The Emperor Norton Trust

EMPEROR NORTON  ::  Life

The Life & Legend of Emperor Norton

Emperor Norton (1818-1880) is both a legend and an historical figure. It’s not always easy to tell where one begins and the other one ends.

This much we know about his birth: Joshua Abraham Norton was born to Jewish parents, John and Sarah Norton, in the Kentish town of Deptford, England, which now is part of London. The precise date has been trickier to pin down. Most likely, though, he was born on 4 February 1818. (For much more detail on this, see our essay, "Joshua Abraham Norton, b. 4 February 1818," part of our Emperor Norton's Birth Date Project.) 

Two years later, in February 1820, young Joshua and his family — parents, older brother Louis and younger brother Philip (who was born en voyage) — set sail from London to South Africa, where his father established a successful ship’s chandlery.

Nine more siblings were born over the next decade. But, while John Norton's family had grown by leaps and bounds, his business fortunes started heading south around 1840. By the time he died in 1848 — preceded by his wife, Sarah, and his two sons, Louis and Philip — Joshua’s father was insolvent, if not bankrupt. 

As the only surviving son, Joshua in theory would have been the primary heir of his father's estate. Whether this came to pass and, if so, how much was left once the creditors had been paid — perhaps by liquidating the businesses — is uncertain.

Partly, this is because there are indications that Joshua’s relationship with his father was strained.

Perhaps more important: It appears that Joshua left Cape Town by November 1845 — well before the deaths of his parents and his nearest siblings, Louis and Philip, between May 1846 and August 1848.

This is certain: In Liverpool, in early February 1846, Joshua boarded the Boston ship Sunbeam, which sailed for Boston on February 10th, arriving on March 12th. Joshua was on the ship when it landed in Boston. (For documentation, see our May 2021 essay here.)

In November 1879, two months before Emperor Norton's death, the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed the Emperor and penned a profile reporting — apparently from the Emperor's own lips — that, "[i]n 1849, on the fifth day of November...Norton arrived in San Francisco from the Cape of Good Hope via Rio Janiero [sic] and Valparaiso." Most accounts written since then have followed this narrative. According to his obituary in the Daily Alta California newspaper, he dropped anchor in his new home with $40,000.

This last point is undocumented. And sources differ as to whether the "original nest egg" — whether $40,000 or some other number — was composed solely of Joshua's residual inheritance or whether perhaps he paused for several months, or a few years, in South America and engaged in business activities that enabled him to build on a smaller amount.

Indeed, it’s unclear what Joshua was doing in the 3½-plus years between arriving in Boston in March 1846 and arriving in San Francisco in late 1849. When, during this period, was he prompted to consider San Francisco? And, where was he at the time?

According to the undocumented theory initially advanced by Theodor Kirchhoff (1828-1899) in his 1886 German-language collection, Californische Kulturbilder, and "refined" by Allen Stanley Lane in his 1939 biography, Emperor Norton: The Mad Monarch of America, and by William Drury in his 1986 biography, Norton I: Emperor of the United States, Joshua was one of seven passengers aboard the Hamburg steamer Franzeska that launched from Rio and lumbered into San Francisco Bay on 23 November 1849. (For much more on this, see our essay here.)

Arrivals logs corroborate the basic information about the Franzeska itself — but we've not yet been able to establish that Joshua was onboard. His obituaries have him arriving in San Francisco anywhere between 1848 and 1851, depending on the newspaper. His business advertisements began appearing in local papers by June 1850 — which suggests that he was in San Francisco at least by early 1850. It is possible that Messrs. Kirchhoff, Lane and Drury had no proof that Joshua was on the Franzeska — but placed him there mainly to situate him within the Forty-Niner myth.

Joshua quickly established Joshua Norton & Company, a real estate and importing concern, and within three years had parlayed his "starting balance" of 1849 into $250,000 — nearly $8M in 2016 dollars. At least, that the undocumented claim made by Robert Ernest Cowan (1862–1942) in a 1923 essay published in the California Historical Society Quarterly. (For an analysis of the various claims made about Joshua Norton's finances from the time he left South Africa until he reached the height of his wealth in San Francisco, see our essay here.)

Whatever the numbers, this much is known: In very short order, Joshua had made himself into a very prosperous and respected gentleman. He knew all the right people. He was a member of all the right clubs and committees. He was invited to all the right parties. He stayed in the best hotels. He had access. He had arrived.

