Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814-1904) was an abolitionist, businesswoman and entrepreneur during the Gold Rush.
Born the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved voodoo priestess and a Virginia governor’s son on August 19, 1814, near Augusta, Georgia, Mary had no last name. She witnessed a plantation overseer murder her mother and was sold at the age of nine and sent to work as a linen worker at the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans.
Following her service there, she worked as a free servant to Louis Alexander Williams, a Cincinnati merchant. He promised that after she served for some time, she would be freed. However, Williams, in debt and jealous of his wife Ellen’s affection for Mary, placed her in nine years of indenture with an aging Quaker merchant known as Grandma Hussey in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Indentured servants could be of any race, and Mary was told not to reveal her race since she could pass for white. She also adopted Ellen Williams’ name, becoming Mary Ellen Williams.
The Husseys were abolitionists and it was through them that Mary met most of the prominent members of the movement during her youth on Nantucket. Around 1841, she married a wealthy mulatto merchant/contractor named James Smith who was also a slave rescuer on the Underground Railroad. The two worked to help slaves flee to safety in Canada and safe states. When Smith died three years later, he left Mary a $45,000 fortune and a plantation run by freedmen near Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
Around 1848, she began a partnership/marriage with John James Pleasants, though no records exist of it. Smith had left instructions for her to continue the work after his death and so they did. Increasing attention from slavers forced them to move to New Orleans a couple of years later. Pleasants was a relative of Marie Laveau and she and Mary consulted before the Pleasants went to San Francisco in April 1852.
Mary had no “freedom papers” so she passed herself off as white while she worked as a steward and cook in a boardinghouse and invested in real estate and other business activities. She became successful at leveraging social change that many called her San Francisco’s “Black City Hall”. Her money and activities helped ex-slaves avoid extradition, start businesses and find employment in hotels, homes and on steamships and railroads of California.
In 1858, Pleasant returned East, bought land to house escaped slaves and aided John Brown both with money and by riding in advance of his raid at Harper’s Ferry encouraging slaves to join him. Although it was extremely risky, Mary Ellen Pleasant believed slavery had to be ended by force. “I’d rather be a corpse than a coward,” was her motto.
Following the Emancipation Proclamation, she returned to San Francisco to find that her investments had amassed a fortune estimated at $30 million. She then publicly changed her racial designation in the City Directory from “white” to “black” and led the Franchise League movement that earned blacks the right to testify in court and to ride the trolleys. Her lawsuit in 1868 against the North Beach and Mission Railroad was used as a precedent in 1982 to achieve contemporary civil rights.
Mary Ellen Pleasant became one of the most influential women in San Francisco’s early history. She died in 1904 at the age of 89. On her tombstone is inscribed “the mother of civil rights in California”.
