FAR FROM BOTH Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia, California sent relatively few soldiers across the country to see action in the eastern states during the U.S. Civil War. While around sixteen thousand men from California volunteered for the Army of the Pacific, fewer than five hundred Californians engaged in combat in the eastern theater of war.1 Not only was the cost of transporting soldiers from the Pacific to the Atlantic states prohibitive, but their services were needed in a wide area of the West, ranging from Washington to Arizona. Their duty was to ensure that the Confederacy not seduce or conquer the American West.
Barely a week after the humiliating Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, on the other side of the continent in the desert of the American Southwest, John R. Baylor, the Confederate commander of the Second Texas Rifles, and his three hundred men waded across the Rio Grande a little upriver from El Paso and claimed a large chunk of the New Mexico Territory for the Confederacy. The small outpost of Federal troops at Fort Fillmore promptly surrendered.2 Soon after, the South occupied most of the territories of New Mexico and Arizona. On December 4, the Rifles’ new commander, Major Henry H. Sibley, proclaimed, “An army under my command enters New Mexico to take possession of it in the name of the Confederate States.”3
California rightly was thought to be next on the Confederates’ list of targets. The Rebels believed that getting and maintaining control of New Mexico and Arizona was vital to their plans for westward expansion to reach ports on the Pacific coast.4 Military conquests like Baylor’s and Sibley’s might not have been the only means by which they sought to achieve this goal. After taking command of the U.S. forces in San Francisco in late April 1861, General Edwin V. Sumner notified the army headquarters in Washington, DC, “There is a strong Union feeling with the majority of the people of this State, but the Secessionists are much the most active and zealous party, which gives them more influence than they ought to have from their numbers. I have no doubt but there is some deep scheming to draw California into the secession movement . . . expecting afterwards to induce her to join the Southern Confederacy.”5 The War between the States now threatened to knock on California’s door.
Trying to quiet worries in Washington about the state’s loyalty, on May 17, 1861, John G. Downey, the governor of California and the husband of native daughter María de Jesús Guirado, signed a concurrent resolution by the legislature stoutly affirming “that the people of California are devoted to the Constitution and the Union of the United States, and will not fail in fidelity and fealty to that Constitution and Union now in the hour of trial and peril.” Downey was to serve the remainder of his term as California’s first “war governor,” one of three who would occupy that position before the Civil War was over. The state’s resolution soon was tested. Just three days after the Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run, the War Department sent a letter to Governor Downey in Sacramento asking him to raise a volunteer regiment of infantry and five companies of cavalry. As the importance of the Union forces’ defeat at Bull Run became clearer in Washington, subsequent letters followed, each more urgently asking that increasing numbers of men be raised, to keep cross-country communications routes open and “to aid in enforcing the law and protecting public property.” In August, Downey made the formal call for volunteers to join newly commissioned cavalry and infantry units of the California Column that was to be sent to wrest the Arizona and New Mexico territories back from the Confederacy.6
Some Latinos joined the Union forces. One of the first men to volunteer for the cavalry was the governor’s brother-in-law Juan Francisco “Pancho” Guirado, who enlisted on August 16 as the first lieutenant of Company B.7 The son of the landowners Rafael Guirado and Vicenta Urquides, Pancho Guirado was only twenty-one years old when he volunteered to serve his new country.8 He enlisted in San Francisco, then was sent to Camp Merchant on the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, where the rest of his company assembled during the next few weeks. Company B then rode to Southern California, where the California Column spent the winter. Most of the column’s men were raw recruits, in need of intensive training before they would be fit to fight or even march properly.9
While they prepared themselves for their impending journey to the Rio Grande, reports of additional Confederate activity surfaced, most ominously that Confederate cavalry under Captain Sherod Hunter were headed from Mesilla, the capital of the new Confederate Territory of Arizona, toward Tucson, which was much closer to California.10 Dashing across the Sonora desert from the Confederate headquarters on the banks of the Rio Grande, Hunter entered Tucson with about a hundred cavalrymen on February 28, 1862, and raised the Stars and Bars over the town plaza on March 1. By then, however, although he and his men were not aware of it, the California Column was on the move. By late February or early March 1862, the unusually heavy rains that winter had ended, making the route passable for the column’s supply wagons. They left Southern California in several parties whose numbers totaled about 2,350.11
Yet already, even as detachments of the California Column moved east, the Confederates were running into trouble in New Mexico. Out of supplies, unable to replace their casualties after skirmishes with Union forces, and fearful of the advent of fresh troops from California, the Rebels retreated to Mesilla. They were harassed by Latino cavalry from New Mexico under the leadership of Captain Rafael Chacón, who later wrote a spirited description of his campaign. The first detachment of the California Column arrived in Tucson on March 20, about two weeks after the Confederates had decamped, with the rest coming in several waves thereafter. They then went on to New Mexico, intending to engage the Rebels there. Guirado, along with the rest of Company B under Colonel Edward E. Eyre, was sent ahead of the main body to make a reconnaissance along the Rio Grande. Apprised of their advance, the Confederates hurriedly left New Mexico for Texas, indeed so quickly that they left their wounded behind. Thus Guirado was present when, on July 4, 1862, the Stars and Stripes was raised over the Rio Grande for the first time in more than a year, near Fort Thorn, and New Mexico was again firmly under Union control. The Federal forces were welcomed by local residents, who quickly had become disenchanted with the Rebels’ persistent thievery and requisitioning of their property.12
While Guirado rode with the cavalry, a number of California Latinos signed up to slog on foot in the infantry. They were a minority among their mostly Atlantic American and European-immigrant comrades, but they shared the same experiences. For instance, Braulio Mejía volunteered for the 5th Regiment of Infantry in Sacramento in December 1861 and was assigned to Company I, one of five from the 5th that subsequently became part of the California Column sent to Arizona and New Mexico. Given the high percentage of post-1848 immigrants among Latinos in the gold country, Private Mejía most likely was an immigrant, probably from Mexico. At Las Cruces in the fall of 1864, a number of veterans of the 5th Infantry, along with some men from the 1st Infantry of California Volunteers, were consolidated into the First Battalion of Veteran Infantry; Mejía thereafter found himself in Company D of the new battalion.13 Another Latino volunteer, Antonio Rosea, who originally joined the 5th Regiment of Infantry in Placer County in Northern California in 1861, probably also was an immigrant. After a brief desertion from the 5th, he reenlisted as a Veteran Volunteer in the 1st Regiment of Infantry. He was finally discharged at Los Pinos, New Mexico, on September 15, 1866.14
The Arizona and New Mexico territories were not the only places Latino soldiers from California served during the Civil War. The Army of the Pacific played a primarily defensive role, its presence deterring Confederate advances into a broad swath of territory ranging from Washington State to New Mexico and Colorado, and Latinos from all over that vast territory joined it. In Watsonville, California, Andrés Guzmán and Ismael Pinto enlisted on the same day, November 12, 1864, joining Company A of the 8th Regiment of Infantry; both were discharged, along with the rest of their company, on October 24, 1865.15 In Arcata, amid the redwood forests of Northern California, José Santa Cruz and Gregorio Vidal enlisted on May 12, 1863, and were discharged on May 13, 1865, with the rest of their comrades from Company B of the First Battalion of Mountaineers.16 Juan Reyes, who enlisted in Company E of the Mountaineers on May 23, 1863, was joined by José Martínez four days later. Both were from the town of Ukiah and were mustered out with their company at Fort Humboldt on June 14, 1865.17
The first Confederate invasion of the West had failed, but Rebel designs on the territory had not completely evaporated. After retreating to Confederate-held Texas, Baylor, obsessed by the idea of a western extension of the Confederacy, began agitating to retake the Arizona Territory. He received a new commission as a colonel in the Confederate Army, with permission to recruit 2,500 Texans to regain Arizona and New Mexico.18 This continuing threat of Confederate aggression prompted General George C. Wright to ask Brigadier-General Andrés Pico, then serving as the commander of the First Brigade of California Militia, to recruit a battalion of Spanish-speaking Native California Cavalry, from among a population whose renowned horsemanship particularly fitted them for patrolling the Arizona desert. These were the first predominantly Latino troops from California. California state senator Romualdo Pacheco, a Californio himself, had first suggested the idea, which found ready acceptance at the War Department. Four companies eventually took shape: Company A, recruited from several northern and central counties; Company B from San Francisco; Company C from Santa Barbara County; and Company D from Los Angeles County. Due to Andrés Pico’s age—he was fifty-four—and infirmities, his nephew José Ramón Pico took over early in 1863 and recruited vigorously, even advertising in Spanish-language newspapers before formal orders arrived from Washington (see figures 16 and 17).19
Gathering the nucleus of Company A in San José, Pico gave a rousing speech linking the fight for freedom and democracy in the American Civil War to the struggle against the French in Mexico. “Sons of California! our country calls, and we must obey! This unholy rebellion of the Southern States must be crushed; they must come back into the Union, and pay obedience to the Stars and Stripes. United, we will, by the force of circumstances, become the freest and mightiest republic on earth! Crowned monarchs must be driven away from the sacred continent of free America!”20 Nearly eighty young men enlisted in Pico’s company, many bringing their riatas (lariats) with them, which they could handily use as weapons to supplement their firearms.21 They were a mixed lot, about half Californios and the rest Latinos from Mexico and Chile, with a few Yaqui Indians and even some non-Latinos for good measure.22
In Santa Barbara County, Antonio María de la Guerra raised another company in 1864, the Santa Barbara Company, or Company C of the Native California Cavalry, and was commissioned its captain.23 José Antonio Sánchez formed Company D in Los Angeles County. One of its first volunteers, enrolled first as a sergeant and then as second lieutenant, was Pancho Guirado, already a veteran of the Civil War in the West with the California Column. Unfortunately, he was discharged with a disability only a few months after joining, before the Native California Cavalry ever left the state. Guirado later recovered, however, for he joined a Missouri cavalry regiment in 1865 and served until the end of the Civil War. Nor did Sánchez end up going with the company he had raised. He resigned at the end of May 1864 and remained in Los Angeles, where he was active in local politics on behalf of Abraham Lincoln’s reelection.24
FIGURE 16. Captain (later Major) José Ramón Pico organized Company A, First Battalion Native California Cavalry, in 1863 and served with the unit until 1866. (Courtesy Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History)
FIGURE 17. Captain José Ramón Pico took out an advertisement in La Voz de Méjico in March 1863 to attract recruits for the Native California Cavalry, Companies A (San José) and B (San Francisco). (La Voz de Méjico, March 3, 1863, p. 2. CESLAC UCLA)
