Mary Ellen Pleasant

Mary Ellen Pleasant was born on the nineteenth of August 1814 — by her own later account at Georgia, by other accounts at the West Indies — under conditions of which the precise particulars were never disclosed by Pleasant herself. She was raised in Nantucket, Massachusetts from approximately age ten at the household of a Quaker merchant by the name of Mary Hussey — the precise terms of which she described in her published memoir as an indenture.

She was married in 1841 at twenty-seven to the Cuban planter James W. Smith, who died in 1844 leaving her an inheritance of over forty thousand dollars in gold and a directive to use it in the abolitionist cause. She used the inheritance to operate stations of the Underground Railroad across the Massachusetts coast and the Ohio borders between 1844 and 1849.

She relocated in April 1852 to San Francisco — arriving the second week of April 1852 at the height of the Gold Rush boom of the post-Sutter’s Mill years — under the name Mrs. Mary Ellen Smith. She took employment at a boarding-house at the corner of Washington and Stockton Streets and ran the boarding-house for an annual fee of five hundred dollars plus the right to keep her own private investments separate from the boarding-house accounts.

She accumulated across the following forty years a personal fortune that had reached an estimated one million dollars by 1875 — the rough equivalent of thirty million dollars in the dollars of the current period — derived from the real-estate investments she made through the white financier Thomas Bell as legal front. The Bell-Pleasant partnership held by 1880 the principal Black-financed real-estate portfolio in the western United States.

She gave thirty thousand dollars in eastern bank notes to John Brown at a Chatham, Ontario meeting in May 1858 — over fifteen months before the October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia — as the principal Black financial backing of the raid. The note book of the raid that Brown carried on his person at Harpers Ferry bore the inscription ‘the ax is laid at the foot of the tree, when the first blow is struck there will be more money to help’ — over the signature ‘M.E.P.’

She was the principal plaintiff of the 1866 Pleasant v. North Beach & Mission Railroad Company case at the California Supreme Court — the first successful Black plaintiff against streetcar segregation in California history, in advance of the Boston and the New York streetcar cases of the same decade.

She died at San Francisco on the fourth of January 1904 of complications of a stroke, at eighty-nine.

She is honored here as the financier of the Harpers Ferry raid.