Even so, Los Angeles remained a violent place, and Angelenos remained acutely aware of the problem. “Matters and things about town present the usual characteristics which later years have rendered peculiar to this people,” Henry Hamilton wrote in the Star.
There is the same delightful uncertainty of life, both animal and vegetable, which has served to render us peculiarly susceptible to the enjoyments of the present—meager as they may be—without hazarding our peace by speculations upon a future, which experience has taught us, defies our calculation. Possessed of a climate which challenges competition with the most favored of localities, its salubrity unsurpassed, yet the children may become familiar with the sciences of reading and writing from the numerous and ever-recurring Probate Notices, which, with their huge plethoric capitals, stare out from the walls and awning posts upon the passers by.
One of those children, sixteen-year-old Josephine Donna Smith—whose poem calling for vengeance in the aftermath of the killings Hamilton published in the Star—was repelled by the disorder. “This is an awful, awful town to live in,” she wrote to a cousin. “I don’t believe there is another place in the world so small as this town is that has more crimes committed in it every day.” For Henry Barrows, the persistent high level of criminal violence simply demonstrated the necessity for more lynch law. “There has been considerable shooting and cutting in our midst of late,” he reported in late 1859. “Our people will have to make an example of some of the desperadoes lurking about.” If all the bad guys were lynched, crime would be eliminated.
In that year, 1859, the grand jury of Los Angeles County handed down thirty felony indictments for violent crime, but only four men were convicted. Barrows, a member of the county’s Republican central committee, blamed the Democrats in control of county government since 1850. Horace Bell likewise denounced county officials as “foragers at the public crib,” more interested in advancing their personal interests than in promoting collective order and justice. By California law the compensation for county officials came from the fees they collected in the course of their duties, which could add up to considerable sums. The office of sheriff in Los Angeles County was said to be worth $10,000 annually, propelling James R. Barton into the ranks of gentleman farmers.
But county officials were not simply in it for their own enrichment. They were operatives in a political machine. The opportunity to stand for county office as a Democrat was a favor bestowed by local party boss Joseph Lancaster Brent. With friendly presidential administrations in Washington after 1852, Brent also had a considerable say in the federal patronage—the appointive positions for the post office, the land office, the office of Indian affairs, the customs service, and the federal judiciary. Dozens of subordinates, appointed by county and federal officers, made up a veritable political army that mobilized at each election. The result was the dominance of “the Democracy,” as the machine was known in the day. For Barrows, the Democracy was the problem. There was more to it than that, of course. The county’s criminal justice system was underfunded and understaffed. Juries were extraordinarily sympathetic to claims of self-defense. The courts, undercut by vigilantism, lacked legitimacy and authority. Yet again, Barrows had a point. County officials were often incompetent and corrupt. Moreover, most were men of violence.
CONSIDER THE MAN elected district attorney of Los Angeles County in 1859, Edward John Cage Kewen, universally known as E. J. C. Kewen, or sometimes “Alphabet” Kewen, although never to his face. Kewen was one of those hot-tempered gentlemen popularly associated with the chivalrous traditions of the Old South. Born in Mississippi in 1825, he imbibed the code of honor from his Irish father, a decorated veteran of the Battle of New Orleans, who died in a duel when his son was only eight years old. Kewen was slightly built, “somewhat undersized,” in the words of an acquaintance, but “every ounce of his anatomy was filled with Southern fire.”
He attended university, read law, and was admitted to the Mississippi bar at the age of nineteen. The law carried him into politics. Kewen’s political hero was Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, perennial Whig candidate for president, and it was while stumping for Clay in 1844 that Kewen discovered his talent for political oratory. Politics became his lifeblood. He relocated to St. Louis, where he opened a law practice and edited a political journal until 1849, when he joined the Gold Rush at the age of twenty-four. Brash, self-confident, and full of himself, Kewen was not everyone’s piece of cake. He was one of those men, wrote an associate who rode with him on the trail to California, “whom I would like to buy at my estimate of their worth and sell at theirs.”