All four companies finally assembled at Camp Drum in Wilmington, California, in late June 1865 and began the trek of nearly five hundred miles across the desert to Tubac, to defend Arizona. During summer, temperatures in the Sonora desert can reach 110 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit; water and forage for animals are scarce. So as not to deplete what little was available, the companies were sent at staggered intervals.25 Company D left on July 21 and arrived at Fort Yuma on the banks of the Colorado River on August 4, with the weather so hot that one bilingual cavalryman wrote, “I . . . can consciously swear that if Hades is any warmer I’m a candidate for ‘Los Cielos Santos’ [‘the blessed heavens’].” After a few days’ rest for the horses, they escorted a military supply train carrying “grub for Uncle Sam’s boys in Arizona” to Tubac. After three more weeks’ travel through the desert, Company D finally arrived in Tubac, only to find that the U.S. forces they were expecting to join there—including Companies A and B of the Native California Cavalry—were moving to establish a new post at Fort Mason, near Calabasas.26
Soon after all the California Cavalry arrived at the new Fort Mason post in Arizona, on September 5, the realities of the United States–Mexico–Confederacy–French conflict descended on them. With Mexican imperialist forces closing in, Governor Ignacio Pesqueira of the Mexican state of Sonora, a supporter of Juárez’s government, found himself backed up against the United States–Mexico border. He asked permission to cross and received it—and protection—from the U.S. Army at the fort.27 The imperialists were forced to halt their pursuit at the border. Frustrated by this development, the imperialist prefect of Altar and Magdalena, José Moreno, threatened to cross the border, seize Pesqueira, and hang him from the nearest tree, even if his men had to climb over the dead bodies of the Fort Mason garrison to do it.28 U.S. Colonel Charles Lewis laconically replied, “Let him come and try it.”29
Amid this tension, twenty-six men from Companies A and B deserted across the border into Mexico, taking horses and firearms. On being informed by a letter from Mexico that the deserters were in the town of Magdalena—contemporaneous reports do not make it clear who sent it—Lewis promptly dispatched Captains José Ramón Pico of Company A and Porfirio Jimeno of Company B, along with thirty of their men, to bring the deserters back. Under an 1861 extradition treaty between the United States and the Republic of Mexico, Pico and Jimeno had the legal right to do this, without interference by Mexican officials. But this northern region of Mexico was now under de facto French and imperialist rule.30
Pico and Jimeno crossed into Mexico and arrived at the outskirts of Magdalena, in Sonora, where about fifteen of the deserters were reported to be hiding. Pico drew his men up outside the town and sent Lieutenant William Emery as a messenger to Prefect Moreno, the commander of the three to four hundred imperial troops there, formally requesting that the deserters and their stolen equipment be handed over to him. When Emery did not return in a timely manner, Pico lost patience. With eight or ten cavalrymen, he rode into town in a markedly aggressive manner, coming to a brisk halt in front of Moreno’s office. Pico dismounted, went into the office, and informed the prefect that he had come for the deserters and their equipment. Moreno objected to the U.S. troops’ hostile stance on Mexican soil. Pico responded that the United States did not recognize the French-imposed imperial government; the only legal government of Mexico was that of President Juárez, with which the United States had an extradition treaty. Moreno ordered his cavalry to prepare for battle. In response, Pico ran out to the street and ordered his escort to mount up as well, sending a messenger to the rest of his troops outside the town to prepare for action.31
Pico thereupon publicly defied Moreno, warning him that the imperialists had better be prepared to kill him and all his men, as none would submit to being taken prisoner. This prompted an old man in the crowd that had gathered to watch the standoff to call out, “¡Vivan los Americanos!” (“Hurrah for the Americans!”). Uncomfortably reminded by this spontaneous salute to the (Spanish-speaking) U.S. presence that imperial rule was not happily accepted by all Mexicans, including some in Magdalena, Moreno eventually stood his men down and came to an arrangement with Pico. He would write to his superiors in Hermosillo, forwarding Pico’s request for the deserters and their arms. Pico would remain in Magdalena with his small escort, while Captain Jimeno and the rest of the California cavalrymen would withdraw across the border into U.S. territory.32
Nonetheless, after Jimeno had returned to the Arizona Territory, Pico’s continued presence in Magdalena somehow was interpreted as a detention, and rumors soon flew to California that the French had imprisoned him.33 In San Francisco on October 6, El Nuevo Mundo reprinted, in Spanish translation, excerpts from a letter originally published in the Wilmington (CA) Journal five days earlier, written by a Captain Dimpfel at Fort Yuma, Arizona, on September 20. Dimpfel related that “an officer just came into my office with the news that Captain Pico, of the Company of Native Californians, who . . . was sent to the Mexican border, has been captured by the French, and is now a prisoner in their hands. This incident will bring a war with France, and it would not surprise me if the French should make an attempt to penetrate into California via this place.”34
The reality, however, turned out to be far less momentous. Officials in Hermosillo soon instructed Moreno to send Pico back across the border without either the deserters or the stolen U.S. government property. The Mexican imperialists demanded an apology for the perceived insult of this U.S. incursion into Mexican territory but apparently never got one. On the basis of these respective disappointments, tensions eased for a time.35
As noted in chapter 2, the Mexican victory at the first battle of Puebla in 1862 inspired a number of Latinos in California to offer their services to the Mexican Army. While most of these volunteers were immigrants, primarily from Jalisco and Oaxaca, the occasional Californio also signed up. Just a few weeks after Puebla’s surrender, a group of twenty Mexican immigrants in Virginia City, Nevada, informed La Voz de Méjico that they were ready and willing to return to their homeland “to take part in the present war of France against Mexico.” The same editorial announced that Francisco G. Ramonet, who had been instrumental in establishing the junta patriótica in Sacramento, “in conformity with the call that has been made, soon will be ready to take part in the defense of his homeland.” These individual declarations by patriotic Mexicans provided an occasion for the editor Antonio Mancillas to try to set the record straight about what his newspaper was and was not doing to assist the Juarist cause in Mexico.36
The issue at stake was that anyone recruiting men to go to Mexico to fight the French was breaking U.S. neutrality laws. Yet it was not, technically, illegal to provide money or certain types of nonmilitary supplies to those individuals who decided, of their own accord, to go to Mexico to fight. Therefore Mancillas insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that he was not recruiting per se—encouraging and facilitating, yes, but not recruiting.
Many ill-intentioned persons have caused the rumor to be circulated, with harmful intent, that we are trying to enlist men for the war against France. And as this involves responsibility for breaking the neutrality laws of the United States, which prohibit any person from recruiting soldiers in order to send them out of the state, we protest that we have never had such a thought, not now or ever. . . . We are ready to cooperate in sending men, money, and whatever items that the United States’ laws of hospitality do not prohibit. . . . Our newspaper columns, our own small resources, our activity—all, all are at the disposal of those sons who are lovers of Mexican liberty.37
The first newspaper documentation of a Latino volunteer going to Mexico read, “Jesús Hernández, a Mexican living in San Luis Obispo County, is the first patriot who has left this state, that we know of, to take part in the present war. May all those in whom a Mexican heart beats, imitate his noble example. He took with him twenty-five pounds of gunpowder, a hundred pounds of bullets, a rifle, and a revolver.”38 A little over a month after the announcement of Hernández’s departure, the steamship Oregon left San Francisco’s Folsom Street wharf on the afternoon of September 5, 1863, headed for Guaymas. Mancillas noted that a good number of Mexican immigrants were on board. “Many of our fellow countrymen have gone back, and among them citizen José León, who is going to take part in the defense of our homeland. He is provided with a rifle, revolver, and [other] munitions of war. We wish them all a good, comfortable, and lucky journey.”39
Although there were such occasional reports of individuals or small groups of Latinos going to Mexico, California’s Spanish-language newspapers were understandably careful to carry little detailed news about the movement of soldiers to the south. Hints did appear in the papers, nevertheless, from time to time, suggesting that the number of men going to fight the French was noticeable, although perhaps not large. Death and illness notices provide some information. For instance, in December 1864, while Ulysses S. Grant was settling into his long siege of Richmond, La Voz de Méjico published a notice detailing the unfortunate fate of one Latino who had left California to join the Mexican Army. “CITIZEN JOSÉ RENTERÍA. From Mazatlan is communicated to us the news, very affecting to us and to the many friends this worthy citizen has in California, of his having been defeated between Culiacán and El Fuerte, gravely wounded, and taken prisoner. Señor Rentería, a zealous Mexican and possessed of a soul that still was not touched by vice or corruption, has shed his blood in defense of the homeland! We are sure that the Mexicans of California will feel a righteous sorrow upon reading this notice.”40
A death notice sketches the story of a Mexican refugee who fled to San Francisco early in the war, only to go back later to fight the French, “cavalry colonel Luis A. Tostado, killed in the aftermath of the bloody battle of Hermosillo on May 4, 1866, defending the sacred cause of his homeland’s independence!” The San Francisco newspaper in which this appeared gave him an epitaph that would have served as well for any number of Latinos who chose to fight the French in Mexico: “There ended the career of that self-sacrificing soldier who went from a foreign country to seal with his own blood the cause of our dear Mexico’s liberty.”41
The Californio Mariano G. Vallejo and two of his sons, Platón and Uladislao, experienced the two fronts of the war to defend freedom and democracy, from the Confederacy in the United States and from the French in Mexico. Mariano Vallejo had been the commander of the province’s military when California was part of the Republic of Mexico, and he ever afterward retained a soft spot in his heart for Mexico. But as a U.S. citizen after 1848, he quickly developed a sincere loyalty to the United States and its institutions. When the American Civil War broke out and the French soon thereafter attempted to impose a monarchy in Mexico, two of Vallejo’s sons took part in the momentous conflict, one in the U.S. Army against the Confederacy, and the other in Mexico against the monarchists.
Platón Vallejo, born in 1841 in Sonoma, became the first Latino physician from California to attend medical school in the United States; prior to his graduation in 1864 from Columbia University in New York, Latino physicians in California usually had studied in Mexico City or Guadalajara. The Bear Flag Revolt took place, literally, in Platón’s front yard; he watched the Atlantic American invaders paint the first Bear Flag in front of his house. In 1853, he went to study at St. Mary’s College in Baltimore for two years, then returned to California to continue his studies at San Francisco College.42 In April 1860, a year before the United States descended into civil war, Platón returned to the East Coast to study at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.43
Partway through his medical studies, however, he received the following letter from the New England Soldiers’ Relief Association, on June 8, 1862:
Doctor Vallejo, with his medical friends will kindly go on the “State of Maine” and attend the sick and wounded on the steamer.
