Sonoma Historian, Autumn 2021 issue
On April 1, 1870, Sonoma County’s Black militia, the Colfax Guard, gathered at noon in Petaluma’s Hill Plaza Park to celebrate passage of the 15th Amendment. Their 30-gun salute—one for each of the 30 states to ratify extending voting rights to Black men—marked the first celebration of the amendment held in California.
The festivities continued into the evening at Hinshaw Hall, beginning with a rousing performance by the Petaluma Brass Band, a prayer from the white minister of the First Baptist Church, and a reading of the new amendment by George W. Miller, captain of the Colfax Guard. The evening’s featured speaker, Edward S. Lippitt, then stepped to the stage.
President of the Sonoma County Republican Party, the eloquent Lippitt began his oration with a quote from the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Once the cheering died down, he launched into a sermon about God-given rights, making a sharp distinction between political and social rights, and arguing that the right to vote did not, in any way, imply nor grant to Blacks social equality or integration. The social order, he told the crowd, would remain unchanged.1
Lippitt’s belief reflected a political calculus on the part of Republicans. The end of slavery also meant an end of the Three Fifths Compromise to the Constitution, which allowed Southern states to count slaves as partial humans for purposes of congressional apportionment and votes in the Electoral College.
The change to counting emancipated Blacks as full citizens ironically increased the electoral power of the recently defeated Southern states and of their predominantly Democratic congressmen. To create a numerical counterbalance, Republicans extended the franchise to Black men, assuming the majority would vote for their party, the party of Lincoln.2
Lippitt closed his talk with a call to Blacks to “educate up their race” in meeting their new responsibilities as voters. It was another area that the erudite Lippitt, a longtime educator, believed best addressed by racial segregation.
In 1863, six months after he moved to Petaluma to assume the role of superintendent of schools, Lippitt found himself faced with a new California Supreme Court ruling that required public school districts with more than ten Black students to fund “separate but equal” schools.3
In Petaluma, a Black barber named George W. Miller had opened a private Black school just a few months earlier. Lippitt quickly agreed to fund Miller’s school, making Petaluma one of six California cities with a state-supported “colored school.”4
The next year, Miller set out to establish Sonoma County’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church in town. Lippitt, who, in addition to his duties as school supervisor, served as minister of Petaluma’s Methodist Episcopal Church, offered the support of his abolitionist congregation, taking time himself to teach Sunday school at the new church.5
Miller’s alliance with Lippitt was typical of many Black barbers of the time—their access to an exclusive white clientele provided them with economic and social advantages in assisting their Black communities. (In Santa Rosa, barber John Richards played a similar role).
Born and educated a free man in New Jersey, Miller spent a good deal of time in San Francisco, then a center of Black intellectual and social activity, as a member of the Black Freemasons, the Bethel A.M.E. Church, and the California Colored Citizens Convention, a prominent group of activists working to rescind the state’s Black restriction laws.6
He was also sergeant of San Francisco’s Black militia, in the Brannan Guard. In 1869, as the 15th Amendment was making its way through the state ratification process, Miller decided to form a local Black militia, the Colfax Guard, named for Ulysses S. Grant’s newly elected vice-president, Schuyler Colfax.7
As previously the Speaker of the House, Colfax helped to shepherd through Congress the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the 14th Amendment protecting the civil rights of former slaves. In 1865, Speaker Colfax came to Petaluma to visit his uncle, Elias Matthews, and made an inspiring address outside the American Hotel (site of today’s Putnam Plaza), directly across from Miller’s barbershop.8
After proudly assembling the Colfax Guard for their 30-gun salute on April 1st, Miller’s hopes of an easy political birth were quickly dashed, when the county clerk refused to register Black men to vote.9
With the exception of Petaluma, Sonoma County was politically dominated at the time by the Democratic Party, which also held the governor’s seat and control of the state legislature. State Democratic legislators, having made California just one of seven states to reject ratifying the 15th Amendment prior to its passage, now invoked, with the governor’s support, states’ rights in denouncing the amendment as unconstitutional.
