they could expect to earn astounding dividends). The largest of the companies, La Californienne, sent six teams of workers to the diggings, pledging food, shelter, and tools, but delivered on none of the promises. Like those who joined other French societies (and like members of most Anglo American companies organized to go to California), the Californienne emigrants were on their own once they reached their destination. Neither did shareholders who stayed behind in France see dividends. Still, between company-sponsored and individual emigration, well over twenty thousand French-speaking people traveled to California during the Gold Rush.66

  At least one of the French emigration schemes caught the attention of Karl Marx, who saw in it a symbol of failed revolution. Authorized by the Paris prefect of police, the Société des Lingots d’Or in 1850 organized a lottery, the proceeds of which would be used to transport five thousand poor emigrants to California. The grand prize was a 400,000-franc gold ingot. Although lotteries were illegal in France, government officials hoped by this plan to rid themselves of a good number of the Parisian radicals of 1848 as well as other undesirables. Writing in 1852, Marx lambasted the scheme: “golden dreams were to supplant the socialist dreams of the Paris proletariat.” The laborers, he lamented, “did not recognize in the glitter of the California gold bars the inconspicuous francs that were enticed out of their pockets.”67 However Parisian workers understood their purchase of lottery tickets from the Société des Lingots d’Or, Marx indeed captured the irony of a gold rush that followed on the heels of a failed revolution. Not so long before—on the streets of Paris in February of 1848—some French people had bolder dreams.

  Halfway across the world, a sixteen-year-old named Fou Sin was leaving his job in a Hong Kong store to board an American ship called the Captain Tiger, on which he would serve as cabin boy. Little did he know that ten years later, in 1858, he would stand in a California court and be sentenced to death by hanging—having been accused, along with four other Chinese, of robbing a water company safe and murdering a white clerk who worked for the company manager. In part because Fou Sin was charged with such a crime, his life at first glance seems unlike those of most Chinese immigrants to California. Nonetheless, Fou Sin’s biography reveals much about the Gold Rush emigration of people from Guangdong Province, in South China.

  At an early age, Fou Sin traveled the global trade routes that linked most of the continents, and learned as well what role a young man from the Pearl River Delta could expect to play in the expanding capitalist markets of the world. Speaking to a white newspaperman in 1858, Fou Sin explained that he had been born in the 1830s on a tiny farm “about three day’s travel from the city of Hong Kong,” where his father also worked as a stonecutter. His mother died young, leaving her husband with two sons. When Fou Sin was about twelve, he boarded a British brig as a cabin boy. A year and a half later, he went back and took up work at the Hong Kong store, where he learned to speak English. Then, in 1848, he returned to seafaring labor, now on the ship Captain Tiger. When that vessel docked in Singapore, Fou Sin stayed behind and worked as an “English officer’s boy” for three years.68

  The next few years of Fou Sin’s life read like a lesson in the geography of market connections. He spent three seasons as steward on a French whaling ship that traveled between the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) and New Bedford, Massachusetts, by way of Cape Horn. Settling for a time in Honolulu, Fou Sin worked as a cook for an American merchant’s family. Then, after a brief stint as a steward on an interisland schooner, he headed for the Amur River, stopping briefly in Japan. (The Amur River drainage, though nominally Chinese territory, was an area of Russian expansion in the 1850s.) Boarding a Russian man-of-war at the mouth of the river, Fou Sin stopped for a few days in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, where he saw the effects of British and Fre
nch attacks on the city during the Crimean War. Finally, the Russian ship sailed east for California. On New Year’s Day in 1857, Fou Sin arrived at San Francisco.69

  A Gold Rush–era Chinese emigrant. His name is unknown. The daguerreotypist Isaac Wallace Baker may have asked this man to display his queue, thereby creating a more exotic image for Anglo American viewers.

  Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California.

