On a warm night in 1841, William Alexander Leidesdorff sat on the porch of an old white house covered in vines in New Orleans with his fiancée, Hortense. As she leaned on Leidesdorff, she could tell that something was bothering him. Hortense looked into his heavy-lidded, auburn eyes. “What is troubling you, William?” she asked, looking up at him with her big blue eyes framed by blond curls. Against his better judgment, he confided in her.
He stammered as he tried to get the words out. “I’m a . . .” He finally told her. Hortense’s eyes filled with tears.
As she took in his confession, she scanned his features. He had a round, pale face with a straight nose, ruddy cheeks, piercing deep-set brown eyes, bushy sideburns, and curly brown hair that he wore slicked back with oil. As he cried, he confessed that he was from the Virgin Islands, the son of a Jewish Danish sailor and merchant and a black island woman. He had been passing for white since he had arrived in New Orleans from the Caribbean as a boy, rising from working on the docks to commanding a ship in his midtwenties. Hortense plunged her face into the sleeve of his velvet jacket and sobbed heavily. “My father will never let us marry, and I cannot deceive or disobey him.” “Our dream has ended, but I will love you as long as I live,” he said.
“Go! You must go,” Hortense told Leidesdorff. “My heart will always belong to you. Run, William! I must tell my father!” she shouted after him as he retreated into the night.
Hortense came from an aristocratic New Orleans family that owned slaves and would strongly disapprove of Hortense marrying a man of color. After Leidesdorff left, she went inside the house and told her father about him. Incensed, her father announced that the wedding was off, dragged her to the door of her room, and pushed her inside. “You will never see that nigger again,” he swore, turning the key and locking her in.
The next day, Leidesdorff received a package from Hortense’s father with the engagement ring inside and decided to leave New Orleans. He sold everything he owned and purchased a ship. The day before he was to leave the city, he was walking down Canal Street, and was passed by a funeral procession. He stood in the doorway of a store and watched the mourners go by. He spotted Hortense’s mother, father, and sister in one of the carriages, and his heart sank. That night there was a knock at the door. When he opened it he was greeted by a priest. The man handed Leidesdorff a small gold cross, which he immediately recognized as Hortense’s. “Hortense’s last words were that she wanted you to have this,” the priest told him.
In 1841, Leidesdorff left New Orleans. He sailed to California, then a remote Mexican territory. As he stepped off the gangplank of his ship in Yerba Buena Cove, he saw a backwater of thick forest and green hills dotted with Indian communities, military forts, cattle farms, and Catholic missions. Deciding he would live openly as a mixed-race man, he settled in San Francisco and started an import-export company shipping tallow and animal pelts from California to Hawaii and Alaska. Once that business turned a profit, he used the money to open a general store, a warehouse, a lumberyard, and a shipbuilding business; he also built San Francisco’s first hotel. San Francisco had very few inhabitants at the time. Leidesdorff, still trying to mend his broken heart, seemed to relish the isolation. His only friends were his employees, a bartender at his hotel, and his black laundress. At night they would go down to the beach on the northern coast of San Francisco to swim. Sometimes they’d just sit on the rocks, looking up at the moon, and talk until the sun came up, listening to the waves crash on the shore.
In 1844, Leidesdorff, then Mexican California’s most prominent resident, was granted citizenship by the Mexican government. In return for his allegiance, Mexico gave him more than 35,000 acres of undeveloped land. His acquisition made him the largest landowner in the area.
Leidesdorff built a large mansion in the hills of San Francisco, which he referred to with tongue in cheek as “the cottage.” His house was a New Orleans–style home with dozens of rooms, a wraparound porch, and the state’s only flower garden. His estate functioned as a de facto US embassy in Mexican California territory. A convivial host, he received generals and politicians at his residence. He served his guests beer and meat and offered them cigars. He apologized for not having better whiskey, which was hard to come by in the West. “We get what we can get,” he would tell them. “Would you like some tequila?” He spoke with a strange accent, a mix of his father’s Danish, his mother’s Caribbean patois, and a southern drawl.
In 1846, when Mexico went to war with the United States, Leidesdorff switched his allegiance to the Americans and was appointed United States Vice Consul to Mexico. After the Mexican–American War ended and the US annexed California, the US government made Leidesdorff the treasurer of the territory. In 1847, he built California’s first public school and a horse racing track for the citizens’ entertainment. In 1848, when gold was discovered in the Sacramento valley, the value of his property and business skyrocketed to over $1 million, making him the first African American to achieve a net worth of more than a million dollars in the history of the United States.
One spring night, Leidesdorff retired to bed in his quarters on the top floor of his mansion. The next morning, doctors pronounced him dead of “brain fever.” Flags in San Francisco were hung at half-mast, and Californians wept for the loss of one of their most beloved.
After his death, Joseph Folsom, a real estate investor, traveled to the Virgin Islands and found Leidesdorff’s estranged mother, Anna Marie Sparks, his sole known heir. He convinced her to sign over her son’s property for a payment of $75,000 ($2.1 million). The Leidesdorff estate was worth more than $1.4 million ($38 million). With the stroke of a pen, the fortune and legacy of America’s first black millionaire was stolen.