California, a Slave State

June 5, 2023
University of Delaware historian Pfaelzer (Driven Out) delivers a searing survey of “250 years of human bondage” in what is now the state of California. Contending that California thrived as an outpost of Spain, Mexico, Russia, and the U.S. because “it welcomed, honed, and legalized numerous ways for humans to own humans,” Pfaelzer notes that an 1850 state law legalized bondage of Native Americans, and recounts the harrowing story of T’tc~tsa, an Indigenous girl who survived the massacre of her village by the U.S. Army, was kidnapped, and sold to a rancher as a field laborer and sex slave. In the late 19th century, California also imported tens of thousands of Chinese women and girls, kidnapped or traded by their families in China, who were sold as sex slaves; often they were delivered onto the docks in San Francisco in padded crates. Pfaelzer traces the practices of today’s prison system, such as the leasing of convicts to private employers as forced labor, back to the various slave trades that occurred in California, and makes an irrefutable case that unpaid labor was a major engine of the state’s economic growth. Readers will be outraged.