Meet The Emperor Of The United States of America, Also Known As Joshua Abraham Norton
- May 23, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
In September 1859, a bankrupt San Francisco businessman walked into the offices of a local newspaper and handed over a notice declaring himself Emperor of the United States. Most cities would have laughed him off the premises or had him committed. San Francisco printed the notice, and then kept humouring him for the next 21 years, right up until his funeral drew a bigger crowd than most sitting politicians could hope for.
Quick Answers
Who was Emperor Norton? Joshua Abraham Norton was a San Francisco businessman who, after losing his fortune, declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. He had no real political power, but the city largely humoured and even embraced him for the next two decades.
Was Emperor Norton actually insane? He was widely regarded as mentally unwell by the standards of the time, and the 1870 census officially recorded his occupation as emperor while noting he couldn't vote due to insanity. He was never institutionalised, and remained lucid, well-read and gentle in daily life.
How did Emperor Norton die? He collapsed on a San Francisco street corner on 8 January 1880 and died before he could reach a hospital. An estimated 10,000 to 30,000 mourners turned out for his funeral procession.
A Fortune Made and Lost
Joshua Abraham Norton was born in England, most likely in 1818 though his own gravestone gives 1819, and spent his childhood in South Africa after his family emigrated there. He arrived in San Francisco in 1849 with roughly $40,000 inherited from his father, right as the Gold Rush was turning the city from a sleepy port into one of the fastest growing places on Earth. Norton had a genuine talent for business, and within a few years had built his inheritance into a real estate and import fortune worth an estimated $250,000, a substantial sum for the period.
It fell apart just as quickly. In 1852, hearing that China had banned rice exports, Norton tried to corner the San Francisco rice market, buying an entire shipload at a steep price on the assumption that scarcity would send the price soaring. Days later, several more rice ships sailed into the harbour, prices collapsed instead, and Norton tried to walk away from the contract. The suppliers sued him, and after more than two years of costly litigation he lost the case, then lost his real estate holdings, and by 1856 had filed for bankruptcy. He dropped out of public life entirely for roughly three years.
An Emperor Is Declared
Norton resurfaced in September 1859 with an entirely new identity. He hand-delivered a notice to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin declaring himself, in his own words, "Emperor of these United States," and calling on delegates from every state to assemble and reorganise the government under his authority. The Bulletin printed it. Two years later, once France invaded Mexico, Norton expanded his own title further, adding Protector of Mexico for good measure.
What exactly triggered the shift has never been fully settled. His biographer William Drury has argued there wasn't a single dramatic breaking point between the ruined businessman of 1856 and the emperor of 1859, but rather signs of the persona building for years beforehand. Whatever the cause, San Francisco in 1859 was still a young, chaotic, reinvent-yourself kind of city, barely a decade removed from being a small port town, and it turned out to be exactly the kind of place willing to entertain a self-declared monarch rather than lock him away.
Twenty-One Years on the Throne
Norton spent the next two decades governing a country that never once acknowledged him, and doing it with genuine consistency. He conducted daily inspections of San Francisco's streets, checking that sidewalks were clear, buildings under construction were safe, and police officers were actually on duty. He issued handwritten proclamations to local newspapers on everything from national politics down to a skating rink operator who'd refused to lend him a pair of skates, and reporters kept printing them, treating his decrees as a genuine, if eccentric, part of the city's civic conversation.
His most famous proclamation called for a bridge to connect San Francisco and Oakland across the bay, decades before anyone seriously discussed what eventually became the Bay Bridge. A less successful order, issued not long after, demanded that the United States Congress be dissolved by force. Congress declined to comply.
He also used the position, unlikely as it was, to take public stands well ahead of his time. Across more than 250 recorded proclamations over his reign, he called for Black San Franciscans to be allowed on public streetcars and into public schools, for Chinese residents to be permitted to testify in court, and for fair treatment of Native American tribes, with at least 14 separate proclamations specifically defending Chinese civil rights, some published in the Pacific Appeal, one of the era's few Black-owned newspapers. On at least one occasion the advocacy became physical rather than just written. According to local accounts, Norton once placed himself directly between an angry mob and a group of Chinese immigrants during a period of anti-Chinese rioting, and stood his ground reciting the Lord's Prayer until the crowd lost its nerve and dispersed. He supported women's suffrage and pushed for the city to keep its streets, ferries and railways properly maintained for ordinary residents.