Kewen opened a law practice in Sacramento, invested in city lots, and grew wealthy. He defended the claims of speculators against the protests of settlers, and was an officer in the militia company that dispersed protesters during what became known as the Squatters’ Riot of 1850, which earned Kewen the honorific title of “colonel.” The following year he was joined by his two younger brothers—Achilles and Thomas—both recently returned from a failed filibuster invasion of Cuba. Kewen lent his support to their efforts to recruit Californians for another invasion of the island, and in the autumn of 1851 the two brothers departed Sacramento with a company of volunteers. The invasion never came off, and in 1853 Achilles Kewen returned to California with the news that brother Thomas was dead, the victim of a tropical disease.
By that time E. J. C. Kewen had married and relocated his practice to San Francisco, where he became a leader of the city’s Whigs. In 1854 he transferred his allegiance to the nativist Know-Nothings, becoming one of their “big guns,” although he was the son of an Irish emigrant. That contradiction didn’t seem to bother Kewen, but his brother Achilles proved more sensitive. When, during a boozy saloon dispute, a belligerent Texan accused him of being “a damn Know Nothing,” the younger Kewen punched the man in the nose. Kewen immediately offered an apology for his instinctive response, but his opponent insisted on satisfaction. In a duel fought with rifles before several hundred spectators, the Texan was killed. Politics and violence went hand in hand.
Several months later Achilles Kewen left San Francisco to join the filibustering expedition of William Walker in Nicaragua. He was shot and killed in one of his first engagements. The deaths of both his brothers, Kewen told a friend, “drove him almost to despair.” He sought to avenge them in late 1855 by organizing a military company of some eighty volunteers and joining Walker in Nicaragua. He participated in several minor skirmishes and was twice wounded before Walker appointed him principal spokesman and fund-raiser for the cause, a task for which Kewen was far better suited.
Filibustering enjoyed wide support in California. William Walker fought under the “lone star” banner of American expansionist tradition. In the Star, Henry Hamilton celebrated the “new fields of glory” Walker had opened in Central America “for adventurous spirits.” One of those spirits was Horace Bell, who enthusiastically enrolled as an officer in Walker’s army in early 1856. Bell loved the camaraderie and saw a good deal of action—suffering a serious wound in one engagement—but found the experience deeply disillusioning. The turning point for him came during a conversation with a fellow officer after a particularly bloody fight. “Look here, my friend,” the man told Bell, “do you know that we are in the wrong? We are trying to rob these people of their property and country. They are fighting for all they hold dear—and right always prevails over wrong.” Filibustering, Bell concluded, was “the spirit of conquest run riot.”
Walker suffered ignominious defeat in 1857, and Kewen returned to California. His wife had been staying with her parents in southern California, and he relocated his legal practice there, moving the family into a palatial adobe in San Gabriel. By that time Kewen had abandoned the Know-Nothings for the Democrats. In political philosophy, he explained, he remained “a Whig of olden time—a disciple of Clay.” But times had changed. The critical political choice of the day, he delared, was between “Democracy and Black Republicanism,” and the
re was no doubt where Kewen stood on that divide. Local Democratic leaders welcomed him enthusiastically into their ranks.
ANOTHER LEADING MEMBER of the southern California Democracy was Hilliard P. Dorsey, a Mississippi native who had moved to Los Angeles to assume a patronage appointment as register of the U.S. Land Office. Dorsey located near Kewen in San Gabriel, and they became fast friends. Dorsey was “a fighter from way back,” Horace Bell recalled, “a pistol fighter, a knife fighter, and away up in rough and tumble.” He joined William Osburn in the terrorist assault on the Californio community at Mission San Gabriel in the aftermath of Sheriff Barton’s death. But it wasn’t only Californios who were wary of Dorsey. His no-holds-barred fight with U.S. Attorney Isaac S. K. Ogier was only one of his many brawls with fellow Anglos. “The greater portion of the neighborhood in which he lived was in constant dread of him,” wrote a contemporary, “and would yield to almost any terms to prevent a difficulty with him.”
