Leland Stanford

Leland Stanford
8th Governor of California
In office January 10, 1862 – December 10, 1863
Lieutenant	John F. Chellis
Preceded by	John G. Downey
Succeeded by	Frederick Low
United States Senator from California
In office 1885–1893
Preceded by	James T. Farley
Succeeded by	George C. Perkins
Personal details
Born	March 9, 1824(1824-03-09) Watervliet, New York
Died	June 21, 1893(1893-06-21) (aged 69) Palo Alto, California
Political party	Republican
Spouse(s)	Jane Elizabeth Lathrop
Alma mater	Cazenovia Seminary
Profession	Entrepreneur, politician
Signature

Amasa Leland Stanford (March 9, 1824 – June 21, 1893) was an American tycoon, industrialist, robber baron, politician and founder of Stanford University.

Biography

Early years

Stanford was born in 1824 in what was then Watervliet, New York (in what is now the town of Colonie). He was one of eight children of Josiah and Elizabeth Phillips Stanford. Stanford was raised on family farms in Lisha Kill and Roessleville (after 1836) areas of Watervliet. The family home in Roessleville was called Elm Grove. The Elm Grove home was razed in the 1940s. His immigrant ancestor, Thomas Stanford, settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in the 17th century. Later ancestors settled in the Mohawk Valley of New York about 1720. Stanford's father was a farmer of some means. Stanford attended the common schools until 1836 and was tutored at home until 1839. He attended Clinton Liberal Institute, in Clinton, New York, and studied law at Cazenovia Seminary in Cazenovia, New York in 1841-45. In 1845, he entered the law office of Wheaton, Doolittle and Hadley in Albany.

Stanford was admitted to the bar in 1848, and then moved to Port Washington, Wisconsin, where he began law practice with Wesley Pierce. His father presented him with a law library said to be the finest north of Milwaukee. On September 30, 1850, he married Jane Elizabeth Lathrop in Albany. She was the daughter of Dyer Lathrop, a merchant of that city, and Jane Anne (Shields) Lathrop. The couple were the parents of one son, Leland Stanford, Jr., born in 1868 when both were middle-aged.

In 1850, Stanford was nominated by the Whig Party as Washington County, Wisconsin District Attorney.

Businesses

In 1852, having lost his law library and other property by fire, he moved to California during the California Gold Rush. His wife Jane remained in Albany with her family. He went into business with his five brothers, who had preceded him to the Pacific coast. Stanford was keeper of a general store for miners at Michigan Flat in Placer County, and later had a wholesale house. He served as a Justice of the Peace and helped organize the Sacramento Library Association, which later became the Sacramento Public Library. In 1855, he returned to Albany to join his wife. Stanford found the pace of Eastern life too slow, and in 1856, he and Jane moved to San Francisco and engaged in mercantile pursuits on a large scale.

Pacific Railroad Bond, City and County of San Francisco, 1865

Stanford was one of the four major Sacramento, California businessmen known popularly as "The Big Four" (or among themselves as "the Associates") that were the key investors in the Central Pacific Railroad that was incorporated on June 28, 1861, and of which Stanford was elected president. His other three associates were Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington with Theodore Dehone Judah as the nascent company's chief engineer. In 1861, he was again nominated (the first run was in 1859) to run for Governor of California, and this time he was elected. The railroad's first locomotive, named "Gov. Stanford" in his honor, is on display today at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

In May 1868, he joined Lloyd Tevis, Darius Ogden Mills, H.D. Bacon, Hopkins, and Crocker in forming the Pacific Union Express Company, which merged in 1870 with Wells Fargo and Company. As head of the railroad company which built the western portion of the "First Transcontinental Railroad" over the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, Nevada, and Utah, Stanford presided at the ceremonial driving of "Last Spike" in Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869, where the grade of the CPRR met that of the Union Pacific Railroad, which had been built west from its eastern terminus at Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska.

