As one of only two states in the entire western United States, California could hardly have been more isolated at the start of the Civil War. No transcontinental railroad or telegraph has yet connected it to the rest of the country, and no battles would be fought there. Nonetheless, California proved essential to the Union’s war effort, supporting the economy with its vast reserves of gold, raising huge sums for military medical assistance, and providing large numbers of troops. per inhabitant.
California’s membership in the Union was never a done deal. Although admitted as a Free State under the Compromise of 1850, some white residents continued to illegally enslave blacks, even as a movement emerged to ban African Americans from the state altogether. At the same time, the state legislature enacted a system that forced many Native Americans into bondage.
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The pro-slavery Democrats, known locally as Chivalry, or “Chivs,” were particularly prominent in Southern California and were led by Senator William M. Gwin, who owned hundreds of slaves in his former state. of Mississippi origin. In 1859, the Chiv-dominated state legislature even passed a bill that would have split California in half, with the southern half open to slavery. (The US Congress never considered the plan, killing him as well.)
That same year, the pro-slavery chief justice of the state Supreme Court assassinated a less slavery-prone U.S. senator from California in a duel.
“You had to be a little brave to try to instill a sense of Union in parts of California,” says Glenna Matthews, author of “The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California. ”In downtown Los Angeles, for example,“ it was impossible to fly the Stars and Stripes ”.
With so many sympathizers in the South, including in the highest echelons of the military, Confederate President Jefferson Davis allegedly expected California to slide into crippling internal strife, if not completely separate itself. But he made a major miscalculation. As it turned out, his supporters, while vocal, were vastly outnumbered by other Californians who increasingly rallied to the Union cause.
California sends Calvary and infantry
Indeed, the state’s residents responded with aplomb to a federal call for troops in the summer of 1861, immediately forming two cavalry regiments and five infantry regiments. By the end of the Civil War, some 17,000 Californians, many of whom were Gold Rush veterans, would serve as Union soldiers out of a total population of less than 400,000. (A few hundred men additional would join Confederation.)
“It is more labor than the [West] has never seen before, “says Andrew E. Masich, president of the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh and author of” Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861-1867, “which points out that the California troops were in many ways superior to their eastern counterparts.
“They can go up, they can shoot, they can live outdoors in difficult conditions,” explains Masich. “They can also cover faster and longer distances … and they are certainly risk takers.” To top it off, the quartermasters found them taller than the men in the Army of the Potomac, with bigger heads and feet.
A California Civil War company formed in Hayward in 1861 poses for the photo.
Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California
These new Californian volunteers were needed, first, to replace the army regulars who had been sent east to fight in the great battles of the war. Stationed across the west from Kansas to Washington, California troops protected postal routes, built and repaired forts and roads, mapped largely uncharted territory, secured borders, and protected supply shipments.
They also rushed to Confederate homes, such as the Los Angeles area, capturing armed rebel sympathizers at gunpoint and imprisoning them and other criminal secessionists in places like Fort Alcatraz (later the site of the famous prison).
The largest California-centered war operation began in the spring of 1862, when 2,350 Gold State troops, later followed by about 6,000 others, began a 900-mile march from Fort Yuma, in the Southeastern California, El Paso, Texas. Led by Officer James Henry Carleton, this so-called California column helped repel a Confederate invasion of New Mexico territory.
Carleton and his men then began to set up the new Arizona territory. Several veterans of the California column were even elected to the Arizona legislature in 1864, while others have served as prominent physicians, lawyers, judges, merchants, ranchers, and miners.
California forces brutally target American Indians
Other than two skirmishes, however, they never really fought off the Gray Coats. In fact, the entire Californian column suffered only three deaths at the hands of Confederate fire. Instead, the men spent much of their time in Arizona waging war against the Apaches, who had launched a campaign to expel the Federals and Confederates from their territory.
Although both sides committed massacres, Californians were particularly brutal, at one point slaughtering at least 50 Apaches, including women and children, in a surprise nighttime assault on a village. On another occasion, Apache leader Mangas Coloradas was captured after being lured under a truce flag. Californians apparently tortured him with heated bayonets, shot him in an alleged escape attempt, boiled his severed head to remove the flesh, and ultimately shipped his skull east, according to some reports. as a macabre and pseudo-scientific memory.
California volunteers have also aggressively clashed with other Indian tribes, committing so many acts of violence – and speaking so openly of extermination – that some historians view their actions as part of genocide. Records show that from the Gold Rush to the end of the Civil War, federal troops, state militias, and white vigilantes killed at least 9,492 to 16,094 Native Americans in California alone. , many of whom were non-combatants.
Even when they did not shoot them, armed Californians seized Native American prisoners, sold bonded women and children, deported tribes en masse, and engaged in the systematic destruction of their food supplies, resulting in countless deaths. additional. One particularly notorious incident, known as the Konkow Maidu Trail of Tears, occurred in September 1863, when 461 undersupplied tribal members were forcibly walked about 160 km over rough terrain. Only 277 arrived at their destination.
California Battalion Fighting in the East
Of all the California Civil War soldiers, only one organized group, consisting of about 500 men, moved east to the main theaters of the conflict. Known as the California Battalion, they sailed along the Pacific coast, crossed the Isthmus of Panama (before the canal was built) and eventually landed in Boston, where they joined the Second Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment.
From there, the California Battalion participated in the defense of Washington, DC, countered the lightning raids by the guerrillas of Confederate Colonel John S. Mosby (nicknamed “the Gray Ghost”), helped drive the Confederates out of the Valley of Shenandoah and was instrumental in the decisive decision. siege of Petersburg. In the process, they won the respect of their enemies, with one Confederate soldier calling Californians “notoriously good fighters.”
California Ships Gold East
The workforce, however, was only one aspect of California’s contribution to the war effort. Tens of millions of dollars in state gold, shipped east by steamboat, also played a major role, a fact that neither escaped Jefferson Davis nor Abraham Lincoln.
Sometimes California troops have even been ordered to abandon their other gold prospecting duties. “A tremendous amount of wealth was being discovered in California,” says Matthews, who, although the gold bullion generally went to northern banks, not the federal government, “reassured people that the United States did were not going to go bankrupt themselves, and so it became easier for the US government to get loans.
Equally important, Californian troops kept the gold out of rebel hands (and blocked their access to the Pacific), denying “the Confederacy the wealth and ports it so longed for in the West,” Masich says.
In addition to gold, Californians also sent silver across the country, using the new transatlantic telegraph line. Most notably, they raised more than $ 1.2 million – far more than any other state – for the United States Health Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross that provided food, clothing and medicine to people. sick and wounded soldiers, thus filling a void left by the derisory medical establishment of the army.
“People were away from the fighting, but they wanted to support the war,” Matthews says. “It was the dawn of the California ATM, as fundraisers like to think of us.”
State support for Abraham Lincoln increases
With prominent civilians like Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister who had recently moved from Boston to San Francisco, mobilizing support from the Sanitary Commission and the Union as a whole, California politics began to change. In 1860, for example, Lincoln won only 32% of the California vote, while in 1864 he won 59%.
“Seeing the turnaround was extremely encouraging for the people,” Matthews says, adding that it kept “the feeling of the North high when there were so many dark days.”
Lincoln himself greatly appreciated California, telling a friend that he wished to visit the “wonderful” state and that “the production of his gold mines has been a wonder to me, and his noble position to the Union, his generous liberal offerings to the Sanitary Commission, and his faithful representatives … have been loved [her] people to me.
