E Clampus Vitus · The Senate at Benicia, 1853

The morning the Clampers came before the Senate

On Thursday, 17 March 1853, in the capitol at Benicia, a California senator asked his colleagues to lend their chamber to the “E. Clampsus Vitus” Society. One senator said he would rather cut his right arm off. Another named the Chairman of the Committee on Personal Beauty. And the next day the Senate struck the whole affair from its journal. Step into the room, and play the debate as the papers told it.

Opening the chamber…

The room

Benicia was the capital of California for thirteen months, from February 1853 to February 1854, and the Legislature met in a brick building put up in 1852 for the town’s city hall. A newspaper of December 1852 gave its measure: forty-five by eighty-seven feet, the lower story fourteen feet in the clear, the upper fifteen, and a lower hall of forty-two by forty-six feet opening straight from the front door. The Senate met in that lower hall, and the Assembly upstairs. The six cedar columns of the Senate chamber, the state’s marker says, began life as the masts of ships abandoned in the bay. The building had no plumbing, no heating and no lighting of its own, so here it is a bright March morning, with the sun through the east windows.

The desks, the chairs, the bar, the flag of thirty-one stars (California was the thirty-first state) and the people are drawn from the furnishings of the time and the restored chamber that the state keeps today. Where each senator sat is not recorded, and the faces and gestures are imagined; so is the clerk’s handwritten page, since the printed Journal of the Senate has not a word of the debate. The words in the captions are the newspapers’, quoted exactly.

The debate

The whole story, with the three newspapers that reported it and the Senate’s own silent journal, is in E Clampus Vitus: the complete record. Jim Cirner found the Daily Alta California’s report of the vote to strike it out.

Sources: Sacramento Daily Union, San Joaquin Republican and Daily Alta California, all of 19 March 1853 (California Digital Newspaper Collection); Placer Times and Transcript, 30 December 1852, on the building; the State of California’s marker at the Benicia Capitol State Historic Park. Made by Project Scroll in three.js (MIT licence). Project Scroll is independent research. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by E Clampus Vitus, Inc. or any of its chapters, and it does not speak for the order. E Clampus Vitus®, ECV® and Clampers® are registered trademarks of E Clampus Vitus, Inc., named here only to identify the order.