This is a transcript of a series of interviews conducted by Helen Holdredge in 1938 with William Willmore. Mr. Willmore's father worked for Mary Ellen Pleasant, and he knew her personally. The following is transcribed from Ms. Holdredge's handwritten research notes found in the San Francisco History Room of the San Francisco Public Library.
"Mammy was very clever at getting hold of money to help out her people. All of the people she worked with at slave running in Massachusetts were prospering and they had no idea she was colored. But the Negroes knew. Secretly they called her Madame Pleasants but they were always very careful to address her by her first husband’s name whatever that was because I’ve forgotten. And don’t even think anyone called her Mammy as I’m doing to you. Indeed she wouldn’t have stood for it. It was Sarah Althea Hill who did that and people heard about it during the Sharon case and when everyone began calling her that she was furious. Other times she’d say “It gives me a suspiration.” When she’d hear of a slave being captured she’d say “It’s going to be sticky around the edges but I’ll lay wages against them keeping him (or her) there.” I remember my father telling about that many times."
HH: You’ve told me a lot about the Bells and Mammy but I’d like to hear about her Abolition activities. I know about the murder of Nicolas Gordon and father by a brother of the Schell that married one of the Woodworth sisters things like that. But I haven’t got it clear as to just what Mammy did or even if it is true she was behind the rescue of slaves.
Willmore:
“The Negroes brought to California were mostly slaves who served as personal servants. Southerners came here expecting to succeed in making California into a slave state – I mean they could live here and make the slaves earn their fortunes. The movement was headed by William Gwin, but the takeover he planned never got underway. Many of the slaves were brought here by gamblers and there was a law preventing them from collecting a slave’s wages. If the slave owner breaks the law he lost the ownership of the slave. Then there were slaves who had escaped and some Southerners who had never owned some particular slave would make a claim. Not too many pulled this trick, there was always the danger a slave might have freed and manumission papers could be produced. The Negroes were timid but not nearly as unthinking as many imagined.
Sharp thinkers like Mammy and David W. Ruggles Senior formed an organization to protect. Later it was James E. Brown, Senior who stood out in the organization. But I’m going the long way around to answer your question. Mammy, right from the beginning when she was working for some men who owned a commission house, carried on her own affairs. She got tied up because they were always entertaining so she got some men she’d worked along with in the Underground – back in New Bedford. She’d send messages around to their offices and the actions would be very fast. Sometimes a slave’s owner would want to return home to the South and he wouldn’t want to pay his charge’s passage. He could sell him before the state was admitted to the Union. But after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed the Negroes slung together in the fear that someone may at dishonestly lay claim to any one of them. There was a law against Negro testimony and so Mammy saw that they had to be an organization with everyone a member to which abolitionists would contribute money if legal fees had to be paid. So, Mammy and Ruggles and Allen Francis Senior got together and saw to it that every Negro belonged. I think it was called a convention, and these were meetings held in a church, usually scheduled for a time when Mammy could attend. She always knew ahead of time of the merchants she worked for were to have guests so she’ pick an evening when she could hurry all immediately when supper was over. Her life was packed with activity – three meals a day and no going out when the Committee of Vigilance held meetings. She‘d have to be home when these were over because she’d have to serve them something when they returned. George Gordon had a men’s hairdressing parlor in the basement of the Tehama House and he picked up a lot of gossip of what was going on and it would all be promptly relayed to her just as she relayed the gossip she heard. Some Negroes of course, had already been seized and taken back into slavery and the Negroes got more and more determined to prevent it from happening.
Mammy was very clever at getting hold of money to help out her people. All of the people she worked with at slave running in Massachusetts were prospering and they had no idea she was colored. But the Negroes knew. Secretly they called her Madame Pleasants but they were always very careful to address her by her first husband’s name whatever that was because I’ve forgotten. And don’t even think anyone called her Mammy as I’m doing to you. Indeed she wouldn’t have stood for it. It was Sarah Althea Hill who did that and people heard about it during the Sharon case and when everyone began calling her that she was furious. Other times she’d say “It gives me a suspiration.”
When she’d hear of a slave being captured she’d say “It’s going to be sticky around the edges but I’ll lay wages against them keeping him (or her) there.” I remember my father telling about that many times.
Of course I disremember when I first saw her but it would be about seventy years ago. My father was her steward then and we lived across the street from her upper Washington Street boarding house. Sometimes she’d call on my mother to lend a hand with the cooking if there was some emergency and I’d be underfoot but I’d be very quiet and she liked me because she said that I had good manners like my parents.
