Voters in the land of gold had adopted a governing document that forbade slavery. Some of the reasons were geographic and based on population—like many states that had entered the union since the original thirteen, California did not contain the large farms or plantations that would make slavery economically viable, plus the region’s black population was small. Other reasons were philosophical; those who ventured to California were free spirits, entrepreneurs, and live-and-let-live adventurers. The very fact that they had traveled so far under onerous conditions to reach America’s West Coast,
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