  In San Francisco, Fou Sin set himself up at a sailors’ boardinghouse kept by an African American man named Overton. Finding intermittent work as a cook in a white-owned boardinghouse and a black-owned hotel, Fou Sin kept himself employed for a few months, before he had to settle for sleeping and eating at a Chinese barbershop. In the meantime, he got into a fight at a “Spanish dance house” with a black man, who Fou Sin claimed called him a “d——d Chinaman.” That incident landed Fou Sin in jail. But no witnesses appeared against him, and so he was released. Fou Sin then took two jobs in quick succession as cook for a Panama steamer and a San Francisco hotel. Once again unemployed, he got into another scrape, this time at a Chinese brothel, but he managed to escape arrest. Down on his luck, Fou Sin was fortunate to run into an old friend from his Sandwich Islands days—Chou Yee, a man who had grown up in the same district near Canton as Fou Sin. Chou Yee was in San Francisco just briefly and was preparing to return to the Southern Mines. He assured Fou Sin that there was plenty of work for Chinese cooks in the diggings and offered to lend his friend the thirty dollars it would cost to travel to the town of Jackson and find a position. Fou Sin accepted, and the two men left the city for the mines in September of 1857.70

  Unlike Fou Sin, most Chinese immigrants to California had not spent years sailing the world’s oceans, dropping anchor at far-flung Pacific and Atlantic ports. Most did not speak English, and few had spent as much time as Fou Sin working for European and U.S. employers. But Fou Sin was not an anomaly. His experience instead was an extreme example of the changes at work in the lives of people in South China, especially since the Opium War of 1839–42. Some of those changes were the immediate result of European and American attempts to draw China more firmly into the ever-expanding economic sphere of North Atlantic nations, and of attempts among southern Chinese to nurture a market-based economy of their own. Other changes had longer histories.

  Fou Sin, for example, told newspapermen that his father’s farm in South China was really “a very small piece of land.” Having some sense of what Americans meant by the term “farm,” Fou Sin was trying to convey the situation rural people faced in his homeland. Ever since Europeans in China had introduced new crops such as peanuts and sweet potatoes that could be cultivated on marginal lands, the Chinese population had increased rapidly. By the early nineteenth century in South China, that growth had outstripped the region’s ability to support its inhabitants, and people lived on small plots that amounted to a quarter acre per person. This turn of events, however, did not necessarily bespeak widespread rural poverty: the Pearl River Delta supported a well-developed market economy, and some foodstuffs were imported from other areas.71 Then, too, emigration from South China was not a new phenomenon, and Fou Sin’s father’s decision to send one of his sons abroad followed older regional practices as much as it responded to recent upheavals. From the time that the Han Chinese had moved south into the area that became Guangdong Province, a process that took many centuries, they had been relatively isolated from the interior of China by mountains and thus oriented toward the South China Sea. Foreign trade was conducted largely through South China ports, and emigration was common. Indeed, by the time of the Opium War, large settlements of overseas Chinese thrived in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.72

  Other changes in South China had more immediate antecedents. It was this complicated set of transformations that created the global lines of trade and migration Fou Sin followed before he arrived in California. The British, voracious tea drinkers and lovers of Chinese silk and porcelain, had found in the eighteenth century a commodity that could stop the one-way flow of English silver into Chinese coffers. That commodity was Indian opium. The conquest of India allowed Britain to develop a profitable triangular trade engineered by the East India Company. The trade’s success depended on an eager market of Chinese opium smokers, and indeed, between 1730 and 1830, British sales of opium to China increased a hundredfold. The ending of the East India Company’s monopoly on Asian trade in 1834 only increased sales of opium, as North American and other European merchants rushed into the breach. Chinese officials, of course, deplored the spectacular expansion of the opium trade and the drain of Chinese silver to the West. To an already rigorously regulated system of foreign commerce, the emperor in 1838 added an all-out war on opium. A war on opium was a war on Britain, and as English merchants withdrew from Canton to Hong Kong, the Chinese fortified coastal waterways. Battles ensued, and as the war moved north out of Guangdong and Fujian provinces toward Nanjing in 1842, the Chinese sued for peace. The Treaty of Nanjing forced concessions that would haunt Chinese diplomatic and trade relations for the rest of the century. Not to be outdone, the United States and France quickly demanded treaties that gave them the same rights as Britain.73

