California's Legislature Has Roots in Slavery. Are Lawmakers Ready to Confront That?

S

ean Ryan was unaware of the most brutal chapters of American history when he started high school.

He spent much of his adolescence in what he described as a religious cult that his mother joined, near Redding. While children his age constructed models of Spanish missions using sugar cubes and popsicle sticks, a longtime popular assignment in California’s fourth-grade classrooms, Ryan was placed in a series of rotating apprenticeships. Starting when he was 8, Ryan chainsawed tree limbs with lumberjacks near Mount Shasta, paved roads in Arizona and went to Reno for a plumbing gig — work organized by his mother’s church.

Ryan moved in with his father in San José when he was 14. He enrolled in school in the adjacent suburb of Los Gatos, an upscale community tucked in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. His first class — U.S. history — required reading about the Trail of Tears, the forced displacement of 60,000 Indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the southeastern part of the United States. Thousands died as they were marched to reservations west of the Mississippi River.

The brutality of American history, like the forced labor of Indigenous people in the 18th and 19th centuries to build the Spanish missions, startled Ryan.

“I just cried in front of the whole class,” Ryan, now 53, recalled. “They were like, ‘What is going on?’ And I was like, ‘I never knew any of this stuff. This is all completely new to me.’”

What followed was an insatiable desire to learn more about his family’s history. Did his ancestors have a role in the subjugation and forced removal of people? Ryan’s research revealed that he had a direct connection to California’s foundational years, when a veneer of frontier freedom and prosperity concealed an agenda anchored in racist hostility and terror.

It began with a photo. A great-aunt on Ryan’s mother’s side heard about his interest in genealogy, and asked whether a box of records she had would help his hunt. Among the documents included was a picture of his great-great-great grandfather: James Madison Estill, a founder of California’s system of mass incarceration, who was an early California legislator and who enslaved more than a dozen people as he advanced a scheme in the 1850s to reinstate enslavement in the newly formed state.

California is now going through a similar unearthing of its past. The state’s Reparations Task Force is examining the historic harms of slavery and anti-Black racism in California.

Although California entered the nation as a free state, pro-slavery lawmakers, including enslavers like Estill, held outsize influence in its early Legislature. They enacted laws aiding enslavers, and supported the expansion of human bondage across the country.

The bill creating the Reparations Task Force was passed with bipartisan support in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It was heralded as a transformative step for racial justice. When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill that September, he vowed the state would not “turn away from this moment to make right the discrimination and disadvantages that Black Californians and people of color still face.”

On Friday and Saturday, that task force will meet in Sacramento, the state Capitol where Estill and his allies sought to create a western outpost for the ideals that would galvanize the Confederacy. On the task force agenda: how to potentially provide financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people.

Slavery is an afterthought in the popular California origin story of rugged Gold Rush frontierism. But hundreds of enslaved Black people were involuntarily brought to the state to work in the gold mines by Southerners who hoped to replicate the system of chattel slavery and plantation agriculture on the Pacific Coast.

Last summer, the task force released a preliminary report (PDF) detailing California’s history of enslavement and its many decades of discriminatory policies — in housing, education, health care, criminal justice and other areas — that established the systemic racism that persists. In July, the task force will present recommendations on how Black residents should be compensated for this enduring oppression.

But at the state Capitol, the preliminary report has been largely ignored in the months since its release, according to state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), a member of the task force.

“I’m sad to report not a single one of my colleagues have even mentioned this report, and I doubt very seriously if any of them have really taken time to read it,” he said.

“They need to read this report, they need to understand what’s there and understand the history instead of the whitewash that we’ve been allowed to perpetuate itself as American history for almost 400 years.”

‘A bit hard to swallow’

Estill, whose surname is also documented in some places as “Estell,” brought his family from Kentucky to Missouri in the 1840s. He sought fortune by starting a military prison, a grain mill and a postal route. When the ventures stalled, Estill journeyed on to California. He left his wife and young children behind, but took his most prized possessions: the people he owned.

In the census taken on Nov. 20, 1850, just 10 weeks into California’s statehood, Estill was recorded as a farmer in Solano County, with real estate valued at $15,000. Listed beneath his name are 14 men and one woman — with surnames of either Brown or Smith — who ranged in age from 18 to 40.

June Brown
Joe Brown
Isaac Brown
John Brown
Bill Brown
Peter Brown
Thomas Brown
Mid Brown
Bolin Brown
Comins Brown
Joe Smith
Higins Smith
Whitehead Smith
General Smith
Minerva Smith

The following note is scribbled in the margin next to the list of names: “These men were slaves in Missouri and have contracted to work in this state and then be free after two years.”

As soon as Estill was elected to the state Senate in 1851, representing Napa and Solano counties, he began to pursue laws that would allow him to keep his human property in California, a “free state,” and advance the institution of chattel slavery. As some of his peers found fortunes mining for gold, Estill charted a path toward a more lucrative American hustle: the construction and management of state prisons.