Genl. Gould
Vice Chairman, etc. etc.44
Given the date of the letter, these were most likely casualties of the Union Army’s ultimately ill-fated attempt to take Richmond in June and July of that year. Platón evidently acceded to this request, for on June 23 he received another one, this time from the resident surgeon at the New England Soldiers’ Relief Association. “Two hundred sick & wounded soldiers are expected here at about 9. am tomorrow morning & you are respectfully requested to be present to assist in dressing their wounds.”45 Three days later, another letter from the surgeon asked, “200 sick and wounded soldiers are coming in can you come down immediately & assist us about the dressing.”46 With Richmond in danger of falling to Union forces, the Confederate Army was placed under the command of General Robert E. Lee, who mounted an energetic defense of the Rebel capital. Lee forced the Union’s General George McClellan to retreat from the Virginia Peninsula, and the Confederacy was, for the time being, saved. Union wounded poured into New York. Niceties were largely forgotten under the crush of casualties—more than eight thousand Union soldiers had been wounded in the campaign—and on July 7, Platón Vallejo received a curt telegram from the New England Soldiers’ Relief Association surgeon that said only, “Sick & wounded will be here at three o’clock.”47
Even though his mother had specifically advised him, “Platon . . . I want to tell you not to go to war,” events had gone far beyond leaving a conscientious physician of republican sensibilities any choice. Shortly before the second battle of Bull Run, on August 28–30, 1862, Platón Vallejo joined the New York Sanitary Commission of Volunteer Surgeons.48 As a battlefield surgeon, he had to go out to the killing ground after the guns had stopped firing and bring the wounded to the field hospital. While at this task one night, he encountered a Confederate officer. The man turned to be not only a surgeon, there on a mission much like Platón’s own, but also a former classmate of his from Columbia University. They embraced briefly and no doubt asked about each other’s lives since the parting of their ways in New York. Then each returned to his duty, taking the wounded back to their respective lines.49
After his tour of duty, Platón returned to New York to complete his medical studies, graduated in 1864, and went home to California. Still wishing to do his part in the struggle for freedom and democracy, he took a position as an assistant surgeon at the United States naval base at Mare Island, in the San Francisco Bay. He remained in service until the end of the great conflict in the east, in April 1865. Thereafter, he practiced medicine in the town of Vallejo—named after his father—until his death in 1925.50
Uladislao Vallejo, a younger brother of Platón’s, chose to go south instead and fought the French in Mexico. Ula, as he was called by his family, already had made a donation in June 1862 toward the sword commissioned in California for presentation to General Ignacio Zaragoza (see chapter 2).51 In the spring of 1864, with the help of his father’s connections, he went to Mazatlan to join the Mexican Army, “for the cause of Mexico and his ancestors.”52 This first essay at soldiering did not last long. Ula, along with Governor García Morales, was taken prisoner by imperialist forces and fell seriously ill with some sort of fever. Mariano Vallejo pulled strings to have Ula released and brought back to California aboard the steamer John L. Stephens. La Voz de Méjico informed its readers of the arrival of “Ula Vallejo, son of General Mariano Vallejo, who a few months ago departed from this port to offer his services to his old homeland, and who today returns to recuperate from a painful illness that he acquired during the campaign.”53
But he had not returned to stay. President Juárez had dispatched General Plácido Vega, the former governor of the state of Sinaloa, to San Francisco as his personal agent with instructions to procure guns, ammunition, other supplies, and volunteers to fight the French.54 When the chartered barque Josephine sailed out of San Francisco in July of 1866, along with seven thousand rifles, barrels of gunpowder, percussion caps, uniforms, and other small arms, it carried the newly commissioned Captain Uladislao Vallejo of the Mexican Army. With him were other Latinos, including fellow Californios, notably Lieutenant Melitón Alviso and Captain (later Colonel) Víctor Castro.55
Josephine came into Boca de Piedras, near the port of Topolobampo in Sinaloa State, on August 7, and the passengers disembarked with their cargo of weaponry.56 Ula Vallejo and his companions hauled the matériel nearly six hundred miles into the desert to Chihuahua, where Juárez had temporarily established his seat of government. There, the young Californio was made a member of the Presidential Guard, a signal honor. By March 1867, Ula was in San Luis Potosí, preparing for the final push that would restore control of the country to its rightful government.57
In the fall of 1865, during a period when Platón and Ula were back in California, the senior Vallejo went across the bay from his home in Sonoma to San Francisco. There he visited the offices of La Voz de Méjico. During his visit, he saw a Mexican flag displayed in the editor Mancillas’s office and observed that the symbols on it did not look like the coat of arms he had served under for twenty-four years before 1848. A discussion over the proper representation of the Mexican national coat of arms ensued, and Vallejo left convinced that this new flag was not a proper flag of “Mexico, my old homeland.” At his house, he located a flag that had been painted for him years earlier by a young Mexican artist, Agustín Dávila, which bore a design different from the one he had just seen in San Francisco. It had been displayed at commemorations of Mexican Independence Day every year from 1834 until 1848.58
In 1846, Vallejo had been rudely treated by the Bear Flag rebels, imprisoned for nearly a month, threatened with execution, and had his property rifled.59 When he was released from prison, he went home and kept that very Mexican flag in his house for years thereafter, preserving it for the memories it held of Mexico, “the homeland that gave us being, dear homeland.”60 Although the change from Mexican to United States rule had been brusque, Vallejo eventually concluded it was a generally positive development and assumed a prominent role in the new society. He became an elder statesman, consulted on matters large and small, and was on speaking terms with most governors of the state.61 Yet he could not entirely forsake his “old homeland.” He hoped that the flag he had preserved in his house for seventeen years now could help keep the memory of Mexico alive for other Latinos in California as well, so he packed it up and shipped it via Wells Fargo to the offices of La Voz de Méjico, where it could be put on display to remind Latinos of the fate of Mexico, “unfortunate homeland . . . trampled underfoot today by her own wicked children and ungrateful foreigners . . . but which I hope soon will be avenged.”62
Vallejo at the same time took an active interest in matters pertaining to the future of the United States. Early in 1865, he made a trip to Washington, DC. There, on February 11, he wrote to his unidentified correspondent in San Francisco, “Today [Mexican ambassador Matías Romero] came to my room and took me in his carriage to present me to President Lincoln, at a public reception that was being given; the which he performed with great courtesy and adroitness.” In the Gold Rush years, Vallejo had hosted Ulysses Grant at his house in Sonoma County.63 During Vallejo’s Washington trip of 1865, Grant repaid this courtesy, to the extent that military exigencies allowed, even though he was prosecuting the final stages of his siege of Richmond. On February 10, Romero gave a dinner for Vallejo, at which one of the guests was Vallejo’s old acquaintance the Latin-Yanquí admiral David Farragut, who had been stationed at Mare Island in California in 1854–1858.64 Vallejo also spent some time with his old friend María Ámparo Ruiz de Burton, who later deployed her observations of wartime Washington in her satirical English-language novel Who Would Have Thought It? (published 1872).65 Including side trips to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Niagara Falls, and other communities, Vallejo spent nearly five months touring the East Coast, finally returning to California on July 9, 1865.66
FIGURE 18. General Mariano G. Vallejo (center) in Monterey on July 5, 1886, the fortieth anniversary of the raising of the U.S. flag over California. The floral arrangement commemorates the Mexican-American War, during which Vallejo was commander of Mexican forces in California. (BANCPIC–1978–195–05–PIC Grand Army Badge, courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
In 1877, Vallejo visited Mexico City, where he was interviewed by a local newspaper correspondent. Summing up his life’s experience, he said, “I am an American because the treaty of Guadalupe [Hidalgo] placed me on the other side of the line, dividing the two nations, but I was born a Mexican; my ancestors were Mexican and I have always maintained with my sword the honor of Mexico. I have both Mexican and American children and I desire for my native land all the prosperity and progress enjoyed by the country of some of my children and mine by adoption” (see figure 18).67
While most of California’s population supported the Union during the Civil War, there was a sizable minority who favored the Confederate cause. As early as April 1862, the editor Manuel E. Rodríguez of La Voz de Méjico cited an article in the San Francisco Bulletin, that contained a letter claiming Los Angeles was full of Confederate sympathizers.68 In April 1861, General Edwin V. Sumner transferred federal troops from Fort Mojave to Los Angeles because he was of the opinion that “there is more danger of disaffection at this place than any other in the State.”69 In May 1864, a detachment of the Native California Cavalry were sent from their training camp at the Drum Barracks in Wilmington to Los Angeles, where they arrested one J. F. Bilderbeck, who allegedly had remarked in public “that he hoped the Confederates would kill every negro who might be taken with arms in his hands, and every white man who might be in command of them or with them.”70
Some prominent Latinos were known to sympathize with the Confederacy as well, such as Ygnacio Sepúlveda (see below) and the wealthy Ygnacio del Valle. Del Valle was a close friend of the former boss of Los Angeles’ Democratic party, the lawyer and former Los Angeles Rifles member Joseph Lancaster Brent, who had left California in 1861 to join the Confederate Army. Brent never returned to California, even after the war was over, because he refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Union that California’s postwar legislature demanded from all law and court officials.71 Just after news of Lincoln’s assassination reached Los Angeles in April 1865, Del Valle’s friend Ulpiano Yndart warned him to keep his political opinions to himself and not even go out in public for the next few days, for “the Union Party will never forget, or refrain from charging the party of the South with responsibility for the death of their President.” Such a warning would not have been necessary had Del Valle not been a recognized Confederate sympathizer.72
Separatist opinion was also vaguely reported to exist in Northern California. In April 1863, La Voz de Méjico noted, “The other day, a notice was published that the separatists in Napa are holding secret assemblies that threaten to disturb the public peace. The loyal citizens have armed themselves, and General Wright already has knowledge of these matters.”73 In the course of informing the Spanish-speaking public on the debate circulating in California about the need for security against Confederate agents, Rodríguez cautioned against believing wild rumors. In light of the J. M. Chapman plot earlier that year, however—in which a handful of Confederates in San Francisco unsuccessfully tried to seize a schooner and turn pirate against U.S. shipping along the Pacific coast—he was obliged to acknowledge that Confederate sympathies and Confederate agents did exist in California. “Ever since, some time ago, the authorities of this port apprehended the schooner C. W. Chapman [sic] in the Bay—which, as it seems, had the intention of becoming a corsair upon American commerce—alarms have been frequent. . . . Without a doubt, there is something of exaggeration in all these fears; but, nevertheless, it is certain that, in the south of the state, there exists a germ of insurrection, and there will not fail to be turbulent spirits in other towns in the hinterland.”74
