UC Riverside

This dissertation presents a qualitative study examining disunion efforts in Southern California in the antebellum and Civil War periods. Through an analysis of the political and social alliances established between transplants from the American South and landowning Californians, this work reveals decades-long efforts to divide California and establish an outpost in the state’s southern region where the ideologies of the American South could take hold. This is examined in three periods, beginning in the 1850s when California proved most alluring to Southern migrants and the separationist rhetoric of Southern Democrats gained influence, to the start of the Civil War when separationists called for disunion, through the end of the war as state politics restructured in the aftermath of the national crisis. As this work demonstrates, from as early as the state’s first constitutional convention in 1849, through the start of the war, disunion efforts remained a constant among Southern legislators and their social and political allies. Proposals to create an independent territory in Southern California reemerged annually, nearly finding success in the eve of the war. With the national division reaching the west, the conversation among many Southern sympathizing Californians turned to secession and the possibility of the state joining the rebellion or becoming independent. While secessionist rumblings continued throughout the war, California’s military leaders and political figures appointed by the Lincoln administration ensured the state’s continued loyalty, often through extreme measures. Southern Democrat’s return to political dominance in postwar Southern California brings the story to a full circle, imposing legislative measures that closely resembled the philosophical positions of Southern legislators, reestablishing the link between the Golden State and the American South.