A month later, on presidential election day, the Los Angeles Democracy was even more shocked when the telegraph delivered the news that Abraham Lincoln, the Republican nominee for president, had won California’s electoral votes. Proslavery and free-soil Democrats had fielded separate slates of electors, allowing Lincoln to prevail with a 35 percent plurality. In Los Angeles County, however, the proslavery ticket captured fully 45 per cent of the vote. Henry Hamilton comforted his fellow Chivs in the Star. “Whatever disaster may have occurred elsewhere,” he wrote, “here our glorious banner flutters in victory.”
There was strong secessionist sentiment in southern California following the election. That was only natural, Hamilton argued. “We are on the highway to and from the South, our population are from the South, and we sympathize with her. Why then should we turn our backs on our friends and join their enemies to invade, impoverish, and despoil them?” Judge Benjamin Hayes—who considered himself “southern from nature and association, to say nothing of principle”—was one of the few southern men to declare himself a unionist. The thought of civil war, Hayes wrote to a friend in Missouri, made him “sick at heart.” He hoped Angelenos would take advantage of their isolation and remain aloof from the conflict. But Los Angeles would experience its own local civil war.
Secessionist Hamilton of the Star and unionist Charles R. Conway of the Southern News—a new paper that commenced publication in 1860, using the press of the defunct El Clamor Público—sought to incite rather than to calm public passions. Conway had only recently arrived in Los Angeles from the Midwest, but he quickly got up to speed, and it was not long before bad blood had developed between the two editors. Their war of words turned violent shortly after the election, when Conway published an item poking fun at Hamilton’s supposed dalliance with a lady of the night. Enraged, Hamilton went looking for Conway, and finding him on the street, charged at the offending editor with a walking stick in his upraised hand. Conway pulled a revolver and fired several rounds, hitting Hamilton, who ignored his wounds and beat Conway severely before fainting from loss of blood. “This grim catastrophe struck me as quite novel and surprising,” wrote a visitor to Los Angeles who witnessed the affray. “But the residents found such an occurrence commonplace.” Hamilton and Conway were hauled into justice court and fined, then released to the care of their doctors.
While editors battled, partisans busied themselves organizing armed militias. The Los Angeles Grays, a unionist company chartered in early 1861, failed to muster much support. But eighty citizens enrolled in the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles, a secessionist group commanded by Undersheriff Alonzo Ridley. Ridley, a thirty-year-old former miner, trader, and Indian agent, was an avid supporter of the South and slavery. He petitioned the state government for support of the Mounted Rifles, and Governor John G. Downey, catering to the Chivalry faction of the party, personally authorized a full complement of rifles, revolvers, and sabers. “They would be put to good use,” Ridley declared. Unionists in Los Angeles wondered just what that use might be, and Ridley was summoned before a federal grand jury to explain. No action was taken against him, but it was a reminder that federal authorities were keeping an eye on secessionists in Los Angeles.
General Albert Sidney Johnston of Texas commanded the Pacific Division of the U.S. Army, headquartered in San Francisco. Learning that his home state had joined the Confederacy, Johnston tendered his resignation and traveled south to Los Angeles, where he and his wife planned to spend several weeks with her brother, Dr. John S. Griffin, before returning east by steamer. While he was staying in San Gabriel, Johnston was approached by Undersheriff Ridley and several associates, who informed him of their plan to use the Mounted Rifles to seize control of southern California and deliver it to the Confederacy. “To all of them he gave the same advice,” Johnston’s wife recalled, that “nothing could be gained by turning this country into a scene of civil war.” If you want to fight, he told them, “go South.” Taking Johnston’s advice to heart, Ridley offered the Mounted Rifles as Johnston’s escort overland to Texas. Under the circumstances it was an offer Johnston could not refuse, and in the spring of 1861, leaving his wife in the care of her brother, and accompanied by at least a dozen former U. S. Army officers who had resigned their commissions, Johnston and the Mounted Rifles departed.