Estill won a contract to run the prison system the year he was elected to the Legislature. He pocketed profits from the forced labor of incarcerated people, who, under his authority, built a monument to mass incarceration: San Quentin State Prison.

“No man has received one tenth the money from the State that General Estill did; and no man made greater profit on what he received,” read a scathing obituary in The Sacramento Bee.

The deeper Ryan dug into his great-great-great grandfather’s past, the more he found the man “despicable.”

“It was a great research project, but at the end of the day, it was kind of a bit hard to swallow,” Ryan said. “It was obvious people hated him.”

Ryan’s research was guided by a trove of records, articles and photographs. The same documents don’t exist for the descendants of enslaved people, like the Browns and the Smiths listed on the 1850 census — a vexing issue for the task force currently grappling with who could become eligible for compensation from the state of California.

The pursuit of his family history took Ryan around the world. He learned that Estill’s granddaughter was married to an anatomist who moved his family to Bangkok for work. Inspired, Ryan moved with his family to Bangkok and stayed overseas for a decade. Now he lives with his wife and four kids in Oregon, where he works as an oceanographer on devices that collect energy from waves.

“I’ve definitely made life choices based on some of this stuff,” said Ryan. “To me, finding out about the history of my family was very cathartic, I guess. It filled a lot of holes. I really kind of dug into it and it became very important to me.”

Fugitives in a ‘free state’

Pro-slavery politicians like Estill were instrumental in California’s formation as a state. The issue of slavery was clearly on the minds of the delegates who gathered in Monterey to write California’s constitution in the fall of 1849. In fact, the slavery debate literally shaped the state.

Historians of early California history like Franklin Tuthill and Rockwell D. Hunt have detailed how the state’s current eastern boundary was forged through a debate with pro-slavery delegates who wanted to create a massive state that would stretch into present-day Utah. They believed that a state so large would inevitably be broken into two states: one where slavery would be allowed, the other free. Even though the delegates officially banned slavery in California, the meeting at Colton Hall in Monterey was “understood to be under the management, imaginary if not real, of southern men,” according to historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. And men like William Gwin, a Mississippi enslaver who moved to California and became one of its first U.S. senators, would dominate early state politics under the pro-slavery “Chivalry” wing of the Democratic Party.

“I would say in terms of the people who came to California thinking about elected office, rather than just the gold mining, that tended to be Southerners,” said Alex Vassar of the California State Library, who wrote a book on the history of state legislators. “And so they brought their values, they brought the customs of their place and their time to California with them.”

And some, Vassar said, “actually served in the state Legislature owning slaves.”

Vassar has documented members such as state Sen. William B. Norman, who brought an enslaved person from Mississippi to California, and Charles S. Fairfax, who traveled west from his family’s Virginia slave plantation and eventually became speaker of the state Assembly. The Marin County town where Fairfax built his manor now bears his name.

In the 1850s, enslavers and their allies were part of the legislative majority in California that took two dramatic actions in support of enslavement: passing the state’s fugitive slave law and backing the explosive Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the federal law allowing the expansion of slavery into the territories.

“We know that it wasn’t just always a symbolic issue,” said Stacey Smith, associate professor of history at Oregon State University, who is advising California’s Reparations Task Force. “Certainly there were specific members of the state Legislature and the congressional delegation who had a direct interest in enslaving people in California and keeping control over them.”

The federal Fugitive Slave Act, which required residents and law enforcement in free states to assist with the capture and return of escaped enslaved people, was included in the agreement that ushered California into the union.

But the federal law only dealt with enslaved persons escaping across state lines, and California’s enslavers had no legal recourse if their captives escaped within the new, free state. To account for this, pro-slavery lawmakers drafted the state’s own fugitive slave bill, that would give enslavers a one-year window to recapture formerly enslaved people they had brought to California pre-statehood, and forcibly take them out of the state and back to slaveholding states in the South. The legislation, officially “an Act respecting Fugitives from labor, and Slaves brought into this State prior to her admission into the Union,” passed the Assembly in February of 1852.

In the Senate, where the proposal had been defeated the year before, the Chivalry had to overcome opposition from anti-slavery Democrats, most notably San Francisco Sen. David Broderick. The bill was carried in the state Senate by Estill. Lawmakers deliberated the bill for days before a final vote. Opponents hatched a series of roadblocks, desperately trying to weaken the proposal with amendments or at least find a majority willing to adjourn for the night. But Estill and his allies prevailed.

The Senate Journal for April 13, 1852, shows that after more than a dozen procedural votes, the bill passed 14–9, and was signed by Gov. John Bigler. One-year extensions of the law were subsequently passed in 1853 and 1854. Not included in the record is the fact that Estill was fighting to protect his ownership of the 15 people who toiled without compensation on his Solano County farm, less than 50 miles down the Sacramento River.

“He wasn’t just wanting to promote the ‘Southern values’ of protecting slavery and slave property in California,” said Smith, who chronicled the history of unfree labor in California in her book Freedom’s Frontier. “He had a direct, personal economic interest in a fugitive slave law that would allow him to take enslaved people back to the Southern states when he decided that he no longer wanted to have them working in California.”