Then, in late 1852, Joshua Norton took some bad advice. When a famine in China created a shortage of rice, driving prices up 900%, Joshua was presented with an “opportunity” to corner the market by buying — at 12½ cents a pound, as opposed to the prevailing 36 — a shipload of Peruvian rice in San Francisco harbor. The price: $25,000.

He put $2,000 down, with a contract for the rest, on 22 December 1852. Had things gone as planned, Joshua stood to make a very handsome profit indeed. But, the next day, and then over the next two weeks, several more shiploads of rice arrived from Peru — all of superior quality to what Joshua had bought. The price of rice plummeted to 3 cents a pound. Suddenly, his good deal looked very, very bad.

Joshua sought to void his contract, on the grounds that he had been misled. The matter was tied up in litigation for nearly two years — at great personal cost.

In August 1854, at the depth of this legal crisis, Joshua was inducted as a member of Occidental Lodge No. 22 of Free and Accepted Masons.

Finally, in October 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled against Joshua. Although the fallout from this ruling all-but-ruined him financially, Joshua tried to regain his footing by running for San Francisco tax collector in May 1855.

And, while Joshua was forced to file for insolvency in August 1856, local newspapers continued to feature his business ads at least until mid 1857.

In September of that year, Joshua served on a jury in trial of someone accused of stealing a bar of gold from Wells, Fargo & Co.

Joshua continued to cast about for a new role, announcing his candidacy for U.S. Congress in August 1858. (When the election took place in September 1859, Joshua was not on the ballot.)

By this time, he was living in a Kearny Street boarding house whose accommodations were decidedly below the style to which he had become accustomed at the decade’s outset.

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IT MAY BE THAT Joshua Norton slipped into a reclusive depression and that this is why there are fewer public traces of him during this period. (We piece together the available evidence for his whereabouts between 1856 and 1859 here and here. )

Fewer public traces — but not none. In July 1859, Joshua took out a paid ad in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin newspaper. The ad was a brief “Manifesto” addressed to the “Citizens of the Union.” It outlined in the broadest terms the national crisis as he saw it and suggested the imperative for action to address this crisis at the most basic level.

A little more than two months later — and just 10 days after the election of 7 September 1859 — Joshua was back in the pages of the same paper, with the following Proclamation published on 17 September 1859:

At the peremptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of February next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.

Norton I.,
Emperor of the United States.

It was signed: “Norton I., Emperor of the United States.”

In early 1866 — after French emperor Napoleon III invaded Mexico in May 1862, and a little more than halfway into the 3-year tenure of Napoleon’s puppet ruler Maximilian I that began in May 1864 — he added the secondary title “Protector of Mexico.”

Over the course of a 20-plus-year “reign” that ended with his death in January 1880, Emperor Norton continued to urge those political reforms that he felt were necessary to secure the general welfare and, as he put it, to “save the nation from utter ruin.”

Early Proclamations calling for the abolition of Congress (followed by a call, when that decree went unheeded, for the Army to forcibly “clear the Halls of Congress”), the dissolution of the two-party system and even for the “Republic of the United States” itself to be “dissolved” in favor of a temporary monarchy seem remarkably contemporary and, indeed, radical in 2022. (Some claim that the Emperor also called for a League of Nations — but, the claim appears to be undocumented.)

Predictably, given the scenario — “Man suffers financial calamity, proclaims own Majesty” — questions about the Emperor’s sanity trailed him. His biographer, William Drury, argues that, in fact, there was no single “snap” between 1852 and 1859, before which he was completely “normal” — but, rather, that there were signs of “the Emperor to come” well before Joshua Norton arrived in San Francisco.

As to what happened after September 1859, the travel documentarian Timothy “Speed” Levitch put it this way: “Some say he’d gone mad; others say he’d gone wise.”

Indeed: Most often using his preferred modus of the newspaper Proclamation, Emperor Norton called for many things in the 1860s and '70s that were well ahead of their time.

• He was an adversary of corruption and fraud of all kinds — political, corporate and personal.

• He was a persistent voice for fair treatment and enhanced legal protections for immigrants and racial/ethnic minorities.
  

  • He demanded that African Africans be allowed to ride public streetcars and that they be admitted to public schools.

  • He commanded that the courts allow Chinese people to testify in court; and he pronounced that “the eyes of the Emperor will be upon anyone who shall counsel any outrage or wrong on the Chinese.”