Several Californios joined the company, including Antonio María “Chino” Varela, the well-connected young man who had been pardoned for his criminal association with the Manillas gang. A few months before, Varela’s father, Don Sérbulo, had been murdered, his throat cut ear to ear by an unknown assailant. The old rebel, increasingly addicted to drink, had before his death been arrested several times for petty theft and drunken assault. “The deceased was a great favorite with the early American residents of this section,” noted the Star, “as he once saved their lives, aided alone by his energetic humanity.” Chino Varela, his only son, would now fight for the South. The company reached Texas in July after weeks of hard travel. The Los Angeles Mounted Rifles had the dubious distinction of being the only free-state militia that went over to the Confederacy.
BRIGADIER GENERAL EDWIN V. SUMNER, Johnston’s replacement as commander of the Pacific Division, was alarmed at reports of secessionist strength in Los Angeles. Nearly every county official was on the record in support of the Confederacy. Concluding that there was “more danger of disaffection at this place than any other in the state,” he ordered several companies of volunteers south to garrison the pueblo. “There are people here anxious for a difficulty,” Captain Winfield S. Hancock reported from Los Angeles. “Those persons who have heretofore been influential and active leaders in politics, and have exercised great control over the people, are encouraging difficulties here by open avowals of their opinions.”
On a Saturday in early May 1861, several hundred secessionists paraded through the Monte under a homemade Bear Flag, their standard of rebellion. (California did not adopt the Bear Flag as the official state banner until 1911.) “We were ready and determined and well organized,” remembered William “Tooch” Martin, a resident of the Monte who took part in the protest. The secessionists marched on the home of Jonathan Tibbetts, one of the few unionists in the township. “He was a Black Republican, and we knew he was giving information to the government,” recalled Martin. Tibbetts was indeed reporting to federal authoritieson the activities of the Monte chapter of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society that promoted a Confederate victory. The crowd surrounded the Tibbetts place, beating pots and pans and blowing horns. A man mounted a fence and shouted to Tibbetts to come out and fight. Tibbetts responded by flinging open the shutters and leveling the barrel of his rifle at the man. “Get down, Bill,” he shouted. “Get down or I’ll shoot you off that fence.” The man got down and the protest ended without violence.
Captain Hancock was relieved. “There need be no anxiety concerning matters at this place,” he reported. Unionist Angelenos were less sure about that. “Secessionists are getting very noisy here,” reported U.S. Attorney Kimball S. Dimmick, the new appointee of the Lincoln administration, and “we may have to fight them yet.” His appeal for additional troops was seconded by other prominent unionists, including Henry Barrows, J. J. Warner, Abel Stearns, Pío Pico, and Manuel Requena. Sumner responded swiftly and effectively, dispatching several additional companies to southern California and ordering the construction of Drum Barracks, a base near San Pedro where several thousand soldiers were garrisoned for the duration of the war. Army officers encouraged the formation of a civilian home guard, distributing arms to residents who willingly took the oath of allegiance to the United States. Emboldened, supporters of the North organized a “Union Club,” which became a kind of shadow county government. “Until very lately all the ‘organizing’ has been on one side, and that the wrong side,” Barrows wrote. “Patriots have come to the conclusion that it is time for them to organize.”
A few weeks later Barrows was named U.S. marshal for the southern d
istrict of California, and soon thereafter Warner was appointed deputy provost marshal, responsible for local security. Through an extensive network of spies and informers, they provided Union officers with detailed reports of local secessionist activity. Although the struggle between the two sides continued until war’s end, the troops at Camp Drum ensured that Los Angeles remained firmly within the control of the United States. Fifteen years after the war of conquest, turbulent Los Angeles was once again occupied by American troops.
