California had been admitted to the Union as a free state (one in which slavery was not permitted) by the Compromise of 1850. Nevertheless, along with most “free-soil” partisans, Californians evidently saw no incongruity between antislavery feelings and racial hostility toward blacks. It was as if the evil of slavery had tainted the very people who were its victims, and so it developed with the Chinese, once they became associated with images of slavelike status.