Horace Davis collection of Davis-Bancroft-King family papers, 1667-1976, bulk 1667-1939

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Summary

Creators:
Davis, Horace, 1831-1916
Abstract:
This collection contains the papers of California businessman and two-term U.S. Representative Horace Davis. The papers include Davis’s correspondence, manuscripts, publications, and genealogical research. They also encompass the documents of the Davis family in America from the 17th to 20th centuries and include land deeds and other contracts, family registers, wills and estates, correspondence, and other personal and official documents. Smaller sections of the collection pertain to the Bancroft family and the California minister Thomas Starr King.
Extent:
14.5 Linear Feet 2 cartons, 4 document boxes, 6 flat boxes, 1 oversize folder
Language:
English and Collection materials are in English, with one poster in Latin.
Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Horace Davis collection of Davis-Bancroft-King family papers, BANC MSS 2015/182, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Background

Scope and content:

This collection contains the papers of California businessman and two-term U.S. Representative Horace Davis. The papers include Davis’s correspondence, manuscripts, publications, and genealogical research. They also encompass the collected documents of the Davis family in America from the 17th to 20th centuries and include land deeds and other contracts, family registers, wills and estates, correspondence, and other personal and official documents. Smaller sections of the collection pertain to the Bancroft family and the California minister Thomas Starr King.

The collection is divided into seven series:

Series 1 (Correspondence) includes the incoming correspondence of Horace Davis, his son, Norris K. Davis, his wife, Edith K. Davis, and his father, Massachusetts governor John Davis.

Series 2 (Davis family documents) is divided into two subseries: historic documents and contemporary documents. The historic documents were collected in a scrapbook and range from the 17th to 19th centuries. The documents contemporary to the time of Horace Davis cover the 19th and 20th centuries.

Series 3 (Manuscripts)contains the writings of Horace Davis, including his articles and memoirs.

Series 4 (Genealogical research) contains five scrapbooks of correspondence, notes, clippings, and other research material collected by Horace Davis about the Davis, Bancroft, Chandler, and Brigham families.

Series 5 (Publications) includes prints and reprints of articles, speeches, sermons, and other writings by Horace Davis, Andrew McFarland Davis, John Davis, Hasbrouck Davis, Lucretia Bancroft, Thomas Starr King, and other authors.

Series 6 (Thomas Starr King) contains the collected documents of California minister and Union loyalist Thomas Starr King.

Series 7 (Mayberry Davis) contains the journal of Mayberry Davis, of undetermined relation to Horace Bancroft.

Biographical / historical:

Horace Davis was a businessman and United States Representative from California. Davis was born on March 16, 1831 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended the Worcester public schools and Williams College, graduated from Harvard University in 1849, and studied law in the Dane Law School of Harvard University. He was the son of Massachusetts Governor John Davis and the younger brother of diplomat John Chandler Bancroft Davis.

Davis relocated to San Francisco, California, in 1852, where he first worked as a gold miner, surveyor on a coastal steamer, and a purser for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. He helped found the Mercantile Library Association of California and resigned from the organization in 1855. In 1860, he established the Golden Gate Flouring Mills and later became president of The Sperry Flour Company, which was formed from a consolidation of several local mills in 1892.

During the Civil War, Davis served in a San Francisco-based Home Guard, a local militia and “secret league… formed to ensure the loyalty of California to the Lincoln administration” and to elect a loyal governor, Leland Stanford, through active campaigning, maintaining “patriotic propaganda throughout the state,” and patrolling the polls on election day (1). He presided over the Produce Exchange of San Francisco from 1867 to 1877, when he was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives. He served there from March 4, 1877 to March 3, 1881.