(This interview lasted two hours and there were portions of it which rambled off the subject these I did not take down)
MARCH 4th, 1938 at San Francisco
Present: Christine Gilbert
Willmore:
One of the Woodworth brothers went East to bring out his mother and sisters in 1857. The other brother took a vacation camping out on Red Rock Island to d a lot of hunting. Their business partner, Schell carried on alone. The River Kings (the Minton Brothers) asked to borrow Mammy, but she didn’t really have much to do because they were always traveling up or down on matter pertaining to their river lines. As a consequence, Mammy busied herself more than she ever had before with abolition activities. Her friend from New Bedford, Charles West, had the Negro boarding house going by then. Mr. Zander, Robert Gwin and another man name Mr. McAlvord were all behind her and I seem to recall my father that Thomas Randolph was there by then.
HH: He’s the one who became a minister at Marysville?”
Yes, but that was a lot later. Allen Francis helped her out too, but they never got on too well together. He spoke only French previous. He was very light with blue eyes and on the haughty side. But he wasn’t clever like David Ruggles and James Brown and George Dennis. They were all go-ahead and won a great deal of admiration from the white men helping out the slaves.. You were asking about the Archy case. I’ve been thinking about that. It was the most discussed case among the Negro colony. There were others that required a lot of thinking about but maybe it stood out because Mammy had more time. She had the three laundries going but no boarding houses as yet. I probably can give you only the most elementary facts. The Woodworths that is the two brothers – lived together with Mammy as their housekeeper but they kept getting burned out and moved from place to place. I disremember why they deserted Casa Grande. I know they didn’t yet live in the twin houses on Minna because that was after Selim married and set up separate. But Mammy had charge of their house even if she was working for the Mintons.
She was the one who hid Archy out in the supposedly locked-up Woodworth house.
There had been a bill introduced to prevent Negroes from settling in California. This caused a great deal of panic among the colored people and a lot of them hurried out of the state to go to the gold fields discovered in British Columbia one of Mammy staunchest supporters, George Dennis (also colored) went. The Archy case regarded a Mr. Stoves (Stovall). He was a schoolmaster and he had brought Archy with him from the South. He wasn’t the success he’d counted on in California so he was going to leave and take Archy back with him. Mammy and her followers decided that Archy had the right to remain and if it was found he had then this would be very important to all the Negroes, those who had been brought here and those who had come on their own. But Mr. Stoves Had hired Archy out and that broke the Fugitive Slave Law, if I’ve got all the angles sorted out proper-like. Archy had escaped from a Sacramento river boat where his master had put him in charge of an agent. He was found, arrested and taken to the jail in Sacramento where the police absolutely refused to surrender him to his owner. But Stoves got writ but the matter was taken up in the Supreme Court. It was decided that there had been no emancipation for Archy. Mammy and her followers provided the slave with a lawyer to defend his interest. Slavery was prohibited – Stoves claimed he was only on a trip to California and had brought Archy with him as his servant. Against this claim was the fact that he had set up a private school in Sacramento. I can’t get into all the legal angles but Stoves had told Sacramento families – assured them – the he was setting up the school on a permanent basis. Charles Crocker, who built the railroad, assured Archy’s attorney that this was so. Crocker hated slavery and he had very early, along with Stanford, helped keep slavery out of California. It was for a fact the interest in abolitions that had brought Crocker, Stanford, Hopkins and Huntington together in the first place, long before they dreamed of a railroad across the mountains. Stoves had broken no law by bringing his slave with him to wait on him. It was proven that Stoves was not a visitor, yet the laws which were in existence did not uphold Archy’s positions so they could not be enforced. He was delivered to his owner. Stoves took Archy to San Francisco himself and prepared to depart for Mississippi with his slave. It was a this point Mammy acted. She did not have George Dennis to help but she had James E. Brown and David W. Ruggles and those who aided them. A new writ was obtained for Archy’s liberation. Stoves was asked to state the circumstances of his claim and now swore Archy had escaped from him in Mississippi. Archy was freed but re-arrested. Abraham Lincoln’s close friend, Ed Baker was engaged for Archy’s lawyer. Stove’s statements in Sacramento not agreeing with those in San Francisco, the United States Commissioner, George Pen Johnson ordered him liberated.
George Dennis had returned in time to snatch Archy from Stoves and they had been actually on their way back to the South when the Negro Committee chartered a tug boat for a huge sum of money and with an order signed by Judge Terry seized Archy. This had been before the second trial at San Francisco. Somehow Mammy raised the money for the trial which was a test case. When won, Mammy had to hide Archy until she was able to send him to Canada.
