Confederate sentiment in Southern California ran deep

A photograph published in The Times in 1925 shows Confederate veterans and others at Hollywood Forever Cemetery for the unveiling of a monument to fallen soldiers of the Confederacy. At this famous “last supper” were Hancock’s friends and fellow officers — the Southerners Albert Sidney Johnston, Lewis Armistead, Richard Garnett and George Pickett, who had resigned their Union commissions. A wily old Union Army commander, Edwin Sumner, sized up the situation for Washington, D.C., from his Bay Area HQ: Secessionists were not the majority but “the most active and zealous party” in California, and as for L.A., “there is more danger of disaffection at this place than any other in the state.” It is “necessary,” he informed the nation’s capital, “to throw reinforcement into that section immediately.” Before the Civil War, some Californios and residents from the American South agitated again and again to divide the state in half — Union sympathizers in the north, Southerners and slavery supporters in the south. The victorious Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sagely remarked of the tens of millions in California gold that paid the Union Army’s bills: “I do not know what we would do in this great national emergency were it not for the gold sent from California.” More than 200 men left L.A. County to wear the Confederate uniform, but only two local men were known to have joined the Union army. The Ballona vote was thrown out, and according to historian John W. Robinson in his book “Los Angeles in Civil War Days,” a San Francisco Bulletin reporter here during the election wrote that “to all intents and purposes, we might as well live in the Southern Confederacy as in Southern California.” The Confederate monument at Hollywood Forever Cemetery stood from 1925, when this photo was published in The Times, until 2017.