While the Central Pacific was still abuilding, Stanford and his associates acquired control of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1868. Stanford was elected president of the Southern Pacific, a post he held (except for a brief period in 1869-70 when Tevis was acting president) until ousted by Huntington in 1890.

Stanford was a director of Wells Fargo and Company from 1870 to January 1884 and, after a brief retirement from the board, again from February 1884 until his death in June 1893.

Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion"

In 1872, Stanford commissioned Eadweard Muybridge to use newly invented photographic technology to establish whether a trotting horse ever has all four feet off the ground simultaneously, which, it was found, they do. This project using one of Stanford's own trotting horses, Occident, which illustrated motion through a series of still images viewed together, was a forerunner of motion picture technology.

Stanford moved to San Francisco in 1874, where he assumed presidency of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company, the steamship line to Japan and China associated with the Central Pacific.

The Southern Pacific Company was organized in 1884 as a holding company for the Central Pacific-Southern Pacific system. Stanford was president of the Southern Pacific Company from 1885 until 1890, when he was forced out of that post, as well as the presidency of the Southern Pacific Railroad, by Huntington in revenge for Stanford's election to the United States Senate in 1885 over Huntington's friend, A.A. Sargent. Stanford was elected chairman of the Southern Pacific Railroad's executive committee in 1890, and he held this post and the presidency of the Central Pacific Railroad until his death.

He owned two wineries, the Stanford Brothers Winery in Alameda County founded in 1869, and run by brother Josiah, and the 55,000 acres (223 km²) Great Vina Ranch in Tehama County, containing what was then the largest vineyard in the world at 3,575 acres (14 km²). He also owned the Gridley tract of 17,800 acres (72 km²) in Butte County and the Palo Alto Stock Farm in Santa Clara County, which was the home of his famous Standardbred horses: Electioneer, Arion, Sunol, Palo Alto, Beautiful Bells, and Chimes. The Palo Alto breeding farm gave Stanford University its nickname of "The Farm". The Stanfords also owned a stately mansion in Sacramento, California, which was the birthplace of their only son, and is now the Leland Stanford Mansion State Historic Park, a house museum used for California state social occasions. The home they owned in San Francisco's Nob Hill district, which was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, is now the site of the Stanford Court Hotel.

Politics

Leland Stanford in 1890

Stanford, a leading member of the Republican Party, was politically active. In 1856, he met with other Whig politicians in Sacramento to organize the California Republican Party at its first state convention on April 30. He was chosen as a delegate to the Republican Party convention which selected US presidential electors in both 1856 and 1860. Stanford was defeated in his 1857 bid for California State Treasurer, and his 1859 bid for the office of Governor of California. In 1860, he was named a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, but did not attend. He was finally elected governor in 1861.

He was the eighth Governor of California, serving from January 1862 to December 1863, and the first Republican governor. Due to large winter storm floods, the governor was said to have needed to row in a boat to his own inauguration. A large, slow-speaking man who always read from a prepared text, he impressed his listeners as being more sincere than a glib, extemporaneous speaker.

The gold strike in California had brought a large influx of newcomers into the territory. The Chinese immigrants, in particular, were subject to persecution in the gold fields and in small towns and cities, as well. Anti-Chinese sentiment became an official political issue over time. Stanford, as governor, ostensibly supported the prevailing mood in the state, which lobbied for the restriction of Chinese immigration. In a message to the legislature in January 1862, Stanford proclaimed, “The presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race.” His pronouncement was initially received with widespread enthusiasm, and Stanford was lauded as a defender of the white race. Public opinion shifted when Stanford's blatant hypocrisy was disclosed. As the head of the Central Pacific, Stanford oversaw a corporation which imported thousands of Chinese laborers in the construction of the railroad.

During his gubernatorial tenure, he cut the state's debt in half, and advocated for the conservation of forests. He also oversaw the establishment of the California's first state normal school in San José, later to become San José State University. Following Stanford's governorship, the term of office changed from two years to four years, in line with legislation passed during his time in office.

