In 1841, a Black man arrived in California at the helm of a ship, carrying ambition and a secret: William Leidesdorff. Within a few years he became an American diplomat and civic leader who helped found San Francisco on a stretch of windswept sand dunes, building one of the largest fortunes in California. When he died in 1848, he left a fiercely contested estate, and the fight over his legacy continues.

Born in the Danish Caribbean to a Danish father and an Afro-Caribbean mother, Leidesdorff built a record so vast it obscured his origins. In the two centuries since, that record has become a mirror reflecting each era's own legend more than the man himself.

The Ledger and the Mirror is a meticulously researched biography and a critical look at how Leidesdorff has been reinvented again and again. Drawing on archives in California, Denmark, and the Gulf Coast, Eric Friedman reconstructs who Leidesdorff actually was—and what each generation made of him. Strip away the legend, and what remains is a man remarkable enough to inspire it, and a story about how history itself gets made.

PRAISE FOR THE LEDGER AND THE MIRROR

"The Ledger and the Mirror is a well-researched biography of William Leidesdorff, one of Yerba Buena and young San Francisco's leading, and most enigmatic, citizens. It clears up a number of myths about this mixed-race pioneer."—GARY KAMIYA, author of Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco and Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City

"The history of a city is never straightforward, especially in a place as tumultuous as San Francisco, and that's what makes Eric Friedman's biography of William Leidesdorff so fascinating. In telling the story of a civic leader forced by society to hide his Black identity, Friedman captures the ever-shifting tensions of 1840s San Francisco and tells the tale with refreshingly urgent twenty-first-century prose."—JOHN KING, author of Portal and Cityscapes