Stephen Clark Foster, serving as prefect of the Los Angeles district, dispatched an urgent message to Governor Peter Burnett, who had been elected California’s first American governor the previous autumn. “Our town has been some three months infested with a gang of rowdies and gamblers who alike set law and order at defiance,” Foster wrote. “They have rendered the place a very unsafe one for the peaceable inhabitants,” and he requested the governor to dispatch a military company to the pueblo. Burnett might well wonder, Foster admitted, why a town of several thousand persons could not muster a sufficient force to put an end to such disorders. “The answer is this,” he wrote. The vast majority of the permanent residents were Californios, while nearly all the rowdies were transient Americans. “The native population, unaccustomed as they are to our laws, if called on would certainly be led on into excesses that would arouse national hatreds and lead to far worse evils. . . . Already, in two instances, sectional fights where firearms have been used have taken place between Californians and Americans, and we know not the hour when the difficulties of 1846 may not be renewed.”
IN THE TRANSITION between Mexican and American governance, the authority of local officials came under assault, and Benjamin Hayes soon was directly involved. Shortly after he began working for Stearns, Hayes was approached by Stephen Cribbs, a young black man recently arrived in Los Angeles. Cribbs and his father, both free men of color, had come from Arkansas in the employ of an American, a Dr. Josiah Earl, a friend and associate of Benjamin D. Wilson’s. The elder Cribbs took sick and died, and when the son attempted to claim his father’s property, which included a valuable team of mules, Earl refused, declaring that Cribbs had been his slave and thus the mules belonged to him. The trouble began when Hayes agreed to represent the younger Cribbs in a suit to recover his inheritance. Although slavery had been banned in Mexico since 1829 and was outlawed by California’s new constitution, many southerners brought slaves overland, intending to utilize them in the mines. Los Angeles teemed with “sons of the sunny South,” in Hayes’s words, and many of them regarded the suit he brought on Cribbs’s behalf a direct threat to their interests.
A day or two later Marshal Purdy learned that three black men, including Stephen Cribbs, had been brutally assaulted. A passerby heard cries for help coming from the courtyard of an adobe, and investigating found Colonel Thomas Thorne of Texas whipping two black men. They were his slaves, Thorne said, and were being punished for refusing to accompany him to the mines. He believed they had been inspired by Cribbs’s lawsuit. That same night another witness reported seeing a group of half a dozen men attack Cribbs with clubs, shouting that this was payback for what he had been saying around town. Cribbs, described as “a tall and powerful black man,” broke away from the group and vaulted over an eight-foot wall as his assailants fired their pistols at him. Had they caught him, a witness heard one of the men exclaim, “they would have killed him as dead as a herring.”
Before coming to California from Ohio, Purdy had been an antislavery activist who founded and edited an abolitionist newspaper. He had no intention of letting this matter drop. He collected the statements of witnesses and filed a police report with Stearns. But the southerners were not about to submit either. On March 4 they held a meeting, and afterwards a delegation of them confronted Purdy at his office, saying they had been appointed to deliver a message. “They told me,” Purdy reported to Stearns, “that I was required to leave the city within the space of 24 hours, at my peril, which I distinctly understood to mean the peril of my life.” The next day one of the southerners pulled a revolver on Purdy. The marshal reacted in character, seizing the gun with one hand and the attacker with the other. “He cocked and discharged one barrel at me and attempted to cock it again,” said Purdy. “I held his hands so as to prevent his re-cocking it.” Assisted by one of his deputies, Purdy succeeded in getting control of the weapon, but his assailant escaped with the aid of two accomplices.
