Archy Lee's Struggle for Freedom: The True Story of California Gold, the Nation’s Tragic March Toward Civil War, and a Young Black Man’s Fight for Liberty - Hardcover

Brian McGinty’s ArchyLee’s Struggle for Freedom tells the little-known story of one of the most dramatic struggles for freedom that took place in the years immediately preceding the American civil war. Archy Lee had been a slave in his native Mississippi, but while still a young man he crossed the plains to gold rush California, where slavery was banned by law, and in January 1858 became the subject of a heated battle. Slavery’s supporters insisted that he was still subject to Mississippi’s law, and opponents argued that he was now free. The congregants of San Francisco’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church sang a celebratory hymn to the “The Year of Archy Lee” after a federal court declared that he was a free man. Lee and other California blacks then sailed north to British Columbia, where they hoped to elude further efforts to enslave them. Lee’s San Francisco attorney was the brilliant Edward Dickinson Baker, who Abraham Lincoln called his “dearest personal friend,” who was elected a U.S. Senator from Oregon in 1860, and who introduced Lincoln on the steps of the U.S. Capitol when he was inaugurated as president in 1861.

McGinty’s account is the first to reveal the true story of what historians have called “California’s Dred Scott case” and also to describe related events that occurred in the “Year of Archy Lee”: the bloody 1858 struggle over slavery in the Kansas Territory, the 1858 debates over slavery between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in Illinois, and the 1858 appearance in the night sky over California and the rest of North America (including one of the Lincoln-Douglas debate sites) of the beautiful Donati’s comet, the first comet ever photographed and a heavenly body regarded by many as an omen of approaching disaster or heavenly triumph. McGinty’s earlier books about Abraham Lincoln and John Brown reveal the same concern for human freedom he tells with fervor and drama in ArchyLee’s Struggle for Freedom.

Brian McGinty is a writer and historian whose special interests include American history, the history of the American West, and American legal history. His previous books include Lincoln and the Court, The Body of John Merryman:Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus, John Brown's Trial, and Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. .