Fort Alcatraz

Thanks! Let me clarify:

It was Southern California, formerly Alta California, that wanted to secede. This part of the state was mainly populated by Californios who were not happy with the results of the Mexican War and by a lot of Southerners who found the south of the state suitable for agriculture and supported slavery. That was against the California constitution, as California had been admitted as a free state. They did vote to secede from both the state of California and the Union - they would split the state into North and South, with the southern part named Colorado. (Colorado was still part of the Utah Territory at that time.) The Angelenos raised a Confederate unit - the Los Angeles Rifles - and there was a California Native Cavalry, which was entirely Hispanic. Confederate sympathy was so strong in Southern California that the governor stationed three companies there to be sure it remained in the Union.

Here is a concise overview of the matter from a SoCal history blog:

http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_f...california-tried-to-split-from-the-north.html

So would a present-day citizen of Los Angeles be considered a true southerner? :sneaky:
 
Diane

Have you got anything besides a blog post (which does not have any references) as evidence of your earlier assertion about California gold and remaining in the Union by one vote?

That vote was from San Bernadino - this was not a statewide referendum but only in Southern California. Let me get some sources together and go from the top. Not too many people know about this section of the CW! :smile:
 
That's a good museum. I still don't see the "one vote" that you posted. I'm worried sick that some high school student will take your post, believe it, take it to school, and be embarrassed by the error thereby destroying his or her academic career and his or her ability to earn a living. It may be too late.
 
That's a good museum. I still don't see the "one vote" that you posted. I'm worried sick that some high school student will take your post, believe it, take it to school, and be embarrassed by the error thereby destroying his or her academic career and his or her ability to earn a living. It may be too late.

Don't worry! Some kid isn't going to be led to perdition and a life on skid row because I posted about one vote. :giggle: It came from San Bernadino, as per my above post # 44. I like the list of CW notables they have listed who were involved in California.
 
Don't worry! Some kid isn't going to be led to perdition and a life on skid row because I posted about one vote. :giggle: It came from San Bernadino, as per my above post # 44. I like the list of CW notables they have listed who were involved in California.
My point is that California was not that close. Yes there were some secessionists in southern California, but they folded quickly.
 
My point is that California was not that close. Yes there were some secessionists in southern California, but they folded quickly.

No, I have to disagree with you - there was a lot of secessionist activity throughout California. It wasn't just Unionists who rushed for the gold! There were lots of Confederate flags flying around and some various St Albans-type plotting going on. It did go both ways. Even before he declared for the South, A S Johnston had some considerable reason to be concerned for his life, and he wasn't the only Southern-leaning army officer to feel a little uneasy in California. As the US army withdrew, the militia started getting active - and paranoid about Southern sympathizers - which is why you had things like the Battle of Sonoma. That's got to be the most bizarre non-fight fight of the whole CW! The commanders on Alcatraz, Angel Island and other points around the Bay were jumpy as long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs - every rumor was met with a flurry of action. Fortunately they didn't get a chance to fire off their cannon - the cannon at Yerba Buena was so old it probably would have taken out the gun crew instead of the enemy! Like a lot of Union states with heavy Southern sympathies within its boundaries, there was a lot of agitation. Both CW California governors (Downey then Low) clamped down as hard as they could on any secessionist feeling. Downey in particular was determined to keep SoCal in California. More serious than Confederates was the threat of the Californios re-uniting with Mexico, and Lincoln was already keeping his eye on Texas and Mexico. Particularly in Southern California, there was a distinct danger that the Confederates would rile up the Indians there. Sibley apparently didn't think of that - it could have actually made a difference if he'd worked out a deal with the Apaches or Mojaves!
 
Alcatraz civil war prison...

In September 1862, Gen. George Wright, commanding the Department of the Pacific, received Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton’s orders of Aug. 8, 1862, issued with the president’s approval, that authorized U.S. marshals, chiefs of police, and other authorities to arrest anyone “discouraging volunteer enlistments, giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” or engaged “in any other disloyal practice.”


On Sept. 12, 1862, Wright ordered the “immediate erection” of a prison on Alcatraz and wrote the sheriff of Solano County that he could make arrests “on affidavits setting forth the facts.”


It was used as a gulag...


The Evolution of Alcatraz as a Military & Civilian Prison


Though Alcatraz is now famous for its role as a federal prison, its history as a holding place for criminals began before the Civil War. The army first used the guardhouse’s basement cell room in 1859 to contain soldiers who had committed crimes. Because of the island’s escape-resistant location in the middle of San Francisco Bay, other army posts began to send their hardcore soldier prisoners to Alcatraz for safekeeping. By 1861, the government designated Fort Alcatraz as the official military prison for the entire Department of the Pacific.

It was during the Civil War that the military began to house a different kind of prisoner. When President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeus corpus in 1863, the judicial system could arrest individuals and imprison them without trial in a court of law. The Union government in San Francisco now used the Alcatraz guardhouse to imprison private citizens, accused of treason, as well as soldiers. At this time, treason was broadly defined to encompass any pro-Confederate or anti-Union sentiment, from rejoicing in the Union’s loss of a battle, refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Union, or recognizing the Confederate States of America, to plotting or privateering for the Confederate cause. Many local politicians and citizens, whose loyalty to the Union was suspect, were arrested and jailed on Alcatraz to serve time. These prisoners could be detained without a trial and despite a lack of sufficient evidence of their crimes.

Here is the link to the NPS site about Civil War Alcatraz...

https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/civil-war-at-alcatraz.htm


 
In the news again -

Deep beneath the surface, Alcatraz has been keeping secrets. Now a team of researchers from Binghamton University, the Golden Gate Recreation Area, and the Concrete Preservation Institute in Chico have published the results of their experiments using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to peak beneath the storied island and find out what the onetime prison is hiding.

The resulting paper, branded with the snappy title The Fate of the Historic Fortifications at Alcatraz Island Based On Terrestrial Laser Scans and GPR Interpretations From the Recreation Yard, appeared in the journal Near Surface Geophysics in January.

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/6/1825...rtification-tunnel-buildings-discovered-under

Here's the other Fort Alcatraz threads, so that the next person searching this topic doesn't have to wander far.

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/alcatraz-prison-reveals-civil-war-fortress.96206/#post-819978

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/forgotten-forts-series-fort-alcatraz.87976/#post-694878
 
Here's an interesting photo from the Library of Congress, showing Alcatraz island in the distance. "1864" appears at the entrance of the road pictured here, but LOC dates this photo as 1866. In the second image, I've zoomed in on the island at higher resolution.

alcatraz_loc_1864or1866.jpg



alcatraz_loc_1864or1866_hires_detail.jpg



Roy B.
 
I was reading about Fort Alcatraz this morning. Before it was a famous prison Alcatraz served as a military post. Most history buffs familiar with the island know this but I dont think people really realize how extensive this fortification was. By the end of the war Alcatraz had an armament of over 100 cannon. Heres a few diagrams and picture I found. I wonder how she and her garrison would have faired in a fight with an invading fleet...

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If you have an interest in Fort Alcatraz, I highly recommend John Martini's book Fortress Alcatraz. John is a fantastic historian; he and I have worked some projects together and I have the utmost respect for him. He is also a great person!
The pictures in his book are fantastic. He found a number of mislabeled pictures and was able to identify them as having been taken on Alcatraz. They show the caponiers in full function, as well as batteries of guns on the ramparts. Here is a picture from A Legacy in Brick and Stone of a gun line at Alcatraz. I found this picture at National Archives and Records Administration.

16-15 Alcatraz gunline Rev01.jpg
 
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