Peter Hardeman Burnett

Peter Hardeman Burnett (November 15, 1807 – May 17, 1895) was an American politician and the first elected governor of California, serving from December 20, 1849, to January 9, 1851, and the first to resign from office. Burnett was elected governor almost one year before California's admission to the United States as the 31st state in September 1850, and was the last governor during the interim period that began with US military occupation during the Mexican–American War.

Burnett was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but raised in rural Missouri. He was raised in a family of slave owners, later owning two of his own. In 1828, he married Harriet Rogers.

Burnett did not receive any formal education aside from elementary school, but educated himself in law and government. After owning a general store, he turned to his law career. Defending a group of Mormons—including Joseph Smith—who were accused of treason, arson and robbery, Burnett requested a change of venue for the court proceedings. During transportation to the next venue, the defendants escaped.

His move to the West

In 1843, having failed as a merchant and heavily in debt, Burnett became part of the exodus of Easterners moving Westward, moving his family to Oregon Country (now modern-day Oregon) to take up farming in order to solve growing debts in Missouri, an agricultural endeavour that failed. While in Oregon Country, Burnett began his forays into politics, getting elected to the provisional legislature between 1844 and 1848. In 1844, he completed construction of Germantown Road between the Tualatin Valley and what became Portland. It was during his time in Oregon that Burnett, a traditional Southern Protestant, began to question the practices of his faith, drifting his religious views more to Roman Catholicism. By 1846, Burnett and his family made the complete transition from Protestant to become Catholic.

While in the Legislature, and later as Provisional Supreme Judge, Burnett signed Oregon's first exclusion laws. Under an 1844 law passed by the provisional government—just after the same government abolished slavery—slave holders could keep their slaves for up to three years, after which all black people, free or slave, had to leave Oregon Country or face flogging.

Upon news of the discovery of gold in Coloma, California on January 24, 1848, Burnett and his family moved south to participate in the rush. After modest success in getting gold, Burnett envisioned a career in law in San Francisco, a rapidly growing boomtown thanks largely to the Gold Rush. On the way to the Bay Area, Burnett met John Augustus Sutter, Jr., son of German-born Swiss pioneer John Sutter. Selling his father's deeded lands in the near vicinity of Sutter's Fort, the younger Sutter offered Burnett a job in selling land plots for the new town of Sacramento. Over the next year, Burnett made nearly US$50,000 in land sales in Sacramento, a city ideally suited due to its closeness to the Sierra Nevada and the neighboring Sacramento River's navigability for large ships.

In 1848, Burnett was among those who founded the city of Oregon City in Butte County, California.

In 1849, Burnett announced his intentions to return to politics. 1849 saw the first California Constitutional Convention in Monterey, where territorial politicians drafted documents suitable to admit California as a state in the United States. During the 1849 referendum to adopt the California Constitution, Burnett, now with name recognition in Sacramento and San Francisco, and a resume that included the Oregon Provisional Legislature, decided to run for the new territory's first civilian governor, replacing the string of military governors and bureaucracy from the U.S. military. Burnett easily won the election over four other candidates, including John Sutter, and was sworn in as California's first elected civilian governor on December 20, 1849 in San Jose in front of what would soon (after statehood in 1850) become the California State Legislature.

The Burnett Administration

In the first days of the Burnett Administration, the governor and the California Legislature set out to create the organs of a state government, creating state cabinet posts, archives, executive posts and departments, subdividing the state into 27 counties and appointing John C. Fremont and William M. Gwin as California's senators to the federal U.S. Senate. Despite home proclamations and bureaucratic reorganizations that recognized California now as a U.S. state, the U.S. Congress and President Zachary Taylor had in fact not even signed authorization of statehood for California. Part of this miscommunication was due to California's relative remoteness to the rest of the U.S. during the time, but also to over-enthusiastic attitudes by politicians and the public alike to get California into the Union as quickly as possible. Following long contentious debates in the U.S. Senate, California was admitted as a (non-slave) state on September 9, 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850. Californians did not learn of their official statehood until one month later, when on October 18, the steamer Oregon entered San Francisco Bay, with a banner strapped to her rigging reading "California Is Now A State."

During those advancements into statehood, Burnett's popularity among the legislature, the press, and the public plummeted. Relations between the Legislature and Burnett began to immediately sour in early 1850, when bills pressing for the incorporation of Sacramento and Los Angeles as city municipalities, with Los Angeles being a special incorporation due to its earlier pueblo status during the previous Spanish and Mexican rule, passed the State Assembly and Senate. Burnett vetoed both bills, citing special incorporation bills as unconstitutional and that reviews for municipal incorporation were best left to county courts. The legislature failed to override Burnett's veto of the Los Angeles bill but succeeded in overriding the Sacramento bill making it California's first incorporated city.

