Representative Rodman McCamley Price

Rodman McCamley Price (May 5, 1816 – June 7, 1894) was an American naval officer, businessman, and Democratic Party politician who served as the 17th Governor of New Jersey from 1854 to 1857 and represented New Jersey in the United States House of Representatives for one term from 1851 to 1853. He also played a notable role in the early establishment of American civil authority in California during and after the Mexican–American War, served on the first San Francisco City Council, and became a prominent real estate speculator and tycoon on the Pacific coast.

Price was born in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey, on May 5, 1816. He came from a family with Revolutionary War connections; his grandfather and great-uncle had served as quartermasters in the Continental Army and later became merchants. During his youth, his family relocated to New York, and he attended the public schools of New York City before enrolling at the Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey. He pursued classical studies at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), but his course of study was cut short when illness forced him to withdraw before graduation. After leaving college, he read law, though he never entered legal practice, instead choosing to engage in the commission business in New York City, where he began to build the commercial and political connections that would shape his later career.

Through family ties and political connections to the administration of President Martin Van Buren, Price secured an appointment as a purser in the United States Navy in 1840. In that capacity, he was responsible for managing ship finances, payrolls, and provisioning. His early naval service was in peacetime, and he served aboard the steam warships USS Fulton and USS Missouri. In July 1843, he was aboard the Missouri when it made one of the first transatlantic crossings by a steam-powered warship. The voyage ended dramatically when the Missouri was wrecked off Gibraltar in an accidental fire. Price remained in Gibraltar as a guest of the British consul and then traveled through the Iberian Peninsula and to Paris. During this period he met Washington Irving, then United States Minister to Spain, and assisted Irving in research for his work on Christopher Columbus. Returning to naval duty, Price was assigned as purser to the sloop of war USS Cyane, part of Commodore John D. Sloat’s Pacific Squadron. His duties took him to ports such as Monterey, Matamoros, and Lima, where he bargained with local merchants and oversaw supplies and payrolls.

Price’s naval career became intertwined with the Mexican–American War and the American conquest of California. On July 7, 1846, the USS Cyane transported a detachment of United States Marines that seized Monterey, California. That same day, Commodore Sloat, acting as Military Governor of California, appointed Price prefect and alcalde (magistrate) of Monterey. In this role, Price administered the military occupation for about a month and was responsible for recording land titles and overseeing local civil affairs. He used his position to participate in the early rush for California land, acting as Sloat’s investment agent and partner and laying the foundation for his later real estate fortune. After returning to New York in 1848, Price secured another naval appointment as purser for the Pacific Squadron and relocated to San Francisco, where he managed provisioning and payroll for ships operating between Monterey and Honolulu. With the onset of the California Gold Rush and soaring commodity prices, the Navy expected him to support American financial stability and prevent the outflow of gold to London, but Price instead focused on private enrichment, becoming a real estate tycoon and entering local politics.

In San Francisco, Price quickly emerged as a civic figure. He was elected to the first Common Council (Ayuntamiento) of San Francisco and served from August 6, 1849, to January 10, 1850. He supported ambitious infrastructure projects, including the city’s Long Wharf, and invested heavily in local property. His naval career, however, ended in controversy. In August 1849, he was detached from the Pacific Squadron for making unauthorized drafts on specie in the Customs House and for failing to submit required quarterly expense returns. He returned east to account for Navy funds, but his case was complicated when the steamer Orleans St. John, on which he was traveling along the Alabama River, caught fire. Price claimed that payroll vouchers were destroyed in the blaze, leading to prolonged litigation over $88,000 in unaccounted Navy funds that would shadow him for decades. Despite these difficulties, his political fortunes in California remained strong. He served as a delegate to the September 1849 California Constitutional Convention and finished third in the November 1849 election for the state’s first U.S. Representatives. On December 28, 1849, he purchased Rancho San Geronimo from fellow naval officer Joseph Warren Revere for $7,500, sharing profits from timber exports, and on August 6, 1851, he bought the remainder of Revere’s property for $8,000. His eventual return to New Jersey later influenced Revere to acquire farmland and build The Willows, a mansion in Morristown, New Jersey.

By the early 1850s, Price had largely withdrawn from California and reestablished himself on the East Coast. He purchased a mansion in Hoboken, New Jersey, and entered into a Wall Street partnership to manage his California holdings and continue speculating in western real estate. In 1850, his father and Commodore Robert Field Stockton—who knew Price from Stockton’s tenure as military governor in California—helped engineer his nomination as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from New Jersey’s fifth congressional district, comprising Bergen, Essex, Hudson, and Passaic counties. Taking advantage of divisions within the Whig Party following the Compromise of 1850, Price narrowly won election in what was typically a Whig stronghold. As a Democratic member of the Thirty-second Congress, he served from March 4, 1851, to March 3, 1853. His term in the House was relatively uneventful; he was not an especially active legislator and devoted much of his attention to his California real estate interests and constituent services. He participated in only one recorded House debate, speaking in favor of recodifying naval martial law. In that speech he defended traditional flogging as conducive to a “well-ordered, well-disciplined ship,” but argued that summary courts-martial should replace the captain’s unilateral power to punish at sea. He was defeated for reelection in 1852 and returned to New Jersey to focus on his business affairs.