  Yet after the Opium War, Cantonese people in South China made it difficult for foreigners to go about their business as the Treaty of Nanjing stipulated, mounting urban riots and attacks by local militias emboldened by participation in the recent conflict. Meanwhile, secret societies known as the Triads stepped up their activities in the Pearl River Delta, drawing on social discontent, economic dislocation, and antigovernment sentiment to move from older practices of banditry and smuggling to open rebellion. In an 1854 conflict known as the Red Turban Revolt, for example, bands joined together to capture the city of Fatshan and threaten Canton itself. Government forces eventually crushed the uprising, but nothing seemed to arrest the wave of violence that washed over South China in the 1850s—clan feuds, antiforeign riots, secret-society warfare, battles between Hakkas (migrants from the north and their descendants, who came to constitute an ethnic minority in South China) and Puntis (Cantonese speakers whose forebears had lived in the region longer). Hakka-Punti conflicts took on new meaning in the 1840s when Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka man from Guangdong influenced by Protestant missionaries, gathered converts to his Society of God Worshipers in neighboring Guangxi province. The movement he started evolved into the bloody Taiping Rebellion of 1851–64, which nearly toppled China’s Qing dynasty. Although the heart of the uprising was located from Guangxi north to Nanjing, it was rooted in the ubiquitous foreign presence and social upheaval of South China, and its impact reached back to Guangdong as well.74

  These transformations, along with the firmly market-oriented economy of South China and the established trade ties between the region and North America, contributed to widespread emigration from Guangdong in the midnineteenth century.75 Although South China had long sent many of its sons and a few of its daughters abroad to augment household economies, the Gold Rush migration in some ways represented a new departure. Earlier emigrants tended to come from southern Fujian Province and northeastern Guangdong, while California-bound Chinese came from the Pearl River Delta area in south-central Guangdong.76 When white authorities charged Fou Sin with murder in Amador County in 1857, they alleged that he had acted in concert with four other Chinese, including his friend Chou Yee. One of the men was never apprehended, and another took his own life in jail. But the three other men implicated in the murder grew up within a hundred miles of each other in the Pearl River Delta area, where market economies were most developed and where dislocations accompanying foreign incursion were most acute. Fou Sin and Chou Yee had grown up in the shadow of Canton itself and were drawn into the web of global commerce early—Fou Sin left South China in the mid-1840s, and by the mid-1850s he had crossed paths with Chou Yee in the Sandwich Islands. The third man, named Coon You, seems to have grown up in the Heungshan district, closer to Macao. He told new
spapermen through a translator that he was only twenty years old and had come to California just a year or so before he was arrested for murder. Unlike Fou Sin, who at twenty-six had not married, Coon You left a wife behind in China.77

  Coon You—young, recently married, non-English-speaking, probably a direct migrant from Guangdong to California—had more in common with most Gold Rush Chinese than did the much-traveled Fou Sin. When Fou Sin first left home in 1845, he did so with his father’s approval and no doubt contributed to his family’s well-being either through his earnings or simply by his absence. But by the time he boarded his second vessel in 1848, he did so without his father’s consent, a point he emphasized when he was interviewed in jail. So it seems likely that his movements from that time on were not part of a household economic strategy. By contrast, Coon You, who was eager to speak of his marriage, probably still thought of himself as his family’s emissary to Gam Saan (“Gold Mountain,” the Cantonese term for California). Like other Chinese in the mines, Coon You likely did what he could to send home remittances to relatives. Before his arrest, in fact, he had been working his own placer claim along a creek in Amador County. By late 1857, however, when he was arrested, it was clear that some of the prime gold deposits left in the Southern Mines were not in the creeks but in the coffers of water company managers. It is not clear if Coon You, along with Fou Sin and Chou Yee, would have been willing to mine a safe and bludgeon a clerk to get a bigger share of those riches.78