  • He proclaimed, with respect to Native Americans, that all "Indian agents" and other parties connected with frauds against "the Indian tribes" were to be publicly punished before as many "Indian chiefs" as could be assembled together.
    

• He was a religious humanist and pluralist who favored church-state separation and warned against the dangers of of puritanism and sectarianism, refusing to give his imprimatur to any one church or synagogue but, rather, attending them all. And he prohibited the enforcement of state Sunday Laws, which discriminated against Germans and Jews.

• He supported women’s right to vote.

• He was a defender of the people's right to fair taxes and basic services, including well-maintained streets, streetcars, ferries and trains.

• He was an exponent of technological innovations that enhanced the public welfare.

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ONE OF THE MORE whimsical "proclamations" attributed to the Emperor is held as Writ by many San Franciscans, to this day. Evidence of the decree's authenticity remains elusive.

So far, the earliest citation we've found for the text — see our essay here — is in David Warren Ryder's highly romanticized and unsourced account, San Francisco's Emperor Norton, published in 1939, nearly 60 years after the Emperor's death. In this self-published book, Ryder claims that the Emperor declared:

Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word “Frisco,” which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a High Misdemeanor, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars.

Usually overlooked, in addition to the absence of a source for this "proclamation," is an etymological question. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "linguistic" wasn't coined until at least the mid 1840s, when Joshua Norton was approaching 30. Moreover, a review of newspapers from this period suggests that the word did not come into any kind of regular use until some decades later.

How likely is it that that Emperor Norton not only would have encountered the word "linguistic" but that he also would have incorporated the word into his vocabulary for use in a Proclamation?

The truth is that all of the accounts of this Proclamation, starting with Ryder's, are unsourced. But, even without offering sources, some are bold enough to claim that it was published in 1872.

One thing that Emperor Norton did that year for which there are sources: He set out the original vision for what we now know as the Bay Bridge. With three newspaper Proclamations in January, March and September of 1872, the Emperor called for the survey and construction of a great bridge linking Oakland and San Francisco via Goat Island (today called Yerba Buena Island).

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EMPEROR NORTON was a man of contradictions — on the fringes of society yet right in the thick of it.

He read the leading newspapers every morning. Often, in the afternoons, he went to a library to continue his reading; to write Proclamations; and — if his library of choice was the Mechanics’ Institute — to play chess. In the evenings, he could be seen at public lectures or debates. And he often attended the proceedings of the state legislature, in Sacramento.

In all of these ways, the Emperor kept himself well-versed in the national and local issues of the day. Indeed, his Proclamations — which could be visionary — were elegantly written and crisply argued.

But the Emperor lived as a pauper, eking out his existence, from between summer 1864 and summer 1865 until his death, at the Eureka Lodgings, a three-story boarding house at 624 Commercial Street, where his 50-cent-per-day accommodation — sometimes paid for through the beneficence of his Masonic brothers and former business associates — consisted of a 9-by-6-foot room sparsely furnished with a rickety cot, a sagging couch, a night table and a wash basin. Closet not included. (For more on when Emperor Norton arrived at the Eureka, see our essay here. For more on the Eureka building and its location at the current site of 650/652/654 Commercial Street, see our essay here.)

Three doors to the east, at the Morning Call newspaper, worked a young journalist in the summer of 1864 — Samuel Langhorne Clemens, soon to be better known as Mark Twain — who became one of the Emperor’s most empathetic observers.

Despite the Emperor's meager living arrangements, he had a strong sense of imperial style and decorum. He wore a regimental uniform — sometimes Union, sometimes Confederate; often a well-worn “hand me down” donated by the U.S. Army base at the Presidio — and carried a great gnarled walking stick. For formal occasions, he embellished his basic ensemble with over-sized gold epaulets, a sword and a beaver hat with an ostrich plume.

In his lapel, he wore a carnation — usually a gift of a day-old blossom, too withered to sell, given him by a sympathetic florist.

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TO SUPPLEMENT charitable contributions of money, food, rent and personal effects — which, to preserve his dignity, he called “taxes” — the Emperor eventually took to printing and selling his own scrip, in denominations of 50 cents to 10 dollars.

The scrip — promissory notes payable at 7 percent interest in 1880 — routinely was honored in San Francisco.

The fact that the city humored such an eccentricity says much about Emperor Norton and much about San Francisco.

But the Emperor wasn’t just humored. He was beloved.

Theaters reserved some of their best seats for the Emperor on opening nights.