The Democratic state attorney general instructed county clerks to defer Black registration until “appropriate legislation”—a clause in the amendment— could be adopted by Congress.10
Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat was even more blunt. “Let it be understood, far and near,” the newspaper wrote, “that negroes are not permitted to register as voters in Sonoma County.”11
In California, such opposition was largely theatrical, as only 1,731 of the state’s 4,272 Blacks were men 21 years of age or over, posing little threat to the political balance of power. Sonoma County had only 80 Blacks, more than half of whom lived in Petaluma.12
In mid-April, Lippitt—then in the process of leaving education to open a law practice—was appointed interim editor of the Republican Petaluma Journal & Argus, when the editor, Henry L. Weston, left for an extended trip to Europe.
Waging a war of words against the Democrats, he argued that efforts to suppress Black voters would forever align Blacks with the Republicans, keeping the party in control of the national government indefinitely.13
On April 18th, the city of Petaluma defied the county clerk, allowing George Miller and 13 other Black men to vote in a city election.14 Their defiance came on the heels of a similar election in San Jose, making the two cities the first in California to put the 15th Amendment to work.15
It was only after Congress instituted “appropriate legislation” on May 31st, passing the first of three Enforcement Acts imposing fines and penalties on those who obstructed or hindered any person from voting, that Sonoma County’s clerk allowed Blacks to register.16
Their first opportunity to officially vote came in June during a special election seeking voter approval of construction subsidies for new railroad lines.17 A week later, Miller and a delegation of Black citizens turned up with a band at Lippitt’s home, presenting him with a set of silver tablespoons, with the Goddess of Liberty engraved on one side and his initials on the other, as a token of their appreciation for his able advocacy on their behalf.18
It wasn’t long however before the Colored Convention grew frustrated with the reluctance of Republicans to embrace their full civil rights, especially in education. In November 1871, the convention’s Educational Committee, of which Miller was a member, decided to lobby for all school children, regardless of color, being admitted to common public schools.19
After championing two bills that died in the state legislature, the committee took their case to the state Supreme Court.20 In the test case of Ward v. Flood, the court upheld the “separate but equal” principle in California school law, but also mandated that Black children be publicly educated, including, if necessary, in white schools.21
With the court’s ruling in hand, the committee began lobbying school districts to abolish “colored schools.” They were helped by the Recession of 1873, during which school districts strapped for funding, opted to enroll Black students rather than fund two separate school systems. By 1875, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and Vallejo public schools had all been integrated, leaving Petaluma, its school board dominated by Democrats, the lone holdout.22 Thanks to Lippitt, it became a polarizing local issue.
That same year, Lippitt resigned as county chairman of the Republican Party, and in 1876 launched the Petaluma Courier, a pro-Democratic newspaper. Although he attributed his political conversion to the Republican’s egregious treatment of the South during Reconstruction, it also came on the heels of his defeat in the Republican primary for county district attorney.23 (Republican party officials may have also discovered that Lippitt fled to California from Cincinnati in 1862 while under indictment for embezzlement).24
As editor of the Courier, Lippitt initiated a newspaper war with Weston’s Petaluma Argus, labeling it a “negro-worshipping sheet” for its support of integrating Black students into white schools.25
The skirmish went viral, drawing ridicule in Republican newspapers from San Francisco (“an ante-rebellion spirit of caste is still alive and dominate in Petaluma”) to Pennsylvania (“a great blotch on the face of human progress”).26
Lippitt also renounced his support of the 15th Amendment, accusing northern carpetbaggers of subjecting the South to “the rule of the most ignorant races of servile men” in giving Blacks the vote while denying the same right to former Confederate officers. He maintained that it would take generations for Blacks to be sufficiently educated to vote.27
During the 1876 U.S. presidential election, Lippitt threw his support behind the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, even though his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, was someone Lippitt had worked with before the Civil War as a young lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Hayes served as city solicitor.28
After a contested election, Hayes assumed the presidency in return for agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. That same year, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Enforcement Acts protecting the 15th Amendment, ruling that voting rights were best-regulated by state authorities without federal intervention. The two actions led to a series of “Jim Crow” restriction laws that disenfranchised the Black voters for decades.29
In 1880, President Hayes paid a visit Petaluma, lunching at Lippitt’s home, even though Lippitt had publicly denounced him as “rotten, low, mean, and sneaking.”30 That same year, the California legislature outlawed the state’s “separate but equal” educational policy. By that time, most of Petaluma’s Black population had departed for more supportive communities in Vallejo and Oakland, leaving just one student enrolled in the town’s “colored school.”31
George Miller did not live to see this legislative triumph he had long fought for. In the fall of 1873, at the age of 48, he died unexpectedly while preparing for a Colored Convention in Sacramento on education.32
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A version of this article appeared in the Sonoma Historian.
