L.A. Friends Faced Each Other at Gettysburg

In the early days of July 1863, three generals whose lives had taken them from the steep mountains and broad ocean of Southern California to the quiet fields and hills of a Pennsylvania village called Gettysburg played out the most dramatic chapter in a tale of friendships that stretched back to the California frontier.

It was in Los Angeles that these men--whose friendships had formed before the Civil War commanded allegiances on opposing sides--had once drilled and danced and dined.

Their names endure today in chronicles of the War Between the States: Lewis Armistead, Richard Brooke Garnett and Winfield Scott Hancock. Another future general stationed in Los Angeles at the time was Albert Sidney Johnston, who would be killed at Shiloh.

Soon they would split, Hancock staying with the Union Army whose uniform they all had worn, the other three aligning themselves with the South. But here in California, they formed friendships that not even the war could totally rupture.

Hancock arrived with his family in 1859, opening downtown Los Angeles’ first military compound. His wife, Almira, known as “Allie,” accustomed to the exciting social life in Washington, D.C., came reluctantly with their two children.

They eventually took up residence in a red-painted brick cottage on seven acres at 3rd and Main streets. Their neighbor in the identical cottage next door was Virginia-born Cameron Thom, Los Angeles’ city and district attorney.

Hancock, in charge of all federal property in Southern California, quickly became part of the close-knit circle of politicos that included former Mayor Benjamin Wilson, Phineas Banning, Joseph Lancaster Brent and Thom.

Hancock had already cultivated friends who would occupy high places; as a 16-year-old cadet at West Point in 1840, he played war games with such future generals as Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, George Pickett, and a future governor of California, George Stoneman.

Of Hancock’s friends and future adversaries, Armistead had assumed command of the barracks in San Diego, and Garnett was busy chasing outlaws and protecting settlers from Indians in the Mojave Desert. Johnston, who was already a general, headed the Army’s Department of the Pacific.

In the years before the Civil War, Los Angeles was a nest of Southern sympathies; half of its residents had migrated from the South. Only 350 of the city’s 1,500-plus votes went to Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and Hancock soon found himself busy keeping Southern sympathizers under control.

News of the attack on Ft. Sumter on April 12, 1861, took 12 days to reach San Francisco by Pony Express--but only a few minutes to be telegraphed to Los Angeles. In El Monte and Los Angeles, demonstrators endorsed the Southern cause.

Confederate recruitment camps were set up in El Monte and the San Bernardino Mountains. Sentiments were so anti-Union that anyone wanting to enlist in the Union Army had to sneak out of town and ride to San Francisco.

Protecting his supply depot of arms and ammunition, Hancock recruited a group of loyal citizens to defend Camp Fitzgerald; he even armed his wife.

After reinforcements arrived from Ft. Tejon on May 15, Hancock organized public demonstrations--speeches and a parade--for the Union cause. He ordered the United States Hotel, a hotbed of rebel activity, closed down.

Tensions ran high as the officers chose sides. Nervously awaiting his own orders, Hancock gave an emotional farewell party at his cottage for friends, most of whom resigned their commissions to fight for the Confederacy.

Johnston was there; his wife would stay in Pasadena throughout the war, at the house she named Fair Oak, after her Virginia hometown. Fellow guests Garnett, Armistead and Thom, a soon-to-be honorary Confederate captain, would not see Hancock again until they met in battle at Gettysburg.

At the mournful gathering, Armistead gave then-Capt. Hancock a new major’s uniform, anticipating his promotion.

In August 1861, just before the Hancocks departed, their 5-year-old daughter, Ada, christened Phineas Banning’s steamer “Ada Hancock” at the harbor. (Two years later, the small boat was dropping off passengers at San Pedro when the boiler exploded, killing 26.)

On July 3, 1863, riding into the third day of battle at Gettysburg with profanity on his lips, Hancock was an inspiration to his tired, bloodied and discouraged regiments. As his troops clutched the ground on Cemetery Ridge, Hancock rode across his line of men, completely exposed to the rain of exploding shells.

He was hit in the groin, but ordered his men to prop him up in his saddle so he could keep issuing commands. In agony from his wound, he continued fighting until the lump of lead lodged against his pelvic bone was removed.

About 12,000 rebels, led by his old friends Garnett, Armistead and Pickett, stepped out of the trees on Seminary Ridge along the west front of the battle in what would come to be known as Pickett’s Charge. Two long lines of men started toward the Union ranks across three-quarters of a mile of open ground.

Garnett was killed more than halfway across the field. Armistead, the only Confederate general to reach the Union line, was mortally wounded but lived long enough to stammer out a last message: “Say to Gen. Hancock for me that I have done him, and you all, a grievous injury, which I shall always regret.”

Before he went into battle that day, he had entrusted Gen. Longstreet with his prayer book and instructions to give it to Hancock’s wife, whom he had long worshiped from afar. It was inscribed: “Trust in God and fear nothing.”

After the war, Hancock was assigned the task of arranging the execution of the four people convicted of conspiring in the assassination of President Lincoln. He pleaded unsuccessfully with President Andrew Johnson to reconsider the case of Mary Surratt, who owned the house where the assassination was planned. In 1880, Hancock ran for president against James A. Garfield and lost by 7,000 votes.

Hancock died in 1886 and was buried in his hometown of Norristown, Pa., in a simple granite tomb he had designed himself when his daughter, Ada, had died 11 years earlier at age 18.

Three years before Hancock died, the couple returned triumphantly to Los Angeles, where thousands of well-wishers lined the streets. His old adversary and friend, Cameron Thom, by now the mayor of Los Angeles, was waiting to salute him.