Yes, slavery existed in California, historian says

As a free state before the Civil War, California would seem untouched by slavery and the debates around it. Yet the real picture is more nuanced.

An estimated 500 to 1,500 Black people were “forcibly imported” into California as slaves by their owners, historian Kevin Waite told an audience at Redlands’ A.K. Smiley Library on Tuesday night, May 2. He’s the author of “West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire.”

While even 1,500 is a small number compared to the 4 million slaves in the United States in the 1850s, it’s not zero, is it?

Waite asked that we imagine the effort it took not only for a White slave owner to travel by horse-drawn wagon across much of the country, but to smuggle in slaves. That, he said, showed how valuable the slaves must have been.

The most famous may be Biddy Mason, who was brought from Georgia to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1848, and from there to the Mormon colony in San Bernardino in 1851. She had to walk, driving the animals, across the Mojave Desert.

According to Waite’s research, early San Bernardino had 30 slaves. Fourteen of them, including Mason, were owned by Robert Smith, who was probably the largest slaveholder in the West. (Even in the 1850s, the Inland Empire was problematic.)

Mason won her freedom in court and became a leading citizen of Los Angeles. I wrote about her in 2020, saying she was one of the most notable people ever to hail from San Bernardino.

The West had a lot of Southern transplants and sympathizers, many of whom had outsized influence because they got coveted federal appointments, Waite explained. It was part of a national movement to tip the balance of power toward slavery and the Confederacy.

While Abraham Lincoln carried California in the 1861 presidential election, his margin here was the lowest of any free state, Waite said.

How did the tide turn? Sympathetic as many Californians were to the South, the majority recoiled from secession and the Confederacy, which they saw as extremism. And Lincoln shrewdly purged 1,500 civil servants in the West and replaced them with pro-Union appointees, stripping Southerners of much of their power here.

Yet, Waite pointed out, as the post-Civil War “Lost Cause” movement took hold to normalize the Confederacy, the influence lingered.

As recently as a decade ago, California still had more than a dozen things — redwood trees, peaks, highways and schools — named for Confederate figures, generally Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis. Many have since been renamed, including an elementary school in Long Beach, but not all.

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