Frederick Bee

Frederick Beewas an American attorney, entrepreneur, and diplomat who was one of the principal advocates for the civil rights of Chinese immigrants in the United States in the 1870s and ’80s.

Bee—whose father was an English immigrant, tailor, and Mason—spent his early life in New York state. In 1849 he followed his brother Albert W. Bee to the California goldfields, where he began an involvement with mining that lasted many years. During that period he and his brother established and operated a store in Hangtown (which became Placerville in 1854). By the mid-1850s, mining in California was largely divided between native-born miners on one side and low-paid but productive Chinese miners and the capitalist entrepreneurs who employed them on the other. When Bee hired Chinese miners for a difficult project that involved extracting gold from a water-filled pit in 1855, he was remaining true to his beliefs as a self-described capitalist.

In the late 1850s Bee oversaw the construction of a telegraph line, popularly known as the “Grapevine,” from Placerville across the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In 1859, as the president of the Placerville and Humboldt [Overland] Telegraph Company, he obtained funding from the U.S. government to extend his telegraph network eastward. Partnering with the Western Union Telegraph Company (under whose aegis his firm was later consolidated), he was ultimately able to realize his vision of a transcontinental telegraph line, much to his own financial gain.

About that time Bee also may have come up with the idea for the Pony Express (there are several theories regarding the origins of the famous horse-and-rider mail relay system). Regardless of whether the idea was his, Bee was among those whose names were included on the charter granted to Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company (the formal name of the Pony Express) by the Territory of Kansas in 1860. Sometime between 1859 and 1860, as his lobbying efforts took on a national scale, Bee began employing the honorary title of colonel.

He shifted his focus to the building of railroads for most of the period from 1862 to 1876. He also was one of the original incorporators of Sausalito, California, as a founder of the Sausalito Land and Ferry Company. While acting as a lobbyist for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and unsuccessfully pursuing congressional approval for a subsidy for a steamship mail service to Australia, Bee developed an interest in the Pacific region that led him to invest in and work for the Central Polynesia Land and Commercial Company. The extent of Bee’s culpability in that notorious scheme to control Samoa is unclear. His return to railroad building ended in failure when the Olympia Railroad and Coal Mining Company was unable to begin operations in Washington state in the early 1870s.

When a joint congressional committee held hearings in San Francisco in 1876 to investigate the “extent, character, and effect of Chinese immigration,” several local attorneys refused Indiana Sen. Oliver H.P.T. Morton’s offer to represent the interests of the principal organization of Chinese Americans, the Chinese Six Companies, likely in part because they feared the potential repercussions that might have resulted for them from nativist reaction had they accepted. Bee, however—having recently experienced business failures and mindful of the limited opportunities available in the then struggling economy—took on the job in the same capitalist spirit that had earlier put him on the side of the Chinese miners. While establishing a consulate in San Francisco in 1878, representatives of the Chinese government recognized the need for assistance from a Westerner and, having learned of Bee’s earlier attempts to help Chinese people settle disputes, hired him as consul. In that capacity he acted on behalf of the Chinese immigrant community before the U.S. government and in court, defending the rights of the Chinese against discriminatory local laws and seeking redress and reparations for growing anti-Chinese violence in California and elsewhere in the United States, perhaps most notably in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where 28 Chinese miners were killed by their coworkers for refusing to join a strike.

A man of high principles, Bee became the target of death threats as he confronted the second California Constitution in 1879, which allowed for the removal of Chinese residents by local governments, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a federal law that prohibited the immigration of Chinese labourers. From 1882 to 1892 Bee spent much of his time dealing with habeas corpus cases created by the Exclusion Act. But two weeks before his death, in May 1892, the Geary Act made Chinese immigration even more restrictive. Although he was not often successful in winning significant reforms for the Chinese people that he represented, Bee provided inestimable support for Chinese immigrants in their struggle for civil rights at a time when they had few allies, and he bolstered their determination to fight on.