The Arrest That Backfired
Only once did the authorities seriously test how far the city's patience actually went. In January 1867, a young police officer named Armand Barbier arrested Norton, first on a vagrancy charge and then, once it turned out he had money on him, on a charge of lunacy that could have seen him committed to the state asylum in Stockton. San Francisco erupted. Newspapers ran furious editorials on his behalf, one from the Daily Alta California arguing that Norton "has never shed blood. He has robbed no one, and despoiled no country," and adding pointedly that this was more than could be said for most actual monarchs. Police Chief Patrick Crowley ordered him released within days and issued a formal public apology on the department's behalf. Norton, for his part, responded by issuing his own Imperial Pardon to the officer who'd arrested him. From then on, San Francisco police reportedly saluted him whenever they passed him in the street.
A City That Played Along
San Francisco didn't just tolerate Norton, it actively built an infrastructure around indulging him. Restaurants and saloons fed him for free. Theatres kept a seat open for him on opening nights. The local Freemasons paid a stipend that covered his nightly room at a boarding house on Commercial Street, which he insisted on paying for himself out of that same allowance rather than accept it as pure charity. He issued his own Imperial Treasury Bond certificates, promising 7 per cent interest by 1880, and locals and tourists alike bought them up as souvenirs rather than genuine investments. Banks reportedly honoured cheques written in his name. Even the 1870 federal census played along in its own bureaucratic way, listing his occupation simply as emperor, while noting in the voting eligibility column that he was ineligible, on grounds of insanity.
He dressed the part daily: a military style coat lined with brass buttons and gilt epaulettes, a beaver hat topped with a feather, and a walking stick or umbrella depending on the weather. By most accounts he was gentle, courteous and genuinely well informed on current events, and the only recorded moment he turned violent was when he spotted a newspaper cartoon mocking him and put his cane through a shop window in protest.
The Myths That Outgrew the Man
Norton's afterlife has generated almost as much folklore as his actual reign did, and not all of it holds up. Bummer and Lazarus, the pair of stray dogs whose scrappy adventures became local celebrities in their own right during the same years Norton reigned, are still widely and incorrectly described as his own pets. They weren't; the two stories simply got tangled together over decades of retelling.
The most repeated version of his obituary claims the San Francisco Chronicle ran a dramatic front page headline the morning after his death reading Le Roi Est Mort, The King Is Dead. Researchers who've gone back to the original papers have found that headline did run in the Chronicle, but not until three days later, tucked on page eight above coverage of his funeral rather than blazoned across the front page the next morning. The famous, mournful obituary passage people often quote, describing him dying on a reeking pavement in a moonless, rain soaked night, wasn't in the Chronicle at all. It ran in a rival paper, the Morning Call, Mark Twain's former employer.
The funeral itself was real enough. Estimates of the crowd that turned out for his funeral procession range from roughly 10,000 up to as many as 30,000, drawn from every level of San Francisco society, a striking send-off for a man whose boarding house room, once cleared out, held little more than his uniforms, walking sticks, a sabre, a small collection of Imperial currency, letters he'd written to Queen Victoria, 98 shares in a defunct gold mine, and a handful of fabricated telegrams he'd apparently written to himself from the Russian Tsar. When the city cleared its cemeteries in 1934, Norton's remains were moved to Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma with a full new ceremony and headstone, again at public expense, though later research has cut the popularly cited crowd of tens of thousands at that reburial down to a far more modest few hundred.
A Legacy Longer Than His Reign
Norton outlived his own reputation as a mere curiosity. Mark Twain is widely believed to have drawn on him for the pompous, self-declared King in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published five years after Norton's death, and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote him directly into his 1892 novel The Wrecker. His story has since inspired books, at least one opera, stage plays, comic strips and a genuine modern advocacy campaign, the Emperor Norton Trust, which has spent years lobbying to have the Bay Bridge, the very project he proclaimed into existence over a century before it was built, formally named after him.
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For more of history's genuinely unforgettable oddballs, read Britain's Greatest Eccentrics: The Bizarre, the Brilliant and the Completely Unhinged.
For another self-made urban legend built almost entirely out of sheer nerve, see The Wild Flights of Thomas Fitzpatrick: From Bar Bet to Urban Legend.
