Of all of the sounds now vanished from the guts of previous 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 good distance from its dwelling, however all through the Civil Struggle, you might hear it in secessionist hangouts just like the previous Bella Union Lodge.
The yell normally went together with hollering and arguing, and perhaps the bibulous singing of “We’ll Grasp Abe Lincoln To A Tree.” That was the Confederates’ poor rejoinder to the Yankees’ insult tune concerning the Accomplice president, “We’ll Grasp 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 a couple of bars of these taunting tunes — pushing, egging, daring somebody to begin one thing.
That modest-scale surrogate Civil Struggle 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 virtually seven to at least one: a reported 11,333 two-legged residents to some 70,000 bovine.
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You might often obtain promotional content material from the Los Angeles Occasions.
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 considered 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 Struggle. Owen acquired away, and wound up within the Altadena foothills, the place he died in 1889.
A clipping from an April 1936 version of The Occasions exhibits a Accomplice veteran, at Dixie Manor in San Gabriel, with an previous uniform coat. The picture accompanied a information merchandise reporting that Dixie Manor’s final surviving member was sick and that the house for Accomplice veterans was closing.
(Los Angeles Occasions archive)
However in 1929, virtually 65 years after the Civil Struggle ended — a human lifetime — the United Daughters of the Confederacy opened Dixie Manor in San Gabriel, a house for previous Accomplice troopers. Twenty-one of them went by means of its care earlier than the manor closed up store in 1936. Lots 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 best” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
How did Southern California wind up so … Southern?
Effectively, the Butterfield stagecoach routes ran from Texas by means 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 usually ignored that. (In 1856, Biddy Mason, born in Mississippi and introduced right here by a slave proprietor, gained her freedom from a choose 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 legal professional and the county surveyor; even the sheriff and two of his underlings had been pro-Accomplice, and considered one of 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 road handle redacted. The Southland city was a hotbed of Accomplice exercise within the 1860s — and had Klan and neo-Nazi parts properly 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 Struggle 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 street 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 Nineteen Sixties and ‘70s, the American Nazi Get together opened up store on the town.
The precise warfare merely blew open these schisms.
The Bella Union Lodge, standing a couple of 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 shade lithograph portrait of P.G.T. Beauregard, the Accomplice common who had ordered the bombardment of Ft. Sumter.
The lodge shared its grounds with the workplaces 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 informed his readers within the pro-Union Bay Space that secesh Angelenos crammed the spring air with “Dixie.” What he really wrote was “canine bark it, asses and mules bray it, and bilious bipeds whistle it.”
Plans had been underway for a giant pro-Union demonstration in Could 1861 when an nameless risk posted outdoors 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 probably the most mythologized occasion of Los Angeles’ Civil Struggle occurred behind closed doorways within the Military quartermaster’s brick dwelling at third and Fundamental 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 pals of Winfield Scott Hancock, who as quartermaster was charged with defending Union armaments in Los Angeles. He took this all significantly sufficient to arm his spouse, Almira, towards being taken prisoner.
At this well-known “final supper” had been Hancock’s pals 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 affix 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 grew to become generally known as Pickett’s Cost. Garnett died within the subject. Armistead lived lengthy sufficient to inform a subject surgeon, “Say to Basic Hancock for me that I’ve executed him, and also you all, a grievous harm, 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 turn out 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 brilliant 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 Fundamental Road will need to have been past unusual. They had been finally 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 apprehensive sufficient about secession sentiment right here that federal troops’ numbers had been bulked up. A wily previous 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 “probably the most energetic and zealous get together” in California, and as for L.A., “there may be extra hazard of disaffection at this place than some other within the state.” It’s “needed,” he knowledgeable the nation’s capital, “to throw reinforcement into that part instantly.”
Earlier than the Civil Struggle, some Californios and residents from the American South agitated repeatedly to divide the state in half — Union sympathizers within the north, Southerners and slavery supporters within the south.
Paradoxically, the Civil Struggle put a cease to that — however not perpetually. On occasion some look-at-me legislator tries as soon as extra to carve up California. When a three-state horizontal divvy was proposed within the Nineteen Nineties, the PBS program I co-hosted held a contest to call these putative states. The winner, I consider, was “Fogland, Logland and Smogland,” however I secretly rooted for “Id, Ego and Superego.”
The South was proper to consider that California was vital 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 identified 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 Occasions in 1936 exhibits pages from the annual California conference of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The occasion was held on the Beverly Hills Lodge.
(Los Angeles Occasions / UCLA Library)
And so the warfare trudged on — hundreds 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 search out instances and find the unvaccinated and supply — and typically insist on — administering the vaccination without cost. Not everybody cooperated.
Within the September 1862 elections, accusations of poll box-stuffing turned out to be true. Members of the California Volunteers — a sort of home-front militia to assist the Union maintain 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 identified 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 Struggle Days,” a San Francisco Bulletin reporter right here throughout the election wrote that “to all intents and functions, we’d as properly dwell within the Southern Confederacy as in Southern California.”
The Accomplice monument at Hollywood Ceaselessly Cemetery stood from 1925, when this picture was revealed in The Occasions, till 2017.
(Los Angeles Occasions 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 dwelling 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 — acquired 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 dwell.”
Nobody wanted social media or telephones to unfold this calamity. Distraught Angelenos ran by means 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 dwelling 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 predominant pressure, I held him again, convincing him ultimately of his folly.” A person rejoicing in public at Lincoln’s homicide may himself have turn out to be a lifeless 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 grew to become free and opened a barber store. However when warfare got here, he sided with the South. He had been arrested in Could 1863 and compelled to stroll hobbled by ball and chain from central L.A. to the Drum Barracks on the harbor. Alongside the best way, 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, “Now we have been and are but secessionist.” Horace Bell discovered that Accomplice-sympathizing pals nonetheless turned their backs on him, and considered one of them informed him, “The thought of a Los Angeles man of your stamp preventing on the facet 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 catastrophe calendar of fireplace, flood, drought and quake.
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a posh place. On this weekly function, Patt Morrison is explaining the way it works, its historical past and its tradition.
