Born in California while it was still Mexican
territory, Romualdo Pacheco was the privileged
stepson of a prominent merchant and landowner
on the Pacific frontier. An avid outdoorsman who won fame
for his prowess as a hunter, and a member of elite society
in San Francisco and Santa Barbara, Pacheco defended the
rights of landowners and promoted industry in his growing
state. “Romualdo Pacheco … was indisputably the most
illustrious Californio of his time,” noted a contemporary.1
José Antonio Romualdo Pacheco, Jr., was born
October 31, 1831, in Santa Barbara, California. His
mother, Ramona Carillo, belonged to a prominent
Mexican family.2 Pacheco’s father, a native of Guanajuato,
Mexico, and a captain in the Mexican army, had arrived
in California in 1825. He was killed outside Los Angeles
five weeks after his namesake’s birth, while protecting
Mexican governor Manuel Victoria in the waning days
of Mexico’s war for independence from Spain. Pacheco’s
mother subsequently married John Wilson, a Scottish
sea captain. The couple’s wealth afforded Romualdo and
his older brother, Mariano, a comfortable childhood. In
1838 the two boys sailed to Hawaii on their stepfather’s
ship, the Don Quixote, to attend Oahu Charity School
in Honolulu, an English-language institution run by
missionaries and family friends. Pacheco became fluent in
English and French and, after returning to California in
1843, he had to re-learn Spanish.3 Pacheco went to work
on his stepfather’s shipping fleet, learning navigation skills
and studying with a private tutor. In 1846, during the
Mexican-American War, while Pacheco was transporting
cargo up the California coast on a vessel flying the Mexican
flag, the U.S.S. Cyane stopped and searched his ship near
Monterey. Permitted to continue his journey, Pacheco
was stopped again near the coast of San Francisco, where
he was allegedly imprisoned briefly by the U.S. military.4
Pacheco was a wealthy businessman and rancher by 1848
when he accepted U.S. citizenship, which he was granted
by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.5 He subsequently
worked on his parents’ estates north of Los Angeles, in
San Luis Obispo County, becoming an expert horseman,
and dabbled a year later in the mining business during the
California Gold Rush.
Pacheco eventually answered the familial call to
political service when California became a state in 1850.
Profoundly interested in protecting the rights of Southern
California landowners, his stepfather, John Wilson, was
San Luis Obispo County’s first treasurer and served on
the county’s first board of supervisors in 1852. After
California joined the Union in 1850, Pacheco’s brother,
Mariano, was elected to the state legislature and served
a single term before poor health forced him to retire in
1853.6 Carrying on the family tradition, Pacheco entered
the political arena, serving as a superior court judge for
San Luis Obispo County from 1853 to 1857 and then as a
state senator until 1862. Initially a Democrat, Pacheco ran
for re-election as a Union Party candidate in 1861 because
of his deep disdain for slavery and his disapproval of the
secession crisis; Pacheco was one of the first prominent
Hispanic Americans to speak out against African-American
slavery.7 In 1863 Pacheco joined the Republican Party,
and California Governor Leland Stanford appointed him
to fill a vacancy for state treasurer; he won election for a
full term later that year. Also in 1863, Governor Stanford
commissioned Pacheco as a brigadier general in the
California state militia to command Hispanic troops in the
First Brigade of California’s “Native Cavalry.”8 Maintaining
ties to his father’s birthplace, Pacheco became a key contact
for Mexican President Benito Juárez, connecting his
emissaries with prominent Californians who supported
his war against France in 1864.9 In 1863 Pacheco married
Mary Catherine McIntire, a Kentucky playwright who
became one of California’s first published female authors.10
The couple had a daughter, Maybella Ramona, and a son,
Romualdo, who died at age seven.
In 1867 Pacheco lost a re-election bid for state treasurer;
however, he returned to the state senate in 1869. At
the Republican state convention in 1871, Pacheco was
nominated for lieutenant governor under the winning
ticket headed by Newton Booth. When Booth accepted
an appointment to the U.S. Senate, Pacheco became
governor of California in 1875, serving from February
to December. The first Hispanic American and the first
native Californian to serve as governor, Pacheco focused
on building new government facilities and services and
on mediating between Spanish-speaking Californians of
Mexican descent and settlers from the Eastern United
States and elsewhere.11 His experience as a rancher made
him an expert with a lasso, and he was acclaimed as the
only California governor known to have lassoed a grizzly
bear.12 Pacheco withdrew his name from nomination for a
full term as governor in 1875 when he realized he had little
chance of winning in the fractious GOP state convention.
