Robert Owens was connected to these networks as a businessman and community figure. His standing gave him access to information and to the white legal and political establishment in ways that other Black Californians might not have had. When the moment came to act on Mason’s behalf, he had the relationships to make the action effective.
## December 1855: The Crisis
The precipitating event of December 1855 is described somewhat differently across the sources, but the core elements are consistent. Robert Smith was planning to leave California and take his household — including Biddy Mason and the other enslaved people — to Texas. His financial situation had deteriorated; the San Bernardino Mormon colony was not prospering, and Smith apparently owed money. Texas was a slave state, and the move there would solidify his legal claim on the people he held as property in a jurisdiction that fully supported that claim.
The timing matters for a reason that goes beyond Smith’s specific finances. In 1857, two years after these events, the Supreme Court would issue its ruling in *Dred Scott v. Sandford*, holding that enslaved people had no standing to sue in federal courts and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories. If Smith had succeeded in moving Mason and her family to Texas before that ruling, the legal avenue used by Hayes would have been foreclosed. Hayes’s ruling was possible in January 1856 partly because the law had not yet been used at the federal level to close off state-based freedom suits entirely.