The brilliant audacity of California’s method of admission into the Union stands without parallel in the history of the nation.  Outside of the original thirteen colonies, she was the only State carved out of the national domain which was admitted into the Union without a previous enabling act or territorial apprenticeship.  What was called the State of Deseret tried it and failed, and the annexation of Texas was the annexation of a foreign republic.  The so-called State of Transylvania and State of Franklin had been attempted secessions of western counties of the original states of Virginia and North Carolina, respectively, and their abortive attempts at admission addressed to the Continental Congress, and not to the Congress of the United States.  With full right, then, did California, by express resolution spreading the explanation upon the minutes of her constitutional convention[7], avowedly place upon her great seal her Minerva — her “robed goddess-in-arms” — not as the goddess of wisdom, not as the goddess of war, but to signify that as Minerva was not born, but sprang full-armed from the brain of Jupiter, so California, without territorial childhood, sprang full-grown into the sisterhood of states.

When it is remembered that California was not admitted into the Union till September 9, 1850, and yet that the first session of its State Legislature had met, legislated, and adjourned by April 22, 1850, some appreciation may be had of the speed limit -if there was a limit.  The record of the naive self-sufficiency of that Legislature is little short of amazing.

On February 9, 1850, seven months before the admission of the State, it coolly passed the following resolution:  “That the Governor be, and he is hereby authorized and requested, to cause to be procured, and prepared in the manner prescribed by the Washington Monument Association, a block of California marble, cinnabar, gold quartz or granite of suitable dimensions, with the word ‘California’ chiseled on its face, and that he cause the same to be forwarded to the managers of the Washington Monument Association, in the city of Washington, District of Columbia, to constitute a portion of the monument now being erected in that city to the memory of George Washington.”  California did not intend to be absent from any feast, or left out of any procession — not if she knew it.  Looking back now, our belief is that the only reason she required the word “California,” instead of the words “State of California,” to be chiseled on the stone was that the rules of the Monument Association probably prohibited any State from chiseling on the stone contributed by it any words except the mere name of the State itself.  And the resolution was obeyed — the stone was cut from a marble-bed on a ranch just outside Placerville, and is now in the monument!

On April 13, 1850, nearly five months before California was admitted into the Union, that Legislature gaily passed an act consisting of this provision:  “The common law of England, so far as it is not repugnant to or inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States, or the Constitution or laws of the State of California, shall be the rule of the decision in all the courts of the State.”