Reparations and the 175th Anniversary of the birth of California

The 1850 Compromise, established the State of California, the Fugitive Slave Act and 3 additional laws guiding land use from the acquired from the US Mexican War.

The delicate balance of 30 states was divided equally between 15 free states and 15 slave states. With the addition of vast rich open territories historically an open range where Native Americans maintained custody of the land for thousands of years was forever changed.

During the long and contentious debates to establish California, the compromise over slavery intensified dramatically.

California itself was divided over the issue, as a large number of slave-owning Southerners had travelled to California to seek their fortunes utilizing slave labor.

Gold was discovered January 1848 and in the Spring of 1849 Gold Rush, chattel slavery expanded throughout the southern and northern gol fields. Many miners expressed concern that slaveholders accompanied by slaves had an unfair advantage in the mining camps and that slavery's inherent inequality violated "the independent entrepreneurial sprit of the mines".

However, elaborate plans and advertisements to expand slavery into California populated Southern newspapers and elaborate plans while elaborate plans and advertisement in Abolitionist newspapers promoted “emancipation in the West.”

US Army and US Navy personal abandoned duty and joined the early quest there were no laws or enforcement mechanisms for limiting “America’s Peculiar Institution.”

It turned out to be quite risky for slave owners themselves. The territory had no slave patrols, nor local police very interested in maintaining slavery, so “self emancipation” was quite common.

California Military Governor Riley called for “white male only” elections and by October 1849, the first California Constitution Convention was held.

The most heated debates at the Colton Hall, Monterey convention, in the old Capitol City of Mexican California was on the status of slavery in the proposed new state.

While some Southerners who had come to California were staunchly in favor of giving official sanction to slavery in California, Northern abolitionists and American miners (who did not want competition from the slave-holders in the gold fields) were well represented within the ranks of the convention.

The chairman of the California Constitution Convention, William Gwin, was himself a slaveholder from Tennessee. Gwin, however, was much more interested in gaining control of the California Democratic Party than he was in favoring either side of the debate, later serving as the Senior US Congressman from California.

His fellow Southern members of Congress, we’re not pleased he did not seek to write the institution of slavery into the 1849 Constitution.

The Compromise of 1850 later permitted California to be admitted to the Union as a free state. Gwin and war hero/abolitionist John C. Frémont became California's first Senators.

Although California entered the Union as a free state, the framers of the state constitution wrote into law the systematic denial of suffrage and other disparaging laws to deny economic opportunity to non-white citizens

Some political and economic interests went so far as to attempt to deny entry of all people of African Ancestry both free and slave into California.

The California Legislature almost passed a bill that would ban the immigration of early California Pioneers of Pan African Ancestry to California.

State Senator David C. Broderick, a fierce opponent of slavery and former firefighter from San Francisco, managed to kill the bill through parliamentary maneuver, as the State Assembly was too drunk celebrating to reconvene to consider friendly amendments to the legislation.

Slavery did persist in California even without legal authority. Some slaveowners simply refused to notify their slaves of the prohibition, and continued to trade slaves within rural parts of this vast new state.

Numerous state trials ruled against and in favor of emancipation. The California Supreme Court was pro-slavery and found creative ways to support slavery in a “Free” Stare.

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.

Our California Legislature passed a law in 1850 that excluded any testimony of non-whites against whites in court admissible.

In 1852, a stronger California State Fugitive Slave Law was passed and chattel slavery in the Gold Fields waned as quartz industrial gold mining expanded.

By 1856, Judge Benjamin Ignatius Hayes ruled in famous Los Angeles case and 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.

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.

Archly Lee finally 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.

When the US Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott Case, “slave or free the black man has no rights the white man is bound to respect” reached California, many who participate in the “Underground Railroad Network to Freedom”’ in California fearful of the hostile maneuvers against them, over 700 Pan Africans 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.

2025-2026 proposed Juneteenth and Reparations laws are being drafted and debated in our California State Legislature, this 175th Anniversary celebrating an official journey to establish the State of California, “hidden figures” may come to the light.