March 5th, 1938
Present: Mrs. Martha O’Donnell
I believe the place where the Negro commission gathered was the AME Church on Scott Street. There was no regular quarter in San Francisco, but she had a peculiar Negro colony. The old Southern families liked to live in great style but my father said life on the plantation houses wasn’t as elegant, as romantic novelists would have people believe. The floors were kept polished all night but rugs, if they were foolhardy enough to have them on the main floor suffered from muddy boots. Their dogs wandered in and out, bugs flew in and bits of straw dead leaves and so on were tracked in. The luxury was expressed mostly in massive furniture like Mammy had in her upper Washington Street boarding house. The meals, of course, were sumptuous and there were always guests. I remember my father as a boy saying there was always great excitement when a boat arrived. If it came at night, the slave children carried lighted faggots down the path to the pier and the housekeeper would despair because the new arrivals would track in either mud or dust. But the slaves enjoyed these times as much as the master and his family. My father came from a plantation on the River Road outside New Orleans The plantation name was Linwood and my grandfather had been a slave of a Mr. Kerner who went bankrupt. Later Kerner’s son Duncan put the plantation back on its feet and built a new plantation house. My father, in spite of being a favorite with the Kerners, escaped one day after his master was at a convention in New Orleans. An Abolitionist persuaded him to take the route over the Underground and he was in San Francisco by 1850 by such devious means I am unable to relate it all. My father became attached to Mammy very very early. She used to say he knew more about how to keep things elegant than the other Negroes in San Francisco and that was why he became her steward. But he had no freedom papers and he darted about among
Mammy’s operations always afraid he might encounter someone who had known him as a slave. He had followed Mammy’s advice never to talk to the other Negroes. For years until Lincoln declared slaves free, he lived a hidden life. He first knew Mammy when she had her first employment with the commission merchants and he fared much better after he met her.
Learned from William Willmore
Southerners weren’t very happy in California. They had been used to being surrounded by slaves over whom they had authority but men of great wealth or power never emigrated to California. It was another class – some looking for political positions – but mostly men who had not been able to get what they wanted in the South. The political class dreamed of introducing slavery and gaining possession of huge holdings on the Pacific Coast. But the majority of people coming to California were opposed to slavery and denounced it. Few had any talents or even respectability. (Willmore is now talking much more openly than when I first approached him. He has a quick mind and is almost dropping his peculiar Negro expression. Only when he grows tired, he lapses into the Negro idioms – HH)
The Southerners got thwarted in their schemes. To others it appeared wicked and people were indignant. People didn’t want Negroes in California, but they particularly didn’t want them here as slaves.
March 6th, 1938
You were asking about life in the South. My father once told a story about a slave name Edna. Nathaniel Holland, a San Francisco attorney, was in New Orleans. He went to an auction of slaves. Because he was from California word got around that he was fabulously rich and was in the market for a maid for his wife, which was not true. He saw on the slave block an almost white slave girl. No planter wanted white Negroes for their cotton plantations or their sugar plantations. The girl was an octoroon with straight hair from Georgia. Only a very limited number of men would purchase such a girl.
An excessively fat, disgusting looking man who was overdressed and jelled rode up on horseback. It was obvious he was either a gambler or connected with a house of ill fame – pardon – I mean a place of ill repute.
Holland made up his mind to give him a contest and the bidding on the white slave ran up to $1,150 before the man gave way. Holland assured her that things would be all right. He was getting married. She could be his wife’s maid and in California she could earn her freedom.
Edna was sent by the attorney to San Francisco with a married couple who were friends of his. She stayed two years with the Hollands then became the housekeeper for a gentlemen’s club and she acquired three thousand dollars. Now the odd part of this story is that her former owner, Alfred Sidney Spencer, of Atlanta Georgia had been her owner. He had bought her as a playmate for his own daughter when she was two years old. Spencer was a attorney but he ran into trouble with this investments in New Orleans and had to settle his debts. Edna, as an asset, had to be sold. Spencer went to San Francisco to practice law and was amazed to find Edna who was ell to do from purchasing real estate. She moved into a cottage with him and she cared for him up until the time he died. But he first married her and present was their child, blue-eyed and flaxen haired, aged two. The clergymen united them because no license was required and there was no publication of the marriage. The daughter inherited considerable property and when grown never admitted to her colored blood.
March 7th, 1938
Present: Mrs. Martha O’Donnell
The Fugitive Slave Law had no weighty opposition. It was pushed through in a hurry to benefit some men who had designs on slaves a Mrs. Cross and her child and a Mrs. Whales. The men were headstrong Southerners but they had influential political connections and did a powerful lot of talking in their unprincipled aims.
My father was in Mammy’s laundry at Jessie and Ecker when the French-Negro seaman murdered Ann Phoebe Smith. That was either in 1856 or 1857 but of course you have that story from the newspapers.
HH: No I’m afraid I haven’t.
Well, I’ll tell it to you then, the best I can. The girl hated the man because he was a mighty low-slung person. In those days my father was what known as a porter. He didn’t become Mammy’s steward until later when she had learned that he was never great on any big talk about her affaires. He rolled it all into a tight ball like it was string. My father was an escaped slave, brough out over the Underground by Mammy Pleasant in the early days and that was something he never forgot.
