Peter Hardeman Burnett (15 November 1807-17 May 1895) was the Democratic Governor of California from 20 December 1849 to 9 January 1851, preceding John McDougal.
Biography[]
Peter Hardeman Burnett was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1807, the son of a slave-owning family; he was raised in rural Missouri. He became a lawyer, defending Joseph Smith and several Mormons during the 1838 Mormon War. In 1843, he moved from Barry, Missouri to Oregon to leave behind his debts in Missouri and take up farming, and he served in the provisional legislature from 1844 to 1848. In 1846, he converted to Catholicism, and he signed Oregon's first exclusion laws, threatening Black people with flogging if they did not leave Oregon. Burnett and his family settled in Sacramento, California during the California Gold Rush of 1848, and Burnett also founded Oregon City in Butte County. In 1849, he was elected California's first civilian governor, dividing the state into 27 counties. He also signed a law which enabled the enslavement of Native Americans amid the California Indian Wars, and he declared that the war against the Indians was a war of extinction. He was also an early proponent of banning Chinese immigrant laborers from California and would advocate for the Chinese Exclusion Act after leaving office; he as an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court in 1857, he also pushed for the total exclusion of Blacks from California, while resisting making California a slave state. He died in San Francisco in 1895 at the age of 87.