The end of the Northern Rebellions, the Rebeliones del norte as they were called in Mexico, had come to a very unhappy conclusion for Mexico. What started as two unrestful regions, Alta California and the northern half of Coahuila y Tejas, had broken away from Mexico entirely into two independent nations. The latter had become the Republic of Texas, governed by Samuel Houston. And the former had reorganized itself into the California Republic, a vast nation that covered more than 1,200,000 square kilometers of North America yet was sparsely populated. It held vast mineral reserves, capacity for staggering agricultural production, and some of the most beautiful natural landscapes of any part of the world.
The thing of it was, no one really knew this at the time. Since the days of Spanish colonization, what was now California had been ignored by both the Spanish Empire and then Mexico after independence. Mexico had held such little interest in Alta California that they had invited American settlers to settle the land for them. They had created small settlements along the coast, and a handful in the interior. Even as the rebellion had dawned in 1832, there were only 30,000 Anglo-Californians, 7,000 Hispanic-Californians, and somewhere on the order of 20,000 natives all through the interior. In total, California had approximately 60,000 people, comparable to the nearly 70,000 in Texas.
Many considered California and Texas to be sister nations, born out of rebellion from Mexico. The two, though, were sisters only in circumstance. Texas had been settled by men from the south of the United States, and many had brought their slaves. As such, the Republic of Texas had many slaves at the time of its independence, and Texas had legalized slavery within its borders. California, however, had been settled by men from the northern United States, and had carried their anti-slavery attitudes with them. At the start of independence in 1836, there were 236 Afro-Californians, and not one of them was enslaved, with the Seventh Amendment of the California Constitution proclaiming slavery illegal in the new republic. And unlike Texas, where one of the principal calls for independence was that Mexico had banned slavery, California had declared independence out of a new sense of latent nationalism, identifying itself as Californian and not Mexican.
Indeed, while Texas wanted to be closer to the United States and held an almost jingoistic attitude towards Mexico, California wanted a cordial relationship with Mexico and was very desirous of remaining independent of the United States. In many ways, Texas and California were destined to be rivals, if not enemies. Over the horizon, however, emboldened by the purchase of Louisiana, the United States had started growing ever more desirous of expanding from sea to sea, seeing to extend the eagle's wings across the continent.
Within California, there was a problem from sheer demographics. The base of the republic rested on the Anglo-Californians. They had settled the coast and immediate interior, with the base of their population in the new capital of San Francisco, a sleepy little town of just 17,000 people. The Latinos lay mostly in the same area, mostly involved in ranching and small-scale mining operations outside of the cities and often corralled into what had been called barrios in the cities. And everywhere lived the Native Californians, often derisively called the "First Nations". They were mostly ignored by the government, although those farsighted enough to see future immigration feared for encroachment on their lands.
The future was full of great doubt for the young nation. But it also held great, great promise.