April 2, 2020
By Susan Anderson
California, a “Free State” Sanctioned Slavery
In a late-night raid in April 1852, three formerly enslaved black men who had built a lucrative business hauling mining supplies during the California all Gold Rush, were rousted from their cabin by armed white men. They were forcibly taken before a justice of the peace in Sacramento County who ordered them deported to their former “owner,” a white man in Mississippi.
Robert Perkins, his brother Carter, and their business partner Sandy Jones, would file the first lawsuit challenging the state’s new Fugitive Slave Law. Passed just 6 weeks earlier, it decreed that any enslaved black person who had entered California when it was still a territory had no legal right to freedom even though the state constitution banned slavery.
In 1848 when the gold rush hit, white southerners flocked to the state with hundreds of enslaved black people, forcing them to toil in gold mines, often hiring them out to cook, serve, or perform a variety of labor. Sometimes fortunes were amassed on the backs of this free labor. Yet California’s place in the nation’s history of slavery is missing from most historical accounts and many are surprised to learn of its practice in the golden state.
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California’s constitution proclaimed that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for punishment of a crime, shall ever be tolerated.” Yet archives statewide contain evidence that slavery was practiced out in the open. One newspaper ad in the Sacramento Transcript offered “A valuable Negro girl, aged eighteen…of amiable disposition, a good washer, ironer and cook” for sale.
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https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/blog/california-a-free-state-sanctioned-slavery/
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