In November 1864, two outlaws claiming Confederate sympathies, John Mason and Jim Henry (the latter an alias for Tom McCauley), murdered three passengers while holding up the stagecoach that ran between Watsonville on the coast and Visalia in the Central Valley. The justification these bandits reportedly gave for their atrocious act was that “their victims were Republicans, and they had sworn to murder every Republican they might find.”75 Together with a small band of like-minded supporters, Mason and Henry took to the hills and proceeded to terrorize Fresno and Monterey Counties for months. In January 1865, Company B of the Native California Cavalry, under the command of Lieutenant John Lafferty, arrived at Camp Low in Monterey County. As described by Major Michael O’Brien, “the gay and gallant Spanish lancaroes [sic] came dashing through the town with the lances in their hand, a flag flying from each of them. I assure you that they presented a warlike appearance.” Major O’Brien informed them that the bandits were hiding out not far away and sent Lafferty and twelve of his men to capture them. They scoured the countryside, but the Mason and Henry gang managed to elude them, and Company B soon thereafter was sent to Arizona, where their Captain Jimeno was to take part in the standoff at Magdalena.76
In addition to supporters of the Confederacy, Latinos in California also occasionally had to worry about sympathizers with French rule in Mexico. In July 1862, Rodríguez commented in La Voz de Méjico, “They write to us from Los Angeles that, in that part of the state of California as well, there are bad Mexicans who sympathize with the French invaders.”77 French sympathizers could be quite open about their opinions, although they ran the risk of a violent response from their political opponents. A notice from the town of Ventura, for instance, described what happened when one man tried to celebrate Maximilian’s arrival in Mexico. “In San Buenaventura, a conservative—or traitor—wanted to celebrate with music and brandy the news that Maximilian had come to Mexico; but the patriotic Mexicans got together and gave him such a warm welcome with stout sticks that the Maximilian supporter had to run away at a moment’s notice.”78 At New Almaden, “Señora Luz Bailón heard that an individual was saying ‘Long live Maximilian! Long live the Empire! Long live Napoleon!’ and ‘Death to Mexico!’ The lady, irritated by these cries, got up from her seat and delivered him such a tremendous blow with a stick that she left him senseless. That’s how Mexican women teach traitors a lesson.”79
Despite these occasional anecdotes, estimating how many Latinos sympathized with the French is difficult. One of San Francisco’s Spanish-language newspapers, El Éco del Pacífico, although previously a liberal journal, by late 1862 had become an ardent supporter of the French Intervention, due to its affiliation with the French-language L’Écho du Pacifique. Only one issue of El Éco del Pacifico published during the Civil War survives today.80 Thus, what little is known of Latino French sympathizers in California comes mostly from El Éco articles reprinted in San Francisco’s liberal Spanish-language newspapers, La Voz de Méjico and El Nuevo Mundo, not infrequently accompanied by sarcastic commentary from the editors.81
After the fall of Puebla and the occupation of Mexico City in 1863, the victorious French general, Élie-Frédéric Forey, called together the conservatives’ Assembly of Notables to announce a new political order in Mexico. Some Latinos in California supported this program, and at the beginning of 1864 a group of them wrote a statement saying so, which first circulated as a broadside. La Voz de Méjico obtained a copy and printed the statement, adding a lengthy, sardonic editorial introduction. Thanks to this publication, some idea of the opinions of imperialist sympathizers in California can be known. The statement began by reminding readers of the horrors of recent Mexican history, including the civil war of 1857–1861. “Take a look back, go over the pages of our history, and . . . you will always find the poisoning hand, the fratricidal hand that tyrannizes in the name of liberty and destroys in the name of reform, leaving behind its bloody traces, desolation and extermination.” Their solution to the problem was monarchy. And in accordance with Napoleon III’s plans, they knew just who ought to occupy the throne: “We proclaim as our EMPEROR THE MAGNANIMOUS AND ENLIGHTENED FERDINAND MAXIMILIAN, ARCHDUKE OF AUSTRIA.” Based on their self-description as “conservatives in California . . . far from our beloved homeland,” it would appear that the promoters of this statement had fled Mexico after the Juárez government triumphed in the War of the Reform (see chapter 2). None of them, however, seem to have signed the statement.82
FIGURE 19. Ygnacio Sepúlveda, a scion of the Southern California Sepúlveda family, was a California county judge in 1869, a federal district judge in 1874, and a superior court judge in 1879. In 1883 he went to Mexico and did not return to Los Angeles until 1913. (Courtesy Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History)
Another prominent French sympathizer whom La Voz de Méjico named was Ygnacio Sepúlveda, a member of the numerous, Los Angeles–based Sepúlveda clan and a cousin of the Del Valles (see figure 19). He was admitted to the bar in 1863 after Joseph Lancaster Brent mentored him in his law studies. The liberal press noted his movements in California during this period and denounced him as both a Copperhead and an associate of Mexican imperialists. “The steamer Brother Jonathan came in on Saturday the 18th of the present month, arriving from Los Angeles. . . . Among her passengers were the infamous traitor ex-general Gándara, his son F. Gándara, and A. I. [sic] Sepúlveda (the Copperhead), who has been the traveling companion of these noteworthy persons.”83 This identification of Sepúlveda as a Confederate sympathizer, in the context of his accompanying two French-supporting Mexicans, underlines the close linkage between the Confederates and Mexican imperialists in the perceptions of many Latinos in California. In this case, those perceptions were not mistaken: Sepúlveda had relocated to Mexico, where he was a member of the Assembly of Notables and held judicial office under Maximilian’s regime.84
Although to date they have received scant mention in accounts of California’s military history, Latinos were among those who formed militia units to assist in maintaining law and order during the Gold Rush, particularly in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara (see chapter 1). During the American Civil War, nearly all the regular army units stationed in California were recalled to the war in the eastern states, and local militias had to take over their duties, which included keeping domestic order and guarding against any possible Confederate attempts to invade or infiltrate the state.85 For the most part, these official state militias comprised Atlantic Americans and European immigrants, although a few Latinos did join here and there. Only one all-Latino official California state militia company is on record, the Zaragoza Guard of Marysville, active in the years 1865–1866; thirty-two of its fifty-two members also belonged to the Marysville junta patriótica.86
To qualify as an official militia of the state of California, any group organized for that purpose had to register the names of its members and elected officers with the county clerk in the county of its formation and, perhaps more crucially, had to have a bond on deposit with the county, normally in the thousands of dollars, to guarantee its members’ good conduct.87 Many would-be members of Latino militias in the 1860s were anything but prominent and certainly did not have the financial resources to put up the necessary bonds. Yet there were unofficial Latino militias in a number of communities throughout the state: Marysville, Sonora, New Almaden, Hornitos, and San Francisco. Their existence demonstrates the willingness of many Latino men to translate their support of the Union and Juarist causes into concrete action, even if they were unable, for one reason or another, to join the regular armed forces of either the United States or Mexico.
These unofficial, unregistered militias have gone largely unnoticed in formal military histories of California, due to the lack of official records of their formation or activities. The contemporaneous press, however, especially the Spanish-language press, did notice their existence, and it is thanks to newspaper accounts that anything is known about the Latino militias at all. Yet the press had to be cautious in what it said about their activities, so as not to implicate militia members in breaking the law against recruiting men on U.S. soil to fight in Mexico. As a result, they received sporadic and selective coverage, making it difficult to reconstruct in many cases exactly when they were organized, who their members were, or what the nature of their routine activities was. Most frequently, they were mentioned in connection with celebrations of the Cinco de Mayo, Mexican Independence Day, and other festive events, which produces in the modern reader the misleading impression that they were merely a species of color guard, with no real military function. But one article does provide evidence that at least some of these militias equipped and trained themselves for serious military action, whether or not they ended up seeing any, in either the United States or Mexico.
In an 1864 editorial on the subject of Mexicans’ patriotism by José Rentería and Antonio Mancillas of La Voz de Méjico, the editors observed approvingly that some young Latino men were drilling in the use of weapons in the hope of going to Mexico to fight the French, once they could scrape together funds for their passage. “At New Almaden this idea has become general to such a point that they have managed to form a fine military company, with very good weapons, splendidly uniformed; and we already know that they are preparing to celebrate the CINCO DE MAYO with all the pomp their scarce resources permit.”88 Until such time as they could raise travel funds, however, it would seem that the New Almaden militia had few outlets for its members’ military ambitions, except for serving as a ceremonial guard in Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day celebrations. Aside from this somewhat indiscreet mention of the New Almaden group’s military ambitions, however, the Spanish-language press usually took care to discuss the Latino militias of the day only in connection with their participation in patriotic celebrations. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to assume that like their counterparts at the New Almaden mine, the militias in San Francisco, Marysville, Sonora, and Hornitos were formed with more serious intent.
San Francisco’s Latinos organized a small militia of artillerymen sometime before Mexican Independence Day, 1863, outfitted with colorful uniforms in the accepted military style of the day. According to La Voz de Méjico’s description of that year’s festivities, “At ten-thirty in the morning, the crowd that was to go to the cathedral was already gathered at Turnverein Hall. . . . They formed up, placing the artillerymen—fifteen men in number—in front. Thanks to their scarlet tunics with green collar and cuffs and brass buttons, blue trousers, and kepis with a tricolor rosette on the front, above two little brass cannon [insignia], they presented a martial appearance.” Late in the afternoon, the artillerymen accompanied the band and dignitaries up Russian Hill, where various speeches were made, then fired a twenty-one gun salute to the Mexican flag as it was lowered before a cheering crowd.89
A passing reference in La Voz de Méjico just before the Cinco de Mayo celebrations of the following year suggests that taking part in patriotic ceremonies was not the only connection the Latino artillerymen of San Francisco had with California’s juntas. The report was mainly concerned with irregularities found in accounts recently submitted by one of the Central Managing Junta’s trustees, the actor Gerardo López de Castillo (for more on Castillo, see chapter 2). All the money apparently had been accounted for, but some had been spent otherwise than the Junta Central had authorized. “We add that the aforesaid sum was put in the hands of this gentleman a little more than eight months ago, and that the Central Managing Junta entrusted him with the purchase of some trunks with it, to hold the equipment, etc., of the body of Mexican artillerymen that was organized in this city.” Castillo had, instead, spent it on something else.90 The fact that the Central Managing Junta, which was directly responsible for remitting funds to Juárez’s government in Mexico, had planned to spend some money on storage for the artillerymen’s “equipment, etc.”—that is, their military supplies—hints that, in this case at least, it was also to some unknown extent helping to finance the outfitting and equipping of a Latino militia on American soil whose members intended to go fight in Mexico. This would have been quite illegal, of course, which doubtless was why La Voz de Méjico was so vague about what was supposed to have gone into those trunks.
