Of rebel raiders and the West

FORT POINT, A STATELY brick pile at the base of the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge, might be the most overlooked landmark in California. Literally and figuratively overshadowed by a world-famous landmark and a storied view, it’s the relic of a history that’s as easy to miss as the fort itself.

Between 1861 and 1865, 500 Army soldiers stood constant guard at Ft. Point, securing California’s largest (population 58,000) and richest city during the Civil War. Thousands of other Union military forces were dispersed throughout the state.

California was anything but a passive bystander in America’s bloodiest conflict. Union and Confederate partisans had split, in large part, over the question of whether the territories of the West and states such as California would be open to the spread of slavery. When the war came, Confederate-Union conflicts, including a handful of battles, flared on Western soil.

California entered the Union in 1850 as a free state, and Abraham Lincoln, in the 1860 presidential race, managed to carry the state. But only barely. In 1861, slavery remained illegal in California, but blacks lacked full rights, such as suffrage. Moreover, with the Gold Rush of 1849, thousands of Southerners had streamed into the state, many of whom favored the Confederacy. By the time the war erupted, about 40% of California’s white population of 380,000 hailed from below the Mason-Dixon line. U.S. officials in California thus faced the challenge of tamping down open and clandestine Confederate insurgencies within the state and preventing invasion by outside rebel forces.

In February 1861, two months before the Civil War’s first shots, officials in the outgoing administration of President James Buchanan ordered the completion and arming of Ft. Point, whose construction, begun in 1853, had languished. They anticipated the fort’s strategic importance in protecting the “treasure steamers” that soon departed from San Francisco carrying east-bound gold donated by patriotic Californians to Union coffers.

During the war, the Confederacy launched eight major warships aimed at destroying commercial shipping. Of those, the Shenandoah, a “commerce raider” clandestinely purchased in Britain and dispatched to prey on the whaling fleet, was the most feared along the West Coast. A 220-foot auxiliary steamer -- propelled by steam and wind -- the Shenandoah eventually became the only Confederate ship to circumnavigate the globe. During the steamer’s 13-month, 58,000-mile voyage, she destroyed 32 Union vessels.

By spring 1865, rumors in San Francisco had the raider California-bound, intent on capturing a treasure steamer or even laying siege to the city. One rumor suggested that San Francisco was so vulnerable that a ship dispatched by the Shenandoah had already slipped into the port to procure provisions for the raider.

Ironically, San Francisco’s fears of the Shenandoah reached their apogee in July 1865, three months after the Civil War had formally concluded.

When sentries at Ft. Point spotted a whaler, the Milo, approaching the Golden Gate on July 20, 1865 -- long before the end of the whaling season -- they surmised that she did not bring good news. Local newspapers soon headlined sensational stories.

The Shenandoah’s Confederates, using their signature ruse -- the flying of a false flag -- captured the Milo. They refused to believe what the whalers told them: The South had surrendered months earlier. In exchange for the Confederates’ promise to save his ship, the Milo’s captain had to agree to transport his own crew and the Shenandoah’s growing roster of potentially mutinous prisoners to San Francisco. The Shenandoah would go on to destroy 17 ships, including nine Yankee whalers burned on a single day in the Bering Strait.

In San Francisco, the cries for retaliation mounted. Over the next few weeks, however, as the Shenandoah failed to appear along the Pacific Coast of the U.S., the city breathed easier. By then, the raider was off Mexico’s coast.

There, a British merchantman had delivered -- again -- the news of the Confederacy’s collapse. This time, the Shenandoah’s officers and crew believed it. The news meant that for months they had been fighting without cause or state: In the eyes of the world, they were no better than pirates, a hangable offense. Stowing their cannons and camouflaging the ship as a merchant vessel, they commenced an outlaw odyssey in search of a friendly port somewhere in the world.

California, and the weary soldiers who stood the fog-shrouded vigil at Ft. Point, had weathered the rebel threat. But for the Confederates aboard the Shenandoah, their own drama had suddenly grown infinitely darker and more complicated.