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CHAPTER 24 •
THE PLAGUE IS UPON US
OPPOSITION TO THE CIVIL WAR in Los Angeles was greatly affected by local conditions. During the war years southern California suffered through four plagues of biblical proportion. First came the flood. The rains began Christmas Eve 1861 and continued for more than a month, dumping nearly fifty inches on the county, better than three times the annual average. The Los Angeles River overflowed its banks, destroying farms, orchards, and vineyards. The San Gabriel and Santa Ana Rivers broke from their channels, creating a vast inland sea, drowning livestock by the thousands. Then came the drought. The next two winters produced less than ten inches of rain, a third of normal levels. The grasslands withered and thousands of cattle starved to death. Rancheros rushed to sell their remaining stock, creating a market glut and collapsing prices. Property values fell by more than 70 percent. The county pressed suits for delinquent taxes, and the sheriff conducted scores of forced sales from the courthouse steps.
Next came the pests. “As misfortunes come in groups and not singly,” a correspondent reported in the spring of 1863, “the plague of locusts is also upon us.” The black clouds of swarming insects first appeared in the San Fernando Valley, where they attacked and destroyed the vineyards of Andrés Pico, then moved on to feed on the rest of the county. “Gardens or orchards, or grain-fields are invaded,” reported the Star, “and in a day or two laid bare by these voracious creatures.” The swarms finally subsided as the weather turned cooler. But then came the pestilence itself. An epidemic of smallpox began that fall and grew in intensity until it peaked in early 1864. Dozens of victims died each day. Benjamin Hayes, accompanying Antonio Coronel to a burial at the Catholic cemetery at the end of Eternity Street, drove past the shuttered adobes of Sonoratown. “Coronel pointed out to me one house in which eleven had died, in another three, in this two remained sick, in that three, in that one, and so on.” At the cemetery Hayes noted “the great number of fresh graves.” The rancherías were hardest hit. From 1860 to 1870 the number of Indians enumerated on the census of the county fell from two thousand to little more than two hundred.
During these terrible years the secessionist Democrats of Los Angeles did what they could to mobilize public fear and frustration in opposition to the Union. Before a large crowd at the Bella Union in the spring of 1862, prominent Democrat Andrew Jackson King, who had replaced Alonzo Ridley as undersheriff, excoriated the federal government for taxing the people, proclaimed the Confederacy “the only constitutional government we have,” and then, to the sustained cheers of his audience, unveiled a life-size portrait of General P. G. T. Beauregard, hero of the Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run. As U.S. Marshal Henry Barrows complained to military authorities, King sought “to give éclat in a disaffected community to the rebel cause.” He demanded that King be charged with treason and arrested. Undersherriff King was picked up, interrogated, and released by the military authorities after taking the oath of allegiance to the United States. Barrows protested his lenient treatment. “In what country would the display of portraits of generals of the enemy in war be tolerated,” he wrote, “especially in a disaffected community as this is?” Federal authorities promised stricter enforcement.
Later that year the Lincoln administration authorized federal marshals to arrest anyone giving aid and comfort to the Confederacy, suspending the right of habeas corpus in all such cases, and Barrows soon found an occasion to use his new authority. In the state and local elections of September 1862, several hundred soldiers cast their ballots at the polling place nearest their barracks. Virtually all of them were from northern California, and county officials protested that they were ineligible to vote in local contests. E. J. C. Kewen, running for a seat in the state assembly, personally challenged the votes of many soldiers, who reacted with outrage. “Pistols were flourished and threats of every kind made,” recalled one observer. Kewen complained of being “abused and menaced in a most wanton and outrageous manner,” and finally left when an army officer said he could no longer guarantee his safety. To be sure, the Los Angeles Chivalry, which commanded a large majority in the county, had little to fear from the votes of several hundred soldiers. “Secesh has carried this county again, body and boots, for Dixie,” Henry Barrows reported. “For all intents and purposes we might as well live in the Southern Confederacy as in Southern California.” Kewen nevertheless filed a formal protest and succeeded in getting the county clerk to throw out the results for the precinct where the soldiers had voted. The Chiv strategy was to keep the pot boiling.
