The Fondo Piadoso de las Californias — a private endowment that paid for a royal frontier
A charitable fund built from private Mexican donations that financed the settlement of the Californias from 1697, at a moment when the royal treasury had given up paying for it. It carried the missions, the soldiers and the ships; it was expropriated in administration when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767, with its purpose preserved in the decree that took it; and it ended as the first case decided at The Hague in 1902.
Why this wins its question: The Pious Fund is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as the first case decided by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and the Spanish century that created it is compressed into a clause. Reversing that is the point here: a crown that had written California off as unaffordable, an enterprise licensed on condition that it never draw on royal revenue, a frontier whose soldiers and sailors were paid by private donors, a foundation deed of 1735 endowing it in perpetuity, and a 1767 expulsion decree that took the fund while binding itself to keep its purpose. The same deed's own language about "barbarous people" and the licence's right to arm soldiers are quoted here beside the charity, from the one document that prints them together.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The fund began where royal financing stopped. In 1697 the Jesuits Juan Maria Salvatierra and Eusebio Francisco Kino petitioned the king of Spain for leave to undertake the conversion of the people of California, and the king, in the words of the record, recognised "that prior expenditures on the part of the royal treasury for the purpose of obtaining the subjugation of California had proven a failure, and that it was not proper to expend additional public property to make new conquests in that neighborhood", and that the enterprise was to rest on the charitable contributions certain persons had offered.
The licence carried conditions that show what kind of enterprise it was. The fathers were not to have power, without an order from the king, to draw on the royal revenues for such "conquests"; everything conquered was to be taken possession of in his name; and the fathers were to have absolute control of the expedition, "with the right to arm soldiers for their protection". A missionary undertaking financed by donors was also an armed occupation performed on the crown's behalf, and the licence says both things in one sentence.
In the latter part of October 1697 the party landed at the small harbour of San Dionysio, threw up an entrenchment, erected a tent as a temporary chapel with a cross planted before it, and on 25 October took formal possession of the country in the name of the king.
For a time the fund carried the entire cost of the frontier, military included: the whole expenses of the missions founded by these fathers and their successors "and all the soldiers and sailors employed were defrayed from the charitable contributions which formed the nucleus of the Pious Fund". Only later did the king consent to take the expense of the soldiers and sailors upon himself and allow the missionaries a stipend of two hundred pesos a year for their personal support.
The record states that as late as 1734 the missions occasioned no expense to the royal treasury and no money had been furnished the missionaries as salary or stipend. On the same page the total of contributions for the development of the California missions down to 1731 is given as 120,000 dollars, on the authority of the Noticias de la Provincia de Californias, with the qualification that judicious investment had probably augmented the sum somewhat.
The deed generally regarded as the foundation deed of the fund is dated 8 June 1735, from the Marques de Villapuente and his wife the Marquesa de las Torres de Rada, and the value of one half of the property it conveyed is given as 204,000 dollars. It conveys to the Society of Jesus and its Californian missions, "now and at all times hereafter", so that from the profits of the estates and the increase of their cattle, large and small, the missions may be maintained in the manner laid down "forever" — a perpetual endowment, not a subsidy renewable at pleasure.
The endowment kept growing by private gift. In 1746 the Marques de Villapuente founded an eleventh mission with the sum of 10,000 dollars, and in 1747 Dona Maria de Borja, Duquesa de Gandia, furnished the missions by her will with 62,000 dollars, a contribution that rose after the falling in of annuities left to servants to more than 120,000.
What the donors thought they were paying for is on the record in their own words, and it is not neutral. The 1735 deed recites the Society's members as having "drawn into the fold of our holy Catholic faith great numbers of those barbarous people", to whom they were devoting themselves at the sacrifice of their lives, and gives as a motive that the many other tribes "now at the doors of the church, as well as those remaining yet undiscovered", should not be deprived of the same advantages. The fund was an instrument of conversion and its foundation deed says so.
In 1767 a royal decree ordered the banishment of the Jesuits and the taking possession of their temporalities by the government, with a further decree in 1773 enforcing it; the order itself was abolished by papal decree of 21 July 1773. Three of the missions that had been established were suppressed, and the missions of northern California were afterwards established by the Franciscans, supported — in a phrase the record quotes — "out of the enormous Pious fund acquired by the Jesuit fathers".
The formula by which the crown took the fund is the most consequential sentence in the whole story, because it separated administration from ownership of the purpose. The king declared that he had "subrogated in my royal person all the rights of patronage which belonged to the regulars of the said order, and also those which they might possess in common with those other orders, without prejudice to these being devoted to the same purpose which they were before the time of the expulsion". The trust survived the confiscation of its trustee, and that is why the obligation could still be argued over in an international tribunal a century and a half later.
The witness is a party's brief and is treated as one. Everything above is read from the printed Case of the United States before the arbitral tribunal at The Hague in 1902, a document arguing the American claim against Mexico, which narrates the Spanish period from a transcript of record it cites by page. It is used here for the recitals and quotations it makes and not for the conclusions it draws, and the confidences above are set accordingly; a Spanish-archive reading of the same deeds could revise the figures.