A Self-Governing Dominion

A Self-governing Dominion: California, 1849–1860 by William Henry Ellison traces California’s turbulent political evolution from the framing of its first constitution to the factional battles that culminated on the eve of the Civil War. Ellison interprets the decade as a formative era when Californians, spurred by circumstance and necessity, developed a strong ethos of self-rule—sometimes cooperative, often contentious, but always marked by a determination to assert autonomy in shaping local and state institutions. The narrative begins with military occupation and improvised legal systems in the wake of conquest, moving through the gold rush and the constitutional convention at Monterey, and continuing into the 1850s with debates over land ownership, Indian policy, vigilante justice, sectional division, and political patronage. At each stage, Ellison underscores the central theme: Californians perceived themselves as a people apart, compelled to devise political structures without waiting for distant authority.

Drawing upon both archival sources and established scholarship, Ellison reconstructs how the new state managed competing claims of sovereignty and legitimacy while simultaneously navigating national controversies over slavery, federal land policy, and Native dispossession. The book highlights emblematic episodes: the Bear Flag Revolt’s improvised republicanism, the persistence of alcalde justice amid American common-law innovations, the explosive constitutional debates over suffrage and slavery, and the dramatic contests between William Gwin and David Broderick, whose rivalry epitomized California’s struggle to define its political identity. Ellison emphasizes how fortuitous circumstances—California’s distance from Washington, the sudden influx of gold seekers, and the sectional tensions rending the nation—magnified the stakes of local decision-making. In presenting California as a “self-governing dominion,” Ellison provides not only a detailed account of a unique frontier political culture but also a reinterpretation of how the state’s formative decade secured its place within the Union while cultivating a tradition of political independence.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.