## Inside Hayes’s Chambers
The proceedings before Judge Benjamin Hayes were structured by the legal constraints of the period in ways that make it difficult to reconstruct exactly what happened. The testimony rule barring Black people from testifying against whites meant that Mason could not formally speak on her own behalf in open court. Hayes’s decision to hear the matter partly in his chambers, where he could conduct informal interviews, was a workaround that the legal structure technically permitted.
What Hayes heard from Smith was apparently a version of the voluntary arrangement argument: that Mason and the others had agreed to accompany him, that the journey to Texas was a matter of their willing participation in his household’s movement. This argument had a certain surface plausibility in the absence of contrary testimony from the enslaved people themselves — which is precisely why the testimony rule was such an effective tool for enslaving people to maintain their claim.
What undermined this argument was the structural analysis Hayes applied. He examined the relationship between Smith and Mason and found that the conditions for a voluntary agreement did not exist. Mason and her family were illiterate; they had no independent access to information about California or Texas law; their entire lives had been organized around a relationship of coerced dependence with Smith. For Smith to claim that they had voluntarily agreed to accompany him to a slave state was for him to claim a kind of consent that the structure of the relationship made it impossible for them to give.