Mary Ellen Pleasant

The First Black Female American Self-Made Millionaire

Portrait of Mary Ellen Pleasant.

When blacks in America faced insurmountable obstacles due to rampant and systemic racism, Mary Ellen Pleasant amassed a fortune and became a self-made millionaire before any other black female American, including Madame C.J. Walker. As a young adult, Mary became a participant in the Underground Railroad and helped enslaved people flee the South. She was an active abolitionist during the period of the Gold Rush and financed the infamous 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia, led by John Brown. Mary was also a savvy investor, with stakes in railroads, real estate, gold and silver mines, boarding houses, dairies, restaurants, and Wells Fargo Bank. Some estimate that her fortune reached $30 million at its height—close to $1 billion in today’s currency. The 1890 U.S. census listed her as “a capitalist by profession.”

Records of Mary Ellen Pleasant’s early history are scant and conflicting. By some accounts, she was born on a Georgia plantation in 1814. Mary insisted—via an autobiography she dictated to journalist Sam Davis in 1901—that her birthplace was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which she entered on August 19, 1814. She also stated that her father, Louis Alexander Williams, was a silk merchant from the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii), while her mother was an unmixed free negro woman from Louisiana.

At some point in her childhood, she was sent to live with the Husseys, a Quaker family residing on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. While clerking in the family store, Mary began to study the wealthy New England men and women around her while maintaining a degree of invisibility. Mary learned the ins and outs of running a business from the Hussey matriarch, a woman also named Mary. She also derived other entrepreneurial lessons from black business owners in Nantucket.

Mary’s father, Louis, supposedly sent money to the Husseys and arranged for her to be educated in Nantucket, but Mary stated:

[T]hey did not use it for that purpose, and that’s how I came to have no education.”

Nonetheless, Mary blossomed into an intelligent young lady under the guardianship of the Husseys, who she grew to love. As their letters suggest, the Husseys loved her in return, and Mary Hussey’s granddaughter, Phoebe Gardner, introduced Mary Ellen Pleasant to the island’s Anti-Slavery Society.

Portrait of James Henry Smith.

During the 1840s, Mary moved to Boston and became a tailor’s assistant with the aid of the Husseys. There, she met and married a Cuban contractor and merchant named James Henry Smith, who—being a mulatto—passed for white. The couple lent their efforts to the abolitionist movement in Boston, led by William Lloyd Garrison and others. Mary’s new husband contributed to Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, and James and Mary helped fugitives from slavery escape to freedom in Canada and Mexico through the network of homes and volunteers that constituted the Underground Railroad.

James Smith died in 1848 and left Mary a $45,000 inheritance. Mary used some of the money to continue the fight for abolition alone until she married John Pleasants, a former employee of her deceased husband. John’s sir name was also recorded as Plaissance or Pleasance, but Mary Ellen settled on Pleasant for her married name. Mary’s heavy involvement in the Underground Railroad brought undue attention from enslavers who began hunting for her. She fled to New Orleans with her new husband, but fearing imminent capture, Mary headed West to California, and from that point on, John Pleasants is no longer mentioned as being part of her life. 

Mary settled in San Francisco sometime around 1852 and secured employment as a cook and housekeeper despite her sizeable inheritance. She became a silent observer of wealthy whites once more, eavesdropping on their conversations during meetings and business dinners. From the information she gathered, Mary shrewdly invested her earnings and savings in stocks and money markets. She also became a lender, fronting money to gold prospectors at 10 percent interest.

The proposed 1800s San Francisco street where many of Mary Ellen Pleasant’s businesses stood.

To benefit from the Gold Rush, Mary launched a laundry business and expanded to boarding houses, restaurants, and other property investments in the following decade. She also gained the trust of several prominent businessmen after acting as a matchmaker, which is believed to have garnered firsthand financial planning and investment advice. While in San Francisco, Mary continued assisting escaped enslaved persons who she helped relocate to the city. She used her wealth and connections to find them homes and work. She extended help to illegally enslaved black Californians as well. Fugitives were either hidden in her home or the homes of wealthy white acquaintances favorable to the cause. 

Mary has since come to be known as the mother of civil rights in California, considering she devoted her energy and resources to those causes. She fought to earn fellow black citizens the right to testify in court, and she organized a sit-in to protest San Francisco transit authorities since streetcar companies refused to transport black passengers. An 1866 case she brought against North Beach and Mission Railroad Company for denying her passage went to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor in 1868. California banned streetcar segregation statewide in 1893.

Her abolitionist efforts and support of civil rights causes in San Francisco became legendary. But irrespective of that—and despite her capitalistic ambitions, entrepreneurial successes, and wealth—rumors and allegations tarnished Mary’s social standing. Some alleged that her boarding houses doubled as brothels that serviced wealthy white men, even though the same establishments received praise in the past for being respectable when juxtaposed with competing businesses that were crude by comparison.

Others questioned her support of John Brown, who led the infamous 1859 raid on an arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. An unverified account by Mary asserts that she was the wealthy Northerner who penned the note found in the pocket of John Brown following his hanging. It read:

The ax is laid at the foot of the tree. When the first blow is struck, there will be more money to help.”

Mary also admitted to funding John Brown to the tune of $30,000 (close to $1,000,000 in today’s currency). Another blow to her reputation came in the 1870s when Mary, while at one of her boarding houses, met a wealthy white Scottish-American investor named Thomas Bell, who entered into a decades-long partnership with her. Seeing it was the post-Reconstruction era, Mary transferred many of her investments to Bell, including the 30-room mansion she designed and built for him and his wife, Teresa. While Mary worked for Bell as a housekeeper, she controlled the family’s finances. Although they had been business partners for years, Mary was later accused of extorting wealth from Bell, which was never proven.

The relationship between Bell and his wife, Teresa, had faltered, and she sought an opportunity to ruin Mary. Thomas Bell died after falling from the window of an upper floor, and some suspected Mary of murder when Teresa claimed Mary pushed her husband to his death. But those suspicions died down after the public learned that Bell left nothing to Mary in his will. The real trouble came years later when Bell’s widow, Teresa, sued Mary and won. When Teresa gained control of the Bell estate, Mary’s fortune evaporated.

Mary was at once a domestic servant, a self-made millionaire, a conductor of the Underground Railroad, a civil rights activist, and perhaps a former enslaved person, yet the events that came toward the end of her life overshadowed all her accomplishments and reduced her legacy to infamy. Mary Ellen Pleasant is still celebrated in San Francisco, where both a day and a park—though the city’s smallest—is named in her honor. She died in 1904 and was interred in Tulocay Cemetery in Napa, California, by a friend named Olive Sherwood. In 1965, officials added a line to Mary’s gravestone, which she requested before she died. It is how she wanted to be remembered: “A Friend of John Brown.”

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