Most of the Americans in Los Angeles hailed from the South and were accustomed to the brutalities of slavery. They directed their anger at Hayes and Purdy for standing with Cribbs. In fear for his life, Hayes kept a loaded shotgun by the side of his desk and the pepperbox in the pocket of his coat. But the primary target of the southerners was Purdy. Several dozen men assembled in the Plaza and threatened to storm the jail, where the marshal and his deputies were holed up. They took over a meeting of the ayuntamiento, threatening a revolution unless the regidores agreed to eliminate the constabulary Alcalde Stearns had created. Thoroughly intimidated, the councilmen did as they were told, voting to dismiss the deputies, leaving the marshal to face the mob alone. “Poor Purdy was thus left in the lurch,” wrote Hayes. As the meeting was about to break up, Purdy appeared in the doorway, rifle in hand. It looked as if there would be another violent confrontation, but according to Hayes, some of the “northern men” present persuaded Purdy to stand down. The next morning he left for San Francisco, where he became a crusading editor of the Pacific Statesman, a newspaper that opposed the state’s prosouthern Democratic political establishment.
In the aftermath of Purdy’s departure, Prefect Stephen Foster wrote again to Governor Burnett, who had failed to respond to his first appeal. “Our city has been harassed for the last four months by various disorders,” he wrote. “Quite an excitement has been caused within a few days by an attempt on the part of some slaves introduced from Texas to assert their rights to freedom.” The town marshal, “with more zeal than judgment,” had attempted to defend them, provoking a violent opposition. The ayuntamiento had buckled under pressure, leaving the marshal no choice but to abandon the pueblo. “Mob law, to use the harsh but truthful term, is triumphant,” Foster wrote. The authority of municipal government had crumbled, anarchy prevailed, and his only recourse was to appeal for a military force to reestablish order in Los Angeles. Two weeks later he received a response, not from the governor, but from a lowly second lieutenant at the garrison in Monterey. His application for military assistance had been rejected.
•
CHAPTER 14 •
VIOLENCE BEGINS AT HOME
IN THE LATE WINTER OF 1850 —as Los Angeles churned with the violent confrontation between Marshal Purdy and the Americans—Benjamin Hayes joined “a secret junta of all the leading Californians at the residence of Don Agustín Olvera.” Several Americans—including Abel Stearns (who brought Hayes along), Jonathan Temple, and Benjamin Davis Wilson—were in attendance, although, as Hayes put it, “native Californians were then in the ascendancy.” Thus commenced a political machine that would dominate Los Angeles politics for the next thirty years. The junta nominated a slate of candidates, Californios and Americans, for the first election to fill county offices. Hayes was tapped for the post of county attorney. The junta’s ticket won without opposition.
The first order of business for the new officials, especially given the violent turmoil in the pueblo, was setting up and staffing the basic institutions of law and order. The first county sheriff was G. Thompson Burrill, a native of New York who had spent a decade living and working in Mexico before moving to Los Angeles at the conclusion of the war. Burrill was fluent in Spanish and comfortable with Mexicans and Californios. According to Benjamin Hayes, he was “punctilious, perhaps formal” but an effective officer. He hired two deputies, and the three of them made up the totality of the county’s law enforcement authority.
Oversight of the judicial system was in the hands of County Judge Agustín Olvera, a man in his early thirties. Before the war Olvera had served as secretary of the California legislature, during the war as an officer in las fuerzas nacionales, and he was one of the commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Cahuenga. It was his responsibility to supervise the six county justices of the peace chosen at the same election. Each justice was allowed to hire a constable to serve warrants and arrest suspects. Justice court was where most of the everyday work of adjudication took place, and where most cases of violent assault—and there wer
e dozens of those during the county’s first few months—were originally heard. Violent felony crimes such as attempted murder or homicide were referred to the county grand jury for indictment, then to the court of the state’s First Judicial District, which covered all of southern California and was presided over by Judge Oliver S. Witherby, who rode the circuit between Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and San Diego.
Witherby gaveled his court into session in the pueblo for the first time in June 1850. Four attorneys, including Benjamin Hayes, were admitted to the practice of law. And there being no further business, the court adjourned. Despite the extraordinary level of violent conflict in the community, despite a dozen murders in Los Angeles and vicinity since the termination of military occupation, Witherby’s court heard no violent felony cases. Sheriff Burrill simply did not have the wherewithal to investigate or pursue perpetrators.