In his 1933 book The Barbary Coast, Herbert Asbury wrote that, when Emperor Norton’s uniform and hat became tattered, San Francisco’s city government — the Board of Supervisors — bought him new ones. This probably is another of the many apocryphal tales that trail the Emperor (see “Frisco”). But, local newspapers did take note when the Emperor appeared in a “new uniform.” Most likely, these were provided by sympathetic officers at the Presidio, soft-hearted tailors and other such supporters.

To be sure, accommodating Emperor Norton in these ways also was “good for business.” A comic opera called Norton the First had opened in San Francisco on 17 September 1861 — exactly two years after he declared himself Emperor. That year, the first local directory had listed him as "emperor"; the census followed suit in 1870. By the 1870s, he was being referenced in newspapers across the country and was regarded locally as part of the tourist trade. Shops even sold plaster figurines of the Emperor.

But an incident in January 1867 revealed signs of genuine local affection for Emperor Norton.

Armand Barbier was a "special officer," part of a local auxiliary force who members were under the oversight of the police chief and who often were called "policemen" — but who in fact were private security guards paid by neighborhood residents and business owners. When an overzealous Barbier arrested the Emperor for vagrancy, then — when that proved bogus — for “lunacy,” newspapers sprang to the Emperor’s defense.

The Bulletin editorialized:

In what can only be described as the most dastardly of errors, Joshua A. Norton was arrested today. He is being held on the ludicrous charge of “Lunacy.” Known and loved by all true San Franciscan’s as Emperor Norton, this kindly Monarch of Montgomery Street is less a lunatic than those who have engineered these trumped up charges. As they will learn, His Majesty’s loyal subjects are fully apprised of this outrage.

Just as pointedly, the Daily Alta newspaper wrote:

Norton was in his day a respectable merchant, and since he has worn the Imperial purple he has shed no blood, robbed nobody, and despoiled the country of no one, which is more than can be said of any of his fellows in that line.

The police chief, Patrick Crowley, released the Emperor and apologized. The Emperor, for his part, issued an imperial pardon for the errant "special."

And, thereafter, police officers saluted the Emperor when he passed them on the street.

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PERHAPS SAN FRANCISCANS’ fondness for Emperor Norton can be explained, in part, by the fact that, in addition to his holding forth with Proclamations on weighty affairs of state and matters of human rights — and despite his own circumstances — he never lost sight of their most basic, everyday needs.

If the Emperor felt that taxes or water rates were too high; or if he found, on his regular rounds, that the streets or streetcars were not being properly maintained, he issued Proclamations on these things too. (Never mind that the edicts rarely were carried out.)

One of the most charming anecdotes about the Emperor holds that the phrase “queen [or king] for a day” originates with him; that he regularly issued this patent of nobility to those — especially children — who had done him a good deed or who just seemed to be having a bad day and needed cheering up.

In short, he was kind. And he had the common touch.

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ON THE RAINY evening of Thursday 8 January 1880, the Emperor headed out to attend the regular monthly debate of the Hastings Society, at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

As he finished climbing the last block and reached the southeast corner of California and Dupont (now Grant Avenue) — just across the street from the Academy — the Emperor collapsed and died.

The next day, 9 January, the San Francisco Chronicle ran on page 2 — top of the third column — an obituary with the headline "Imperial Ashes." 

It often is claimed that the Chronicle obit included this passage:

On the reeking pavement, in the darkness of a moonless night under the dripping rain, and surrounded by a hastily gathered crowd of wondering strangers, Norton First, by the grace of God, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, departed this life. Other sovereigns have died with no more of kindly care — other sovereigns have died as they have lived with all the pomp of earthly majesty, but death having touched them, Norton I rises up the exact peer of the haughtiest King or Kaiser that ever wore a crown. Perhaps he will rise more than the peer of most of them. He had a better claim to kindly consideration than that his lot “forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne and shut the gates of mercy on mankind.” Through his harmless proclamations can always be traced an innate gentleness of heart, a desire to effect uses and a courtesy, the possession of which would materially improve the powerful living princes whose names will naturally suggest themselves. 

This poetic tribute did appear on 9 January — but not in the Chronicle. Rather, it was part of the page 3 obit in Mark Twain's old paper, The Morning Call.