The necessity of not alerting U.S. authorities to violations of the law against recruiting men to fight in foreign conflicts meant that the Spanish-language press rarely printed the names of militia members. One individual known to have belonged to the San Francisco artillerymen was a Captain Guillén, their commander, who was mentioned as leading them at a Republican political rally in October 1864.91 Another is known only because that year’s Cinco de Mayo festivities featured, among other things, a 101-gun salute, during which one of the artillerymen, Jesús Arellano, burned his hands when his cannon discharged prematurely. “Through luck, the burn was not serious, but he was left unable to work for several days. At the Hall, $25.50 was collected, which was given to Señor Arellano to help with his medical treatment.”92
Latinos in other communities followed San Francisco’s and New Almaden’s examples. By the fall of 1863, a company of Latino militia had formed in Marysville with as many as forty members. Their uniforms, such as they were, consisted of black trousers and blue shirts, and all the men were on horseback. At the time, no newspaper report mentioned their unit name.93 The following year, a correspondent who signed himself only as “R.R.”—possibly Ramón Ramírez, who appeared as a member of Marysville’s junta patriótica in a donation list the month before—sent his local English-language newspaper’s description of the town’s Mexican Independence Day festivities to La Voz de Méjico, which printed it in Spanish translation; his letter included the militia’s name, the Mexican Lancers. At nine on the morning of September 16, the Latino community, led by Juan N. Leal, the president of the Marysville junta, gathered around the Mexican flag at the intersection of Third and A Streets. The Marysville Band approached, followed by the Marysville Rifles, under Lieutenant A. G. Randall, and the Union Guard, commanded by Captain Hubbard. The Mexican Lancers formally received this delegation. To a salvo of small-arms fire, the Mexican flag was lowered from its pole and accorded a place of honor in the parade that followed, led off by Señor Leal, the band, the Rifles, the Union Guard, and the Lancers, who were “mounted and armed Mexican style.”94
Next in the procession was a carriage in which rode the four official speakers of the day, all women. Candelaria García bore the Mexican flag, Abelina Campos the Chilean flag, Maria García the Peruvian flag, and Carmelita Wilson the flag of the United States. The parade halted in front of the Marysville city hall for the ladies to deliver their speeches. Each woman gave a tribute to the flag she carried. Wilson made her address in English, with a good portion of her remarks devoted to the American Civil War, “expressing her most ardent wishes that the government be supported and the rebellion be put down.” The parade then resumed, pausing in front of the local newspaper office to give three cheers for President Lincoln, and finally concluded with a picnic. Throughout these proceedings, the Union Guard periodically fired off salvos in the town square.95
In the mining town of Sonora, a similar group of Latinos had been organized, probably for similar purposes, by September 1864, when they participated in their community’s Mexican Independence Day celebrations. At 8 A.M. on September 16, the American, Chilean, and Peruvian flags were brought out to join the Mexican flag that had been raised the night before, and “at ten in the morning, the company of national militia formed up, at the direction of citizen Estanislao López; they called the spectators’ attention to themselves on account of their elegant dress.” For part of that afternoon’s parade, the town firemen joined this Mexican militia.96
In Hornitos in Mariposa County, the local Latino militia took part in the Cinco de Mayo commemoration of 1865, which was a joint project by Hornitos and the small neighboring communities of Merced River, Mariposa, Santa Cruz, and El Oso. Things got under way at 6 A.M., when a cannon was fired and a band simultaneously struck up below the flagstaff. “At 10:00 in the morning, the band went to the hall, where the company of national militia formed up, at the direction of citizen [Pedro] María Herrera,” and a parade commenced. Another, larger parade took place that evening, ending up once again at the hall. “The hall was very splendid and was elegantly decorated. . . . There could be seen pictures of the distinguished President Benito Juárez [and] that of the hero of the 5th of May, accompanied by those of the immortal Lincoln, Washington, Comonfort, [and] González Ortega, and many other adornments . . . not forgetting that the North American flag also accompanied us, which was invited by the committee.”97
In these reports of Latino militias’ participation in public holidays, the newspapers do not make any explicit link between the parading men in uniform and military action, but despite their caution, they give sufficient hints to indicate that some, if not all, of these Latino militias were organized for the deadly serious purpose of training men to fight in Mexico and that in many cases, the juntas probably were involved in this effort. Could more be discovered about the militias, it very well might reveal that many of the men who made up their membership were also part of a local junta. Notable throughout these descriptions of the celebrations, moreover, is the close identification of the Union and Juarist causes, as evidenced by the participation of non-Latino American citizens in Mexican patriotic celebrations and the conspicuous display of American patriotic symbols alongside those of Mexico. This linkage was equally prominent in California politics in this period.
Amid the protracted battle against slavery and rebellion, Abraham Lincoln’s first term as president was nearing its end, and he had to convince the American electorate to let him see the war through to its conclusion. In some areas of the country, his popularity was low. Antiwar Democrats, popularly known as Peace Democrats or Copperheads, created dissent in the North and the West, including some parts of California. The Peace Democrats were a sizable faction of the Democratic Party, sick of four years of an unprecedentedly bloody war, who did not view the idealistic cause of extending liberty to the enslaved as worth the loss of so much American life and did not believe war was the way to preserve the Union. They put up U.S. General George McClellan as their candidate to challenge Lincoln’s prosecution of the seemingly endless war. Their platform urged that peace be made and the Rebels readmitted to the Union without conditions—even being allowed to keep their slaves—and granted any concessions necessary to end the war and reunify the country. The Copperheads’ simplistic slogans appealed to many voters in the war-weary American public.98 Republican and War Democrat polemicists accordingly set out to refute them in the weeks prior to the election, including in California’s Spanish-language press. One such piece, published in La Voz de Méjico only a week before election day, specifically addressed “Californios and Hispanic Americans.” It argued, in part:
No matter how much they may tell you that if McClellan should be elected we will have peace, it won’t exist except on the paper where he signs his name. McClellan has said that the only condition he desires is union; that is to say, that if the Rebels agree to reenter the Union, he is disposed to concede to them all their other aims . . . that is to say, the continuance of slavery, favoring their filibustering tendencies, protecting their pretentions to the states in the west of Mexico—in a word, letting them be the masters of the country and approving all of their actions.99
Mancillas of La Voz de Méjico exhorted Latinos who were citizens of the United States to vote for Lincoln and urged immigrant Latinos who were not citizens to become naturalized in order to do the same (see figure 20). He declared, “The cause of the Union is the same one that Mexico is upholding. . . . Our destiny is discovered to be identified with our adopted country.”100 California’s Latinos saw that the United States’ struggle was also a Central and South American struggle. A meeting was held at San Francisco’s Philharmonic Hall on October 9 “for the purpose of establishing a Republican club in this city, composed of all the individuals of our Latin race, which may come to be a true nucleus of unity among all the sons of the republics of the American continent; and equally for lending our decided support to the government of the United States.” The result was the foundation of the Club Unionista Hispano-Americano de Lincoln y Johnson (Hispanic American Union Club of Lincoln and Johnson).101
The Hispanic American Union Club soon formed a coalition with other groups that supported Lincoln, including the Irish Club for Lincoln and Johnson. To drum up enthusiasm for Lincoln’s reelection, this coalition held a torchlight parade through the streets of San Francisco on the night of October 16, 1864. Flags bedecked the city’s buildings, their windows were illuminated, and bands played military tunes. By seven-thirty in the evening, Latinos from California, Mexico, and other countries had jammed Terpsichore Hall to overflowing, a good number of them belonging to the Hispanic American Union Club, which used the hall as its headquarters. Marching four abreast, all carrying torches, placards, or the flags of the various American republics, the Latinos joined the parade as it passed by. The Mexican artillerymen in their scarlet tunics were especially visible. The banners and signs the Hispanic American Club carried attested to their bilingual and bicultural heritage. One sign identifying the Union cause in the American Civil War with resistance to the French Intervention in Mexico read, in a combination of English and Spanish, “Honest Abe is our man. Muera Maximiliano [‘Death to Maximilian’].” Another banner paired civil and military heroes of both wars:
FIGURE 20. La Voz de Méjico supported Abraham Lincoln’s reelection campaign. This advertisement ran on the front page of every issue from October 11 to November 5, 1864. (La Voz de Méjico, October 15, 1864, p. 1. CESLAC UCLA)
Lincoln, Juárez
Grant, Negrete.102
A third proclaimed decidedly negative opinions of the leaders of the Confederacy and the imperialists in Mexico: Maximiliano el usurpador / Davis el traidor (“Maximilian the usurper / Davis the traitor”), while a fourth avowed the intention of enforcing the Monroe Doctrine against Maximilian as soon as it became possible: Maximiliano, vete à tu casa, porque con estos muchachos te echarémos fuera (“Maximilian, go home, because with these boys we’re going to throw you out!”). Yet another banner approvingly cited Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves: Dios hizo al hombre / y Lincoln lo declaró libre (“God made man / and Lincoln declared him free”). A huge Mexican flag stretched across Clay Street from the offices of La Voz de Méjico, and a banner hanging from the windows announced the paper’s endorsement: “LA VOZ DE MÉJICO / LINCOLN Y JOHNSON.”103
Latinos all around the state made speeches and wrote letters in favor of Lincoln and the Union. Latino miners had founded the town of Hornitos, in Mariposa County, in 1849; fifteen years later, in 1864, it still had a large Latino population. As in most towns in California, the majority of Latinos in Hornitos supported freedom and democracy, and therefore supported Lincoln. Late in October 1864, the Latino community there helped stage a pro-Lincoln rally. The flags of both Mexico and the United States were prominently displayed together, as they had been in the San Francisco rally. But among the Atlantic American population of Hornitos were a number of people who supported McClellan and the peace platform. Annoyed by the Latinos’ support of Lincoln, local Copperheads made a dramatic public demonstration. They procured a six-pound cannon and, after the speeches were over and the crowd had drifted away, shot a hole through the flag of the Mexican Republic as it waved beside the Stars and Stripes. Then they fled the scene, whereupon a group of Latinos seized the cannon and spiked it with an ordinary iron file. When they taunted the Copperheads the following day over this literal spiking of their gun, one of the latter replied sullenly, “We don’t expect to get, and we don’t even want, the Mexican vote in this campaign.” This insult to the Mexican flag outraged Latinos who supported Lincoln. Mancillas, with some hyperbole, likened this act to the firing of Rebel guns at the American flag flying over Fort Sumter in 1861, thus implicitly equating McClellan’s supporters with the Confederates. The damaged Mexican flag was brought to San Francisco for repairs, but before it was mended, it was displayed at La Voz de Méjico’s offices in a bid for publicity, so that the Latino community could see firsthand the outrage that Lincoln’s opponents had committed. Mancillas urged, “We invite all Mexicans and other Hispanic Americans who have the right to vote to redouble their efforts in favor of the Union cause, from today until the day of the presidential election.”104
A little more than a week before the election on November 8, 1864, Valentín Alviso, a youthful member of an old Californio family in San Leandro, was scheduled to speak at a Union political rally in his hometown, which he invited local Latino residents to attend, “mounted on their best horses [and] bearing the flags of their respective national origins.” The editors of La Voz de Méjico expressed the hope that San Leandro’s Latinos would attend Alviso’s rally, “to publicly demonstrate the patriotic and liberal sentiments that inspire them, and thus to give the lie to those who are trying to seduce them with contemptible promises into voting contrary to their own interests”—by which the editors undoubtedly meant McClellan’s supporters.105 In Southern California, on October 14, a downtown electioneering parade organized by the English-speaking Lincoln and Johnson Club of Los Angeles featured a U.S. Army band that had come all the way from the Drum Barracks at the port of San Pedro. This procession marched along Main Street, pausing in front of the headquarters of the local junta patriótica, where a crowd of Latinos—Californios, Mexicans, Central and South Americans—waited to join it. The flags of the United States and Mexico thereafter led the joint parade side by side, with the Latino participants carrying banners and placards in Spanish denouncing slavery, tyranny, and secession, and the Atlantic Americans banners and placards with similar sentiments in English. When the procession came to a halt in front of the Lafayette Hotel, T. G. Phelps, Ramón J. Hill, a Lieutenant Munday, and the local lawyer J. R. Gitchell all made speeches in English, after which the junta president Filomeno Ibarra addressed the crowd in Spanish, reminding them that the fight against slavery and tyranny was being waged in both the United States and Mexico.