Not until January 1851, when Judge Witherby convened the winter session of district court in Los Angeles, was he asked to render judgment in a case of violent assault. It came in the first suit for divorce heard in Los Angeles County, filed by Francisca María de Jesús Pérez against her estranged husband, Mariano Silvas. Speaking through her attorney, Joseph Lancaster Brent, Doña Francisca told the court that in the twenty years she had been Silvas’s wife, she had lived with him faithfully as a good and virtuous wife.
But notwithstanding her aforesaid behavior and affectionate bearing towards him, he has treated her in a cruel and unkind manner and has been for a long series of years accustomed to whip and beat her with extreme violence without any cause or provocation whatsoever; that at last on or about the 10th of July last, he drove her from his house without any provocation, and has since that time, up to this date, abandoned and ceased to live with her or to provide her with the necessaries of life, although possessed of considerable property.
Doña Francisca prayed the court to award her a “divorce from bed and board,” the common-law term for a legal separation rather than an absolute dissolution of marriage. The California legislature had yet to pass a divorce law, so Brent chose to argue the case on common-law grounds.
Mariano Silvas, Doña Francisca’s husband, was an ordinary vaquero, but something of a local hero, renowned for his fearless conduct at the Battle of San Pasqual. He was also a notorious wife beater. In 1844, three years before the war, the alcalde had summoned him to answer charges of assault filed by his wife. A physician, sent to their house to investigate, found Doña Francisca in bed vomiting blood, with bruises to her head and shoulders and an ear nearly torn off. She had been resting in her room, she said, when her husband suddenly burst in, and “using offensive words questioned my decisions in drawing up the will.” Doña Francisca had been born into the minor gentry, and along with her four siblings, she stood to inherit a portion of her father’s Rancho Paso de Bartolo, on the east bank of the Río San Gabriel. It was a comparatively modest piece of property, but situated in a valuable location, at the ford of the river where the Americans under Stockton and Kearny had fought their way across in 1847. By Mexican law, married women retained title to their own property, and Silvas was agitated about his wife’s plans for her inheritance.
“He dealt me three blows,” she said, “pulled me out of bed, and dragged me by my hair, leaving me on the floor, bathed in blood.” It was not the first time he had beaten her, she claimed, and she wanted the full weight of the law brought down on him. Silvas admitted striking and pushing his wife to the floor, infuriated, he said, by the disrespectful tone she used with him. The alcalde promised further investigation, but within days Doña Francisca withdrew her complaint, saying that she and her husband had reconciled. “He has expressed regret,” she said, “and promises me a new life.”
It was a promise Silvas did not keep, and in Judge Witherby’s court in 1851 he attempted to defend himself. For the entirety of their marriage, he testified, his wife had tested his patience with her “gross and abusive language.” He argued that “corporal chastisement” was required for domestic peace, but was something he resorted to only when it “was necessary to check her violent and unladylike conduct.” The laws of Mexico, Silvas reminded the court, had “allowed of no divorce,” and “it would have been impossible for him to have lived with her without inflicting the chastisement aforesaid, and defendant avers that such was the custom of the country.”
THE JUDICIAL RECORDS of frontier Los Angeles include the voices of hundreds of women and men, protesting and defending the “custom” of intimate violence. The consistent assumption was that a husband had every right to control and discipline his wife, even using violence if necessary. When Jesús Valdes complained to a local justice that her husband, Miguel Soloma, “whipped me severely with a reata without any cause or provocation,” Soloma readily admitted his guilt. “I whipped my wife as charged,” he told the court, “but I done it because she ran away.” Corporal chastisement was a husband’s prerogative, and virtually every man charged with domestic violence asserted the same privilege. María Juana Oliveras complained that her husband had attacked her in a drunken rage. “He tied me to an oak tree and whipped me with a piece of reata,” she said. “My whole body is marked up with blows resulting from his cruelty.” She warned him that if he didn’t stop she would file a complaint against him, but he laughed in her face. “He said that I could do nothing if I did, as he had all authority in his favor, that I was a woman, and the justice would not believe me.”