It also often is erroneously claimed that the Chronicle published its 9 January obit on the front page — under the headline "Le Roi Est Mort" ("The King Is Dead").  That headline did appear in the Chronicle, but not until Sunday the 11th — and atop the paper's page 8 coverage of Emperor Norton's funeral the day before. Here's how the Chronicle  memorialized the Emperor in that article:

His funeral took place yesterday afternoon from the undertaking establishment at No. 16 O’Farrell Street. All the afternoon the remains lay in state in the rear room of the Morgue. Thousands flocked thither for a last look at the man whose peculiarities of mind, garb and person had rendered him familiar to all.

The man of imaginary majesty…narrowly escaped burial in a plain redwood box. Some people…have unkindly surmised that his hallucination was simulated, and that he had adopted his strange life as a cover of a miserly hoard of unaccountably-acquired wealth. When his effects were searched it was found, as his best friends knew, that he had no means.

On his person was found five or six dollars in small change, which was all his store. He has no personal effects of any value, and but for the kindly remembrance of people of means who knew Norton and had business relations with him many years ago when he was a citizen of substance and standing, he would have had a pauper’s funeral at the city’s expense. A subscription paper to procure a funeral fund was drawn up and taken to the Pacific Club where the sponsors soon had all the money they deemed necessary….

After the autopsy Friday the body was prepared for burial. It was clothed in black robe with a white shirt and black tie, and placed in a neat rosewood casket, trimmed handsomely but without elaboration. The general interest felt in the deceased was soon manifest. Early in the afternoon of Friday people who remembered the singular old man kindly, many of them gratefully and affectionately, began to call and ask to be allowed a last glance at the familiar face….

Early yesterday morning the stream of visitors to the bier began. By 7 o'clock quite a number had dropped in, some of them laborers who had got off the car on their way to the shops, to take a last look at the remains of one whom none remembered save with kindly feelings; others were business men who stopped on their way downtown for a similar purpose. Soon the number began to increase and there was a steady stream of people pressing through the office to the little back room where the remains lay in state taking a last glance at the features and filing out at the side exit to make room for the constantly-increasing throng of visitors. By noon there were hundreds of people gathered on the sidewalk waiting their turn. Policemen were called in to regulate the entrance.

The visitors included all classes from capitalists to the pauper, the clergyman to the pickpocket, well-dressed ladies and those whose garb and bearing hinted of the social outcast, however, the garb of the laboring man predominated.

The Chronicle reported in this article that some 10,000 people came to view the Emperor’s body in state — the same number that appeared in the Alta’s account of the funeral. 

In his 1986 biography, William Drury cherry-picked a quote from the 15 January 1880 obituary of the Seattle Daily Intelligencer, claiming that “the funeral cortege that followed his body to the grave was two miles long.” Endlessly repeated in the decades since 1986 and now fully embedded in the Norton myth as a staple of “pop” guidebooks and guided tours as well as the “weird history” genre of web articles, podcasts and YouTube videos, the “two miles long” line conjures the image of a train of carriages and mourners-on-foot so vast as to snake for two miles from front to back.

It is a little more than two miles from 16 O’Farrell to the former site of the Masonic cemetery (now occupied by the University of San Francisco) — this much is true.

But, the Chronicle noted that the cortege, such as it was, amounted to only three carriages, with none on foot — and that there were only some 30 mourners at the burial site.

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FIVE YEARS LATER, Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the character of “the King” is modeled on Emperor Norton.

The Emperor appears as himself in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1892 novel The Wrecker, written with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne.

In 1934, as part of San Francisco’s great cemetery eviction, Emperor Norton’s remains were moved from his original resting place in the city’s Masonic Cemetery to Woodlawn Cemetery in Colma, a few miles to the south of San Francisco. A reburial ceremony included full civic and military honors, and the placement of a new headstone, which remains at the Emperor’s grave. The “myth machine” has manufactured a fantastical throng of tens of thousands of people for this ceremony; it was attended by 200, give or take.

Thirty years later, in 1964, José Sarria (1922-2013) — a drag performer who in 1961 had become the first openly gay candidate to run for public office in the United States — adopted the persona “Empress of San Francisco, José I, the Widow Norton” and secured a burial plot adjacent to the Emperor’s, where he is buried with a headstone that echoes the original.

Emperor Norton’s grave is a pilgrimage site, one that holds a special place of honor for a number of groups — including the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus; the Discordians; and members of the Cacophony Society — who claim him as a patron saint.

The legend continues.

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To learn more, see:

• Photographs

• Original research & commentary

• Emperor Norton Map of the World

• Emperor Norton's Birth Date Project

• The Emperor & “Frisco”

• Further learning