We Mexicans have been invited by the Americans to join with them as brothers in their political ideals; and as we have the same sentiments as the Americans of the North, and we defend the Union and liberty, we do not hesitate to come together and make up one consolidated body with the same ideals. . . . It is our duty, as true Mexicans, to support the liberal party of the United States, giving our vote to Lincoln and Johnson. . . . It behooves us to do so because we are driven by our common feelings with the men who have the same ideals we do, just as the salvation of Mexico depends on the triumph of the North.106
Previous to his appearance on the speaker’s platform in Los Angeles, Hill had delivered an election speech in support of the Union to Latinos farther north along the California coast, in San Buenaventura (modern Ventura) on September 29. Also campaigning for Lincoln’s reelection in the area were prominent Latinos from Santa Barbara, José María Covarrubias and Agustín Janssens. The unnamed correspondent who provided an account of their speeches to La Voz de Méjico predictably linked Latino support for Lincoln to opposition to Maximilian in Mexico: “I am pleased to communicate to you that the Mexican population [here] is made up of loyal and patriotic gentlemen who hate Maximilian and his followers like death. All are in favor of the party of Lincoln and will vote the Unionist ballot.”107
In Contra Costa County, the Union Club in Martinez, together with Union Clubs from the towns of San Ramon, Lafayette, and Antioch, held a large pro-Lincoln rally in the county agricultural society’s hall in Pachecoville on October 29. Bands played, a cannon was fired, and flags waved. When the Mexican flag was carried into the rally, Latinos and Atlantic Americans alike broke into applause. A member of the Berreyesa family addressed the crowd in Spanish, as did the Atlantic American who followed him to the podium, a Mr. Matheson. “If we may judge by the enthusiasm with which these speeches were received, the party of treason [Democrats] received some stout blows. The native Californians of this county are all united in favor of Lincoln and Johnson.”108
Santos Berreyesa had spoken in Napa “about the Union cause” on October 16, and the San Francisco–based president of the Hispanic American Union Club, Agustín D. Splivalo, made a speaking tour to Latinos in Sacramento, Marysville, Placerville, Oroville, and Nevada City, where he found “the Hispanic American citizens well informed about the political issues of the day, and disposed to support our candidates, Lincoln and Johnson, with their votes and influence.”109
As Election Day approached, Mancillas of La Voz de Méjico ran an editorial congratulating Latinos for having demonstrated their greatest political involvement since California became part of the United States in 1850. “This is the first time, since the organization of the state, that the Hispanic American population has participated in so active a manner in the political issues of the country.” He concluded by urging them on, as soldiers to their duty, to support the Republican ticket on November 8. “On election day, may all of you be ready to close with the enemy and win a glorious victory. . . . May November 8 be a memorable day in history, and may every one of you have the satisfaction of having contributed to assuring the definitive triumph of patriotism over treason, of liberty over slavery.”110 When the election results became known on November 10, La Voz de Méjico proudly announced: Mayoría Unionista en el Estado (“Unionist Majority in the State”), Entusiasmo Popular por el Triunfo de Lincoln (“Popular Enthusiasm for Lincoln’s Triumph”).111 Lincoln had won reelection, and the Civil War was to be pursued to its end.
The April 12, 1865, issue of El Nuevo Mundo carried an article with the momentous title: Rendicion de Lee con su ejercito. Capitulacion Honrosa! ¡Generosidad con los vencidos! (“Surrender of Lee, Together with His Army. Honorable Capitulation! Generous Terms to the Defeated!”). It provided, in Spanish translation, texts of the notes exchanged between Grant and Lee, leading up to the surrender of Lee’s forces.112 Rebel forces were melting away, and the once intimidating Confederacy was disappearing.113 With Lee’s surrender, all rational hope had been lost that the South could continue in rebellion.114 The great crusade to eliminate slavery and restore democracy in the United States was coming to a victorious conclusion. The Spanish-language press in California also relayed the reaction of liberal newspapers abroad to the impending fall of the Confederacy, quoting, for instance, an editorial from Madrid’s La Democracia: “‘Peace goes forth in the United States, a peace achieved by the mercy of Lincoln’s firmness, a peace at whose end is the destruction of slavery. . . . The slave will disappear from the sacred soil of liberty. The slave will break his chains. The republic’s territory will be preserved intact.’”115
In Los Angeles on April 10, the day after Lee’s surrender, Colonel James F. Curtis ordered his soldiers at Drum Barracks to turn out in full uniform to celebrate. The next day, they promptly did so. Among the men under his command were two companies of the Spanish-speaking Native California Cavalry, three English-speaking companies of the 4th Infantry, and Company A of the English-speaking 1st Cavalry. On horseback, Curtis led his assorted troops on parade through the town of Wilmington, to the cheering of a crowd, much of which would have been in Spanish. Partway through the parade, Curtis ordered a halt and had an aide read out the Order of the Day, and the soldiers gave three cheers, for General Grant, for the Union, and for Colonel Curtis. Touched, Curtis made a speech that must have dwelt on the recent events in the eastern United States, and on the situation in Mexico, for it concluded, “Brothers, a huzzah for President Juárez, and another for the independence of Mexico!” This brought loud applause from the soldiers of the United States Army, even moving some to tears. The Spanish-speaking and English-speaking soldiers turned to one another. “The native soldiers and the Americans, mixed together, shook hands, swearing that they would go to Mexico to defend the Republic against the monarchy that a despot from Europe wants to erect upon the blood of its children.”116 Freedom and democracy had won after a long battle in the United States, but it remained to be seen what the outcome would be in Mexico.
But abruptly the cheers were silenced, as black-bordered headlines summarized a sudden shocking turn of events. In its April 17 issue, El Nuevo Mundo announced, “Death of President Lincoln! Assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington! Flight of the assassin! . . . Immense sorrow and outrage of the people!” (See figure 21.) La Voz de Méjico the next day echoed, “President Lincoln assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington the night of April 14. The assassin has escaped. Death of the president. . . . Horrible tragedy. . . . The nation weeps in sorrow. Great outrage. They are pursuing the assassins. Details of this horrible event.”117
In San Francisco, riots ensued as news of the president’s assassination spread through the city. Particularly targeted were individuals and organizations known or thought to be sympathetic to the Confederacy or to the imperialist regime in Mexico. Antonio Mancillas got firsthand experience of the reaction when an angry mob appeared at the offices of the Spanish-language Monitor, a “mouthpiece of the Catholic clergy and of the damned traitor faction,” directly across the hall from the offices of his own Voz de Méjico.118 Mancillas was up on the roof, draping the Mexican flag with black crepe in mourning for Lincoln, when the mob arrived at the building on Clay Street. They gave several cheers for the Mexican Republic and its defenders, then stormed up three flights of stairs, intent on wrecking the Monitor’s presses. Initially confused as to which Spanish-language newspaper’s offices were which, the leading edge of the mob invaded La Voz’s office and started throwing things out of the windows, but when their mistake was pointed out to them, they redirected their attentions across the hall instead, “and there Troy burned. The type and its cases were thrown out into the street; the frames, stones, forms, and all its materials entirely demolished. The desks, books, and other tools in the editor’s office met the same fate, its whole contents being converted to a huge heap of wreckage.” Mancillas also reported that a mob had attacked the British-owned paper News Letter, which he scornfully claimed had “constituted itself the official mouthpiece of Maximilian.” He noted that its next issue was to have appeared in San Francisco on April 22, “but the riot on that day has caused it to appear in hell [instead].” Also victims of mob action were the English-language Democratic Press and Occidental and the French-language Union Franco-Américaine.
FIGURE 21. Latinos in California were shocked by the news of Lincoln’s assassination. A little more than a week after the tragic event, El Nuevo Mundo published a specially commissioned engraving of the moment when John Wilkes Booth shot the president. (El Nuevo Mundo, April 28, 1865, p. 1. CESLAC UCLA)
After destroying the Monitor’s offices, the mob Mancillas had witnessed “went on to settle accounts with our ignoble enemies, L’Echo du Pacifique and its offspring, the Spanish-language El Éco. The multitude, enraged, attacked those Gallic mouthpieces that so often have insulted the Union government and all the Hispanic American peoples; their desires were good: to severely punish those exponents of Napoleon.” The intended destruction of L’Echo and El Éco, however, encountered an obstacle: these newspapers shared office space and even machinery with the pro-Union English-language paper Alta California, against which the mob harbored no animosity. One of Alta’s owners, Frederick McCrellish, hastily negotiated with the crowd. “Promising them L’Echo du Pacifique would no longer be published in that building, he caused the people to desist, with regret, from their undertaking; although they stayed there a long time, waiting to ambush its editor Mr. Derbec, for whom they loudly offered a thousand dollars if they might be given him.”
