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Civil War San Francisco and The REBELS AT THE GATE: CIVIL WAR SAN FRANCISCO AND THE CONFEDERATE SEA-BORNE THREAT _______________ A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Hayward _________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History _________________ By Donald E. Bastin June, 2001 i ii Table of Contents Page List of Photographs/Drawings iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: California Nightmare 14 The Pre-War Years 14 The Guns 18 The Coming of the War 22 Pirates, Plotters, and Patriots 30 The Pacific Squadron 36 Money 41 General Wright Takes Command 45 Lime Point 51 Chapter Two: Rude Awakenings 54 The Chapman Affair 54 The Elimination of the Third Line 63 Angel Island and Black Point 67 McDowell Takes Over 72 Chapter Three: The Confederate Threat 78 The Rams 83 The Salvador Pirates 86 The Cruise of the Shenandoah 92 Chapter Four: Dancing Bears 104 The Ball 110 The Alliance 114 Chapter Five: The Odyssey of the Camanche 121 Salvaging the Camanche 127 Resurrection and Rebirth 133 The Launch 136 Mare Island and Oblivion 140 Shenandoah versus Camanche 148 Conclusion 152 Bibliography 162 iii Photographs/Drawings Page 1. Photograph, 8-inch Columbiad, Coastal Defense Gun, Fort Point 22 2. Photograph, 32-Pounder Coastal Defense Gun, Fort Point 22 3. Photograph, 10-inch Rodman Cannon, Black Point 22 4. Watercolor, U.S.S. Lancaster, Flagship, Pacific Fleet 39 5. Drawing, U.S.S. Cyane, Pacific Fleet 40 6. Photograph, U.S.S. Saranac, Pacific Fleet 40 7. Drawing, San Francisco Harbor Defenses 64 8. Drawing, C.S.S. Shenandoah 96 9. Photograph, Camanche, the day of the Launch 150 10. Photograph, Camanche, Post-Launch 151 11. Photograph, U.S.S. Camanche, dry-dock at Mare Island, 1890 151 iv Introduction On the fifth of July, 1865, Captain James Waddell of the Confederate raider Shenandoah left the “gloomy fogs” and ice of the Arctic Ocean and turned the prow of his ship south-eastward, toward the California coast and the harbor of San Francisco. Behind him lay the burned hulks of much of the New Bedford whaling fleet. Ahead beckoned an even greater prize--the city of San Francisco. That great port city he planned to boldly attack and lay “under contribution.” Had Waddell done so, he would have validated the worst fears of the citizens of that city. For over four years, the merchants and civil and military authorities agonized over the possibility of attack from the sea. As Brigadier-General George Wright, commanding the Department of the Pacific, stated in a letter to the commandant of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in early 1863: Under cover of the darkness or a fog I have but little doubt that a steamer might pass the two forts without serious injury; at least the chances are decidedly in her favor. Once within the harbor she can take a position beyond the reach of the guns of Alcatraz island, and, of course, command the city. Now Wright’s dire prediction seemed about to be tested, and the defenses of the city, consisting primarily of the brick fort at Fort Point, the emplacements on the islands of Alcatraz and Angel Island, and a single, untested iron-clad, were about to be tried against a lone Confederate war-bird.1 But, of course, this encounter never happened. The Civil War was over, as Captain 1 James Waddell, C.S.S. Shenandoah: The Memoirs of Lieutenant Commanding James I. Waddell, ed. James Horan (New York: Crown Publishers, inc., 1960), 174-6; Wright to Selfridge, January 26, 1863,The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, (hereafter cited as OR), 128 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901) Series I, vol. 50, part 2, 294. All references are to this volume unless otherwise noted. 1 Waddell learned after he prudently stopped a British sailing vessel that had recently left the harbor of San Francisco. With indisputable proof that the South was defeated, he abandoned his desperate scheme and sailed on to consider his own fate and the fate of his crew, now reduced to the status of country-less pirates.2 The military threat to California from the Confederacy was a gnawing concern of Unionists throughout the state during the Civil War. In particular, the harbor of San Francisco was seen as vulnerable to attack from the sea. This is the story of the measures taken, primarily military but also political, to defend the bay against hostile ships. In order to meet this threat, construction on the fortresses of the bay had proceeded amid pleas for money and guns, and the letters and telegrams of harried and anxious officials, generally solid and stable men, but who stared into the impenetrable fog of the California coast, and imagined the worst. In a state of perpetual anxiety regarding what they felt were inadequate