Black slavery in the United States did not disappear as soon as Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, nor did it end with the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of the American Civil War in April 1865.

June 19th, 1865, marks the date when 250,000 enslaved people in Texas found out that they had been emancipated by executive decree two and a half years earlier. Texas was the last area in the South to receive the news that slavery had been abolished. Not until Union troops under Major General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston did the news reach African Americans in Texas.

Even then, pockets of slavery continued to exist, and one of those was in California.

Delilah L. Beasley tells the story in her ground-breaking book The Negro Trail Blazers of California (1919).

A “colored girl” named Ida (or Addie) Taylor was held as a slave at Hansonville (later named Rackerby) in the hills of Butte County. She worked as a sheepherder. Word of her plight came to the attention of a black man, Robert Anthony, who ran a quartz mill at Honcut. Anthony had come to California as a slave in 1852 and had earned his freedom after two years in the goldfields.

Beasley, who interviewed Robert Anthony, writes:

He drove out to the place and asked her if she did not wish her freedom. She replied: “Yes.” He requested her to get into his wagon and he drove with her to Colusa. Some time afterward this slave girl became his wife.

The Negro Trail Blazers of California, p. 90

Robert Anthony and Ida Taylor were married in Colusa on September 9th, 1870. It was either 1869 or 1870 when the young lady was at last freed from slavery, some seven years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Other than a wedding announcement in the Colusa Sun and the story in Beasley’s book, there is no record of Ida Taylor. She has no age, no birth record, no death notice. No photograph. We don’t know when or how she came to California. She appears all too briefly, and then fades from our view, like so many other black California pioneers.