California’s Forgotten 1776 Story
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in the space of 365 days, in one of history’s best two-for-one deals, the world got Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence.
There’s a third reason to celebrate 1776. That same year, on November 1 – All Saints Day for the liturgically inclined – the Spanish priest Father Junipero Serra established the Mission San Juan Capistrano, the seventh of Spain’s 21 California missions.
These days it’s popular among blockheads to denounce these missions as slave camps and Serra as the whip-cracker in chief. Take the Instagram dad who recently denounced California’s standard fourth-grade field trips to a local mission and the construction of a table-top California mission made with sugar cubes, popsicle sticks and construction paper.
“Missions for us are like plantations for the South,” he says in a claim that discounts the horror of slavery and libels the Spanish mission system. Most of his 1,400 commenters enthusiastically endorse his assessment, praising him and themselves for their “awareness” of “the real story” behind California’s missions.
“I had a long, detailed talk with the principal and my son’s 4th grade teacher and I let them know that we will build the mission project but it will be historically accurate with rape murder hangings and more,” writes one of them. “They asked if we could do something else. We built a greenhouse.” You go, girl.
These aren’t exceptions. In 2020, when George Floyd died in his drug-fueled struggle with Minneapolis cops, he set off rioting and statue-tumbling across the nation. But in California, where slavery was never legal and icons to Confederate leaders and slaveowners are rare, the attackers sought other targets. They often settled on statues of Christopher Columbus (who never set foot in California) and Father Serra (who did).
In that dark summer of Covid and Floyd, vandals destroyed Serra statues – or caused their removal into protective custody – throughout California, from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Santa Barbara, Ventura County, San Gabriel to Olvera Street and Mission Hills in Los Angeles County. Farther south, at the Mission San Juan Capistrano (where, full disclosure, yours truly graduated from the Catholic elementary school) church officials moved their Serra statue to safety behind the mission walls.
The vandals – and let’s not limit that title to the mere statue-topplers, graffiti artists and chanting mobs – reiterate longstanding claims that Junipero Serra was a figure of Hitlerian evil, and the California mission system he helped establish no better than Nazi death camps.
New research reveals a far more nuanced history of Serra and the California missions he helped establish.
In describing that nuance it’s important to establish a commonsense prior: Life is tragic, and one feature of human tragedy is that some powerful empire was always going to claim California. In doing so, that imperial power would inevitably and dramatically reshape the lives of the people who had lived in California for some 15,000 years. But if you had your choice about which of these global powers would prevail, you might have preferred the Spanish (or any Western European nation) over the Russians (who by the 1740s were already moving southward along the Pacific Coast of North America), or (given more time) an aggressive and hyper-racist 1930s Japan or (given even more time) the contemporary People’s Republic of China.
Imperial Spain may have been among the very best of these or other alternatives. But that fact has been masked by American academics who often see Spain’s medieval impulses – of cross and sword – in distinctly materialist terms: Spain used religion to justify or even obscure its violence and theft, they argue.
In fact, the Spanish crown took seriously both conquest and conversion. In letters from the New World, priests (especially Serra and his predecessor, the great Bartolomé de las Casas) defended the natives as children of God and therefore spiritual equals. For their part, the military officers complained that mission priests – especially Serra – coddled the natives and meddled in martial affairs they did not understand.
I’m not arguing that the mission system was a modern liberal institution. But in the seventeenth century, modern liberal institutions were still rare. Mission Indians did not enjoy the freedoms we associate with The Wealth of Nations or the Declaration. The error is in seeing the missions as merely coercive.
That error misses two important phenomena. By the time the Spanish really settled Alta California, intertribal warfare had become so widespread throughout the Southwest that it threatened the entire imperial project. Travel between Mexico City and what’s now California was the equivalent of a trip to the moon – if that space voyage included aggressive aliens murdering one another as well as the travelers. Citing Cahuilla oral traditions and subsequent archeological finds, Yale historian Naomi Sussman notes the commonality of war among nearby tribes – including the Luiseño, Diegeño, Mohave, and Yuma. These battles for resources in California’s arid deserts could be extinction-level events for the losers as well as the winners.
Some tribal leaders fought the Spanish. Others sat out the conflict hoping the storm would pass. Still others seized the opportunity to ally themselves with the newly arrived Europeans to negotiate peace agreements with other tribes. The Spanish, outnumbered in this new and hostile land, gladly accepted the role of diplomats and defenders of the peace.
In this newer history, the missionaries appear as comparatively sensitive cultural midwives in a violent world. The missionaries saw their native converts as spiritual equals – a remarkably short step from the Declaration’s central, history-changing claim that all of us are created equal.
Those who believe that conversion itself was violent – that baptism was a crime against the native people – haven’t read the actual history: After violent clashes with native tribes over the priests’ early attempts to quash native religious practices, one research team notes, the priests “became more flexible with respect to allowing conversion but still allowing Native American religious rituals. This flexibility was the beginning of the building of more durable communities.”
And because these “Native Americans identified as Catholic,” they were in fact treated as Spanish subjects deserving of protection. Laws crafted a century before Serra’s arrival in Alta California “stated that in the Spanish legal system, baptized native people could not be enslaved and those who practiced agriculture had rights to land. Missionaries would use it to act as advocates for native land rights: ‘The land that they formerly held is not to be taken from those Indians.’”
