Confederate sentiment in Southern California ran deep

Of all of the sounds now vanished from the guts of outdated downtown Los Angeles — the songs of the Tongva, the whistles of steam locomotives, the clanging of streetcars — there’s one you’d by no means have anticipated: the Insurgent Yell.

The battle cry of the Confederacy resounded a great distance from its residence, however all through the Civil Conflict, you possibly can hear it in secessionist hangouts just like the outdated Bella Union Lodge.

The yell normally went together with hollering and arguing, and perhaps the bibulous singing of “We’ll Hold Abe Lincoln To A Tree.” That was the Confederates’ poor rejoinder to the Yankees’ insult tune in regards to the Accomplice president, “We’ll Hold Jeff Davis From a Bitter Apple Tree.” (Poor, as a result of the meter doesn’t scan, and who hangs anybody to a tree, anyway?)

Just like the tune, the Confederacy was a failure. However right here — right here, in now politically azure-blue L.A. — sympathy for the South was muscular and, so far as the U.S. authorities was involved, a possible menace.

Consider Jets and Sharks decked out in buckskins or Yankee blue, ambling down our grubby streets, swapping mad-dog stares or whistling just a few bars of these taunting tunes — pushing, egging, daring somebody to begin one thing.

That modest-scale surrogate Civil Conflict was fought right here, within the cow county of Los Angeles, the place the ratio of cattle to individuals on the warfare’s starting was nearly seven to 1: a reported 11,333 two-legged residents to some 70,000 bovine.

These had been fraught instances, knife-edge instances. And oh, do they sound acquainted: treason and vigilantism afoot, radicals spoiling for a struggle, an epidemic and resistance to vaccination orders, and poll box-stuffing accusations, which on this occasion turned out to be true.

I thought of this not way back, when the L.A. County Board of Supervisors moved towards making a county historic landmark of the Altadena gravesite of Owen Brown.

Not a reputation that units off the alarm bells of reminiscence, proper? Owen Brown was a son of John Brown. He was the person who, in 1859, led his sons and fellow abolitionists, Black and white, on a raid of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia, now in West Virginia.

Brown’s aim was to arm and encourage an rebellion amongst enslaved individuals. He failed and was hanged for treason. However the botched raid nonetheless put a match to the fuse of the Civil Conflict. Owen received away, and wound up within the Altadena foothills, the place he died in 1889.

However in 1929, nearly 65 years after the Civil Conflict ended — a human lifetime — the United Daughters of the Confederacy opened Dixie Manor in San Gabriel, a house for outdated Accomplice troopers. Twenty-one of them went by way of its care earlier than the manor closed up store in 1936. A lot of these 21 had been buried in Hollywood Ceaselessly cemetery, the place a 1925 monument to Accomplice troopers and households buried there was carted off in 2017, days after the “unite the right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

How did Southern California wind up so … Southern?

Nicely, the Butterfield stagecoach routes ran from Texas by way of Arizona and New Mexico into L.A., and folks heading west introduced enslaved Black women and men with them, to the gold fields and, after the gold performed out, all through the state.

California’s constitutions forbade slavery, however slave-masters and slave-catchers typically ignored that. (In 1856, Biddy Mason, born in Mississippi and introduced right here by a slave proprietor, gained her freedom from a decide in a Los Angeles courtroom the place she was not permitted to testify.)

Nearly the one non-Southern sympathizing county officers on the outset of the warfare had been the district lawyer and the county surveyor; even the sheriff and two of his underlings had been pro-Accomplice, and one in all them, A.J. King, was briefly arrested for declaring that Accomplice President Jefferson Davis was “the one constitutional authorities we now have.”

In 1860 and 1864, within the two elections that despatched him to and stored him within the White Home, Abe Lincoln misplaced L.A. County. In 1860, he got here in third.

An undated El Monte ham radio operator’s card, from Patt Morrison’s historic assortment, with avenue tackle redacted. The Southland city was a hotbed of Accomplice exercise within the 1860s — and had Klan and neo-Nazi parts effectively into the twentieth century.

El Monte was far out of L.A., however not as far as to overlook out on the motion.

Within the spring of 1861, a couple of month earlier than the Civil Conflict started, the “Monte Mounted Rifles” fashioned up, led by Undersheriff King. Most had been emigres from Texas who introduced their politics to El Monte.

Itching for a sturdy little set-to, they rode round waving the California Republic’s Bear Flag — which by then was a states’ rights image. El Monte’s deputy postmaster refused to ship pro-Union newspapers to subscribers. Even after the warfare, Main Horace Bell, who’d left L.A. to go struggle for the Union, wrote that if he had event to go to El Monte, he discovered himself attacked.

El Monte traveled a protracted highway to shed this popularity; within the twentieth century, an El Monte pastor was additionally the native Ku Klux Klan’s “Kludd,” its non secular chief. And within the Sixties and ‘70s, the American Nazi Occasion opened up store on the town.

