Biography
Swift was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and died in Tokyo, Japan, but spent most of his career in San Francisco, California. Swift was admitted to the California bar in 1857. He worked for the U.S. Land Office from 1865-1866. He was appointed to serve as a regent for the University of California from 1872-88. In 1888, Swift was the delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention.
In 1867 Swift travelled on the USS Quaker City to the Holy City, the trip that Mark Twain made famous in his book Innocents Abroad. Swift's version of this journey is captured in his book Going to Jericho; or, Sketches of Travel in Spain and the East.
As a legislator, Swift wrote provisions in the California State Constitution which gave the county board of supervisors the authority to control water rates. In June, 1880, as a member of the treaty commission to China headed by James Burrill Angell, U.S. Chief Chinese Negotiator, Swift traveled with fellow commission member William Henry Trescot and Angell to Peking (now Beijing), China. The result was the Angell Treaty of 1880 which limited the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. The Angell Treaty regulated and limited the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States but did not prohibit it outright. It separated U.S. trade interests from the immigration issue, and made a legal opening for an exclusion law.
In Chae Chan Ping v. the United States, Swift and LA District Attorney Stephen M. White on behalf of California succeeded in moving the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1888.
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