Recovering Emperor Norton’s 1861 Proclamation Against Privateering
Not a Call for a “League of Nations,” But….
SOMETIMES, historical research produces a discovery — a contemporaneous detail that has not been noted or published before.
Other times, historical research produces a recovery: a contemporaneous detail that has been noted and published before but that — perhaps because the detail has been published a long time ago or because it was published in an obscure, out-of-print venue, or both — did not make its way into the received history, so that the detail has become “orphaned” and “lost” in a way that can make finding it again feel like and be a discovery.
What follows is in the second category.
One of the oft-repeated chestnuts that are offered up in the popular version of the Emperor Norton story is the claim that the Emperor called for a “League of Nations.”
To be sure, Emperor Norton was interested in issues of diplomacy and foreign trade.
This is seen in examples like the Emperor’s
assuming the title “Protector of Mexico” after Napoleon III invaded Mexico then set up his puppet emperor Maximilian I there;
offering his imperial bonds to German “capitalists” as an investment opportunity in the wake of the European trade crisis that accompanied the Franco–Prussian War; and
inviting Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, to a meeting when Pedro visited San Francisco.
But, as many times as I’ve read and heard the “League of Nations” claim, I’ve never seen documented evidence that Emperor Norton called for a formal diplomatic institution along these lines.
And, yet…
Recently, I stumbled across a handwritten Proclamation of the Emperor making it clear that he understood the value and importance of the United States’ participation in international agreements.
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THE PROCLAMATION is dated June 1861 — and, it is about privateering.
A brief Library of Congress article from 2020 explains what privateering is and why it was important in the United States — and to Emperor Norton — in 1861 [emphasis mine]:
“Privateers” were privately-owned merchant ships that the government, in wartime, permitted to attack the enemy’s trade vessels. To incentivize this dangerous activity, the ship’s crew profited by selling the captured vessel’s bounty through a process dictated by federal statutes. To legitimize their actions, the privateers had to obtain “letters of marque" from the federal government. They also were obligated to participate in a court-administered process, which would determine whether the prizes from their exploits were lawful; if so, the cargo would be sold at auction, with the proceeds going to the privateersmen....
The practice of privateering was all but eliminated by the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which was signed by 55 nations. The United States, however, did not sign the treaty, meaning that by the time the Civil War broke out, privateering remained an established practice in the United States.
During the Civil War, Jefferson Davis issued letters of marque to Confederate vessels, under a process similar to the one used by the Union. In response, President Lincoln issued “Proclamation 81 — Declaring a Blockade of Ports in Rebellious States.” This proclamation deemed Confederate-issued letters of marque “pretend” because the United States did not recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate nation, and warned that all persons manning such vessels and attacking Union ships would be tried and sentenced as pirates.
Designating these individuals as pirates, not privateersmen, was a distinction with a huge difference. [Under l]aws [that] had been in place since the First Congress in 1790...Confederate privateersmen who were captured and criminally charged could be convicted of piracy and sentenced to death....
While some Confederate privateersmen were tried as pirates, and a few were found guilty, none were executed. Instead, they were treated as prisoners of war and eventually exchanged for Union troops being held by the South.
In fact, the operative agreement on privateering “signed by 55 nations” was not the Treaty of Paris of 30 March 1856 — the agreement that ended the Crimean War — but, rather, the Paris Declaration Regarding Maritime Law of 16 April 1856.
The Paris Declaration was a kind of coda to the Treaty of Paris.
It was against this backdrop that Emperor Norton issued the following Proclamation of 10 June 1861 [style of transcription — punctuation, capitalization, etc. — mine, adapted for intelligibility; emphases also mine]:
Photograph of manuscript of Proclamation of Emperor Norton signed and dated 10 June 1861. Featured in article, “The Proclamations of Emperor Norton,” published in California Herald, Vol. III, No. 10, June 1956, p. 6. Source: Internet Archive
Proclamation
Whereas, on the 10th day of April 1856, the Representatives of Great Britain, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia & Turkey established as a fixed principle of International Law, that Privateering was & should remain abolished &
Whereas, deeming in consequence that the U. S. of A. shall not remain the Ismaelites of the world
Now, therefore, We Norton I., by the Grace of God & the National Will Emperor of the U. S. of A., do hereby establish the same principle of the International Law, on behalf of the U. S. of A.