I disremember the name of the Madagascar French Negro but he was nimble and tried to force his attentions on Ann Phoebe. He finally went away on his ship. When he returned he headed straight for the laundry. She presented a duck’s back to him and she was up and away upstairs like a blue flash. Mammy forced her to go downstairs and to get the sailor a drink of water. But that wasn’t what he wanted, he was boiling with hatred because he’d demeaned himself for a girl who wouldn’t have him, and he whipped out a knife and cut her throat.
(The sudden spurt of Negro expressions always happened with Mr. Willmore when he grew tired so terminated the interview here. I had noticed whenever he talked about Abolition activities he lapsed into a stilted style of talking and I could only conclude that he had studied the subject at some time and had rather learned it by rote. I could make little out of the accounts of the abolition movement of the early days. Finally I went to the library and copied out articles that clarified the subject…..
Back in 1851, a man named Calloway had a slave named Frank. A man could tour the state with a personal slave but he couldn’t put him to work earning money for the owner. He’d put Frank out to work in the mines for there months. Frank was the spunkiest since someone told him about the saw up in the gold country. He kept the final wages paid him and escaped to San Francisco aboard a river steamer. His master got a writ, he was captured and confined at Long Wharf. The Committee intervened and got an affidavit declaring he was detained by coercion. He was of no mind to be taken back to the Atlantic Coast. I don’t know how it ever did come out but a lot of hot debating went on with torch words thrown in. Seems likely he got freed.
You were wanting to know about Casa Grande. It was Richardson’s house and it stood at Dupont at Clay. When the Woodworth’s bachelor club broke up Mammy was supposed to have persuaded the Woodworths to move to the Casa Grande which was then empty.
David Broderick wanted slaves freed who had worked long enough for their masters to be freed, had they been paid. Broderick lost out. He was a northern man with anti-slavery principles. Native Californians supported him but he wasn’t popular because he was a gloomy, never a smile. Gwin, on the other hand, diverged his friends into federal jobs.
Mammy’s husband came from the plantation of John Hampton Pleasants “Contention” in Goochland, Virginia County, Virginia. John James, her husband had been born there in 1924.
It was said the Captain Edward Gardiner who married the daughter of Mrs. Hussey of Nantucket, where Mammy Pleasants was bound out, visited her in San Francisco. The Gardiners were lost at sea in 1863 and left no children.
George Gordon’s son Nicolas, actually lived at the Bell house at the time Mammy took Viola there.
There was a deep conviction that John Brown had found a financial backer. If it was anyone, it was Mammy Pleasant, just like she said.
George Gordon, a hairdresser, who later had a shop in the basement of the Tehema House, acted as Mammy’s first steward. This was then she had her first house of ill fame and was still with the commission merchants as a housekeeper. They almost found out about it. Gordon testified in court that he had colored blood and therefore couldn’t testify.
Learned from WW:
Mammy had a step-daughter, Smith’s daughter by his first wife who had also been Cuban but had had colored blood. The step-daughter’s name was Emma. She had married a man named Stewart when she was seventeen and lived in Boston. Smith had a much younger half brother who lived in Philadelphia.
Mammy had a child by Pleasants born out of wedlock. This child’s name was Elizabeth and she was left with Mrs. Martha Steele in Boston. Mrs. Steele later came to San Francisco bringing Elizabeth with her. Elizabeth married a man named Peck. She had several children by him but all died in infancy and she herself died when she was twenty eight.
Willmore felt that Teresa Bell had the answer to the puzzling question of whether or not Mammy Pleasant had ever met John Brown. Teresa revealed to Willmore that although it was true enough that Mammy had gone to Canada to give money to Brown, he avoided meeting with her and send his son instead. Mammy was humiliated by this circumstance. She kept back half of the money and gave it to her husband to purchase several lots at Chatham, Canada and in order to set up a hostel to receive escaped slaves. Mammy on the other hand stressed her claim that she had indeed met John Brown, not near any railway yard as some claimed, but at Chatham, where she was registered as Mrs. Smith at the Villa Tavern. She swore it was not the first time she had seen John Brown. She had previously seen him at Akron, Ohio Where Rebecca Howard’s parents lived. James E. Brown could confirm this because he was the escaped slave she had hidden from the slave hunters. James E. Brown never confirmed or denied the story. When Mammy brought him out to San Francisco – or maybe sent him out – he had no freedom papers. The Negroes talked about it but only among themselves.
