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| Mary Ellen Pleasant | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 19, 1814[a] Georgia, Virginia, or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania[a] |
| Died | January 11, 1904[b] San Francisco, California |
| Known for | Entrepreneur and abolitionist |
Mary Ellen Pleasant (August 19, 1814[a] – January 11, 1904[b]) was a 19th-century entrepreneur, financier, real estate magnate and abolitionist. She was arguably the first self-made millionaire of African-American heritage, preceding Madam C. J. Walker by decades.[9]
She identified herself as “a capitalist by profession” in the 1890 United States census.[10] Her aim was to earn as much money as she was able to help as many people as she could. With her riches she was able to provide transportation, housing, and food for survival. She trained people how to stay safe, succeed, carry themselves, and more. The “one woman social agency” served African Americans before and during the Civil War, as well as meeting a different set of needs after Emancipation.
She worked on the Underground Railroad and expanded it westward during the California Gold Rush era. She was a friend and financial supporter of John Brown and was well known among abolitionists. She helped women who lived in California during the California Gold Rush to stay safe and become self-sufficient. After the Civil War, she won several civil rights victories that resulted in her being called “The Mother of Human Rights in California”. Legal battles, though, had mixed results.[11]
Realizing that she was in a tenuous position as a black woman who had gained political and financial power, she sought ways to blend in to the culture of the times. She portrayed herself as a housekeeper and a cook, long after she was wealthy, but she used these roles to get to know wealthy citizens and gain information for her investments. In the 1870s, she made the acquaintance of Thomas Bell, a wealthy banker and capitalist, which helped her make money and keep her riches and true financial status a secret. She spent her money, and developed the plans, to build a large mansion that outwardly was to seem as if it was the Bells’ residence. She assumed the role of housekeeper for the Bells, but it was not a secret in the city that she actually ran the household, managed the servants, and also managed the relationships among the Bells.
Author Edward White said of her: “As an entrepreneur, civil-rights activist, and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush–era San Francisco, shattering racial taboos.”[3]
Biography
Early years
Pleasant was likely born on August 19, 1814.[1][7][a] There are various accounts about where she was born, who her parents were, and if she was born free or not.[1][3] She claimed that she was born free in Philadelphia on Barley Street.[2][a] Others state that she was born into slavery in Georgia or Virginia. She may have been the daughter of a voodoo priestess from the Caribbean, a Hawaiian merchant, or a wealthy Virginian.[1][3][12][a] It was said that she had so many stories about her origins to “please her audience or justify her behavior.”[13]
After her mother disappeared when she was a child,[4] she lived with Mr. and Mrs. Williams[2][4] and was known as Mary Ellen Williams.[1] When she was six[4][c] or eleven years of age,[14] she was taken from a household in Philadelphia or Cincinnati.[15] Mr. Williams brought her to Nantucket, Massachusetts, to be a domestic or indentured servant to the Hussey-Gardner family, who were Quakers and abolitionists.[3][4][15][d] He left some money for her education with the Husseys,[14] yet Pleasant did not get a formal education.[2][13] She later said, “I often wonder what I would have been with an education.”[2][e] Pleasant stated in her memoir that she was brought to Nantucket by her father, but she had no memories of life before Nantucket or why she went there.[2][13]
Mrs. Hussey in her shop sold everything from fish hooks to a ton of coal… Buying wholesale and selling retail was the way she did it and it paid. I was finally placed in the store as a clerk, and I could make change and talk to a dozen people all at once and never make a mistake, and I could remember all the accounts and at the end of the day she could put them down, and they would always be right as I remembered them.[15]
—Mary Ellen Pleasant, quoted in Agency: Married Women Traders of Nantucket 1765-1865
When she arrived, c. 1820, Nantucket was in the “golden era of Nantucket whaling.”[13] As she grew up, she worked in the Husseys’ store.[3][16] Located on Union Street, it was run by Mary Hussey,[2][f] whom she called “Grandma Hussey”. Hussey was the grandmother of Phebe Hussey Gardner, who was married to Captain Edward W. Gardner, a whaler.[13] Pleasant sought to create a better life for herself by focusing on learning what she could from her surroundings. Working at the store helped her develop a friendly manner and business acumen.[16] She said of that time: “I was a girl full of smartness [who] let books alone and studied men and women a good deal … I have always noticed that when I have something to say, people listen. They never go to sleep on me.”[3][16] She was considered a member of the family by 1839 when she was taken into the home of abolitionists Phebe Hussey Gardner and Edward Gardner. Their son Thomas Gardner taught her how to read and write. She left Nantucket c. 1840. Thenceforth she exchanged letters with Phebe Gardner and Ariel Hussey until they died. Phebe and her husband Edward were lost at sea in 1863, and Ariel was deceased by that time.[13][14][g]