The precise warfare merely blew open these schisms.

The Bella Union Lodge, standing just a few yards northeast of the current Los Angeles Metropolis Corridor, was the place the Butterfield stage stopped to disgorge its passengers. It was additionally virtually a clubhouse for Southern sympathizers. Not lengthy after the warfare started, pro-Confederates carried into the Bella Union saloon — as triumphantly as if it had been the person himself — a full-sized coloration lithograph portrait of P.G.T. Beauregard, the Accomplice basic who had ordered the bombardment of Ft. Sumter.

The resort shared its grounds with the places of work of the Los Angeles Star. Its proprietor/editor was an ardent secessionist and racist who thundered that the warfare was being fought for “the degradation of the white race, and the elevation of the African household amongst them.” Henry Hamilton was arrested for treason later within the warfare and spent 10 days in Alcatraz. He needed to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union however returned unrepentant, to a hero’s welcome barbecue in El Monte.

A San Francisco newspaperman advised his readers within the pro-Union Bay Space that secesh Angelenos stuffed the spring air with “Dixie.” What he really wrote was “canines bark it, asses and mules bray it, and bilious bipeds whistle it.”

Plans had been underway for a giant pro-Union demonstration in Might 1861 when an nameless risk posted exterior the Bella Union warned that anybody elevating the Stars and Stripes above the courthouse could be shot. The flag was raised anyway, sans bloodshed, and a 34-gun salute was fired, one volley for every state, boldly together with the Accomplice states.

Perhaps essentially the most mythologized occasion of Los Angeles’ Civil Conflict occurred behind closed doorways within the Military quartermaster’s brick residence at third and Foremost streets, maybe in early to mid-June 1861.

A variety of U.S. Military officers stationed in California had been Southerners by delivery. Some had been additionally colleagues and mates of Winfield Scott Hancock, who as quartermaster was charged with defending Union armaments in Los Angeles. He took this all severely sufficient to arm his spouse, Almira, in opposition to being taken prisoner.

At this well-known “final supper” had been Hancock’s mates and fellow officers — the Southerners Albert Sidney Johnston, Lewis Armistead, Richard Garnett and George Pickett, who had resigned their Union commissions. They’d be fleeing to hitch the Accomplice military — Johnston early on June 16, simply forward of an arrest warrant.

By means of the night, because the tales go, there was some singing, some weeping, and expressions of everlasting affection. Johnston was killed not fairly a yr later, on the Battle of Shiloh. The opposite 4 met on the battlefield at Gettysburg in 1863. The Confederates charged Hancock’s place within the catastrophe that turned generally known as Pickett’s Cost. Garnett died within the discipline. Armistead lived lengthy sufficient to inform a discipline surgeon, “Say to Basic Hancock for me that I’ve accomplished him, and also you all, a grievous damage, which I shall all the time remorse.” Pickett survived however fell right into a slough of despond and vengefulness. One other dinner visitor, the Southerner Cameron Thom, was wounded at Gettysburg however returned to L.A. to grow to be its sixteenth mayor.

A number of days after this lachrymose dinner, a carnival-level occasion delighted Angelenos of both political persuasion. About 30 camels — survivors of a shiny thought about utilizing these “ships of the desert” within the American West — had been despatched down from Ft. Tejon. This unique parade all the way down to a corral on Foremost Road will need to have been past unusual. They had been ultimately moved to the Drum Barracks in Wilmington, bought off, died, and even launched. Rumors endured into the 1900s that they’d escaped and had been breeding within the sandy reaches of the Imperial Valley.

The Union was nervous sufficient about secession sentiment right here that federal troops’ numbers had been bulked up. A wily outdated Union Military commander, Edwin Sumner, sized up the state of affairs for Washington, D.C., from his Bay Space HQ: Secessionists weren’t the bulk however “essentially the most lively and zealous occasion” in California, and as for L.A., “there’s extra hazard of disaffection at this place than every other within the state.” It’s “mandatory,” he knowledgeable the nation’s capital, “to throw reinforcement into that part instantly.”

Earlier than the Civil Conflict, some Californios and residents from the American South agitated many times to divide the state in half — Union sympathizers within the north, Southerners and slavery supporters within the south.

Paradoxically, the Civil Conflict put a cease to that — however not ceaselessly. Every so often some look-at-me legislator tries as soon as extra to carve up California. When a three-state horizontal divvy was proposed within the Nineties, the PBS program I co-hosted held a contest to call these putative states. The winner, I imagine, was “Fogland, Logland and Smogland,” however I secretly rooted for “Id, Ego and Superego.”

The South was proper to imagine that California was crucial to the warfare effort. The victorious Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sagely remarked of the tens of thousands and thousands in California gold that paid the Union Military’s payments: “I have no idea what we’d do on this nice nationwide emergency had been it not for the gold despatched from California.”