(This latter story is consistent with the autobiography dictated to Sam Davis of Carson City and her second autobiography dictated to Charlotte Dennis Downs – HH)
William Willmore March 1938 (not dated) Present: Mrs. Martha O’Donnell
Mammy made great preparations for her meeting with John Brown. She was very exultant, very uplifted according to my father. She turned the money she had collected from Negroes into a bank draft before she set forth for Canada. You ask Charlotte Dennis Downs about it. She heard it from her brother who was Mrs. Mark Hopkins’ steward. It must surely be true because you can’t slow down that kind of learning. The wonderment is that the story even got repeated at all because you see Charles Crocker despised Mammy Pleasant. She had distributed money among strikers – people who were down on the railroad builders. Charles Crocker was in Canada at the time Mammy met John Brown with him was a man named William Stephens. Stephens knew a man who had seen – been the actual witness of Mammy giving the support money to Brown. The man who was the witness of this happening knew Mammy when she was married to her first husband because he was engaged in Abolition activities too. He was there and recognized her and that a sure enough fact. Even Mr. Crocker even if he was most rich, was convinced because the story of Mammy collecting and distributing money was so characteristic of her.
Willmore:
“The Negroes brought to California were mostly slaves who served as personal servants. Southerners came here expecting to succeed in making California into a slave state – I mean they could live here and make the slaves earn their fortunes. The movement was headed by William Gwin, but the takeover he planned never got underway. Many of the slaves were brought here by gamblers and there was a law preventing them from collecting a slave’s wages. If the slave owner breaks the law he lost the ownership of the slave. Then there were slaves who had escaped and some Southerners who had never owned some particular slave would make a claim. Not too many pulled this trick, there was always the danger a slave might have freed and manumission papers could be produced. The Negroes were timid but not nearly as unthinking as many imagined.
Sharp thinkers like Mammy and David W. Ruggles Senior formed an organization to protect. Later it was James E. Brown, Senior who stood out in the organization. But I’m going the long way around to answer your question. Mammy, right from the beginning when she was working for some men who owned a commission house, carried on her own affairs. She got tied up because they were always entertaining so she got some men she’d worked along with in the Underground – back in New Bedford. She’d send messages around to their offices and the actions would be very fast. Sometimes a slave’s owner would want to return home to the South and he wouldn’t want to pay his charge’s passage. He could sell him before the state was admitted to the Union. But after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed the Negroes slung together in the fear that someone may at dishonestly lay claim to any one of them. There was a law against Negro testimony and so Mammy saw that they had to be an organization with everyone a member to which abolitionists would contribute money if legal fees had to be paid. So, Mammy and Ruggles and Allen Francis Senior got together and saw to it that every Negro belonged. I think it was called a convention, and these were meetings held in a church, usually scheduled for a time when Mammy could attend. She always knew ahead of time of the merchants she worked for were to have guests so she’ pick an evening when she could hurry all immediately when supper was over. Her life was packed with activity – three meals a day and no going out when the Committee of Vigilance held meetings. She‘d have to be home when these were over because she’d have to serve them something when they returned. George Gordon had a men’s hairdressing parlor in the basement of the Tehama House and he picked up a lot of gossip of what was going on and it would all be promptly relayed to her just as she relayed the gossip she heard. Some Negroes of course, had already been seized and taken back into slavery and the Negroes got more and more determined to prevent it from happening.
Mammy was very clever at getting hold of money to help out her people. All of the people she worked with at slave running in Massachusetts were prospering and they had no idea she was colored. But the Negroes knew. Secretly they called her Madame Pleasants but they were always very careful to address her by her first husband’s name whatever that was because I’ve forgotten. And don’t even think anyone called her Mammy as I’m doing to you. Indeed she wouldn’t have stood for it. It was Sarah Althea Hill who did that and people heard about it during the Sharon case and when everyone began calling her that she was furious. Other times she’d say “It gives me a suspiration.”
When she’d hear of a slave being captured she’d say “It’s going to be sticky around the edges but I’ll lay wages against them keeping him (or her) there.” I remember my father telling about that many times.
Of course I disremember when I first saw her but it would be about seventy years ago. My father was her steward then and we lived across the street from her upper Washington Street boarding house. Sometimes she’d call on my mother to lend a hand with the cooking if there was some emergency and I’d be underfoot but I’d be very quiet and she liked me because she said that I had good manners like my parents.
(This interview lasted two hours and there were portions of it which rambled off the subject these I did not take down)
MARCH 4th, 1938 at San Francisco
Present: Christine Gilbert
Willmore:
One of the Woodworth brothers went East to bring out his mother and sisters in 1857. The other brother took a vacation camping out on Red Rock Island to d a lot of hunting. Their business partner, Schell carried on alone. The River Kings (the Minton Brothers) asked to borrow Mammy, but she didn’t really have much to do because they were always traveling up or down on matter pertaining to their river lines. As a consequence, Mammy busied herself more than she ever had before with abolition activities. Her friend from New Bedford, Charles West, had the Negro boarding house going by then. Mr. Zander, Robert Gwin and another man name Mr. McAlvord were all behind her and I seem to recall my father that Thomas Randolph was there by then.
HH: He’s the one who became a minister at Marysville?”
