California’s racist carceral roots run deep. In his State of the State message delivered in 1851, California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, a Tennessee-born slaveholder, decried, that “the colored race are by nature inferior to the white.” Three months later, the newly Union-admitted state’s cash-strapped lawmakers, confronted by widespread lawlessness throughout the Gold Rush frontier, happily awarded a ten-year private prison enterprise lease to James Estell, promising him a state-constructed prison and unrestricted use of convict labor, in exchange for him sheltering and feeding the prisoners. A slaveholder himself, Estell called to order the state’s first Democratic Party convention a month later, represented the counties of Napa and Solano as a Senator, and rallied pro-slavery support for the Golden State’s own Fugitive Slave Act in April of 1852, breaking ground at Rancho Punta de Quentin (Quentin Point), in October of the same year.
Joseph Daniels, a decorated officer of the Mexican War, traveled to California in 1849 as a civilian, failed to find gold in Mariposa, and then relocated to heavily wooded Marin County near Point San Quentin (today’s Larkspur), before sending for his wife, daughter, and their slaves in Texas. Having built a sawmill, Daniels began to manufacture lumber, and in September of 1852, one month before Estell was to begin prison construction, Daniels and he became business partners acting as trustees for the San Francisco Manufacturing Company, expecting to profit from San Quentin’s construction. Shady backroom contract bids orchestrated by Estell, his willingness to take bribes for early releases, and other corruption caused lawmakers to reduce the lease bid—Daniels quit the deal in 1853. If mass incarceration is a virus, San Quentin was its gain of function trial.
During 1853, California was roiled in legal tumult following the landmark ruling in In re Perkins a year earlier, which destroyed the free status mandate condition of the Compromise of 1850 by remanding a trio of alleged fugitive slaves arrested in California back to their absentee master. Despite California’s free state status, slaveholding transplants from slave states occupied positions of authority throughout the power scaffold of early statehood machinated to permit masters to retain or remove from the state their former slaves on the contorted basis of property rights.
Free Black men working gold claims in supposedly free California were actually walking targets for the theft of their wares and the dominion of their bodies—they couldn’t give testimony, and they couldn’t enforce their freedom.
For the three Perkins plaintiffs, the arresting sheriff, a Sacramento doctor who treated them, the justice of the peace who upheld their owner’s claim, the judge who heard their habeas corpus appeal, the slaveholding opposition attorney, and the two pro-slavery California Supreme Court Justices who denied their petition using racist language, Chief Justice Hugh Murray and Alexander Anderson, all hailed from or had lived in slave states. Justice Murray infamously owned a thirty-year-old Mississippi-born man named Bill Shakespeare.
In the fall of 1854, at the height of legal contention over the rights of fugitive slaves, one of Daniels’ slaves, sixteen-year-old Henry Hensley, was convicted in a San Francisco court for burglary and sentenced to one year in San Quentin, placing him directly under Estell’s thumb. As a teenager, Hensley, prisoner number 486, was the only enslaved resident housed in San Quentin, until, as the San Quentin log indicates, he suspiciously “escaped.”
In January of 1855, an investigation into irregularities at San Quentin ordered by then-Governor Bigler rebuked Estell for an increasing number of escapes and an overall lack of prison security. Following similar negative findings after a second inspection, legislators terminated Estell’s lease and turned the scandal-plagued facility over to three state prison directors in June.
What they couldn’t know at the time was that in the days just before his ouster, and shortly before Hensley’s sentence was to conclude, Estell brazenly arranged for the kidnapping of Hensley and a second Black inmate named Jose Maria, described later in a news article as a sixteen-year-old Peruvian “negro boy said to be free,” in order to sell them for profit at one of New Orleans’ infamous slave markets without Daniels’ knowledge.
After arranging secret transport of the teens across the bay, Estell arranged for their escort to San Francisco’s Jackson Street wharf, where they were then placed aboard the Pacific, an outbound steamer headed for Nicaragua, by then-California Congressman-elect, Philemon T. Herbert, a pro-slavery lawyer from Alabama who, though slated to leave for Washington in June, quickly accompanied them to the wharf, giving them regal cover.
Herbert’s accomplice, a slave state transplant from Virginia named John E. Stephenson, who ironically had previously worked for Daniels before becoming a lawyer himself, was tasked with traveling with the pair from San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua aboard the Daniel Webster en route to New Orleans. Once there, the pair were sold into slavery, with Hensley fetching $1,000, before each disappeared from the historical record.
Crazy, right?
Anonymous sources outed Estell’s kidnapping plot to two San Francisco Vigilance Committee inspectors who took sworn testimony interviews at the prison and corroborated the pair’s travel via eyewitness accounts from the Marin County Sheriff J. J. Stocker, who confirmed the teens were smuggled out of the prison, and Magistrate Judge Joseph Weed, who could identify who placed the pair onboard the Pacific.
The inspectors’ findings were published in a report cited by the San Francisco Bulletin in an exposé titled, “Exposure of Estell’s Corruption in the State Prison Management.” When Daniels confronted Estell about the loss of his slave, a local attorney, S. A. Sheppard, overheard Estell admit to the scheme and offer to pay Daniels $1,000 as compensation. Daniels accepted the money.
Estell, Herbert, and Stephenson never faced any consequences for conduct that would, today, easily amount to double life sentences in California under state law for multiple kidnappings, with enhancements for crimes against children. Under federal law, the race-based human trafficking of minors would implicate civil rights violations and particularly harsh penalties for state actors acting under color of law. Of course, the entire enterprise would amount to a RICO conspiracy for all parties involved. What’s particularly disturbing, especially in the era of so-called reconciliation, reparations, and our contemporary government taking modest steps to identify and own past abuses committed against persons on the basis of their skin color in the name of the state, is that nobody is talking about this very disturbing history of the carceral state’s birth in California.
Why shouldn’t San Quentin be torn down in the name of the same reckonings that justify the toppling of confederate monuments? Conversely, where is the statue that commemorates the two Black teens who were cell-extracted and sold to the highest bidders by state actors? Why isn’t this narrative taught in either the Ethnic Studies classes taught in California’s high schools or the community college version of the same required for California State University graduates? It confounds us that this dark but true history of San Quentin’s origins wouldn’t have been presented via the San Quentin News by now either. We had to stumble upon it while surfing EBSCO.
Where are the carceral journalists?
Ray R. Albin, a historian educated at San Jose State University, authored The Golden State’s Veiled Dichotomy, which originally appeared in The Western Historical Quarterly, 2023, Vol. 54, 325-346, published by the Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association.