In 1857 Dorsey married Civility Rubottom, youngest daughter of William “Uncle Billy” Rubottom of the Monte, and the following spring she delivered a son they named Kewen, in honor of their neighbor. But Dorsey’s violent temper ruined the marriage. “My daughter was high-spirited,” recalled Rubottom, and Dorsey “didn’t know how to treat a woman.” The bickering and fighting increased after the birth of their son. During an argument one evening Dorsey flew into a rage and violently forced his wife from the house. She showed up at her parents’ place late that night, bloody and bruised, in fear for her own life, and frantic over the child. Rubottom rode to Kewen’s place and asked him to intervene.
Kewen went to Dorsey’s the following morning and found his friend, he testified, “promenading the parlor with the child in his arms.” He was on a mission of reconciliation, Kewen said, but Dorsey would have none of it. “Where’s my wife?” he demanded. When Kewen told him, Dorsey put down the child and began to load an assortment of firearms. “I’ll have my wife here today or I’ll die,” he declared. She would come home willingly, said Kewen, if only Dorsey would allow her to see the child first. “Not unless stained with its father’s blood,” Dorsey replied. He “spoke in a voice so calm, so composed, and so full of determination,” Kewen testified, that “his words sounded upon my ears like the premonitions of destiny.” Hoping to forestall violence, Kewen immediately left for Rubottom’s in his buggy, but was soon overtaken and passed by Dorsey, mounted on a fast horse.
When Dorsey arrived, Rubottom later told Horace Bell, “I was sitting on my front porch with a double-barreled shotgun across my knees.” Noting that his son-in-law was packing a Colt’s revolver, Rubottom called out a warning. “Dorsey, I have but one request to make, and that is that you do not enter my gate.” Dorsey responded with cold determination. “I’ll come in or die,” he said. “We’ll end it right here.” Then, reaching up, he absent-mindedly plucked a leaf from the hedge surrounding the front yard, placed the stem between his gritted teeth, and pushed open the gate. “He didn’t hesitate one instant but walked right in, revolver in hand,” said Rubottom. Dorsey cocked and leveled his piece, and as he did so Rubottom dropped to one knee. The two men fired simultaneously. Dorsey’s shot went high, slamming into the wall of the house. But Rubottom’s double load of buckshot found its mark. When Kewen arrived, minutes later, he found Dorsey on the ground, “a bleeding and gasping corpse.”
Friends of the family upheld both men. “It had to be,” they said, “what else could either do?” The conviction that lethal violence offered the only possible resolution of this family dispute spoke volumes about the honor culture of frontier Los Angeles.
VIOLENCE AND THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE permeated political discourse both before and after the American conquest. That was particularly true during the gathering national storm over the expansion of slavery in the western territories. The Democrats split into two querulous factions. The dominant bloc, known as the “Chivalry” in California because so many of its leaders had come from the South, was aggressively proslavery. In Los Angeles the Chivs were led by Joseph Lancaster Brent of Baltimore and New Orleans, and supported by the oratorical E. J. C. Kewen of Mississippi. The opposition free-soil faction was led by John G. Downey, naturalized immigrant from Ireland and Los Angeles pharmacist who made his fortune lending money to needy rancheros at usurious rates. The most prominent free-soil spokesman was J. J. Warner, who relocated from San Diego to Los Angeles, purchasing the press of the defunct Southern Californian and commencing publication of the Southern Vineyard, an avowedly free-soil weekly.
Both factions of the Democracy fielded candidates for the statewide election of September 1859, and the campaign that summer was a vituperative, no-holds-barred affair. Warner ran for an open seat in the state assembly, Kewen for county district attorney, but they expended most of their energy attacking each other rather than their specific opponents. Warner went after Kewen’s filibustering past, consistently referring to him as “the citizen corporal of Nicaragua.” Like a bandit in the night, Warner declared, Kewen “sneaked into a country with his accomplices for the avowed purpose of despoiling the inhabitants of their goods, chattels, lands, and homes.” Kewen responded by digging up the old accusation that Warner had favored the Californians during the war of conquest and thus was “a traitor to his country.” He was “so notoriously corrupt and villainous,” Kewen declared, “as to wholly exclude him from any consideration except that which prompts a man to kick a snarling cur that intercepts his path.” Friends of both candidates worried that the rhetoric would end in actual violence. Murray Morrison, a prominent Democrat and a close associate of Kewen’s—he was engaged to the sister of Kewen’s wife—took pains to establish a line of communication between the two camps, which may have prevented the candidates from coming to blows, or worse. A violent encounter was by no means inconceivable.
