Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

Sully were promptly married by the local priest,
who was later removed from his post for performing
this ceremony without parental consent. Sully
appeared unaware that his actions might have
compromised the priest and insulted the young
admirer who had unwittingly escorted Manuela to
her wedding, but he could not ignore the offense
he caused her parents. “The old folks are as mad
as well can be,” he wrote. “I went to see them &
was invited never to show my face again.” 9
a “JudgMent FroM god”
Manuela’s parents had reason to feel cheated, but
for Angustias the betrayal was deeply personal,
coming as it did from someone she had treated
as a member of her family. The betrayal was symbolized
by the gold ring that Sully had intended
to wear in her honor. In June 1850, a month after
his furtive wedding, he wrote home to thank his
family for sending it: “The steamer of yesterday
brought me two letters & the ring, which is pronounced
beautiful. Manuela has it.” 10
Angustias was slower than her husband to forgive
Sully, but she reconciled with him when she
learned that Manuela was pregnant. By imposing
on this proud family and violating the code by
which they lived, however, Sully had set the stage
for tragedy. In late March 1851, less than two
weeks after giving birth, Manuela fell violently
ill and died after eating what Sully called a “fatal
orange” sent to her as a present. It was rumored
afterward that the gift came from a disappointed
suitor, who had poisoned the fruit. Sully had
urged her not to eat the orange, fearing that it
might be bad for her, but her mother thought it
would do her no harm and consulted the physician
(her future husband, James Ord), who gave
his consent. “Thus by the ignorance of a doctor
I have been robbed of a treasure that can never
be replaced,” Sully lamented. His black servant,
Sam, who was devoted to Manuela, became so
distraught after her death that he killed himself,
believing “that in the world to come we would all
be united once more together.” The final blow for
Sully came a short time later, when Angustias,
who had recently given birth, took Manuela’s
infant to bed with her to nurse the boy and fell
asleep with him in her arms. “When she woke
up he was dead,” Sully wrote. “She had strangled
it in her sleep. The doctor persuaded her it
died of a convulsion, but to me alone he told
the true story.” 11
In his shock and grief, Sully may have misinterpreted
these terrible events. The “fatal orange”
was just one possible cause of the sudden intestinal
torments Manuela suffered before she died
(she may have contracted cholera). And Sully’s
assertion that Angustias “strangled” the infant
in her sleep hinted perhaps at an unconscious
motive on her part—lingering hostility toward
him—that existed only in his imagination. But
whether those deaths and Sam’s demise were the
result of “ignorance & violence,” as he put it, or
random misfortunes beyond anyone’s control,
Sully had reason to feel that dreadful punishment
had been visited on him and his in-laws.
“It appears like a judgment from God for some
crime that I or her family have committed,”
he wrote. 12
aFter the Fall
Sully was surely aware that the act he believed
set this tragedy in motion—eating a forbidden
fruit—was like the original sin that brought God’s
judgment on Adam and Eve. The fact that his
new family’s devastating fall from grace occurred
in California, a bountiful land likened to Eden,
made that biblical precedent hard to ignore. But
there were other reasons, rooted not in myth but
in history, for Sully to feel that he, as a representative
of the expanding American empire, or
his in-laws, as heirs to the old Spanish imperial
11