## Judge Hayes and His Chambers
Benjamin Ignatius Hayes was the Los Angeles District Judge who heard the case. He was a Missouri-born attorney who had come to California during the Gold Rush and established himself in Southern California’s legal community. He would serve as the region’s dominant judicial figure for years, and the case he was asked to hear in January 1856 was not, in the larger sense, an unusual one: freedom suits by enslaved people brought into California from slave states had been adjudicated elsewhere in the state before this.
What Hayes did, in the face of the law that barred Black testimony against whites, was conduct private interviews. He spoke with Biddy Mason and others involved in the case in his chambers — not in open court, where the testimony rules would have applied formally, but in a less formal setting where he could gather information and form his own assessment. The sources describe him as hearing “her story” in this way, though the specific content of what she told him and how he weighed it against what Smith said is not fully documented.
Smith’s position, in the proceedings, was that the people he had brought west had accompanied him voluntarily and that any arrangement for their return to a slave state was equally voluntary. He apparently also attempted to have Mason’s lawyer withdraw from the case, by some accounts through bribery. The lawyer did withdraw. This was not a system designed to produce fair outcomes for enslaved people, and Smith was operating within that system’s logic.