FOOTNOTES:
1“Celebration of Our Colored Citizens,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 9, 1870.
2Gary Dauphin, “On February 26, 1869, Congress Sent the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to the States for Ratification,” California African American Museum, caamuseum.com, February 26, 2020. https://caamuseum.org/learn/600state/black-history/february-26-1869-congress-sends-15th-amendment-to-constitution-states; Melissa De Witte, “What Did ‘All Men Are Created Equal’ Mean in 1776?” Futurity.com, July 2, 2020. https://www.futurity.org/all-men-are-created-equal-2397112-2/
3Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.
4“Segregation and John Swett,” Southern California Quarterly, 1964, Vol. 46 (1), pp. 69-82; Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.
5“Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt,” edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p.42.
6Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com; The Elevator: “Masonic Notice,” December 21, 1872; “Died,” October 25, 1873; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 42.
7Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146.
8Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.133. Ovando James Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax (Funk & Wagnalls, 1886) p. 257; Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President (1869-1873), https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_Schuyler_Colfax.htm.; Schuyler Colfax Journals, “Across the continent by overland stage in 1865,” BYU Library Digital Collections, p. 21; “Personal,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1865.
9Petaluma Journal & Argus: “Woe is Me, Alhama,” April 16, 1870; “The ‘Democrat’ on Negro Registration,” April 23, 1870.
10“Attorney General,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870; Ralph E. Shaffer, “California Reluctantly Implements the Fifteenth Amendment: White Californians Respond to Black Suffrage, March – June 1870,” Cal Poly Pomona, p.42, https://www.cpp.edu/class/history/faculty/documents/shaffer15thamend.pdf.
11Shafer, p. 94.
12Shafer, p.69; “1870 Sonoma County Census,” Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopedia, 1876, p. 721; 1870 Census, Ninth Census of the United States, Vol. 4 (Ohio State University, 1872), p. 129.
13Petaluma Journal & Argus: “We Bow,” April 16, 1870; “They Voted,” April 23, 1870; “The Colored Vote,” April 30, 1870; “Professor E. S. Lippitt,” Sonoma Democrat, April 23, 1870.
14“A House Divided Against Itself,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870; “Enjoying Their ‘Rights,’” Sonoma Democrat, April 23, 1870; Shafer, p. 94.
15“The Fifteenth Amendments,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870.
16Shafer, pp. 65-67; Kianna Wright, “The Enforcement Act of 1870 (1870-1871),” December 11, 2019. Blackpast.com. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/the-enforcement-act-of-1870-1870-1871/
17Petaluma Journal & Argus: “The Railroad Subsidy,” June 11, 1870; “The Railroad,” June 18, 1870; “Railroad Election Returns,” June 18, 1870; “Great Register, Sonoma County, 1870,” California, U.S., Voter Registers, 1866-1898. Ancestry.com.
18“A Splendid Testimonial,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, June 25, 1870.
19Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) pgs. 178-179.
20The Elevator: “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” April 27, 1872; Address of the Educational Committee, May 11, 1872.
21Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/
22Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood,” Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/
23“Temperance Convention,” Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1875.
24“The Grand Jury,” Daily Ohio Statesman, April 26, 1862; “Young and Pure—More of it,” The Cadiz Sentinel, April 2, 1862.
25“The Negro School,” Petaluma Courier, April 5, 1877.
26Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 22, 1876; “Educational Items,” August 13, 1875; “Our Colored School,” August 11, 1876; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1876.
27“An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt,” edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43; “Reminiscences of a Long Life,” Petaluma Argus,” October 29, 1910.
28Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middleton, Conn, 1883, p. 83-84; “Reminiscences of a Long Life,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1910.
29Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction.” Journal of Southern History (1980): 489-524.
30“Democratic Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, August 18, 1877; “President Hayes in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, September 15, 1880.
31“Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880.
32“Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.