Smith found records of dozens of Black Californians arrested under the act, apprehended by law enforcement in a state that promised freedom. Black people, some of whom came to California to escape racial terror, lived with the fear that they could be seized in the middle of the night and extradited.

“If you had been brought at the height of the Gold Rush, let’s say in early 1849 up through mid-1850 … [then] until March of 1855, so five, six years later, you could be enslaved and returned back to the slave states under California law,” Smith said.

Pushing to expand slavery

The national uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned the political tide against California’s fugitive slave law and made the support of slavery a losing issue for the state’s Democrats.

The law allowed new territories to decide whether to permit slavery within their borders, replacing the generation-old Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in new territories north of latitude 36° 30’, spanning the northern borders of Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was evidence that Southerners were not only intent on preserving slavery, they wanted to expand it. The law incensed opponents of slavery, scrambled national and state party alliances and, in the words of historian James McPherson, “may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward war.”

Despite California’s official status as a free state, its representatives in Congress supported the law. And in the weeks leading up to the final vote, the state Legislature passed a resolution supporting “the Nebraska bill,” as it was known at the time.

California’s show of support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act was nonbinding, but it spoke volumes. The only other legislature in a free state to back the proposal, Smith said, was Illinois — home of the bill’s author, U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas.

“It’s fairly unusual for a free state to pass an endorsement of the Kansas-Nebraska Act when a lot of other people in Northern states — free states, especially the Northeast — are just clamoring for the overturn of the [law],” Smith said.

Voter backlash in California to the Kansas-Nebraska Act helped launch the California Republican Party, slowing the momentum for further extensions of the state’s fugitive slave law. Pro-slavery lawmakers retained control in Sacramento until the Civil War, at times resorting to violence to achieve their goals.

A pro-slavery legislator assaulted an anti-slavery colleague with a cane on the floor of the Senate during debates to extend the fugitive slave law, according to Smith. And in 1859, Broderick, the prominent anti-slavery Democrat, was killed in a duel on the shores of Lake Merced in San Francisco by the Chivalry’s David Terry, a former state Supreme Court justice. As he lay dying, Broderick reportedly said his anti-slavery stances were what pushed his political opponents to violence.

Broderick quickly became a martyr for opponents of slavery, and his bust is still on display in the chambers of the state Senate. As the Gold Rush waned, many of the Southerners in California’s government left the state. Some, like Gwin, backed the Confederacy in the Civil War. The decade-long reign of the Chivalry and their enslavers’ agenda became a historical footnote.

Reparations and atonement

“I think, for the most part, when I say something like ‘slavery in California,’ most people who’ve gone to school in California will say, ‘Oh, the mission system,’” said Smith. “It’s just these other stories, especially about enslaved African Americans, that are a lot less familiar to most Californians.”

Kamilah Moore, a reparatory justice scholar who chairs the state Reparations Task Force, said confronting the Legislature’s pro-slavery history should start in the state’s K–12 schools. She said the task force would like to see a curriculum that acknowledges and teaches California’s role in maintaining the institution of slavery.

“I grew up in California, born and raised, and so were my parents. And none of us learned about this history in school,” she said.

When the task force presents its financial recommendations to the Legislature this summer, the possibility of monetary compensation for the descendants of 19th-century Black Americans will likely stir up the most interest and debate in Sacramento.

At KQED’s gubernatorial debate in October, when asked where he stood on the issue of potential payments, Newsom demurred, saying he would first “want to see the recommendations.”

“By definition, we created the work group to adjudicate the merits of different strategies,” Newsom said. “And so this task force is convening, we’ll see where their recommendations come out and we’ll make a determination after the fact.”

Moore is interested in atonement by the Legislature. Lawmakers today routinely celebrate its history at the vanguard of environmentalism and protections for labor, abortion and LGBTQ rights. But that history also includes support for the brutality of chattel slavery.

“Part of our work as the task force is thinking about how we can get the California state Legislature not only to adopt our final recommendations as proposed, but then also for the body itself to take some self-accountability,” she said.

‘Wouldn’t want to live under a rock’

Ryan’s pursuit of his family history introduced him to members of his extended family.

“Along the way, I’ve been finding a lot of new families that are like first cousins, second cousins, third cousins and then getting to share my information with them, and that’s been a lot of fun getting to meet people,” Ryan said.

Some of his relatives found Estill’s story too painful to confront — like the cousin in New York whose first name was Estill.

“She had seen those pictures of him and knew that he existed but had no idea what his history was or his dealings and stuff,” Ryan said. “And so she was very upset.”

Other relatives have told Ryan to stop doing his research.

“A lot of people are very sensitive to it,” he said. “I never would have thought that — although, by finding out all this stuff about Estill I can kind of understand it.”

He added, “But I also wouldn’t want to live under a rock. So you have to kind of learn from history, right? You don’t want to whitewash history.”