Archy Lee S Struggle For Freedom

In San Francisco, CA, in 1858, a young African American man was freed from the claims of a white man who sought to return him to slavery in Mississippi. This was one year after the Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott decision and during the California Gold Rush, which saw the population of the state rise from 7,000 to more than 60,000 in a few short years. Archy Lee was the name of the man who, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers and determined opponents of human bondage, had just won his freedom from the claims of Charles Stovall. With the aid of pro-slavery lawyers and equally determined supporters, Stovall had sought to capture him and carry him back to a far-away slave plantation. Yet the book is not solely about Archy Lee. It is also about the travel routes that the gold-seekers followed to California in the 1850s, some by land over the Great Plains, some by sea around Cape Horn, yet others by sailing from the east coast of North America to the isthmus of Panama, where they crossed over the land there by train and continued on by sea to San Francisco. It is about the efforts of the racially motivated lawmakers to suppress the rights of all of California’s residents except whites, and to subject people of African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American descent to second-, third-, or even fourth-class citizenship. It is about the residents of the state—including many whites—who fought back against those efforts, seeking to ameliorate or repeal the discriminatory laws and introduce a measure of fairness and justice into California’s civil life. It is about the lawyers and judges who participated in Archy Lee’s legal struggles in 1858, some supporting his claims for freedom while others ferociously opposed them and, in the process, elevated their own political and professional profiles.

Against the backdrop of the run-up to the Civil War, a young African American man in San Francisco in 1858 was freed from the claims of a white man who sought to return him to slavery in Mississippi. Archy Lee was the name of the man who, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers and determined opponents of human bondage, won his freedom from the claims of Charles Stovall. With the aid of pro-slavery lawyers and equally determined supporters, Stovall had sought to capture him and carry him back to a far-away slave plantation. This is the story of Archy Lee, and the fight against slavery in a non-slave state.

Charles Stovall of Mississippi brought his slave into the free state of California leading, in 1852, to the landmark trial to free Archy Lee

The ties that bound Abraham Lincoln to California, and California to Lincoln, have long been overlooked by historians. Although the great Civil War president has been the subject of thousands of books, his important relationship with the Western state, both before and during the war--the part it played in bringing on the great conflict and the help it gave him in winning it--have been little described and imperfectly understood. In Lincoln and California Brian McGinty explains the relationship between the president and the Golden State, describing important events that took place in California and elsewhere during Lincoln's lifetime. He includes the histories of Lincoln's close friends and personal acquaintances who made history as they went to California, lived there, and helped to keep it part of the imperiled Union. McGinty demonstrates that California was in large part responsible for beginning the Civil War, as the principal purpose of its conquest in the Mexican War was to acquire land into which the Southern states could extend their cotton-growing and slaveholding empire. The decision of California's first voters to exclude slavery from the state but to enact virulently racist legislation encouraged Southerners' hope that, if they established a separate republic, it would become an independent slave nation with the power to extend its territory to the Pacific coast of North America and into the Caribbean and Latin America. Lincoln's opposition to their plans unleashed the Civil War. As the struggle played out, however, the hopes of the proslavery Confederates were ultimately defeated because California played a vital role in helping Lincoln save the Union. Lincoln and California shines new light on an important state, a pivotal president, and a turning point in American history.

When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners defended the institution of African American chattel slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations. Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.

In this innovative and insightful book, Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, and London. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region's earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more. Engelhardt draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women's stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.

Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

Plutarch, the famed Greek biographer, wrote The Lives of the Roman Emperors early in his career. Simone Drake could have called her book The Lives of Black Men. She contrasts the portrayal of black men in mainstream media with the way she insists black men must imagine their lives, ambitions, and desires in both the civic arena and the domestic arena. The narrow popular representation of black men as being in perennial crisis is one she rejects, opting instead to see them as active agents of their own destinies. Her book uncovers the ways in which black men in history, literature, film, political arenas, and popular culture have either challenged or been challenged by pathological constructions of black masculinity. Imagining Grace refers to Toni Morrison s Beloved, a black feminist framework Drake uses to see power in vulnerability and emotivenessfrom Tom Joyner s radio show to Richard Pryor s comedy to some of President Obama s social policy. Drake is synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies. Her black lives feature the African American cowboy, Nat Love, also Drake s own grandfather, who imagined grace through military service in the first colored military unit to fight in World War II (what emerges is a narrative of black pride and shame), and thence to movies, where Drake explores the theme of black fathers and daughters (framed by a court case involving The Cosby Show as intellectual property). The chapter that follows, on twisted criminalities, contrasts the valorization of black criminals (thugs) as heroes with the denigration of gay black men, where we encounter the limits of grace in American Gangster, Cornelius Edy s poetry, and the viral video of Antoine Dodson (discussing the attempted rape of his sister). In concluding with Berry Gordy and hi-hop (Jay-Z), Drake meditates on black entrepreneurship as a nationalist site of redemption. We are given in this book a way of seeing and knowing black malenesssophisticated in concept but bracingly vivid in the telling. "