Male prerogative was not always linked to marriage. Francisca Silvas, a single woman in her midtwenties, employed as a laundress, brought a complaint against young José Sérbulo Varela, nephew of his locally famous namesake. She was washing clothes on the bank of the zanja when Varela approached her. They had been seeing each other, but she had broken off the relationship when he began ordering her around. He had left a sash at her house, Varela said, and wanted to retrieve it. Together they walked to her place, and when they arrived, she told the court, “he gave me a severe blow and knocked me down, and kicked me on both knees.” The justice asked her to lift her skirts that he might see, and noted for the record that both her legs were badly bruised. “I had two plaits of hair,” she continued, and “he cut them off with a butcher knife.” As Varela left he shouted at her. “Go ahead, fuck the Americans, you whore, go fuck the Americans.” Varela appeared in court to answer the charge. “I know Francisca, I have mounted her in my house, she is a whore,” he testified. “I have the rights of a man who keeps a woman, and for whatever fault she commits, I have the rights of the man. I have no more to say.”
“The rights of the man”—that was what Doña Francisca challenged in her suit for divorce. At the same time she filed a civil complaint against Pío Pico, the last governor of Mexican California, for unlawfully taking possession of her portion of Rancho Paso de Bartolo. Her father, Juan Antonio Lazaro Pérez, had died in 1847, and the property was partitioned among his five children. That same year Don Pío returned from Mexico, determined to make a new start under the American regime. What he needed, he decided, was a rancho close enough to Los Angeles for him to efficiently conduct business, but distant enough to serve as a retreat. Rancho Paso de Bartolo met his requirements perfectly. He negotiated successfully with the other siblings, but Doña Francisca refused to sell, and after her husband threw her out of their house in the pueblo, she took up residence in an adobe on the rancho, spending several months there in “the peaceable and quiet possession and enjoyment of her property.” But in the fall of 1850 Don Pío “entered upon and took possession of her aforesaid rights in and to the said rancho and ejected her from the same,” claiming the property “by virtue of a pretended bill of sale of her said rights and property, made to him by the husband.” She had authorized no such transfer, Doña Francisca said, and her estranged husband had “no right to sell without her permission and authorization.” She asked the court to declare the sale null and void and require Don Pío to pay her damages.
Judge Witherby’s ruling crushe
d Doña Francisca’s hopes. He summarily dismissed both suits, declaring that she had proven neither case. She was ordered to pay court costs as well as the attorney fees of both Silvas and Pico. Witherby issued an order of execution to the sheriff. “You will proceed to sell sufficient of the personal property of said Francisca Pérez de Silvas to satisfy said costs and if sufficient personal property be not found, then to satisfy the same out of her real estate.” Attorney Brent appealed, but without success. By the time the order to sell was finally executed, James R. Barton had become sheriff. “At the court house door in the City of Los Angeles,” he reported to the court, “I proceeded to sell all the right, title, and interest of the said plaintiff in and to ‘Rancho Paso de Bartolo,’ now known as El Ranchito and occupied by Pío Pico.” Doña Francisca’s share of the property was promptly conveyed to Don Pío. “The rights of the man” had prevailed.
WOMEN WERE VICTIMS in a quarter of the cases of criminal violence recorded after the American conquest. Frequently there was a sexual dimension to the assaults—a violent quarrel between lovers, the rejection of a man’s attentions, or the selection of a lone woman as a target of opportunity. María Cañedo, a married woman of about forty years, was walking home from the house of a friend one evening in 1852 when she was attacked by four men. “I cried out for help,” she said, but “they struck me on the head and dragged me to the ground.” As one of her attackers stood guard with a cocked pistol, she was raped a total of nine times.
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