Later, he served in the United States Senate from 1885 until his death in 1893. He served for four years as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, and also served on the Naval Committee. He authored several Senate bills that advanced ideas advocated by the Populists: a bill to foster the creation of worker-owned cooperatives, and a bill to allow the issuance of currency backed by land value instead of only the gold standard. Neither bill made it out of committee. In Washington, D.C., he had a residence on Farragut Square near the home of Baron Karl von Struve, Russian minister to the United States.

Stanford University

The Memorial Church at Stanford University is dedicated to the memory of Leland Stanford.

Leland Stanford, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, 1881, Stanford museum

With wife Jane, Stanford founded Leland Stanford Junior University as a memorial for their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died as a teenager of typhoid in Florence, Italy, in 1884 while on a trip to Europe. The University was established by the March 9, 1885, Endowment Act of the California Assembly and Senate, and the Grant of Endowment from Leland and Jane Stanford signed at the first meeting of the Board of Trustees on November 14, 1885. Besides defining the operational structure of the University, the Grant of Endowment makes only these specific stipulations: "The Trustees . . . shall have the power and it shall be their duty:

• To establish and maintain at such University an educational system, which will, if followed, fit the graduate for some useful pursuit, and to this end to cause the pupils, as easily as may be, to declare the particular calling, which, in life, they may desire to pursue . . .
• To prohibit sectarian instruction, but to have taught in the University the immortality of the soul, the existence of an all-wise and benevolent Creator, and that obedience to His laws is the highest duty of man.
• To have taught in the University the right and advantages of association and co-operation.
• To afford equal facilities and give equal advantages in the University to both sexes.
• To maintain on the Palo Alto estate a farm for instruction in agriculture in all its branches."

Approximately US$20 million (US$400 million in 2005 dollars) initially went into the university, which held its opening exercises October 1, 1891. Its first student, admitted to Encina Hall that day, was Herbert Hoover. The wealth of the Stanford family during the late 19th century is estimated at about US$50 million ($US1 billion in 2005 dollars).

Personal life

Leland Stanford was an active Freemason from 1850 to 1855 when he withdrew, joining the Prometheus Lodge No. 17 in Port Washington, WI, and then becoming a member of the Michigan City Lodge No. 47 in Michigan City, California. He was also a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows in California

Long suffering from locomotor ataxia, Leland Stanford died of heart failure at home in Palo Alto, California on June 21, 1893, and is buried in the Stanford family mausoleum on the Stanford campus. Jane Stanford died in 1905.

Legacy

Central Pacific locomotives named for Stanford were:

• Gov. Stanford, a 4-4-0 locomotive built in 1863 by the Norris Locomotive Works in Philadelphia and brought to San Francisco by sailing vessel. This engine is preserved at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.
• El Gobernador, a 4-10-0 locomotive built in the Central Pacific shops in Sacramento in 1884. Disappointing in its performance as a freight hauler, it was quietly scrapped in July 1894.

The on-campus Stanford Memorial Church is also dedicated to his memory.

Stanford was inducted into the The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts, California Hall of Fame on December 15, 2008. Tom Stanford accepted the honors on his behalf.

References

•  "Stanford, Leland". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900. 
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

• Governor Leland Stanford biography at the California State Library
• Leland Stanford at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Penny Postcards: Leland Stanford's store: Michigan Bluff, California
• Stanford's racist speech: "Leland Stanford promised in his inaugural address to protect the state from "the dregs of Asia" -PBS.org
• Leland Stanford at Find a Grave

Government offices
Preceded by John G. Downey	Governor of California January 10, 1862 – December 10, 1863	Succeeded by Frederick Low
Preceded by James T. Farley	United States Senator (Class 3) from California March 4, 1885 – June 21, 1893 Served alongside: John F. Miller, George Hearst, Charles N. Felton, Stephen M. White	Succeeded by George C. Perkins
Business positions
Preceded by None	Executive Committee Chairmen Southern Pacific Railroad 1890–1893	Succeeded by Robert S. Lovett