As for the opposition Republicans, local support remained very weak. Francisco Ramírez, Republican candidate for the legislature, had been badly defeated in 1858 but made another attempt in 1859. “I am a Republican from principle,” he declared, “believing that the doctrines on which the party is founded are coeval with Liberty and the Rights of Man.” The party’s local strategy was to break the Chivalry’s lock on the Californio vote. But despite endorsements from a growing list of prominent hijos del país—including former governor Pío Pico, merchant Manuel Requena, and ranchero José Ramón Carrillo—the Republicans were completely shut out. John G. Downey won the statewide contest for lieutenant governor and Warner won an assembly seat, but the Chivs took all the other prizes, electing Kewen district attorney, Tomás Sánchez county sheriff, Andrés Pico state senator, and Andrew Jackson King the county’s second assemblyman. “It is unbelievable,” Ramírez wrote, “that after so many insults and affronts, one still sees the sad spectacle of Hispanic Americans supporting the slavery party with their votes.” Several weeks later he closed his shop and ceased publication of El Clamor Público.
A few days after the election Senator David Broderick, statewide leader of the free-soil Democrats, was killed in a duel with David S. Terry, a prominent member of the Chivalry and a former justice of the California Supreme Court. Throughout the campaign militant Chivs had tried to gin up a fight with Broderick, an effort in which Kewen was deeply implicated, at one point carrying a formal challenge to the senator. “Dueling, shooting, and killing generally seem to be epidemic in our State just now,” Henry Hamilton wrote in the Star following Broderick’s death, but “we suppose there is little use in protesting against the bloody code.” Not long afterward the Democrat-controlled legislature appointed the newly elected Chivalry governor to fill the vacancy created by Broderick’s death, and John G. Downey became governor, the first Angeleno to fill that office since Pío Pico in 1845–46.
Kewen assumed his duty as Los Angeles County’s chief prosecutor, although it remained to be seen how a man with such a violent temperament might handle that responsibility. The answer came a few weeks later. An anonymous lette
r appeared in the press criticizing Kewen for his conduct of a pending criminal case. The publication of such complaining letters was commonplace, but Kewen could not abide personal censure of any kind. He concluded that it must have been written by Columbus Sims, opposing defense counsel for the case in question. In court the following day Kewen launched into a rhetorical assault on Sims with all the verbal vitriol at his command. Finally, working himself to an emotional climax, he picked up a parcel of papers and flung them at Sims, who instinctively grabbed a tumbler and returned fire. The missile went wide but Kewen, recoiling in shock, pulled a small pistol from his pocket and cocked it. The courtroom erupted in pandemonium. Two or three men mobbed Kewen, preventing him from firing. But in the melee Kewen’s pistol fired and the ball struck a bystander, inflicting a serious wound. There is no record of Kewen’s being held to legal account for this criminal outburst, but Hamilton condemned his conduct in the Star. “It places the district attorney in a very awkward position,” he wrote, “for after this display of lawlessness, how can he consistently demand the punishment of offenders against the law.”
LOS ANGELES was one of the most isolated communities in the nation during the 1850s. It took several months for mail to arrive from the East until the commencement of the Butterfield Overland Mail in 1858, which cut the time to three weeks. Entrepreneurs constructed a statewide telegraphic system in the early 1850s, but it was not extended to Los Angeles until October 1860. The telegraphic connection was celebrated with a gala ball held at the Bella Union. The formalities opened with one of Kewen’s trademark orations. He was followed by Henry Barrows, local correspondent for the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, who sent the first dispatch north: “Here is the maiden salutation of Los Angeles to San Francisco by lightning!” The crowd then waited for a reply. When it arrived, it included a summary of the day’s news that shocked everyone in attendance. A fusion ticket of free-soil Democrats and Republicans had triumphed at the polls in the neighboring state of Oregon, resulting in the election of the first Republican senator from the far West.
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