And we hereby command our Navies to capture & deal out the most prompt & effective punishment to all & every persons found engaged in such Piratical Pursuits, whether between the Different portions of our Common Country or a Foreign Foe.
Given under our hand and seal at San Francisco, Cala 10th June 1861
Norton I.
Emperor
This photograph of the Proclamation manuscript appeared in the June 1956 issue of a monthly magazine, California Herald, that was published by the son-and-father team of James J. Friis (1928–2009) and Leo J. Friis (1901–1980). The publishers had launched the magazine in 1953 as Masonic Herald then revised the name when they decided to broaden the focus. In September 1956, California Herald became the official magazine of the Native Daughters of the Golden West.
The photograph was an illustration for an uncredited article, “The Proclamations of Emperor Norton.” It was provided by Morris Wampler Martenet (1868–1956), whose father Jefferson Martenet (1826–1906) had included the original manuscript in a scrapbook.
It appears that this Proclamation was not included in any biographical account of Emperor Norton before 1956. And, California Herald was a mom-and-pop operation with no distribution to speak of and an advertising base composed almost exclusively of local businesses in the Anaheim area, where the Friis family lived. So, especially in the early years, before California Herald became associated with the Native Daughters, historical information published in the magazine would have extremely limited reach — something borne out by the fact that the Proclamation doesn’t appear to show up in accounts of the Emperor after 1956 either.
It seems safe to suppose that the present article is the first public notice of the Proclamation in 66 years.
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Jefferson Martenet (1826–1906). Source: Ancestry.org
BEFORE getting to the substance of the Proclamation, it’s worth exploring at some length the question of how Jefferson Martenet might have come by this manuscript — in part, because this exploration holds the potential to shed light on how Emperor Norton went about delivering Proclamations in general.
The biographical note on Martenet that is is attached to the finding aid for a collection of his correspondence at the Huntington Library includes a preliminary clue [emphasis mine]:
Jefferson Martenet (1828-1906) was born on July 24, 1828 in Baltimore, Maryland. He left Baltimore on September 16, 1852, for Northern California with plans to get rich quick off the California Gold Rush and return home within a few months. He arrived via steamer to San Francisco on October 30, 1852, but spent six months recovering from a sickness in San Francisco until April 1853. He then went to mine in Harbaugh camp near Jackson, California, for ten months until February 1854. He spent less than a month in Jackson, where he worked as a cook and returned to San Francisco by May 1854.
Martenet remained in San Francisco the rest of his life (at least until 1892) trying to accumulate enough wealth to live comfortably back in Baltimore. He first worked as a cook in San Francisco before opening up a book stand in 1855. In May of 1857, he sold his stand and was hired by Epes Ellery and Augustus Doyle as a clerk for the Antiquarian Bookstore at least until 1859. During these years he joined the “Know Nothing” political party and joined a San Francisco volunteer police force in June of 1856, better known as the Vigilance Committee of ’56.
During the U.S. Civil War, Martenet supported the Democrats and the South. He also made his only visit back to Baltimore, made another futile attempt to strike it rich in mining, and married Louise Wiegel. The couple had at least three children, Kate, Jefferson, and Morris.
From 1866 to 1870, Martenet was associated with Dr. T.W. Brotherton, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, in the publication of the Pacific Churchman, official newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese in California. In April 1868, Martenet was elected treasurer of the Churchman publication until it was discontinued in November 1869.