Yes, but that was a lot later. Allen Francis helped her out too, but they never got on too well together. He spoke only French previous. He was very light with blue eyes and on the haughty side. But he wasn’t clever like David Ruggles and James Brown and George Dennis. They were all go-ahead and won a great deal of admiration from the white men helping out the slaves.. You were asking about the Archy case. I’ve been thinking about that. It was the most discussed case among the Negro colony. There were others that required a lot of thinking about but maybe it stood out because Mammy had more time. She had the three laundries going but no boarding houses as yet. I probably can give you only the most elementary facts. The Woodworths that is the two brothers – lived together with Mammy as their housekeeper but they kept getting burned out and moved from place to place. I disremember why they deserted Casa Grande. I know they didn’t yet live in the twin houses on Minna because that was after Selim married and set up separate. But Mammy had charge of their house even if she was working for the Mintons.
She was the one who hid Archy out in the supposedly locked-up Woodworth house.
There had been a bill introduced to prevent Negroes from settling in California. This caused a great deal of panic among the colored people and a lot of them hurried out of the state to go to the gold fields discovered in British Columbia one of Mammy staunchest supporters, George Dennis (also colored) went. The Archy case regarded a Mr. Stoves (Stovall). He was a schoolmaster and he had brought Archy with him from the South. He wasn’t the success he’d counted on in California so he was going to leave and take Archy back with him. Mammy and her followers decided that Archy had the right to remain and if it was found he had then this would be very important to all the Negroes, those who had been brought here and those who had come on their own. But Mr. Stoves Had hired Archy out and that broke the Fugitive Slave Law, if I’ve got all the angles sorted out proper-like. Archy had escaped from a Sacramento river boat where his master had put him in charge of an agent. He was found, arrested and taken to the jail in Sacramento where the police absolutely refused to surrender him to his owner. But Stoves got writ but the matter was taken up in the Supreme Court. It was decided that there had been no emancipation for Archy. Mammy and her followers provided the slave with a lawyer to defend his interest. Slavery was prohibited – Stoves claimed he was only on a trip to California and had brought Archy with him as his servant. Against this claim was the fact that he had set up a private school in Sacramento. I can’t get into all the legal angles but Stoves had told Sacramento families – assured them – the he was setting up the school on a permanent basis. Charles Crocker, who built the railroad, assured Archy’s attorney that this was so. Crocker hated slavery and he had very early, along with Stanford, helped keep slavery out of California. It was for a fact the interest in abolitions that had brought Crocker, Stanford, Hopkins and Huntington together in the first place, long before they dreamed of a railroad across the mountains. Stoves had broken no law by bringing his slave with him to wait on him. It was proven that Stoves was not a visitor, yet the laws which were in existence did not uphold Archy’s positions so they could not be enforced. He was delivered to his owner. Stoves took Archy to San Francisco himself and prepared to depart for Mississippi with his slave. It was a this point Mammy acted. She did not have George Dennis to help but she had James E. Brown and David W. Ruggles and those who aided them. A new writ was obtained for Archy’s liberation. Stoves was asked to state the circumstances of his claim and now swore Archy had escaped from him in Mississippi. Archy was freed but re-arrested. Abraham Lincoln’s close friend, Ed Baker was engaged for Archy’s lawyer. Stove’s statements in Sacramento not agreeing with those in San Francisco, the United States Commissioner, George Pen Johnson ordered him liberated.
George Dennis had returned in time to snatch Archy from Stoves and they had been actually on their way back to the South when the Negro Committee chartered a tug boat for a huge sum of money and with an order signed by Judge Terry seized Archy. This had been before the second trial at San Francisco. Somehow Mammy raised the money for the trial which was a test case. When won, Mammy had to hide Archy until she was able to send him to Canada.
March 5th, 1938
Present: Mrs. Martha O’Donnell
I believe the place where the Negro commission gathered was the AME Church on Scott Street. There was no regular quarter in San Francisco, but she had a peculiar Negro colony. The old Southern families liked to live in great style but my father said life on the plantation houses wasn’t as elegant, as romantic novelists would have people believe. The floors were kept polished all night but rugs, if they were foolhardy enough to have them on the main floor suffered from muddy boots. Their dogs wandered in and out, bugs flew in and bits of straw dead leaves and so on were tracked in. The luxury was expressed mostly in massive furniture like Mammy had in her upper Washington Street boarding house. The meals, of course, were sumptuous and there were always guests. I remember my father as a boy saying there was always great excitement when a boat arrived. If it came at night, the slave children carried lighted faggots down the path to the pier and the housekeeper would despair because the new arrivals would track in either mud or dust. But the slaves enjoyed these times as much as the master and his family. My father came from a plantation on the River Road outside New Orleans The plantation name was Linwood and my grandfather had been a slave of a Mr. Kerner who went bankrupt. Later Kerner’s son Duncan put the plantation back on its feet and built a new plantation house. My father, in spite of being a favorite with the Kerners, escaped one day after his master was at a convention in New Orleans. An Abolitionist persuaded him to take the route over the Underground and he was in San Francisco by 1850 by such devious means I am unable to relate it all. My father became attached to Mammy very very early. She used to say he knew more about how to keep things elegant than the other Negroes in San Francisco and that was why he became her steward. But he had no freedom papers and he darted about among
Mammy’s operations always afraid he might encounter someone who had known him as a slave. He had followed Mammy’s advice never to talk to the other Negroes. For years until Lincoln declared slaves free, he lived a hidden life. He first knew Mammy when she had her first employment with the commission merchants and he fared much better after he met her.