Étienne Derbec, however, had the good sense to lie low for a time. General Irvin MacDowell, the commander of the Department of the Pacific, persuaded the mob to disperse, assuring them that L’Echo would be closed down. By evening, U.S. soldiers were stationed in L’Echo’s offices. Indeed, martial law had to be declared in San Francisco; throughout the night U.S. infantry and cavalry patrolled the streets, and by morning things had quieted down.119 McDowell was as good as his word: L’Echo du Pacifique never published again, although Derbec went on to start a new French-language journal, Le Courier de San Francisco, in May 1865. Doing so, however, required a considerable investment of capital for him, as the U.S. soldiers who were assigned to watch over L’Echo’s offices took it upon themselves to destroy its equipment quite as thoroughly as any mob might have done. Derbec sued the city but never recovered more than a small fraction of the sixty thousand dollars in damages he claimed for L’Echo or the ten thousand dollars for El Éco.120
Latinos throughout the West who had supported Lincoln’s reelection so that he could see the Civil War through to its conclusion were stunned and grieved by the president’s assassination. Donaciano Mazón, the president of the junta in Virginia City, Nevada, summoned its members to a special meeting to reflect on this shocking event. He recalled the recent euphoria of victory, then noted that just at that moment of relief and hope, “a new Brutus raised up his murderous arm and killed one of the most distinguished men of the American continent.” Mazón did not need to go into the details of Lincoln’s assassination, for the junta’s members would have been as fully informed of the events as anyone else in Virginia City. Instead, he dwelt on the meaning of the tragic event. “This victim was the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who after giving freedom to more than four million persons who sobbed beneath the heavy yoke of slavery, sealed with his own blood the redemption of his fellow men. . . . Rest in peace, Apostle of Liberty! Posterity will bless your great deeds, and the remotest generations will speak the name of Lincoln with respect, as one of the principal martyrs and saviors of oppressed humanity.”121
Rafael H. González then explicitly linked the events on the Atlantic coast to developments in Mexico and Latin America. “An unthought-of event has come to fill the hearts of every son of the American continent with mourning. . . . Mexicans! Let us weep for the loss of this virtuous citizen, martyr to the liberty of America.” Although the man had been assassinated, González continued, “his teachings, which have entered the hearts of the people, will not disappear; and his name will be made eternal in history, beside those of Washington and Franklin.” He said that the crowned heads of Europe had tried to take advantage of the Civil War to gain territory in the Americas, but concluded that this had backfired badly on them. “Now they see her [the United States] transformed into a warrior nation, with sufficient resources to raise her voice with pride and say: I have no rival who may compete with me on the American continent.” The North’s victory over the Confederacy and the United States’ consequent elevation to the first rank of modern military powers gave hope to Latinos because it meant the Monroe Doctrine at long last might be enforced. “Here waves a flag with thirty-six stars, and its brilliance illuminates all America. . . . Out of the Americas with any hungry despot who comes here to satisfy his greed!”122
Memorial processions were held throughout the state, in Sacramento, Stockton, Visalia, Placerville, San Andreas, Benicia, Petaluma, Monterey, Sonoma, and Markleeville, among other places.123 In San Francisco, a symbolic catafalque carried the simple inscription “LINCOLN—FIRM—FAITHFUL—TRUE.” The mourners marching behind the catafalque’s military escort included the Mexican consul, José A. Godoy, and some members of the San Francisco junta patriótica.124 In Virginia City’s public mourning ceremonies, two members of the local junta were invited to take places of honor beside the catafalque of the assassinated president.125
As soon as news of Lincoln’s assassination reached New Almaden, the Latino residents draped their houses in mourning. “The sorrow was general, and of so open a kind that the Americans of this place have given a thousand proofs of their gratitude, and were astonished by the two thousand Mexicans living at this mine, for their exhibitions of sorrow at the death of the man whose memory is so appreciated by all the American Continent.” One of the officers of the New Almaden junta, Jesús Herrera, composed a eulogy comparing Lincoln to the great martyrs in history, which ended with the promise that “they will always find us, the Mexicans living at the New Almaden Mine, fighting under your championship and the banner of liberty.”126
When the news arrived in California, some Copperheads and Confederate sympathizers made public demonstrations of joy over Lincoln’s death. In Monterey County, “it is said that the separatist Democrats of Castroville and Allison Ranch . . . when they learned of the unfortunate death of Mr. Lincoln . . . marched in a parade and shot off artillery salvos.”127 Company A of the Native California Cavalry was at the Benicia barracks when news of Lincoln’s death arrived. On April 23, a detachment of twenty-five cavalrymen from this company, under Lieutenant Marcelino E. Jiménez, had to be sent to Green Valley in Contra Costa County to restore the peace after authorities received reports that men alleged to be secessionists were rioting there in triumph at the news of Lincoln’s assassination. According to one report, “they declared themselves openly in rebellion, the day they got the news of President Lincoln’s death.” The cavalry met with violent resistance. “At their arrival, the rioters barricaded themselves in the house of one of their number; and upon the troop’s approach, they fired on it, wounding two of the soldiers,” Antonio Guilman and Juan León. The Native California Cavalry promptly returned fire, wounding two of the rioters in turn. This firm response soon resulted in the rioters’ surrender; ten of them were placed under arrest and taken back to Benicia.128
An examination of Governor Santiago Vidaurri’s activities in northern Mexico provides further insight into the interlocking Union-Mexican-Confederate-French relations from 1861 to 1867. When the Civil War began, Southern agents attempted to seduce governors of the northern Mexican states into some form of alliance with the Confederacy. Vidaurri was one of the few to respond positively; indeed, he even suggested to Jefferson Davis’s envoy in June 1861—apparently in all seriousness—that the Confederacy ought to annex Coahuila and Nuevo León. Davis declined, however, preferring a favorable commercial relationship between their respective territories instead. So Vidaurri allowed Confederate merchants to use his border towns in Nuevo León and Coahuila, both of which abutted Confederate Texas, to bypass the federal blockade of Southern seaports. As the Civil War and the French Intervention continued, he further inclined his policies to favor the Confederacy. By 1863, trade between the Vidaurri-controlled states and Texas had become the Confederacy’s largest commercial outlet, and Southern agents were able to import some war matériel via this route, including gunpowder, food, and clothing. Even charging the Confederates a favorably low tariff, Vidaurri reaped a small fortune from the duties he charged on these goods.129 Yet he was far more devoted to his own interests than to the Confederacy’s. A typical caudillo (local strongman), Vidaurri attempted to hold on to power by playing the Confederacy off against Juárez’s government and later the French when the latter became a factor to be reckoned with in Mexico. Even while allowing the Confederacy to use his ports, he claimed to support Juárez.130
In 1863, Juárez informed the ostensibly loyal Vidaurri that he was moving his headquarters from Saltillo to Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León, and that he expected Vidaurri’s complete support. Marshal Achille François Bazaine soon marched on Monterrey with the French Expeditionary Force, however, in the hopes of defeating Juárez and the republican government’s forces. Bazaine told Vidaurri that he was expected to declare his support for France. Still trying to play one side off against the other, Vidaurri claimed he needed to hold a plebiscite and would abide by the people’s choice when it came to supporting the French or Juárez. Juárez countered that anyone who participated in Vidaurri’s plebiscite would be considered a traitor. Caught between Juárez and the French, Vidaurri fled into Texas to take refuge with the Confederacy. So precipitate had his flight been that he abandoned troops, artillery, and supplies in Monterrey.131 His double, or even triple, dealing had been harmful to everyone’s interest except his own. In its lead article on June 21, 1864, La Voz de Méjico happily republished, in Spanish translation, a Unionist English-language newspaper’s verdict on the ex-caudillo after his flight: “In any way of looking at it, Vidaurri has been a baneful influence on the twin struggles that are occurring presently on this continent, for he has been as harmful to his own country as to the United States. Although he was not—because he could not be—openly hostile to us, he always had the best relations with the Confederates, repeatedly violating the neutrality of Mexican territory and making all sorts of protections available to the Rebels.”132 At least now no one had to guess any longer about Vidaurri’s intentions; he had chosen the Confederacy and tied his future to its fortunes.
A year after Lincoln’s reelection had provided the American president with the mandate to finish the Civil War, Benito Juárez found himself with a reelection problem in Mexico. Under the Constitution of 1857, his term in office was to end late in 1865, but with the French occupying the country’s principal cities, he could see no way that free, open, and honest elections could be held to replace him with a candidate who would continue the struggle against Napoleon III’s attempts to impose monarchy as doggedly as he had. So Juárez resorted to remaining in office himself and continuing to employ the extraordinary war powers conferred on him by the Mexican Congress shortly after the French violated the Preliminaries of Soledad in 1862. On November 8, 1865, he announced that he was postponing the election until the French were expelled from the country. The decision proved highly controversial. Jesús González Ortega, the Mexican general who had defended Puebla during its second siege, in 1863, believed that he should become interim president until a new election could be held. In addition to holding military rank, Ortega was the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the official who the Constitution of 1857 directed should act as president in case of the latter’s incapacity or during any period when proper elections could not be held.133
This controversy over the Mexican presidency generated strong interest among Latinos in California, demonstrating that their robust participation in Lincoln’s reelection campaign the year before had been no flash in the pan but rather a stage in the development of genuine political consciousness and activity. In the summer of 1865, the junta in San Juan Bautista was the first to request that Mexicans residing in the United States be allowed to vote in a Mexican election. One of its members, a Señor Villegas, pointed out that Mexicans in California had been raising funds for Juárez’s government. “In seventeen months, we have not let a single month pass without sending our modest offering to help those who so heroically defend the common cause.” That should leave no doubt of their patriotism. After noting the constitutional requirement for a new presidential election in Mexico, Villegas urged that all the juntas in California write to President Juárez and request that Mexican citizens living abroad be allowed to vote in the election. The San Juan Bautista junta unanimously approved his resolution, and its secretary, J. Higuera, sent a petition to that effect to the Mexican consul in San Francisco, to be forwarded to the Mexican government. Higuera also sent a copy to the editor of La Voz de Méjico so that other juntas around the state might learn more quickly about the proposal.134 The request was not granted, however; indeed, Mexican citizens residing in the United States were not allowed to vote in Mexican elections until 2005.
When it became clear that there would be no election, various liberal factions in Mexico fell to quarreling among themselves. California’s juntas viewed the uproar with alarm. They did not want to simply watch from afar and say nothing as the Mexican government’s heretofore solid political front in the face of the French Intervention crumbled over the issue of elections. They thought Juárez’s pragmatic, if unconstitutional, decision to hold on to power until the war was over was preferable to the alternatives, and decided to say so. A number of juntas quickly made public their support of Juárez’s decision. San Francisco’s junta issued a declaration to that effect, which Godoy sent to the Mexican foreign minister, with a cover letter announcing,
In conformity with what has been decided by the Mexican Patriotic Club of this city, I have the honor to send you the original of the statement that the loyal Mexicans living in San Francisco offer to the Citizen President of the Republic, Benito Juárez, demonstrating to him the satisfaction with which they have been impressed by the decree given in El Paso del Norte on November 8 of last year, resolving to extend the period in which he will fulfill the duties of the highest office of the nation (which the fundamental law demarcates), until such a time as the state of the war which currently is going on against the foreign invader may allow constitutional elections to take place.135
Other juntas followed suit, including the one in Los Angeles, whose petition bore more than two hundred signatures.136 In the event, Juárez did continue to serve as president until the French had been driven out and Maximilian executed, whereupon he duly called elections and won the second of his five terms as president. The fact that California’s juntas so assertively inserted themselves into the question of his continuance in office in 1865–1866, through petitions and demands that their voices be heard, is evidence of the increasing political awareness and participation of Latinos that resulted from the Civil War and the French Intervention.
The collapse of the Confederacy motivated a number of Southerners to leave the United States. Some of them saw Mexico, most of which was still under imperial rule, as a potentially sympathetic refuge. After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, rumor even had the former Confederate president Jefferson Davis trying to flee to Mexico with remnants of the Confederate Army. Latinos in California were concerned that these Rebels might strengthen Maximilian’s forces.137 Although Jefferson Davis never did, a number of leading Confederate figures indeed went to Mexico.138 Some of the ordinary soldiers, on the other hand, simply turned bandit along the border. “On the banks of the Río Bravo and in many other places, the Confederate troops and guerrilla bands committed all kinds of disorders and crimes. The former had not acquiesced in the surrender of their leaders, and they took their rapacity and ill will out on the residents of the frontier. The latter robbed and looted on both sides of the river.”139
Those refugee Southerners who were seasoned soldiers and did not take to banditry could inject a new vitality into the imperialist ranks in Mexico, which accordingly made efforts to welcome them. Land was designated for refugees to settle, various subsidies encouraged them to do so, and a Confederate newspaper began in Mexico City, supported by funds from Maximilian.140 The New Virginia Colony in central Mexico, with its largest town called Carlota after Maximilian’s wife, was founded expressly as a Confederate settlement.141 Even Santiago Vidaurri, nimble as always on his political feet, returned to Mexico from Texas, swearing loyalty to Maximilian and his empire. His reward was to be made the secretary of Finance and War, then the president of the emperor’s council.142
The end of the American Civil War, however, spelled the end of monarchy in Mexico. Not willing to risk a military confrontation with a United States no longer distracted by internal divisions, Napoleon III began to back out of his commitments to Maximilian in Mexico, deciding that the latter would have to rely on his own troops, paid for from his own coffers, to establish an imperial dynasty in the Americas.143 Latinos in California were able to follow Maximilian’s consequent downfall via the pages of the Spanish-language press.
