Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

His personal conquest
of Manuela—achieved by
defying the values and
customs of people over
whom he had power as an
occupier—was not unlike
the exploits of wealthy
Californios and their
colonial predecessors,
who claimed Indians
as mistresses or menial
laborers.
order, were being punished for their sins. His
personal conquest of Manuela—achieved by defying
the values and customs of people over whom
he had power as an occupier—was not unlike the
exploits of wealthy Californios and their colonial
predecessors, who claimed Indians as mistresses
or menial laborers. Sully compared their way of
life to that of a “rich Southern planter, only in
place of Negroes they have Indians for servants.” 13
Although not a slaveholder, Sully had a black servant,
whose death added to the burden of guilt he
bore as a master and conqueror and shared with
12 California History • volume 90 number 1 2012
those of Spanish heritage who once dominated
this country.
The bitterness and resentment that overcame
Sully when the seemingly safe harbor he had
found in California was shattered gradually
receded, allowing him to resume cordial relations
with his in-laws. He and Angustias grew even
closer than they had been before, linked now by a
sense of loss that was too great for either to bear
alone.
Before leaving for Benicia—a transfer he sought
in order to distance himself from Monterey
and its painful associations—he visited Santa
Barbara with Angustias to pay his respects to
her father. Sully characterized that venerable
figure as a “queer old specimen of an old Spanish
gentleman, very polite, very dignified & very
hospitable, but very bigoted & very tyrannical
but not unkind.” As indicated by that ambivalent
assessment, Sully found saving graces in the old
colonial regime of cross and crown that his late
wife’s grandfather represented. Wishing to see
the church where Manuela had been confirmed,
he visited the hilltop mission overlooking the
town and admired “the altar at which she had as
a child so often knelt, & at the foot of the altar
the tomb of her grandmother, who was more
than a mother to her.” Saddened, he left the sanctuary
and walked behind the mission, where an
aqueduct built by Indians under the supervision
of padres now lay in ruins. “It is wonderful what
those old Spanish priests were able to accomplish
with the means at hand,” he wrote. “How they
civilized the Indians & taught them every branch
of useful knowledge & then with the workmen of
their own creation erected works that would do
credit to any part of the world.” 14
Sully’s appreciative view of the mission system
echoed that of Alfred Robinson and other foreigners
with close ties to this society and contrasted
sharply with the skeptical assessments
of American visitors who remained aloof from