As much as this will annoy our progressive friends, civil peace – these durable mission communities – produced the necessary preconditions for real prosperity. According to a growing body of recent scholarship, the mission system created California’s first multitribal, multiethnic, and multilingual society. This emerging common culture included Spanish-language literacy, skilled trades, and a shared framework of Catholic religious and social norms. For those reasons, historians and economists now conclude, “Native Americans living on mission-legacy reservations” prospered far beyond those who lived outside the system. The mission Indians, these historians find, achieved “higher crop income per capita, greater earnings from work per capita, lower crime rates” than those of native communities outside the missions. Most remarkably, the data also shows that phenomenon persisted into the early twentieth century.
None of this diminishes the undeniable hardships, coercion, disease, and population losses associated with the mission era. It does suggest, however, that the historical record is more complex than portrayals that reduce the missions to institutions of unrelieved oppression.
Serra was key to all that – even at his own personal peril. Consider his response to news a year before the founding of the Mission San Juan Capistrano, native Americans rebelled against the San Diego mission. The rebels murdered two priests, including Serra’s friend and colleague Father Luis Jayme; massacred several other Spanish settlers; and set fire to the mission buildings. Spanish soldiers quickly captured the rebel leaders and planned to execute them publicly.
Serra wrote immediately to Spain’s top official in Mexico City.
“I make no excuses for announcing to Your Excellency the tragic news I have just received of the total destruction of the San Diego Mission, and of the death of the senior of its two religious ministers … at the hand of the rebellious gentiles and of the Christian neophytes,” Serra wrote. “All this happened November 5th, about one or two o’clock at night. The gentiles came together from forty rancherías, according to information given me, and set fire to the church after sacking it. Then they went on to the storehouse, the house where the Fathers lived, the soldiers’ barracks, and all the rest of the buildings.”
Having recounted the bloody fighting, Serra appealed for clemency. “Most Excellent Lord,” he continued, “one [of] the most important requests I made of the Most Illustrious Inspector General, at the beginning of these conquests was: if ever the Indians, whether they be gentile or Christian, killed me, they should be forgiven….”
Yes, Serra acknowledged, the military is critical to the Christianizing mission in Alta California: “While the missionary is alive, let the soldiers guard him, and watch over him, like the pupils of God’s very eyes. That is as it should be. Nor do I disdain such a favor for myself. But after the missionary has been killed, what can be gained by campaigns [of violent retribution]?”
Though he promised to make no excuses, Serra went on to provide one: the rebellion was a military failure, he argued, and following that catastrophe Christian mercy was essential.
“Some will say [the goal of a swift and terrifying military response to the Indian uprising] is to frighten them and prevent them from killing others,” Serra continued. “What I say is that, in order to prevent them from killing others, keep better guard over them [the priests and Spanish allies] than they did over the one who has been killed; and, as to the murderer, let him live, in order that he should be saved – which is the very purpose of our coming here, and the reason which justifies it. Give him to understand, after a moderate amount of punishment, that he is being pardoned in accordance with our law, which commands us to forgive injuries; and let us prepare him, not for death, but for eternal life.”
Serra died in 1784 in what’s now Carmel, California. And after his death came the deluge.
Today’s ethnic romanticists, hating all things Western European and American, celebrate the Aztecs (ignoring their imperialism, colonialism, slavery and cannibalism) or Spain’s successors, the Mexicans. But when Mexicans won their independence from sclerotic Spain in 1822, they quickly eliminated the delicate tension in the imperial system: they ejected the mission priests from Alta California and transformed the missions into mere economic machines run by military officials. Life for California’s mission Indians under the Mexicans was to become far more cruel than it had ever been under the Spanish.
We may be thankful then that Mexican flag did not fly over California for long.
“Less than two decades after Serra’s death, a different kind of vessel began appearing on the California coast,” write the historians Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz in Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary. “Ships from England and the United States began to call, first periodically and, over time, with increasing regularity.” In June 1846, just 24 years after the Mexican flag first flew over Alta California, a group of California rebels supporting the U.S. in its war with Mexico, raised a Bear Flag emblazoned with the red star of Texas. Their California Republic lasted just six weeks, ending with the arrival of an American naval squadron in Monterey Bay. The Bear Flag was struck, the Stars and Stripes went up, and Mexico abandoned its claim. In 1850, California was admitted to the union.
Smith offered a theory of how people become prosperous. The Declaration offered a theory of how people become politically free. In that same miracle year of 1776, the founding of the Mission San Juan Capistrano marked California’s incorporation into a social and political framework that would, over generations, make both of those ideals available here. The missions did not mark the arrival of freedom itself but as the beginning of the long, uneven process by which that freedom arrived.
These findings are not widespread. As my colleague Sheridan Karras has noted, it will be difficult to spread them in a public education system that certifies as “educated” children who generally can’t read or perform math at grade level – a system that does not even measure historical knowledge.
That’s how we get the vile campaign against Serra and the early missions. And it explains why, in September 2020, following the George Floyd summer, Governor Gavin Newsom could sign a bill to replace Serra’s statue on the capitol grounds with a monument to Native Americans who once dominated the region.
The truth about Serra, the actual history, is still out there in the intellectual wilderness.