The Civil War produced mixed results for people of color in California. For some groups, there were distinct benefits, for some distinct losses, but for everyone, in the end, outcomes were ambiguous at best. This was because even the biggest winners, members of the African-American community, were not entirely winners, nor were Indians, the biggest losers, entirely without gains. The other generalization that can be offered is this: the story of the Civil War home front in California was sui generis because no other state had so diverse a population.

AFRICAN AMERICANS

In 1860 the number of African Americans living in California was a mere 4,086, of whom 31 percent were women. Although this is a seemingly small number in a state that had almost 400,000 inhabitants, it represented a far larger black population than in any other state or territory west of the Rocky Mountains. Moreover, because almost 1,200 African Americans were concentrated in San Francisco, where they constituted a community with resources – of money, of education – beyond those of most communities of free blacks in the North, they possessed the means to wage pioneering civil rights struggles. One white person who was impressed by their achievements was James Mansfield, the medium whose letters to his wife are an extraordinary source for Civil War San Francisco. He wrote, “Some of the colored people who came here early are immensely wealthy.”