The History of Slavery and Race in California from the Gold Rush to the United States Civil War, 1848-1865

A social and political history, this dissertation examines the history of slavery, freedom, and race in California from the Gold Rush to the U.S. Civil War. In scholarship, California is often viewed as exceptional to the national conflict around slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation in nineteenth century America. By examining underutilized legal records, private correspondences, personal diaries, government documents, and military records, my dissertation complicates these narratives that exclude California from the national struggle between the North and the South around the question of slavery, freedom, race, and labor. In doing so, this dissertation argues that California was a nominally free state that harbored slaves. Indeed, California was an antebellum American state where the politics of slavery and the politics of abolition converged. If it were not for the outcome of the Civil War, this dissertation argues, the free state of California may have become central to the expansion of slavery throughout the American West.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/174258/1/charnan_1.pd