In January 1866, the French emperor made his intentions clear in an address to his country’s Corps Législative. He was obliged to acknowledge the end of the Civil War—“America has come out of her struggle triumphant, with the Union reestablished and slavery abolished”—and diplomatically, if hypocritically, offered best wishes for the United States’ future prosperity. This development inevitably entailed the tacit recognition of the fact that the presence of French troops in the Americas now would not be tolerated by the United States, but Napoleon soothingly assured his legislature, “The emotion which the presence of our troops in Mexico has produced in the United States will be calmed by our frank declarations. The American people will understand that our expedition . . . was not opposed to their interests.” The frankest declaration of all, however, would be action. As a result, he said, “I am in agreement with Maximilian that the date for the return of our troops [to France] should be set.” Napoleon tried to apply a fig leaf, claiming that the troop recall would be accomplished “without compromising the interests of France, which we have been defending in that remote country,” but he carefully avoided saying what it was going to do to Maximilian’s interests.144 It would, of course, effectively pull the rug out from under his feet. Napoleon was as good his word: over the next few months, he withdrew his troops, which California’s Spanish-language press reported on with great satisfaction. La Voz de Méjico reprinted, in Spanish translation, a letter originally published in the English-language Washington Times, which read in part, “The activity for the retreat of the French comes along perfectly. It seems this is going to happen. . . . They will not make any further military efforts, according to what is being said; and from now on Maximilian will have to seek from his popularity and his own resources the means to maintain himself in the position where they have placed him.” The letter writer then added ironically, in French, “Nous verrons” (“We’ll see”).145
Yet Maximilian had no resources. He could neither repay the loans Mexico owed to foreign creditors nor pay what few soldiers he had left—who were, in any case, too few to keep him in power for any length of time.146 Juarist troops occupied Matamoros in the north, Oaxaca was taken in the south, Juárez had moved his traveling capital back to San Luis Potosí, and the symbolic city of Puebla pronounced its allegiance to the Mexican president.147
Maximilian’s falling fortunes turned him into a figure of mockery among Latinos in California. One sardonic report noted that the Californio population of Contra Costa County “had a big meeting in order to display their sympathy for Maximilian. They made an effigy of the usurper, which they decapitated and burned.”148 A theater troupe put on a comedy titled Maximiliano y la Doctrina de Monroe (“Maximilian and the Monroe Doctrine”) at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco; it apparently ended with Uncle Sam kicking Maximilian out of Montezuma’s palace, no doubt with a great deal of slapstick humor. A review proclaimed it as mirroring “the public feeling in favor of Mexico, which has never altered among the people.”149 A Californio in Contra Costa County, Cayetano Juárez, reportedly made a thousand-dollar bet with two Frenchmen that the French and the Austrians would leave Mexico within eight months—that is, by December 1866.150 He lost the wager, but only by a matter of weeks, as the French left Mexico City on February 5, 1867.151 Maximilian’s wife meanwhile went to France to plead with Napoleon III for money and troops, and the Spanish-language press gleefully mocked her mortifyingly unsuccessful trip.152
The end came for Maximilian in the spring of 1867. On March 18, Uladislao Vallejo wrote to his father in Sonoma, noting Maximilian’s desperate attempt to make a stand at Querétaro with his few remaining loyal forces. “Maximilian is at Queretaro, almost starved to death. We will seize him, with his twenty thousand men. I think we will catch him alive. What do our Imperial friends think of it?”153 On the morning of May 15, forces loyal to Juárez captured Maximilian and a number of his subordinates. In San Francisco, El Nuevo Mundo printed their names, in descending order by military rank. “I have here the list of prisoners taken in Querétaro. Emperor—Ferdinand Maximilian. Generals—Miguel Miramón, Tomás Mejía,” and so on, for a total of 364 individuals. Maximilian was kept at Querétaro, and a court-martial convened to try him, Miramón, and Mejía.154 Conspicuously not named in this article, although he had been at Querétaro in Maximilian’s civil service, was Ygnacio Sepúlveda. Fortunately for him, Sepúlveda, as a Californio, was a U.S. citizen. The Juárez government sentenced him to a four-year prison term, but on learning of his fate, his friends Phineas T. Banning and Volney E. Howard in Los Angeles wrote to Senator Cornelius Cole for help. Cole prevailed on the U.S. State Department to intercede for Sepúlveda, who received an early release and returned to Los Angeles in June 1868.155
Although defense attorneys were assigned to the former emperor, his trial’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. Maximilian was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, for, “whatever his private virtues may have been, he was a foreign invader—an inciter of domestic treason and the recognized head of a great insurrection.” On the morning of June 19, 1867, he, Miramón, and Mejía were executed by firing squad at the Cerro de las Campanas in Querétaro. “On the soil of North America, a descendant of the imperial house of Hapsburg has been judged, condemned, and executed by the descendants of the Aztecs.”156 While some expected a bloodbath to follow Maximilian’s downfall, Juárez had only a short list of public enemies to be hunted down, less than a dozen. Santiago Vidaurri, the Confederate sympathizer and turncoat former governor of Nuevo León and Coahuila, was one of them. He hid in the house of a U.S. citizen he knew in Mexico City but was found at midnight of June 21–22 and spent his last hours in the company of General Slaughter, a former Confederate officer, before being shot at four in the morning on June 22.157
An epitaph pronounced on Maximilian and his regime by the English-language newspaper Alta California, almost immediately reprinted in translation by El Nuevo Mundo, heralded the return of normalcy to Mexico, implicitly defined as democratic self-determination. “Whatever may have been the character of his public policy in Mexico as a would-be ruler, his reign, although brief, had been subversive of the imperishable right of the people to govern themselves.”158 The restoration to power of Juárez’s government was not, therefore, only a matter of the Mexicans having beaten a foreign invader; it was also, like the Civil War in the United States, an assertion of the validity of freedom and democracy.
Latinos responded to the events of the Civil War and the French Intervention by creating a new public memory in the commemoration of the Cinco de Mayo. Unlike the heavily scripted commemoration of Mexican Independence Day, however, Cinco de Mayo celebrations were not limited by protocol and precedents. As a result, Latinos in California chose and adapted holiday symbols they found appropriate to the memory it celebrated, such as displaying both the U.S. and the Mexican flags. This fluidity and the practice of linking the celebration of the first battle of Puebla to current events began as early as the waning days of the Civil War.
How profoundly Abraham Lincoln’s death and legacy touched Latinos in California can be seen in their effects on celebrations of public memory, especially the Cinco de Mayo. Barely a week after the conclusion of national mourning for the lost president in 1865, the Latinos of Virginia City, Nevada, commemorated the Cinco de Mayo, but this anniversary introduced some new practices. The day started, as it had the previous year, with the raising of the Mexican flag at dawn to a twenty-one gun salute, which was followed by a salvo every fifteen minutes thereafter throughout the day. That evening, the crowd filed into the hall of the Mexican Patriotic Club, which was decorated, as was usual on such occasions, with the flags of both Mexico and the United States. Between the two flags, however, was something new: a portrait of George Washington. To one side were portraits of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, and on the other portraits of Juárez and González Ortega.159
The junta’s secretary, Rafael H. González, delivered a speech declaring that the fates of the United States and Mexico, of Lincoln and Juárez, were intertwined. Liberty and self-determination by the people were his themes. “And can an empire be tolerated in Mexico? No, a thousand times no! For there can be no monarch without territories, and those of Mexico belong to the descendants of Montezuma, redeemed by the blood of Hidalgo and Iturbide; it is not the patrimony of any adventurer prince, nor of any traitor.” He went on to make reverent reference to the American Civil War just ended. With the extinction of the Confederacy, hope for freedom now could be seen in Mexico.
Liberty, whose first dawn begins to appear on the horizon of my country, after the smoke which had obscured it in Richmond has been put out, will make us free and independent. Now that holy and formidable struggle of the United States has ended; and today the complications into which the intruder Maximilian will enter, will show him, very soon, the road he ought to follow. . . . Just as there is no rose without a thorn . . . there is nothing begun for the good of humanity that has not been conquered with blood. . . . Without this war of giants that we have witnessed in the United States, the pustulant wound of slavery would not have been healed.
Lincoln might be dead, but his spirit would inspire Juárez to finish the fight for freedom in Mexico, “Benito Juárez, who has worked for progress, for independence and liberty, with the virtue of a Socrates and with the faith of the venerable and immortal Lincoln.” This, then, was the meaning of the holiday, which González encapsulated in his closing exclamation: “Mexicans! Hurrah for Zaragoza! Hurrah for the Cinco de Mayo!”160
In his Mexican Independence Day speech in San Francisco later that year, José Montesinos classed Lincoln, Juárez, and Zaragoza together as heroes who had risen from humble beginnings to become champions of freedom and human rights. “In wars for rights, for justice, in the great conflicts by which nations are transfixed, the men who rescue them do not, for the most part, rise or ever have risen from the upper classes of society. . . . From humble people, from the midst of an obscure breed, poor, where they had no connections: that is whence they have come—if not Washington or Bolívar, then indeed Garibaldi, Lincoln, Juárez—and that is whence the immortal Zaragoza came too, the lamented young man, the undefeated warrior, the glory of Mexico.”161 In his speech that same day in Los Angeles, Filomeno Ibarra included a tribute to Lincoln among those to other heroes of the Western Hemisphere, such as Washington, Hidalgo, and Bolívar. “For the second time, the United States’ liberty was threatened . . . but God’s finger pointed out Lincoln; Divine Providence inspired this great man; and with a constancy unmatched in history, he saved the American nation from the tyrants’ talons a second time. You magnanimous man, you broke the chains of four million people and rid the United States of the stain that had dishonored her! . . . Lincoln! Immortal hero! Rest in peace!”162 On a more domestic scale, in July 1865 a Mexican seamstress in San Francisco, Refugio Romo de Velasco, embroidered a miniature portrait of Lincoln surrounded by the American flag. A few months later, she had completed likenesses of Grant and Zaragoza, and all three went on display in her city’s Industrial Exhibition in September, to great acclaim.163
In 1866, more than a year after Lincoln’s death and funeral and the surrender of the Confederacy, Latinos in San Francisco gathered for the fourth commemoration of the Cinco de Mayo. The celebration was held in Dashaway Hall, which was decorated with the Mexican, American, and Chilean flags, along with the flags of other Latin American republics. On the speakers’ platform were the Mexican, American, and Chilean flags, “above which were seen pictures of the citizen Benito Juárez; of the hero of the day, Ignacio Zaragoza[;] . . . those of the father of the great American republic, Abraham Lincoln, and that of Grant.”164 An American institution, known as the Cinco de Mayo, had been definitively born, on American soil, celebrating the very American values of freedom and democracy, created by citizens, immigrants, and refugees whose first language was Spanish.
The July 3, 1867, issue of El Nuevo Mundo carried the news of Maximilian’s execution, the end of monarchy in the Americas, and the victory of freedom and democracy in North America. Its editor had not overlooked the coincidence that the next day would be the Fourth of July. It seemed almost as if the timing had put an exclamation point on the triumph of freedom and democracy in Mexico and the United States. Thanks to its California-born, American-citizen editor, Francisco P. Ramírez, the same issue featured a Spanish-language version of the Declaration of Independence, which Ramírez doubtless had translated himself: Cuando en el curso de los eventos humanos, viene á ser necesario para un pueblo disolver los lazos políticos que le han reunido con otro . . .165
