1850s San Francisco rallied to free a slave
On the morning of March 5, 1858, San Francisco's black community was on high alert.
For days, organized groups had been patrolling the waterfront. On March 5, word went out that the two men they were looking for - a white man and his slave who desperately wanted to be free - were about to leave town.
Many of the city's 1,000 or so African Americans - merchants, cooks, barbers, deckhands and laborers - headed down to the Market Street and Vallejo Street piers, where two steamers were ready to weigh anchor. What happened next was one of the most dramatic racial incidents in the pre-Civil War West.
The story began a year earlier, when a young Mississippian named Charles Stovall traveled to California with his 19-year-old slave, Archy Lee. As Rudolph Lapp notes in "Archy Lee: A California Fugitive Slave Case," during the Gold Rush it was common for whites from the South to bring their slaves to California. Although California was a free state, white visitors could bring slaves here as long as their stay was temporary.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/1850s-San-Francisco-rallied-to-free-a-slave-5132669.php
'You varmints! We'll see whether free people are to be kidnapped in this way!' "
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