In 1853, Price was recruited by New Jersey Democrats to run for governor. His Whig opponents attacked his association with the powerful transportation monopoly known as the “Joint Companies”—the amalgamation of the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company and the Camden & Amboy Railroad—and questioned whether his extended residence in California disqualified him from holding state office. The Democratic campaign emphasized opposition to monopoly and a broad promise of “reform.” Price was elected governor by a reduced but still substantial margin and took office as New Jersey’s 17th governor in 1854, serving until 1857. As governor, he had limited leverage against entrenched county political machines and the large corporations that dominated the state’s economy, but he adhered to Jacksonian Democratic principles, criticizing unchecked corporate consolidation, paper bank currency, and excessive public spending. To honor his reform pledges, he supported the creation of a Law Reform Commission to reorganize the state judiciary, ultimately striking a compromise with Whigs that allowed passage of the reforms in exchange for a greater number of Whig judicial appointments.

Price’s administration addressed a range of political, social, and economic issues. In response to rising Protestant nativism, he recommended that the legislature consider a limited moratorium on naturalization in the period immediately preceding elections, while resisting calls for statewide prohibition of liquor and saloons so long as “constitutional rights” were respected. On the national question of slavery, he favored local control, particularly in the Kansas Territory, and in 1856 he campaigned on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee James Buchanan and New York City Mayor Fernando Wood. Economically, he continued to work with the Joint Companies, negotiating with Stockton to extend their charter until 1869 with a provision for possible state takeover twenty years later, in part to preserve the approximately $200,000 in annual tax revenue the monopoly generated for New Jersey. He repeatedly urged the abolition of the town highway commissioner system in favor of countywide administration of roads, but his proposals were blocked by local interests that relied on the existing system for patronage.

As governor, Price also pursued initiatives in infrastructure, regulation, and education. Concerned about the impact of rapid development along the Hudson River, he joined with New York Governor Myron Clark to establish a joint harbor commission to investigate whether Manhattan’s expanding wharves impeded river flow and to recommend official bulkhead lines, an early example of interstate port regulation. He created the first pilots’ board to assist Newark and Jersey City shippers who were struggling to maintain a share of transatlantic trade from Liverpool. At the urging of agricultural societies and industrial interests in northern New Jersey, he established the state’s first geological survey, financing it in part by selling maps of New Jersey’s soil and mineral resources to European investors. In the field of public education, Price is sometimes regarded as a father of the New Jersey public school system. Building on earlier efforts by Democratic governors Daniel Haines and George F. Fort, he responded to longstanding calls for improved public schooling by supporting legislation to create state normal schools for teacher training, thereby helping to transform professional education into a significant statewide interest group. He participated in the 1854 Sussex Institute and advocated extending similar institutions to all counties. In January 1855, he called for a state training school and drafted the bill that established the Trenton Normal School, a foundational step in New Jersey’s public education infrastructure.

Barred by the New Jersey Constitution from serving consecutive gubernatorial terms, Price left office in 1857. He sought appointment as United States minister to Mexico under President Buchanan but was unsuccessful. Thereafter he turned primarily to business ventures, many of them aligned with the industries that had expanded during his governorship. With his business partner Horace P. Russ, he developed quarrying operations on his father’s property along the Hackensack River, using the stone and minerals to produce pavement for construction projects in New York, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia. While still in office he and his father had established a privately owned ferry line between Weehawken and New York City, whose flagship vessel was named the Rodman M. Price. He also organized barge commerce on New York State’s inland waterways and continued to speculate in land in the hills of southern Bergen County. During the secession crisis and the early months of the American Civil War, Price largely withdrew from active partisan politics but served as one of nine New Jersey delegates to the Peace Conference of 1861, which sought to avert armed conflict. On April 4, 1861, he authored an editorial urging New Jerseyans not to take up arms, reflecting his preference for compromise and conciliation.

In his later years, Price lived as a gentleman farmer in northern New Jersey but struggled with persistent financial difficulties, particularly after the death of his father. Many of his business enterprises failed, and the unresolved issues stemming from his California-era Navy accounts and land dealings continued to trouble him. In 1890, after decades of litigation and lobbying, the United States Congress passed a bill granting him relief on his long-standing claims against the Navy related to the disputed purser accounts. The funds he received were immediately applied to settle another debt arising from his California real estate ventures, providing little lasting financial security. At one point late in life, he was confined in a debtors’ prison in the Hackensack jail. Rodman McCamley Price died in Oakland, Bergen County, New Jersey, on June 7, 1894. He was interred in the Reformed Cemetery in Mahwah, New Jersey, closing the life of a figure who had moved from naval service and frontier politics to the highest office in his native state and then into a long, often troubled, retirement.