The 1849 Constitution's Hidden Radicalism: Colton Hall
Near Monterey, California
In the fall of eighteen forty-nine, forty-eight men gathered in this room to write a constitution for a state that did not yet exist. They finished in forty-three days. What they produced was, for its era, startling.
Eight of the forty-eight delegates spoke only Spanish. Not as a second language. Only Spanish. So California's first constitution was printed in both English and Spanish, which made it unusual among American founding documents at a moment when the United States was actively debating whether its legal system was for English speakers only.
The constitution prohibited slavery. California's framers settled the slavery question in this constitution months before the Compromise of eighteen fifty addressed it for the rest of the country, when California entered the Union as a free state that same year. It gave married women the right to hold separate property, a right that most American women in eighteen forty-nine did not have under English common law. Married women in Spanish California had held stronger property rights under the legal system of the Mexican period, and the delegates who came from that tradition knew it. The progressive provisions may have been less radical innovation than the preservation of a legal norm that already existed in the room.
The building itself had been Monterey's first public school before the delegates arrived. It was named for Walter Colton, a naval chaplain turned alcalde, the first American to hold that position in Monterey.
The constitution they wrote here was ratified by California voters, who at that point were exclusively men, in November eighteen forty-nine. California was admitted to the Union in September eighteen fifty. Colton Hall remained a public building. It is still one.
The document they produced in this room was drafted by a group of men who between them had been citizens of Mexico, the United States, and various European nations, and who had to negotiate across those formations every time they reached a contested question. The results show it.