By the autumn of 1868, Martenet was engaged in a collection agency business. Martenet also wrote poetry, spun yarn, played the guitar and piano, and sang. Martenet died in 1906 in Mill Valley, California.
We learn here that, between 1855 and 1859, Martenet was a bookseller, latterly as a clerk at Epes Ellery’s Antiquarian Bookstore. Ellery established the shop with Augustus Doyle in 1854, but it appears that he had bought Doyle out by 1856 — so, it would have been Ellery who hired Martenet.
The listing for Martenet in the San Francisco directory of 1860 shows that he still was working as a “clerk with Epes Ellery” that year. The 1861 directory has Martenet simply as a “clerk.” But, in light of what happened next, it seems most likely that he was with Ellery in 1861 and much of 1862 as well.
Booksellers often also sold stationery, as well as dealing in letters, photographs and other such “documentary” ephemera. And, in their Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865 (Stanford, 2002), Peter Palmquist and Thomas Kailbourn note that, in 1865, Martenet was in business with Daniel Schley selling books, stationery and celebrity photographs from their shop at 633 Market Street.
In fact, the earliest listing for Martenet & Schley is in Langley’s San Francisco directory of 1862:
Listing for Martenet & Schley booksellers and stationers, Langley’s San Francisco directory, 1862, p.45. Directory in the collection of the San Francisco Public Library. Source: Internet Archive
There are listings for the business in the 1863, 1864 and 1865 directories as well. It appears that the 1866 directory for San Francisco is lost. But, by the time of the 1867 directory, Jefferson Martenet is listed as having taken up a new profession as a bill collector.
The 1862 San Francisco directory was published in September 1862. But, the listing for Martenet & Schley was included in the front section of information “received too late for regular insertion.”
It’s a good guess that Martenet and his business partner provided the information about their new enterprise sometime in the summer of 1862 and that Martenet had remained with Epes Ellery until that time, learning as much as he could about the book trade before setting out on his own.
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BY REPUTATION, Jefferson Martenet was a bookseller for at least a decade, from 1855 to 1865.
But, it might have been Martenet’s stationery line that brought the Emperor Norton manuscript to his doorstep.
If this Proclamation of 10 June 1861 was published in a newspaper, it would have been published in June or July 1861. I’ve yet to find this. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t published in a newspaper — and, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.
Indeed, in thinking about who — besides the Emperor — is most likely to have had their hands on the manuscript itself, the most obvious candidates are:
(a) a newspaper editor
(b) someone who worked in that newspaper’s print shop
A newspaper editor might have been more likely to keep the manuscript as a memento — but only if he had decided not to publish it.
If an editor had decided to publish the Proclamation and passed the manuscript along to his print shop, a tradesman working in the shop might have been less sentimental about the handwritten artifact and — if he had some sense of who Emperor Norton was — might have seen an opportunity to trade the manuscript for cash.
Here’s the thing. Most newspapers during this period did not have their own print shops. Rather, they contracted the printing of their papers to “job printers” who printed a host of other things in addition to the newspaper. Things like: directories, manuals, broadsides, flyers, forms and, yes…stationery.
In the course of running his stationery business, Jefferson Martenet would have come into close contact with job printing shops who produced stationery.
It’s possible that one or more of these shops also had newspaper clients.
It’s not difficult to imagine how someone working at one of these shops might have saved an Emperor Norton submission, thinking that Jefferson Martenet might be interested…for a price.
It’s a theory — but not a bad one, I think.
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SUPPOSING that this manuscript is one that Emperor Norton brought and submitted to a newspaper for publication, one question to ask is:
How common was it for the Emperor to present Proclamation copy with strike-throughs, edits and rewrites included on the page — i.e., as opposed to a final “clean copy” with only the text that he wanted published?
It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that, when Emperor Norton dropped off a Proclamation to a newspaper, he stood with whomever was receiving it and read the Proclamation aloud, so that there would be less mistaking his intentions.