Learned from William Willmore
Southerners weren’t very happy in California. They had been used to being surrounded by slaves over whom they had authority but men of great wealth or power never emigrated to California. It was another class – some looking for political positions – but mostly men who had not been able to get what they wanted in the South. The political class dreamed of introducing slavery and gaining possession of huge holdings on the Pacific Coast. But the majority of people coming to California were opposed to slavery and denounced it. Few had any talents or even respectability. (Willmore is now talking much more openly than when I first approached him. He has a quick mind and is almost dropping his peculiar Negro expression. Only when he grows tired, he lapses into the Negro idioms – HH)
The Southerners got thwarted in their schemes. To others it appeared wicked and people were indignant. People didn’t want Negroes in California, but they particularly didn’t want them here as slaves.
March 6th, 1938
You were asking about life in the South. My father once told a story about a slave name Edna. Nathaniel Holland, a San Francisco attorney, was in New Orleans. He went to an auction of slaves. Because he was from California word got around that he was fabulously rich and was in the market for a maid for his wife, which was not true. He saw on the slave block an almost white slave girl. No planter wanted white Negroes for their cotton plantations or their sugar plantations. The girl was an octoroon with straight hair from Georgia. Only a very limited number of men would purchase such a girl.
An excessively fat, disgusting looking man who was overdressed and jelled rode up on horseback. It was obvious he was either a gambler or connected with a house of ill fame – pardon – I mean a place of ill repute.
Holland made up his mind to give him a contest and the bidding on the white slave ran up to $1,150 before the man gave way. Holland assured her that things would be all right. He was getting married. She could be his wife’s maid and in California she could earn her freedom.
Edna was sent by the attorney to San Francisco with a married couple who were friends of his. She stayed two years with the Hollands then became the housekeeper for a gentlemen’s club and she acquired three thousand dollars. Now the odd part of this story is that her former owner, Alfred Sidney Spencer, of Atlanta Georgia had been her owner. He had bought her as a playmate for his own daughter when she was two years old. Spencer was a attorney but he ran into trouble with this investments in New Orleans and had to settle his debts. Edna, as an asset, had to be sold. Spencer went to San Francisco to practice law and was amazed to find Edna who was ell to do from purchasing real estate. She moved into a cottage with him and she cared for him up until the time he died. But he first married her and present was their child, blue-eyed and flaxen haired, aged two. The clergymen united them because no license was required and there was no publication of the marriage. The daughter inherited considerable property and when grown never admitted to her colored blood.
March 7th, 1938
Present: Mrs. Martha O’Donnell
The Fugitive Slave Law had no weighty opposition. It was pushed through in a hurry to benefit some men who had designs on slaves a Mrs. Cross and her child and a Mrs. Whales. The men were headstrong Southerners but they had influential political connections and did a powerful lot of talking in their unprincipled aims.
My father was in Mammy’s laundry at Jessie and Ecker when the French-Negro seaman murdered Ann Phoebe Smith. That was either in 1856 or 1857 but of course you have that story from the newspapers.
HH: No I’m afraid I haven’t.
Well, I’ll tell it to you then, the best I can. The girl hated the man because he was a mighty low-slung person. In those days my father was what known as a porter. He didn’t become Mammy’s steward until later when she had learned that he was never great on any big talk about her affaires. He rolled it all into a tight ball like it was string. My father was an escaped slave, brough out over the Underground by Mammy Pleasant in the early days and that was something he never forgot.
I disremember the name of the Madagascar French Negro but he was nimble and tried to force his attentions on Ann Phoebe. He finally went away on his ship. When he returned he headed straight for the laundry. She presented a duck’s back to him and she was up and away upstairs like a blue flash. Mammy forced her to go downstairs and to get the sailor a drink of water. But that wasn’t what he wanted, he was boiling with hatred because he’d demeaned himself for a girl who wouldn’t have him, and he whipped out a knife and cut her throat.
(The sudden spurt of Negro expressions always happened with Mr. Willmore when he grew tired so terminated the interview here. I had noticed whenever he talked about Abolition activities he lapsed into a stilted style of talking and I could only conclude that he had studied the subject at some time and had rather learned it by rote. I could make little out of the accounts of the abolition movement of the early days. Finally I went to the library and copied out articles that clarified the subject…..