As a representative from California in Congress, Horace Davis campaigned actively against Chinese immigration and was important to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law implemented in the United States to prevent immigration on the basis of ethnicity. Speaking in 1878 and 1879 in support of Congressional legislation restricting Chinese immigration, Davis used racist and hyperbolic rhetoric to warn of “an invasion of Asiatics” turning California into “a Mongolian state” and from there “likely to flood the country,” and described Chinese migrants as “utterly an alien in the body-politic, and like some foreign substance in the human body, breeding fever and unrest till that system is relieved of its unwelcome presence.” He premised his argument on this explanation: “Our fathers dealt simply with the question of European immigration. The strangers coming to these shores in early days… were so little different from our own people that they readily found a place in the great family. But even the founders of the Republic, in their boasted equality of all men, recognized the diversity of races, excluded the Indian from representation, and provided for negro slavery”(2)(3). This collection contains a letter from U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, John M. Coghlan, referencing his and Davis’s involvement in a local ‘Anti-Coolie Club’. He was unsuccessful in his candidacy to the Forty-seventh Congress.

Davis presided over the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce from 1883 to 1884 and the Savings and Loan Society in 1885. He served as a member of the Republican National Committee from 1880-1888. He was elected president of the University of California in 1888 but resigned in 1890. He was named president of the board of trustees of Stanford University by its founder, Leland Stanford, whose gubernatorial election he had worked to secure as part of the Home Guard of 1861. He served in this capacity from 1885 to 1916.

Though Horace Davis was a staunch opponent of Chinese migration, his flour milling companies exported large quantities of flour to China, the Philippines, and Japan (4). This collection contains letters from Senator Stephen M. White to Horace Davis at the Sperry Flour Company during the period of increased hostilities preceding the Spanish-American War (1896-1897). The letters contain direct references to tariff impositions on breadstuffs in the Philippines and to White’s intercession, at Davis’s behest, in the Spanish government on behalf of Warner, Blodgett & Co., Manila, which opened one of the first big steam-powered mills in the Philippines (5). After the start of the American occupation of the Philippines in 1898, Davis rejected an invitation to join the Anti-Imperialist League in 1904, stating that he believed that it was the duty of the United States to ensure that Filipinos were “fit for self- government before we thrust it upon them,” meaning a continued American military presence, which secured American financial interests in the Philippines (6). In 1929, Sperry Flour Company was acquired in the industry consolidation that created General Mills, Inc., though Sperry continued to service the Pacific (7).

In 1899, Davis ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of San Francisco. His platform was that of a champion of “white organized labor” in San Francisco, leveraging his activity in Congress to present himself as a protector of “the labor of its white citizens from the disastrous competition of swarms of Chinese” (8).

Davis was married twice and was a devout Unitarian. He died after an appendicitis operation in San Francisco in 1916 and was buried in Cypress Lawn Cemetery.

References

1. Davis, Horace. “The ‘Home Guard’ of 1861.” Macmillan Company, New York. 1917.

2. Chinese Immigration. Speech of Hon. Horace Davis, of California, in the House of Representatives, June 8, 1878.

3. The Chinese Problem. Speech of Hon. Horace Davis, of California, in the House of Representatives, Tuesday, January 28, 1879.

4. Sperry Flour Company, Manufacturers of Flour and Cereal Products. Catalog. 1913.

5. Doeppers, Daniel F. Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850-1945. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. 2016.

6. Harris, Susan. God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902. Oxford University Press. 2011.

7. Doeppers.

8. San Francisco Call, Volume 86, Number 156, 3 November 1899. “Horace Davis, Labor’s Champion.” P.7, 11

Acquisition information:
Purchased from Michael Good-Books, 6/9/15. Originally collected by Napa Valley Genealogical and Historical Society.
Processing information:

Processed by Lori Dedeyan in 2017.

Arrangement:

Arranged to the folder level.

Accruals:

No additions are expected.

Physical location:
Many of the Bancroft Library collections are stored offsite and advance notice may be required for use. For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the library's online catalog.
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

Collection is open for research.

Terms of access:

Materials in this collection may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). In addition, the reproduction of some materials may be restricted by terms of University of California gift or purchase agreements, donor restrictions, privacy and publicity rights, licensing and trademarks. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the Head of Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000. See: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/reference/permissions.html.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Horace Davis collection of Davis-Bancroft-King family papers, BANC MSS 2015/182, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Location of this collection:
University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000, US
Contact:
510-642-6481
bancref-library@berkeley.edu
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