Part of a series of articles titled People of the California Trail.
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Archy Lee, the California Trail
Archy Lee – California Trail
By Angela Reiniche[1]
California entered the Union as a free state, but that did not mean that enslaved people were magically emancipated upon entering. Take, for example, the case of Archy Lee, who reached Sacramento in October 1857 with his enslaver, Charles Stovall. Despite California’s anti-slavery status, the eighteen-year-old Lee ended up in an all-out fight for his freedom.
Many enslaved African Americans reached the western terminus of the California Trail in the mid-nineteenth century. Most of the newcomers, including Lee, were unaware of the state’s ban on slavery and would not have learned about it if not for a highly organized network of Black and white abolitionists. Lee’s fellow Black Sacramentans, Charles W. Parker and Charles Hackett, ensured that the Hackett House Hotel—located in downtown Sacramento—became a safe meeting place for the growing community of abolitionists who fought for the freedom of people like Lee.[2]
For three months after their arrival in California, Charles Stovall had hired Lee out for wages to support himself and to fund the private school he had opened in Sacramento. During this time, Hackett and Parker made Lee aware of his rights. When both Lee and Stovall became ill, however, Stovall decided to return to Mississippi. Lee, sensing freedom slipping from his grasp, fled from his enslaver once he learned of this plan.[3]
In January 1858, police arrested Lee at the Hackett House Hotel. Law enforcement claimed that, by escaping from his enslaver, Lee had violated the federal Fugitive Slave Act—a product of the same 1850 compromise that led to California’s admission as a free state. Lee was detained in the county jail. The next day, abolitionists gathered outside the courthouse to protest his imprisonment. Judge Robert Robinson opened the hearings on 8 January to a courtroom crowded with spectators. Lee was silent until the judge asked what his wishes were; he replied, “I don’t want to go back to Mississippi.” Stovall, Lee’s enslaver, argued that Lee remained his property—regardless of the fact that slavery was illegal in California.[4]
Once both sides had stated their cases, Judge Robinson ordered Lee freed on 26 January. Despite this ruling in Lee’s favor, Stovall’s lawyers soon convinced the state Supreme Court to hear their case. They argued that, since Stovall never intended to become a permanent resident of California, Lee should be considered an escaped slave—making him unprotected by California law, and thus subject to the federal Fugitive Slave Law. This time the high court ruled against Lee and he was escorted back to jail.[5]
Stovall planned to take Lee back to Mississippi (via Panama) on a steamboat, but a crowd of abolitionists gathered at the wharves to blockade their steamer. Following a violent confrontation between the two sides, Lee was taken to jail yet again. While awaiting trial, San Francisco’s Zion AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church launched a nationwide campaign to raise money for Lee’s legal fees. Lee endured more turmoil—he was freed, and then jailed again—before U.S. Commissioner George Pen Johnston finally decided in his favor on 6 April 1858. Lee’s was the last fugitive slave case in California, but the emancipation of all enslaved people in the United States would not occur for another seven years.[6]
Later that year, the discovery of gold along the Fraser River prompted Lee and four hundred other African Americans to leave California and settle in British Columbia. Lee operated a successful drayage (freight transport) business and bought property. As was the case with most gold “rushes,” the prosperity it brought was short lived; within a few years, Archy Lee had moved back to the United States. In 1862, he was self-employed as a barber in Washoe, Nevada. Lee died at thirty-three under somewhat murky circumstances. Newspapers reported that he had been found buried up to his neck in the sands along the banks of the American River, very sick yet declining assistance. He passed away at the county hospital in Sacramento, California.[7]
California’s status as a free state did not protect its residents from the systems of racism and enslavement operating elsewhere in the United States (and beyond). As Lee’s story illustrates, movement west along the California Trail—or any overland trail, for that matter—did not necessarily guarantee freedom for enslaved African Americans. Lee’s story is more visible in the documentary record, but there were many others in similar situations whose stories are harder to trace.
[1] Part of a 2016–2018 collaborative project of the National Trails- National Park Service and the University of New Mexico’s Department of History, “Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project” [Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CPCESU), Task Agreement P16AC00957]. This project was formulated to provide trail partners and the general public with useful biographies of less-studied trail figures—particularly African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, women, and children.
[2] Shirley Ann Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails 1841-1869 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 200-01.
[3] Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains, 200; and Rudolph M. Lapp, Archy Lee: A California Fugitive Slave Case (San Francisco, Calif.: The Book Club of California, 1969), 7.
[4] Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains, 200-01. (Lee quoted in 201.)
[5] Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains, 201.
[6] Ibid., 202.
[7] Ibid., 202.
Last updated: October 17, 2022