harbor defenses, the military placed over 200 heavy guns around the harbor entrance (and would have placed many more had they been available); the navy ordered an iron-clad warship to patrol the bay; and the citizens of San Francisco warmly embraced as potential protectors the officers and men of a Russian squadron, visiting the bay in the winter and spring of 1863-64. However, no enemy entered the bay, and no shot was ever fired in anger from fortress guns or those on warships. Had such an event taken place, no doubt the history of California during the Civil War would have assumed a role of greater interest for scholars of that conflict. As it is, little is known about the history of California during the Civil War, and local residents, aside from historians and park rangers, know almost nothing about the history surrounding the relics which still stand as a reminder of that far-off time. General histories of the Civil War pay little attention to the impact of California’s 2 Waddell, Memoirs, 175-77. 2 participation as a Union state. For most Civil War scholars, California is simply not a factor in either the outcome or the course of the war. For example, James McPherson’s excellent Battle Cry of Freedom only mentions California in terms of the effect that the state’s entry into the Union had on the delicate balance of power between North and South. Nothing at all is mentioned regarding California once the war commenced. Other historians may mention California, but only tangentially, perhaps with a brief reference to the actions of the Confederate Navy, and in particular to the operations of the Shenandoah in the north Pacific in the latter days of the war. Or some mention is occasionally made of the California volunteers--some 500 California citizens who served in Massachusetts regiments--but this is a rare exception. Even California historians generally give scant attention to the state during the Civil War years.3 The Elusive Eden, a general survey of California history, devotes a little over half a page to the Civil War, primarily to explain its effect on the building of the trans- continental railroad. Berkeley Professor Walton Bean’s California: An Interpretative History, does better, devoting just over three pages to Civil War California. His comments are directed mainly at the exaggerated influence of secessionists and deal little with actual events. While he mentions the “California 500” and the 16,000 volunteers who served in the state, along with military operations in New Mexico, California’s participation in the war he dismisses as “very limited.” Other treatments are scarcely better, generally leaving the reader with the impression that California was simply not a player in the Civil War and remained uninvolved and unaffected by the conflict.4 3 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 70-77. 4 Richard Rice, William Bullough, and Richard Orsi, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, 2d ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 259; Walter Bean, California: An Interpretative History (New York/San Francisco: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 177-181. Andrew Rolle devotes a total of 4 pages out of 535 to the Civil War in his general history of 3 This treatment of California as incidental or unimportant to the course of the Civil War is so pervasive as to be almost unquestioned. This is not to say that California was critical to the outcome of the war (though an argument can be made that it was), but that the emphasis placed on California’s participation, if at all acknowledged, is on the wrong things. What is important is not so much what the state did or was, but what it was not. And what it was not was a Confederate state or, almost as injurious to the Northern cause, an independent republic. Historians tend to forget that, at the time of the war’s outbreak, California appeared to be deeply divided as to its loyalties, and only later swung into the Union column as a solid bulwark of the North. Indeed, Democrats dominated the state government in 1861, and in Southern California, according to historian John Robinson, “every local election between 1861 and 1864 resulted in victory for those who espoused the Southern cause.” The slavery question that sundered the rest of the country was reflected in California by the schism in the Democratic Party, with the pro-southern wing supporting Senator Gwin, and the anti- Buchanan faction led by Senator Broderick. In the elections of 1860, the Northern and Southern Democrats succeeded in cancelling each other out, leading to the triumph of the Republicans and the election as President of Abraham Lincoln, who squeaked by with a plurality of just over one-third of the total vote.
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