Back in 1851, a man named Calloway had a slave named Frank. A man could tour the state with a personal slave but he couldn’t put him to work earning money for the owner. He’d put Frank out to work in the mines for there months. Frank was the spunkiest since someone told him about the saw up in the gold country. He kept the final wages paid him and escaped to San Francisco aboard a river steamer. His master got a writ, he was captured and confined at Long Wharf. The Committee intervened and got an affidavit declaring he was detained by coercion. He was of no mind to be taken back to the Atlantic Coast. I don’t know how it ever did come out but a lot of hot debating went on with torch words thrown in. Seems likely he got freed.
You were wanting to know about Casa Grande. It was Richardson’s house and it stood at Dupont at Clay. When the Woodworth’s bachelor club broke up Mammy was supposed to have persuaded the Woodworths to move to the Casa Grande which was then empty.
David Broderick wanted slaves freed who had worked long enough for their masters to be freed, had they been paid. Broderick lost out. He was a northern man with anti-slavery principles. Native Californians supported him but he wasn’t popular because he was a gloomy, never a smile. Gwin, on the other hand, diverged his friends into federal jobs.
Mammy’s husband came from the plantation of John Hampton Pleasants “Contention” in Goochland, Virginia County, Virginia. John James, her husband had been born there in 1924.
It was said the Captain Edward Gardiner who married the daughter of Mrs. Hussey of Nantucket, where Mammy Pleasants was bound out, visited her in San Francisco. The Gardiners were lost at sea in 1863 and left no children.
George Gordon’s son Nicolas, actually lived at the Bell house at the time Mammy took Viola there.
There was a deep conviction that John Brown had found a financial backer. If it was anyone, it was Mammy Pleasant, just like she said.
George Gordon, a hairdresser, who later had a shop in the basement of the Tehema House, acted as Mammy’s first steward. This was then she had her first house of ill fame and was still with the commission merchants as a housekeeper. They almost found out about it. Gordon testified in court that he had colored blood and therefore couldn’t testify.
Learned from WW:
Mammy had a step-daughter, Smith’s daughter by his first wife who had also been Cuban but had had colored blood. The step-daughter’s name was Emma. She had married a man named Stewart when she was seventeen and lived in Boston. Smith had a much younger half brother who lived in Philadelphia.
Mammy had a child by Pleasants born out of wedlock. This child’s name was Elizabeth and she was left with Mrs. Martha Steele in Boston. Mrs. Steele later came to San Francisco bringing Elizabeth with her. Elizabeth married a man named Peck. She had several children by him but all died in infancy and she herself died when she was twenty eight.
Willmore felt that Teresa Bell had the answer to the puzzling question of whether or not Mammy Pleasant had ever met John Brown. Teresa revealed to Willmore that although it was true enough that Mammy had gone to Canada to give money to Brown, he avoided meeting with her and send his son instead. Mammy was humiliated by this circumstance. She kept back half of the money and gave it to her husband to purchase several lots at Chatham, Canada and in order to set up a hostel to receive escaped slaves. Mammy on the other hand stressed her claim that she had indeed met John Brown, not near any railway yard as some claimed, but at Chatham, where she was registered as Mrs. Smith at the Villa Tavern. She swore it was not the first time she had seen John Brown. She had previously seen him at Akron, Ohio Where Rebecca Howard’s parents lived. James E. Brown could confirm this because he was the escaped slave she had hidden from the slave hunters. James E. Brown never confirmed or denied the story. When Mammy brought him out to San Francisco – or maybe sent him out – he had no freedom papers. The Negroes talked about it but only among themselves.
(This latter story is consistent with the autobiography dictated to Sam Davis of Carson City and her second autobiography dictated to Charlotte Dennis Downs – HH)
William Willmore March 1938 (not dated) Present: Mrs. Martha O’Donnell
Mammy made great preparations for her meeting with John Brown. She was very exultant, very uplifted according to my father. She turned the money she had collected from Negroes into a bank draft before she set forth for Canada. You ask Charlotte Dennis Downs about it. She heard it from her brother who was Mrs. Mark Hopkins’ steward. It must surely be true because you can’t slow down that kind of learning. The wonderment is that the story even got repeated at all because you see Charles Crocker despised Mammy Pleasant. She had distributed money among strikers – people who were down on the railroad builders. Charles Crocker was in Canada at the time Mammy met John Brown with him was a man named William Stephens. Stephens knew a man who had seen – been the actual witness of Mammy giving the support money to Brown. The man who was the witness of this happening knew Mammy when she was married to her first husband because he was engaged in Abolition activities too. He was there and recognized her and that a sure enough fact. Even Mr. Crocker even if he was most rich, was convinced because the story of Mammy collecting and distributing money was so characteristic of her.