Greater than 200 males left L.A. County to put on the Accomplice uniform, however solely two native males had been recognized to have joined the Union military. One was Bell, and the opposite man needed to exit of city to enlist; it was too harmful to take action in L.A.

{A photograph} that ran in The Instances in 1936 reveals pages from the annual California conference of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The occasion was held on the Beverly Hills Lodge.

(Los Angeles Instances / UCLA Library)

And so the warfare trudged on — 1000’s of miles away, however passionately waged in L.A.’s hearts and minds. In 1863 and 1864, official Fourth of July celebrations had been canceled or scaled again to maintain a lid on offended emotions.

A smallpox outbreak in 1862 and 1863 required homes with sick residents to quarantine, and hang around a yellow flag. Medical officers went neighborhood by neighborhood to seek out instances and find the unvaccinated and supply — and generally insist on — administering the vaccination free of charge. Not everybody cooperated.

Within the September 1862 elections, accusations of poll box-stuffing turned out to be true. Members of the California Volunteers — a type of home-front militia to assist the Union preserve the peace right here — weren’t L.A. residents however solid greater than 200 unlawful votes within the Ballona district anyway. Close to San Pedro, volunteers evidently scared recognized Accomplice sympathizers away from the polling place.

The Ballona vote was thrown out, and based on historian John W. Robinson in his e book “Los Angeles in Civil Conflict Days,” a San Francisco Bulletin reporter right here throughout the election wrote that “to all intents and functions, we would as effectively stay within the Southern Confederacy as in Southern California.”

The Accomplice monument at Hollywood Ceaselessly Cemetery stood from 1925, when this photograph was revealed in The Instances, till 2017.

(Los Angeles Instances archive / UCLA Library)

Tempers and emotions didn’t ebb with the South’s failing fortunes on the battlefield. On April 9, 1865 (159 years in the past this week), Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant in Lee’s residence state of Virginia. The information arrived right here by telegraph the following day, however the Union headquarters on the Drum Barracks in Wilmington didn’t hear it till the following day, when the governor telegraphed the give up information. Cannons and the bells made a cacophony of celebration as pro-Union Los Angeles threw off its timidity and danced within the streets.

The enjoyment didn’t final. 4 mornings later, at 9:20 on Saturday, April 15, the telegraph workplace — which stood roughly the place Metropolis Corridor is now — received this information: “President Lincoln and Secretary Seward had been assassinated in Washington final night time. The president died this morning; Seward nonetheless alive however not anticipated to stay.”

Nobody wanted social media or telephones to unfold this calamity. Distraught Angelenos ran by way of the streets, calling out the information. Some collected on the telegraph workplace, crying.

However then, right here and there, from the properties of some Accomplice supporters, got here the sound of jubilation. On the Baer home, younger Henry ran out the door singing “Dixie.” His father, Abraham, an immigrant tailor from Bavaria, dragged him again inside for a whipping. Immigrant pioneer Harris Newmark wrote that this almost broke up the Baer household, as a result of Mrs. Baer was a loyal secessionist.

Newmark was at residence that morning together with his visitor, Dr. John Griffin, a brother-in-law of the Accomplice Gen. Johnston, and Griffin began to do what Henry Baer had run out the door to do, cheering for Jefferson Davis.

With presence of thoughts, Newmark body-blocked him. “By major power, I held him again, convincing him ultimately of his folly.” A person rejoicing in public at Lincoln’s homicide would possibly himself have grow to be a useless man that day.

A number of secessionists celebrating the assassination had been arrested, amongst them an odd character named Peter Biggs. Biggs was a Black man introduced right here enslaved within the early 1850s by his then-owner, a army officer. Biggs turned free and opened a barber store. However when warfare got here, he sided with the South. He had been arrested in Might 1863 and compelled to stroll hobbled by ball and chain from central L.A. to the Drum Barracks on the harbor. Alongside the way in which, he tossed his hat within the air and gave three cheers for Davis.

He was freed after signing an oath of allegiance to the Union, however right here he was once more, delighted on the information of Lincoln’s dying, and arrested once more. 4 years later, Biggs was stabbed to dying in a restaurant by the prepare dinner.

The next month, as Newmark identified in his memoirs, for the primary time ever, Unionists beat secessionists within the Los Angeles metropolis election.

That hardly ended sore emotions. Even after the Appomattox give up, the secessionist undersheriff, King, went on insisting, “We now have been and are but secessionist.” Horace Bell discovered that Accomplice-sympathizing mates nonetheless turned their backs on him, and one in all them advised him, “The concept of a Los Angeles man of your stamp combating on the aspect of the Blacks!”

However different issues quickly pressed in to occupy Angelenos. The drought of 1864 had already began the dying spiral of the area’s cattle-grazing economic system, and in time it was again to enterprise as common — and the seasonal disaster calendar of fire, flood, drought and quake.

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a fancy place. On this weekly characteristic, Patt Morrison is explaining the way it works, its historical past and its tradition.