He ran unsuccessfully as an Independent candidate for
lieutenant governor.
In 1876 Pacheco entered a race for a U.S. House seat
representing a large southern portion of the state that
was mostly on the frontier, stretching from the peninsula
just south of San Francisco to Mono County and the
Nevada border in the east, and nearly 500 miles south
to the Mexican border.13 He received the Republican
nomination at the district convention on August 10,
1876. Facing Democratic incumbent Peter D. Wigginton,
Pacheco campaigned on the development of California
ports, emphasizing his maritime experience. The San
Luis Obispo Tribune reported that in a meeting in that
city on Christmas Day 1875, Pacheco was “greeted
with loud applause [as] he proceeded to give some of
his experiences as a sailor on the Pacific Coast.… From
experience he knew that the matter of protecting our
harbor was perfectly feasible.”14 Wigginton enjoyed more
support from the newspapers in the district, including
the endorsement of the Tribune, but Pacheco’s heritage
appealed to the district’s majority-Hispanic, or “native-Californian,” population.15 Pacheco initially won the
election by a single ballot—19,104 votes to Wigginton’s
19,103—but the incumbent contested Pacheco’s narrow
victory.16 Upon investigation, the California secretary of
state observed that two votes for Wigginton that were cast
in Monterey County were missing from the total certified
by the county’s board of elections; he accused the tally clerk
of changing the final count after the board adjourned and
refused to certify Pacheco’s election. Pacheco petitioned his
case all the way to the California supreme court after the
clerk testified that he had altered the vote count to correct
a clerical error, based on evidence found in board members’
notes.17 The court upheld Pacheco’s election, ordering
the secretary of state to issue the certificate of election.
Carrying this document and the endorsement of the state’s
Democratic governor, Pacheco traveled to Washington.
Convening on October 15, 1877, the Democratic-controlled
45th Congress (1877–1879) attempted to
block Pacheco’s swearing-in based on Wigginton’s contest,
then pending before the Committee on Elections. With
the support of a resolution adopted by voice vote and
sponsored by House Republican Floor Leader James Garfield of Ohio, Pacheco took the oath of office on
October 17, 1877.18 The first Hispanic Member with full
voting rights, Pacheco was unable to pursue many of his
legislative initiatives in his first term. The Committee on
Elections—made up of a majority of Democrats—upheld
Wigginton’s contest on January 31, 1878.19 Though the
committee’s majority agreed with the California supreme
court’s decision regarding the votes cast in Monterey
County, ballot irregularities elsewhere in the district
reversed Pacheco’s razor-thin victory. State law permitted
precinct judges to challenge ballots having any extraneous
“impression, device, color, or thing.”20 Judges rejected
several ballots for both Pacheco and Wigginton because of
this law, and because several voters were not residents of
the state or district. After examining more than two dozen
individual ballots, the committee ruled that Wigginton
had prevailed by four votes. The full House concurred
on February 7, 1878, by a party-line vote of 136 to 125,
unseating Pacheco.21
After Wigginton returned to his San Francisco law
practice at the end of the 45th Congress, Pacheco again
ran for a House seat in 1878. In his next two elections,
Pacheco faced accusations from popular Democratic
newspapers in the district that he was too attached to
the national Republican Party and distanced from his
constituents by his wealth.22 The editors denounced
Pacheco for ignoring his constituents and failing to grant
them plum federal patronage jobs. “He has always received
their passionate aid and has enjoyed the dignity and
emoluments of public office through their votes,” charged
Santa Barbara’s Spanish-language Democratic newspaper
La gaceta, “but none of their class has ever been appointed
to any position or favored for their influence!”23 Yet his
electoral victories were often determined by “the Spanish
vote,” and he successfully campaigned in both English and
Spanish. In September 1879 he defeated Democrat Wallace
Leach and James Ayers, a third-party Workingmen’s
candidate, taking 40 percent, with 15,391 votes. In 1880
he won re-election, defeating Leach by only 191 votes and
winning with 46 percent and 17,768 votes. Workingmen’s
candidate J. F. Godfrey siphoned off 9 percent, with a little
more than 3,000 votes.
