History of slavery in California

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Mission San Luis Rey

and a residence with a tule-thatched awning (1887)

The history of slavery in California began with the

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Spanish missionaries (1769–1820)

The padres would often baptize Native Californian villages en masse and relocate them to the missions, where they would work either voluntarily or by force from location to location. To the padres, the Native Californians were newly baptized members of the Catholic Church and were treated with varying amounts of respect, depending on the priest in question. Many of the soldiers, however, saw them solely as manpower to be exploited. The soldiers would force the Native Californians to perform most of the manual labor needed in their fortresses, and often raped the women of their villages.^[12] There was multiple recorded uprisings by the Native Californians, both violent and nonviolent.^[13]

Mexico and Alta California history (1821–1846)

Mexico gained its independence from Spain, and from 1821 to 1846 California (called Alta California by 1824) was under Mexican rule. The Mexican National Congress passed the Colonization Act of 1824 in which large sections of unoccupied land were granted to individuals, and in 1833 the government secularized missions and consequently many civil authorities at the time confiscated the land from the missions for themselves.^[12] These two acts aided in the creation of a ranchos system that required a large labor force to maintain. Essentially the entire economy shifted from work on the missions to work on large land estates of wealthy Mexicans. A system was devised where it was virtually cost free to utilize indigenous labor; workers were exchanged between ranchos and essentially became indentured servants.

Most of the future

With the 1848 defeat of Mexico, California and other Mexican territories were ceded to United States rule (the Mexican Cession) under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war.

Enslavement of indigenous peoples

Between 1846 and 1855, the Native population decreased by two-thirds and in order to craft California's own code of labor, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was passed in 1850 which "legally" curtailed the rights of the Indigenous.^[14] Within this Act, Native children could be obtained for indenture, convicted Native American could be hired out of jail and Indians could not testify for or against whites. This legalized a form of slavery, of forced labor in California. 24,000 to 27,000 Californian Natives were taken as forced laborers by settlers including 4,000 to 7,000 children.^[15] Between 1851 and 1852, three Indigenous commissioners negotiated treaties with the Natives and eventually eighteen were written, allocating 7.5% of the state as Native American reservations. The United States Senate rejected these treaties and about a year later in 1853, the government designed its own five reservations. These reservations had very poor living conditions and displaced many of the Native Californians from their native lands. There were not enough resources to sustain the Native tribes being forced onto them. Native Californians found themselves struggling to survive from disease and starvation on the foreign land.^[16]

Enslavement of African Americans

During this time, the 30-state nation was divided equally between 15

• In 1849, a white man lost a case against a black man who was accused of both being a slave and being in debt to the accuser. At the time, California was not under U.S. rule, and Mexican law, which prohibited slavery, was used in the case. This resulted in the legal precedent of the official non-acknowledgement of slavery in California.
• In 1851, a
  Fugitive Slave Law
  , which was passed in Congress the previous year, invalid in this case. Furthermore, a California law passed in 1850 had ruled the testimony of non-whites in court inadmissible; hence, even though Frank had admitted to being the owner's slave, the case had proceeded in his favor because his own admission was invalid.
• In 1852, a state
  fugitive slave law was passed in Sacramento, and was unsuccessfully challenged in the Perkins escapee case.^[21]
  However, when the law lapsed in 1855, the Legislature failed to renew it, and the Mitchell case in San Jose resulted in freedom for Mitchell, a runaway slave.
• In 1856, Benjamin Ignatius Hayes freed 14 slaves, including Biddy Mason, who had been held in slavery in a Mormon settlement in San Bernardino for five years, saying the slaves had been kept ignorant of the laws and their rights.^[22]
• In 1858, in one of the most protracted cases over the state-level status of slavery, Archy Lee, a slave who had run away from his owner, Mississippi native Terry Stovall, was arrested four times as his fate - as a slave bound for return to Mississippi with his master, or continued residence in California as a free man - was decided in a flip-flop manner by some three local judges and a United States Commissioner. Archy won the case through the support of the local freed black community in San Francisco. To avoid further legal reprisals by his former owner, he fled to Canada, where he eventually died.^[23][24]

A backlash against these legal wins for the free black community in California whipped up in the State government; the Chinese Exclusion Act was also being debated at that time. Fearful of the hostile maneuvers against them, over 700 African Americans left California in a mass exodus via steam ship for the women and children and mass cavalcade for the men to Victoria, Canada, and the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush.

Civil War (1861–1865)

During the American Civil War, clergyman and politician Thomas Starr King was a fervent speaker, he spoke in favor of the Union and was credited by Abraham Lincoln with preventing California from becoming a separate republic.^[25] At the urging of activist and writer Jessie Benton Frémont, Starr King teamed up with writer Bret Harte.^[26] Starr King read Harte's patriotic poems at pro-Union speeches.^[26] Starr King also raised $1 million in fundraising for Union soldiers, California's largest charity effort during this war.^[25]

Slavery was, for the most part, abolished in all states under the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which took effect on 18 December 1865.

References