S
ean Ryan was unaware of the most brutal chapters of American history when he started high school.
He spent much of his adolescence in what he described as a religious cult that his mother joined, near Redding. While children his age constructed models of Spanish missions using sugar cubes and popsicle sticks, a longtime popular assignment in California’s fourth-grade classrooms, Ryan was placed in a series of rotating apprenticeships. Starting when he was 8, Ryan chainsawed tree limbs with lumberjacks near Mount Shasta, paved roads in Arizona and went to Reno for a plumbing gig — work organized by his mother’s church.
Ryan moved in with his father in San José when he was 14. He enrolled in school in the adjacent suburb of Los Gatos, an upscale community tucked in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. His first class — U.S. history — required reading about the Trail of Tears, the forced displacement of 60,000 Indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the southeastern part of the United States. Thousands died as they were marched to reservations west of the Mississippi River.
The brutality of American history, like the forced labor of Indigenous people in the 18th and 19th centuries to build the Spanish missions, startled Ryan.
“I just cried in front of the whole class,” Ryan, now 53, recalled. “They were like, ‘What is going on?’ And I was like, ‘I never knew any of this stuff. This is all completely new to me.’”
What followed was an insatiable desire to learn more about his family’s history. Did his ancestors have a role in the subjugation and forced removal of people? Ryan’s research revealed that he had a direct connection to California’s foundational years, when a veneer of frontier freedom and prosperity concealed an agenda anchored in racist hostility and terror.
It began with a photo. A great-aunt on Ryan’s mother’s side heard about his interest in genealogy, and asked whether a box of records she had would help his hunt. Among the documents included was a picture of his great-great-great grandfather: James Madison Estill, a founder of California’s system of mass incarceration, who was an early California legislator and who enslaved more than a dozen people as he advanced a scheme in the 1850s to reinstate enslavement in the newly formed state.
California is now going through a similar unearthing of its past. The state’s Reparations Task Force is examining the historic harms of slavery and anti-Black racism in California.
Although California entered the nation as a free state, pro-slavery lawmakers, including enslavers like Estill, held outsize influence in its early Legislature. They enacted laws aiding enslavers, and supported the expansion of human bondage across the country.
The bill creating the Reparations Task Force was passed with bipartisan support in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It was heralded as a transformative step for racial justice. When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill that September, he vowed the state would not “turn away from this moment to make right the discrimination and disadvantages that Black Californians and people of color still face.”
On Friday and Saturday, that task force will meet in Sacramento, the state Capitol where Estill and his allies sought to create a western outpost for the ideals that would galvanize the Confederacy. On the task force agenda: how to potentially provide financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people.
Slavery is an afterthought in the popular California origin story of rugged Gold Rush frontierism. But hundreds of enslaved Black people were involuntarily brought to the state to work in the gold mines by Southerners who hoped to replicate the system of chattel slavery and plantation agriculture on the Pacific Coast.
Last summer, the task force released a preliminary report (PDF) detailing California’s history of enslavement and its many decades of discriminatory policies — in housing, education, health care, criminal justice and other areas — that established the systemic racism that persists. In July, the task force will present recommendations on how Black residents should be compensated for this enduring oppression.
But at the state Capitol, the preliminary report has been largely ignored in the months since its release, according to state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), a member of the task force.
“I’m sad to report not a single one of my colleagues have even mentioned this report, and I doubt very seriously if any of them have really taken time to read it,” he said.
“They need to read this report, they need to understand what’s there and understand the history instead of the whitewash that we’ve been allowed to perpetuate itself as American history for almost 400 years.”
‘A bit hard to swallow’
Estill, whose surname is also documented in some places as “Estell,” brought his family from Kentucky to Missouri in the 1840s. He sought fortune by starting a military prison, a grain mill and a postal route. When the ventures stalled, Estill journeyed on to California. He left his wife and young children behind, but took his most prized possessions: the people he owned.
In the census taken on Nov. 20, 1850, just 10 weeks into California’s statehood, Estill was recorded as a farmer in Solano County, with real estate valued at $15,000. Listed beneath his name are 14 men and one woman — with surnames of either Brown or Smith — who ranged in age from 18 to 40.
June Brown Joe Brown Isaac Brown John Brown Bill Brown Peter Brown Thomas Brown Mid Brown Bolin Brown Comins Brown Joe Smith Higins Smith Whitehead Smith General Smith Minerva Smith
The following note is scribbled in the margin next to the list of names: “These men were slaves in Missouri and have contracted to work in this state and then be free after two years.”
As soon as Estill was elected to the state Senate in 1851, representing Napa and Solano counties, he began to pursue laws that would allow him to keep his human property in California, a “free state,” and advance the institution of chattel slavery. As some of his peers found fortunes mining for gold, Estill charted a path toward a more lucrative American hustle: the construction and management of state prisons.
Estill won a contract to run the prison system the year he was elected to the Legislature. He pocketed profits from the forced labor of incarcerated people, who, under his authority, built a monument to mass incarceration: San Quentin State Prison.
“No man has received one tenth the money from the State that General Estill did; and no man made greater profit on what he received,” read a scathing obituary in The Sacramento Bee.
The deeper Ryan dug into his great-great-great grandfather’s past, the more he found the man “despicable.”
“It was a great research project, but at the end of the day, it was kind of a bit hard to swallow,” Ryan said. “It was obvious people hated him.”
Ryan’s research was guided by a trove of records, articles and photographs. The same documents don’t exist for the descendants of enslaved people, like the Browns and the Smiths listed on the 1850 census — a vexing issue for the task force currently grappling with who could become eligible for compensation from the state of California.
The pursuit of his family history took Ryan around the world. He learned that Estill’s granddaughter was married to an anatomist who moved his family to Bangkok for work. Inspired, Ryan moved with his family to Bangkok and stayed overseas for a decade. Now he lives with his wife and four kids in Oregon, where he works as an oceanographer on devices that collect energy from waves.
“I’ve definitely made life choices based on some of this stuff,” said Ryan. “To me, finding out about the history of my family was very cathartic, I guess. It filled a lot of holes. I really kind of dug into it and it became very important to me.”
Fugitives in a ‘free state’
Pro-slavery politicians like Estill were instrumental in California’s formation as a state. The issue of slavery was clearly on the minds of the delegates who gathered in Monterey to write California’s constitution in the fall of 1849. In fact, the slavery debate literally shaped the state.
Historians of early California history like Franklin Tuthill and Rockwell D. Hunt have detailed how the state’s current eastern boundary was forged through a debate with pro-slavery delegates who wanted to create a massive state that would stretch into present-day Utah. They believed that a state so large would inevitably be broken into two states: one where slavery would be allowed, the other free. Even though the delegates officially banned slavery in California, the meeting at Colton Hall in Monterey was “understood to be under the management, imaginary if not real, of southern men,” according to historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. And men like William Gwin, a Mississippi enslaver who moved to California and became one of its first U.S. senators, would dominate early state politics under the pro-slavery “Chivalry” wing of the Democratic Party.
“I would say in terms of the people who came to California thinking about elected office, rather than just the gold mining, that tended to be Southerners,” said Alex Vassar of the California State Library, who wrote a book on the history of state legislators. “And so they brought their values, they brought the customs of their place and their time to California with them.”
And some, Vassar said, “actually served in the state Legislature owning slaves.”