Several days later Barrows ordered Kewen’s arrest on a charge of treason. Not only had he interfered with the right of soldiers to cast their ballots, but there were reports he had publicly raised three cheers for President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy. Kewen was sent north on the steamer and imprisoned at the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island. “Arrest a score or two more of the secesh leaders,” a local unionist declared, and “they will hush up their seditious talk and their abuse of the Union cause and Union men.” Two weeks later Barrows ordered the arrest of editor Henry Hamilton of the Star on the same charge, and he was sent north to join Kewen. There was little sentiment for keeping them imprisoned, however, and once both men volunteered to take the oath of allegiance and had posted bond, they were allowed to return to Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES SECESSIONISTS lost heart as the tide of battle turned in the North’s favor during the summer of 1863. When news of Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg and Grant’s victory at Vicksburg reached Los Angeles, several dozen unionists gathered to celebrate. They were interrupted by a group of armed men from the Bella Union across the street, who vowed that “no demonstration of joy upon this event would be permitted.” Voices were raised, shots fired, and two unionists wounded. A detachment of troops came on the double from their temporary encampment, the celebration resumed, and there was no further trouble. But the lieutenant in charge reported that “a very feverish and excited feeling nevertheless prevails,” and he recommended that a full company be posted in the pueblo on a permanent basis.
The Chivs remained in control of county government, but with a Republican administration in Washington the federal patronage was controlled by their opponents. One of the biggest beneficiaries was Phineas Banning, who owned southern California’s premier transport company, operating the stage line between Los Angeles and San Pedro as well as a large freighting operation into Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. To better his competitive advantage, Banning purchased land from the Domínguez family, dredged a channel farther inland, and built his own wharf and warehouse at the terminus, which became the town of Wilmington, named by Banning in honor of his Delaware birthplace. An outspoken critic of secession, Banning was a founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the Union Party—a fusion of free-soil Democrats and Republicans—and became the preeminent supplier for the U.S. Army in southern California. Before the war was over, Banning made at least a million dollars from government contracts.
Another political beneficiary was Francisco Ramírez, who returned to Los Angeles in 1862, after two years of editing a newspaper in Sonora, and was rewarded for past political loyalty with a series of appointments, including the position of register of the U.S. Land Office, the post formerly held by the late Hilliard P. Dorsey. In 1863 the Union Party nominated Ramírez as candidate for the state senate, running against his old nemesis, editor Henry Hamilton of the Star. Although he waged a vigorous campaign, Ramírez was ag
ain defeated in what would be his last try for public office. Democrats won all the major contests in the county, although the Union Party was triumphant statewide.
Occasionally, if rarely, unionists prevailed in southern California. In late 1863 Judge Benjamin Hayes announced his candidacy for a third term as district judge. The bench, he wrote, “should be maintained free forever from any influence of mere party politics.” Despite the “vexed questions” presented by the war, Hayes had done his best to maintain the independence and impartiality of the court, and if the people supported him for a third term, he promised continued “fidelity to the Constitution and the Laws.” Hayes ran as an independent and was opposed by both Democrat and Union candidates. What Hayes considered a virtue—his allegiance to the Constitution—the Chivalry attacked as a vice. “Hayes is no especial favorite of mine,” his brother-in-law Dr. John S. Griffin wrote to Benjamin Davis Wilson, one of the county’s leading Chivs. But, he explained, constrained by family ties, he could not oppose Hayes publicly. “I cannot aid or assist in his defeat—I hew close to my wife.” With weak support from Democrats, however, Hayes was defeated in a close contest by unionist Pablo de la Guerra of Santa Barbara.
UNLIKE THE KNIGHTS of the Golden Circle, said Henry Barrows, he and his fellow unionists organized “not secretly, with grips and countersigns, and what not, but openly, though very quietly.” In practice, “quietly” proved little different from “secretly.” Outside the inner circle of the Union Club, the work of men like Barrows and Warner was far from transparent. As Benjamin Hayes noted in his diary, “it is difficult to divine what ‘notions’ are operating at this time on the overzealous dispositions of the leaders of ‘Union Clubs’ and military chieftains (in embryo) who appear to have the control.”
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