Republicans assigned Pacheco to three standing
committees over the course of his career: Public Lands,
Private Land Claims, and Public Expenditures.24 Though
they were not considered particularly desirable, these
assignments reflected Pacheco’s preference for working
within an intimate committee setting rather than making
lengthy floor speeches.25 He focused his legislative efforts,
balancing the rights of landowners in California with a
venture to protect and expand the harbors and railroads
that were the economic lifelines for his remote Western
district. Pacheco attempted to improve the harbor in
the Wilmington section of Los Angeles by requesting
an amendment allocating money in a rivers and harbors
appropriation bill. Citing the lack of safe ports for riding
out storms along more than 500 miles of California
coast, Pacheco also stressed the region’s importance as the
endpoint for the Southern Pacific Railroad. “I would state
from my own personal knowledge of the great wealth and
importance of Southern California, its rapidly increasing
commerce, and the importance of having that point a
secure harbor for shipping,” Pacheco argued. The House
rejected the amendment by a narrow 78 to 74 vote.26 The
Democratic majority in the 45th and 46th Congresses
(1877–1881) meant that Pacheco was typically defeated;
of the 50 bills he introduced, only two—both private bills
introduced on behalf of individuals—became law. Yet,
noting his interest in protecting Western landowners, the
GOP leadership made him chairman of the Committee on
Private Land Claims in the 47th Congress (1881–1883)
when the Republicans regained a majority. Pacheco was the
first Hispanic Member to chair a full committee.
Pacheco broke his silence on national issues in a
debate on the House Floor over a bill restricting Chinese
immigration, on February 23, 1882. Addressing the nearly
50 percent increase in Asian residents in California from
1870 to 1880, Pacheco threw his support behind stemming
the flow of Asian immigration.27 “The subject [of Asian
immigration] is of such vital importance to this country,
and especially to the Pacific coast,” Pacheco declared, “that
I should fail [in] my duty did I not earnestly advocate its
passage and state my reasons for doing so.”28 Espousing
the anti-Chinese rhetoric that had been popular among
wealthy Californians for decades—which was taking hold
nationally in an era of increasing tensions among working-class
laborers—Pacheco argued that Chinese immigrants in
California, primarily single men brought to work railroad
and mining operations, were taking white laborers’ jobs
and degrading the moral character of California’s cities.29
“It is necessary to see with our own eyes the insidious
encroachments of the Mongolian upon every branch of
labor, every avenue of industry,” Pacheco noted. “They are
taking in our factories and workshops, at the plow, beside
the loom, yea in our very kitchens and laundries, the place
of the white laborer.”30 Pacheco described Chinese culture
as “unchanged, unchangeable, fixed, as immovable as the
decrees of fate.” “His ancestors have also bequeathed him
the most hideous immoralities,” he said. “The imagination
shrinks back appalled at the thought of the morals of
a hundred thousand men without families,” Pacheco
added, appealing to 19th-century attitudes toward large
populations of single men.31 Drawing a parallel between
Chinese immigration in California and the African slave
trade earlier in the century, Pacheco appealed for Eastern
support by invoking California’s sacrifices during the
Civil War: “When our great civil war broke out and
ravaged and desolated the land, though the Pacific States
were far removed from the scene of strife, were they
slow to offer their aid?… [Californians] ask merely that
the evil already done to them shall be restricted to its
present proportions.”32 The Chinese Exclusion Act, which
suspended the immigration of all Chinese laborers and
denied citizenship to Asian immigrants, passed the House
on March 23 by a vote of 167 to 66 (with 59 Members
not voting).33 Pacheco joined half the GOP Members (60
of the affirmative votes) and all seven Representatives from
Western states in approving the measure.34
Pacheco did not run for re-election in 1882, but
returned to California as one of its most prominent
residents. After working as a partner in a San Francisco
stock brokerage, he was appointed as an envoy to the
Central American republics by President Benjamin
Harrison in 1890. In July 1891 Harrison named him
minister plenipotentiary to Honduras and Guatemala;
however, he lost the patronage post upon the election of
Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1893. Pacheco
retired to the home of his brother-in-law, Henry R. Miller,
in Oakland, California, where he died of Bright’s disease
on January 23, 1899. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times
said, “We have public men who might well copy in some
measure the pose of mind, the calm dignity, the graceful
honesty and gentle manliness of Romualdo Pacheco.”35
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
[ Top ]