The Underground Railroad
Female abolitionists often were accused of overstepping the bonds of appropriate behavior. The actions of female reformers and abolitionists… roused public opinion and placed their private as well as public lives under scrutiny.[19]
—Lynn Maria Hudson, author of The Making of “Mammy Pleasant”
Pleasant was an apprentice for a tailor in Boston on Merrimac Street, and she may have met her first husband in the shop.[5][20][15] She married James Smith in Boston in the 1840s.[4][14][15][h] Her husband was an abolitionist and together they helped people who had been enslaved make it north to freedom in Nova Scotia via the Underground Railroad.[4][14][15] They coordinated transportation through contacts in Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts, Ohio, and perhaps New Orleans.[4][14] Smith was an agent for The Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison.[14] She was likely to have attended Anti-Slavery Society meetings in Nantucket, led by Anna Gardner, during and after her marriage.[15] Smith, who had been abusive to Pleasant,[14] died after around four years of marriage. Pleasant was left an estate worth tens of thousands of dollars. She continued their work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad,[3][7] for three or four years.[21] It was dangerous work[3][7] and she was harassed for helping runaways and ultimately had to leave the east coast. They were in danger from slavers,[14][15] as well as subject to prosecution and imprisonment under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the later act of 1850 that imposed new penalties on those in the Underground Railroad.[15]
During that time, she returned to Nantucket for a short period after her husband’s death. Edward Gardner had helped transport fugitives to their freedom, and he helped Pleasant manage her husband’s estate after his death.[15] At some point, Pleasant developed a relationship with John James Pleasants,[i] who was a former slave.[21] He had been the Creole foreman of her husband’s plantation[14] or a waiter in New Bedford, Massachusetts.[13] During their marriage, he worked as a cook-seaman.[19][21] They were married c. 1848.[7] She had a baby daughter from one of her husbands named Elizabeth “Lizzie” J. Smith in the late 1840s.[4][19][21] Lizzie was likely left behind on the east coast as Pleasant established herself in San Francisco. Lizzie later made the journey west with Mrs. Martha Steele of Boston.[19]
A number of fellow abolitionists from Boston, Philadelphia, and New Bedford migrated west to California c. 1850;[21] There were more than 700 people, at least 25 of whom were Hussey and Gardner family members, who left Nantucket for the gold coast in 1849.[19][j] She sailed on a ship to New Orleans,[4] where she arranged for the flight of enslaved people, took cooking lessons, and was said to have taken lessons from Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. She arrived in San Francisco in 1849,[4][19] or in April 1852 on the steamer Oregon,[7][14][19] after traveling through Panama.[4] She left New Orleans just as she was about to be captured for her Underground Railroad feats.[4] The voyage to California took about four months.[22]
California Gold Rush and civil rights
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) provided a unique opportunity for blacks. As one African American miner wrote to his wife, “This is the best place for black folks on the globe. All a man has to do is to work, and he will make money.” Many blacks were made rich through prospecting.[3]
Since only one out of ten pioneers coming to the state were women, Pleasant realized that she could seize a very lucrative opportunity to cook and provide lodging for the miners.[3] There was a wrinkle. Americans southerners also made a run for the Gold Coast, taking their enslaved people with them. There were slave catchers and slaveholders who came looking for runaways.[3] Governor Peter Hardeman Burnett was such a southerner who wanted to eliminate all blacks from the state.[3] In addition, there was a California law that allowed any black person to be sold into slavery if they did not have appropriate papers.[5]
Money-making
When she arrived in San Francisco, word had spread that she would be arriving in San Francisco and she was met by a group of men who got into a bidding war to engage her as a cook.[22]
She is said to have had $15,000 (equivalent to $527,640 in 2022) in gold coins when she arrived in San Francisco.[21] She managed her money cleverly. She exchanged gold into silver through Panama $1,000 at a time when the value of gold was high. She deposited silver into a bank, and took it out in gold, she said that she “was able to turn my money over rapidly”. She put some of her money into a number of banks. She also divided money between a black Baptist minister, Thomas Randolph; William West of West & Harper, and Frank Langford with a 10% interest rate.[21]
She worked as a live-in domestic[19][15] and made investments based upon conversations that she overheard from wealthy men as she attended to them during meals and conferences.[21] She established boarding houses, a string of laundries, and brothels.[21][22] She was a co-founder of the Bank of California and she established several restaurants, including the Case and Heiser.[7] John James Pleasant was a sea-cook,[13] who was often at sea during their 30-year marriage.[15] He worked with her for more than two decades as an abolitionist. He also worked in the fight against discrimination in the 1860s. He died in 1877.[21]
More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Pleasant