But, even so, the penmanship and the flow of text here is not entirely “scrutable.” It’s easy to see how the path from manuscript to publication could have become a game of telephone, with elements of the Proclamation as written getting “lost in translation” to the Proclamation as published.
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AS TO THE substance of the Proclamation, three things stand out.
First: Having established that the subject of the Proclamation is privateering, Emperor Norton “command[s]…the most prompt & effective punishment to all & every persons found engaged in such Piratical Pursuits, whether between the Different portions of our Common Country or a Foreign Foe,” making clear that there is no meaningful distinction between privateering and piracy, while quietly calling out the Confederacy, the “portion” that was engaging in the practice.
Second: In expressing his impatience over the United States’ refusal to join 55 other countries in signing the Paris Declaration of 1856, Emperor Norton insists that “the U. S. of A. shall not remain the Ismaelites of the world.”
It’s an interesting choice of phrase and metaphor in this context, “Ismaelite” — and its more common variant “Ishmaelite” — being a word that takes in both the specific connotation of “Arab Muslim” and the more general connotation of “outcast.”
By 1861, Emperor Norton understands too well how undesirable it is to be an outcast. And, on the level that seems most relevant to the Proclamation, the Emperor’s statement that “the U. S. of A. shall not remain the Ismaelites of the world” is his way of putting in italics his larger point that a group of countries is doing the right thing together and that the United States should be inside this group, not outside it.
Still, it’s notable that Emperor Norton uses the essentially ethno-religious term “Ismaelites.” His use of this term in a way that undeniably places Arabs and Muslims “on the outside” could be seen as a harbinger of his later calls for a “Universal Religion” that is “universal” mostly within the majoritarian Judeo–Christian framework of “Protestant, Catholic and Jew” — which presumably included the Emperor’s favored Unitarianism.
One can’t necessarily extrapolate from this that Emperor Norton was “anti-Arab” or “anti-Muslim.” But, it does seem that a robust Arab and Muslim experience would not have been included in his vision of the ideal world.
Indeed, much as the Emperor defends the rights of the Chinese and Native Americans, for example, it is they who — in his view — must assimilate in matters of culture and religion.
Finally — and perhaps most important…
Emperor Norton uses the phrase “principle of International Law.” And, he uses a nearly identical version of this phrase twice.
I’m not seeing that the Emperor used the phrase “International Law” in any other Proclamation.
Emperor Norton’s use of the phrase “International Law” here is important for two reasons:
1) The Paris Declaration of 1856 that Emperor Norton uses as his linchpin now is regarded as one of the first “multilateral attempts to codify in times of peace rules which were to be applicable in the event of war.” [Note: Sometimes, a phrase from Wikipedia can’t be improved upon. ;)]
2) The Paris Declaration is seen as having established principles of international law that later were used in the foundation of the League of Nations (1920) and later the United Nations (1945).
A couple of examples…
Legend has it that Emperor Norton called for the raising of a public Christmas tree in San Francisco’s Union Square.
There is no documentation or other evidence of this. But, the legend persists — because, I think, a Christmas tree in Union Square seems like the sort of thing the Emperor would have wanted.
Legend has it that Emperor Norton issued a Proclamation against the use of “Frisco.”
There is no documentation or other evidence of this. But, the legend persists, because — to put it generously — the Emperor did call San Francisco “the Queen City of the Pacific,” and some who don’t like “Frisco” like to think of an anti-”Frisco” decree as the sort of thing the Emperor would have put across.
Perhaps the claim that Emperor Norton called for a “League of Nations” is like this.
Perhaps someone aware of the Emperor’s 1861 Proclamation for “International Law” spun it into something more than it was, and others now have repeated the “League of Nations” claim so many times — they have — that it has become part of the received narrative, even though there appears to be no documentation or other evidence to support it.
Stranger things have happened.
After all: Calling for a League of Nations is the sort of thing the Emperor would have done.
Even if he didn’t.
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