Characterized as an aloof politician with little support from the Legislature by the San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles press, Burnett grew frustrated as his agenda ground to a halt, and his governance style was increasingly criticized. He became a regular fixture of ridicule in the state's newspapers and on the floor of the Legislature. With little over a year in office, Burnett, the first governor of the state, became the first to resign, announcing his resignation in January 1851. Burnett cited personal matters for his departure. Lieutenant Governor John McDougall replaced Burnett as the Governor of California on 9 January.

His policies

As in Oregon, Burnett pushed for the exclusion of blacks from California, raising the ire of pro-slavery supporters who wanted to import the Southern slave system to the West Coast, but his proposals were defeated in the legislature. From Burnett's First Annual Message to the Legislature, December 21, 1849:

For some years past I have given this subject [African-American settlement in California] my most serious and candid attention; and I most cheerfully lay before you the result of my own reflections. There is, in my opinion, but one of two consistent courses to take in reference to this class of population; either to admit them to the full and free enjoyment of all the privileges guaranteed by the Constitution to others, or exclude them from the State. If we permit them to settle in our State, under existing circumstances, we consign them, by our own institutions, and the usages of our own society, to a subordinate and degraded position, which is in itself but a species of slavery. They would be placed in a situation where they would have no efficient motives for moral or intellectual improvement, but must remain in our midst, sensible of their degradation, unhappy themselves, enemies to the institutions and the society whose usages have placed them there, and for ever fit teachers in all the schools of ignorance, vice, and idleness. We have certainly the right to prevent any class of population from settling in our State, that we may deem injurious to our own society. Had they been born here, and had acquired rights in consequence, I should not recommend any measures to expel. They are not now he few in comparison with the numbers that would be here; and the object is to keep them out.

Similarly, Burnett also pushed for heavy taxation on foreign immigrants. An 1850 Foreign Miners Tax Act, signed into law by Burnett, required every miner of non-American origin to pay US$20. Burnett also argued heavily for increased taxation and for the expansion of capital punishment to include larceny. Burnett also attempted to remove Native Americans as well as foreign miners. In 1851, federal commissioners negotiated treaties with Native tribes in California, which were then blocked by the governor for being too generous in reserving land for the tribes. Instead, the greed for gold wealth led to a second option, which he called a "war of extermination." He declared that warfare would not cease with Native Americans "until the Indian race becomes extinct"

One year after leaving the governorship, Burnett was finally able to repay the heavy debts he had incurred in Missouri nearly two decades before. He entered a number of careers, serving briefly as a justice in the California Supreme Court between 1857 and 1858, the Sacramento City Council, as well as becoming a San Jose-based lawyer, a noted proponent of Catholicism during the Victorian period, and then the president of the Pacific Bank of San Francisco. Although never venturing into politics much after the 1860s, Burnett was an active supporter of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1880, he published an autobiography, Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer. He died May 17, 1895 at the age of 87 in San Francisco, and is buried in the Santa Clara Mission Cemetery at Santa Clara, California.

Burnett's legacy is largely mixed. While regarded as one of the fathers of modern California in the state's early days, his open-racist attitudes towards blacks, Chinese, and Native Americans have tarnished his name today. Burnett's period in the Oregon Provisional Legislature helped facilitate the exclusion of blacks from the state until 1926. In 1844, one of his Oregon proposals was to force free blacks to leave the state and to institute floggings of any who continued to remain. Referred to as "Burnett's lash law," it was deemed "unduly harsh," and it was never enforced, voters rescinding it in 1845. Also, his open hostility to foreign laborers influenced a number of federal and state California legislators to push future xenophobic legislation, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, 30 years after his departure from the governorship. Burnett was also an open advocate of exterminating local California Indian tribes, a policy that continued with successive state governmental administrations for several decades, which offered US$10 to US$25 for evidence of dead Natives. From Burnett's Second Annual Message to the Legislature, January 7, 1851:

That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected.

San Francisco's Burnett Avenue near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood is named after him.

The Burnett Child Development Center, a preschool in a predominantly black San Francisco neighborhood, had been named for Burnett. However, when Burnett's racist positions were rediscovered, the school was renamed in 2011 to the Leola M. Havard Early Education School, in honor of San Francisco's first African-American principal.

Similarly, the Peter H. Burnett Elementary School in Long Beach has been recently renamed, due to Burnett's views. It is now named after Bobbi Smith, the first African-American member of the Long Beach Unified School District's board.