The Archy Case: The California Supreme Court Refuses to Free a Slave

Abstract

THE STRUGGLE FOR human rights and human dignity forms a dominant theme in history. Nowhere is this struggle more clearly exemplified than in the United States. In the ten years before the Civil War, especially, the questions of Negro slavery, the rights of free Negroes, and the status of free Negroes and Negro slaves in free states and territories were topics of discussion on the street corner, in the press, in Congress, and in the Halls of Justice. The courts were vitally concerned with political problems. From the time of Chief Justice John Marshall, the Supreme Court of the United States repeatedly rendered decisions which were as much political as juridical. It is not surprising, then, that the Supreme Court entered the debate over the extension of slavery in the Dred Scott case in 1857. It was an attempt by the Court to resolve the major political problem of the day.' During these pre-Civil War years, state courts also were hearing cases which, at least locally, rivaled the Dred Scott case in significance and interest. The California case, Ex parte Archy, 1858, is an example. Its full political implications remain largely unexplored. Slaves and free Negroes alike were unwelcome in gold-rush California. Various measures to bar them from the state were considered