William Leidesdorff, First In Everything

William Alexander Leidesdorff lived only 38 years, but he fit more in those years than many others into a hundred.

He became America's first Black millionaire (Mary Ellen Pleasant, also of San Francisco, was second. Your school textbook and the Guinness Book of Records may have told you that that distinction belonged to Madam CJ Walker. They lied.)

Leidesdorff was the first English-speaking alderman of San Francisco. He was, as far as I know, the first Black Jewish person to hold public office on behalf of either Denmark or USA, having been Consul for Denmark to California and then U S Vice Consul to Mexico. That was in 1845, 16 years before the Civil War even started. That's San Francisco for you.

He built the first hotel in San Francisco, first horse racing track, and first shipping warehouse. He launched the first steamboat on San Francisco Bay. He donated land to open the first public school, sat on the first School Board and the first City Council. And he did all that in a mere 7 years, while recovering from a loss of his first career and a tragic heartbreak.

Leidesdorff's father was a Danish Jew passing as Lutheran, and his mother, Anne Marie Spark, a woman of mixed Black, Carib, and European ancestry. Leidesdorff spent his childhood on the island of Saint Croix in the Danish West Indies, and moved to New Orleans in 1824. There he became captain of Julia Ann, a fine schooner that he sailed from New York to Panama, St. Croix, Brazil, Chile, Hawaii, Alaska, and from Alaska here, to Yerba Buena.
Not only were Captain Leidesdorff's travels very successful, but he was also in love. She loved him back. They were engaged.

He loved her so much that he could not bear starting their life together with a lie. He told her that he was Black. She (or so it is said) told him that she loved him whatever color his mother was, but could not lie to her parents. Her father... Well, her father had exactly the kind of views on his daughter marrying a Black Man as you'd expect from a Louisiana plantation owner in 1840.
The wedding was off. William Leidesdorff had to leave town quickly. It is said that just before he left he found out that his beloved died of a broken heart. I personally do not believe that a teenager can die of a broken heart, but her father was never tried.

Captain Leidesdorff was the last Black captain to sail out of New Orleans after strict enforcement of the Negro Seamen Acts for almost a generation until the slave owners lost the Civil War.

He settled in Yerba Buena, a small town of thirty families and proceeded to grow it into a city almost single-handed. His knowledge of at least six languages, including Spanish, probably helped, but so did his open-handed generosity.
By 1844 the Mexican government granted him 35,521 acres extending from Sacramento to Folsom, which he called Rancho Río de los Americanos after American River that flows there.
In 1845 the government changed, but USA valued Leidesdorff as much as Mexico ever did. After all, it was he that informed Larkin that the California Republic had been established in Sonoma.
In 1846 the Declaration of Independence was read publicly for the first time in California - on the veranda of one of the largest houses in town, Leidesdorff's house.

William Leidesdorff was so loved in San Francisco that on May 19, 1848, the day of his burial, all business in town was suspended, all schools closed, and all flags flew at half-mast.

Perhaps because he did not expect to die of a fever at 38 Mr. Leidesdorff left no will. Joseph Folsom, the unscrupulous SF Harbor Master, purchased Leidesdorff's multi-million dollar estate from his mother in St. Croix for a paltry $75,000.