Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

fate, wealthy Californios fell back on the custom
of accommodating respectable Americans and
trying to win them over. For their part, Sully
and other officers welcomed those overtures
and found interacting with their Hispanic hosts
enjoyable and instructive.
Sully would follow the example of earlier American
captains and traders by entering this hospitable
society through marriage. But his union
would end tragically, and he bore some responsibility
for setting that tragedy in motion. Although
he had more in common with the appreciative
maritime visitors who courted Californios in earlier
times than with the defiant overlanders who
spurned them, he came into California as a conqueror,
and his marriage amounted to a personal
conquest, which he achieved by imposing on
those over whom he had authority. This ill-fated
marriage was the first of three such relationships
Sully entered into during his military career, all
of them with women from groups subsumed
forcefully within the expansive nation he served.
Professionally and personally, he wrestled with
the contradictions inherent in Jefferson’s goal of
an empire for liberty—a problematic objective
that could not be pursued without taking liberties
in the process.
hoSting the oCCupierS
Soon after landing in Monterey, Sully made the
acquaintance of Angustias de la Guerra, whose
Spanish-born father, José de la Guerra y Noriega,
had commanded the presidio at Santa Barbara
and whose husband, Manuel Jimeno Casarín,
had served as an official in Monterey before
American forces occupied the town in 1846. She
had long and close ties to Anglos. Among her
in-laws were the American merchant Alfred Robinson
and the English trader William Hartnell,
both of whom had become Catholics and Mexican
citizens before entering her family. Annexation
by the United States, she concluded, was a
Professionally and
personally, he wrestled
with the contradictions
inherent in Jefferson’s
goal of an empire for
liberty—a problematic
objective that could not be
pursued without taking
liberties in the process.
better fate for California than continuing “on the
road to utter ruin” under a poor and politically
unstable Mexico. American forces took Monterey
unopposed, and she and other prominent residents
saw no reason to spurn polite American
officers such as Lieutenant Edward Ord, brother
of Dr. James Ord, an army physician whom she
married following the death of Jimeno. In her
wartime diary, she referred to Edward Ord fondly
as “Don Eduardo,” observing that “he looks
like one of us. He is very charming and dances
divinely.” But her friendship with him and other
American officers did not ease her fears that this
new regime might bring wrenching changes to
her country. “Putting the laughter and dancing
aside,” she wrote, “we are all ill at ease because
we do not know how we, the owners of all this,
will end up! May God be with us!” 4
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