by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was a privilege to return again and speak this evening to the Orange County Civil War Roundtable, this time to share some history of “Old Rosy,” or General William S. Rosecrans (1819-1898), who was a key figure in the Union Army during the conflict and who also had a thirty-year presence here in greater Los Angeles.
A prior post here featured a carte de visité photograph, issued during the war years, of Rosecrans and briefly surveyed aspects of his life and careers, so we’ll look here to expand on that post with more detail about his service during the Civil War, as well as his ownership of a large amount of land southwest of Los Angeles, where he made his home during the last five years of his life.
As that 2017 post stated, Rosecrans hailed from Ohio (his father was a War of 1812 veteran) and went to work at age 13 as a store clerk before entering West Point where he finished 5th out of 56 graduates in 1842. He was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers because of his special talent in that realm, as well as taught at his alma mater.
When he resigned at age 35 and returned to civilian life, Rosecrans formed a Cincinnati business that was advertised as “solicitors of patents for inventions . . . [for] all claims, military and naval under the Bounty, Land and Pension laws.” Soon, he became the head of The Western Coal Oil Company, which sold lubricants, grease, paint, varnish, and pitch for roofs and it was while in this enterprise that he was scarred by burns in an oil lamp explosion.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Rosecrans enlisted as a volunteer and was offered a commission as a colonel in the Ohio 23rd Infantry Regiment, which counted future president Rutherford B. Hayes as a major under Rosecrans, while another later chief executive, James Garfield was a chief-of-staff and yet another later president, William McKinley was another subordinate.
As the prior post, noted, service under yet another president-to-be Ulysses S. Grant included a mixed record, with some significant successes, such as at the Battle of Tullahoma, while the loss at Chickamauga was such an unmitigated disaster that Grant relieved Rosecrans, who was generally popular with his men, of his command of the Army of the Cumberland.
Reassigned to the Department of Missouri away from the fields of battle, Rosecrans was at cross-purposes with President Abraham Lincoln over the latter’s order of the release of two Confederate prisoners, which was added to a testy relationship with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
Just after war’s end, Rosecrans made his first visit to California and, in 1866, passed through Los Angeles while on his way from Baja California, where he was inspecting mines, to San Francisco. He resigned from the volunteer service that year and then from the Army in 1867 after President Andrew Johnson made him a Brevet Brigadier General.
Obviously, this area made a big impression as the Los Angeles News observed in its 1 October 1867 edition that:
Gen R. is fully alive to the marked advantages of Southern California in an agricultural view, and is maturing plans for bringing our extensive plains under cultivation, by inducing emigration from the East and from the German States [a reunified Germany occurred three years later]. [With travel time reduced as the transcontinental railroad approached completion—this taking place in 1869] Then the tide of immigration will begin to set in and we must be prepared to receive it. We are informed that the great natural advantages of San Pedro for a harbor, are fully appreciated and acknowledged [by Rosecrans and General John F. Miller, the collector of customs at San Francisco.]
Amid a mass of public lands south and west of Los Angeles, Rosecrans embarked on a scheme to acquire many thousands of acres, though critics later accused him of recruiting some twenty others to submit claims for what were called “lieu lands,” ostensibly set aside for schools, and then selling to him in pre-arranged deals. This was seen as an unethical land-grab by the General, who installed a son, Carl, to manage his interests in the area.
Rosecrans settled in the Bay Area and, in the 1870 census, was enumerated at San Rafael, north of San Francisco, where his occupation was simply “Retired Army Officer.” Two years later, the Los Angeles Star of 9 May 1872 listed the “Rich Men of Los Angeles County,” with F.P.F. Temple topping the list of individuals with a property valuation of well north of $150,000 and William Workman positioned at eighth at not quite $70,000. Rosecrans was at just above $37,000, a respectable amount and well above his prior landed wealth.
Yet, if there were any ideas of subdivision, such as what Temple was pursuing at nearby Centinela, there were not pursued and, for much of the Seventies, Rosecrans battled purported squatters, though it was later found that there were settlers who went through the proper steps of pre-emption of public lands. In November 1877, District Court Judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda ruled against Rosecrans and in favor of 26 settlers in a “lieu lands” case.
In 1880, while in San Francisco where that’s year census recorded him as a “Min[in]g and Gen’l Engineer,” Rosecrans, who’d refused requests to run for governor of California and Ohio and a Representative from Nevada, agreed to stand as a Democrat for the First District of the House of Representatives.
He won election and served two terms between 1881 and 1885, serving as chair of the Military Affairs Committee and, briefly, chair of the Democratic Party Caucus during the 1882 midterm season. Before he left office, Rosecrans garnered significant attention for his opposition to a pension for the ailing Grant, who was in poverty and working on his well-received memoirs before his death later in 1885.
Later that year, Rosecrans was named by President Grover Cleveland to be the Register of the Treasury, an administrative role with no great prestige though if offered a steady salary as one of many patronage jobs in Washington. The Los Angeles Times, however, which was run by Harrison Gray Otis, another veteran of the Ohio 23rd Infantry, lambasted the self-identified reformer by observing that the General
was engaged in a little scheme of reform in Los Angeles years ago. His undertaking then was to reform certain broad acres of government land lying below town, and convert them, in a peculiar manner, into his individual possession. His method was to carry out a wagon load of “the boys” whom he could pick up around the saloons, and let them individually locate claims upon the lands. Returning to town, the claims were duly and as duly transferred to the reformer Rosecrans. Of course, Rosecrans did the right thing by the boys, and besides giving them the free ride and setting up the drinks ad lib, he bestowed upon each a five-dollar gold piece. In this manner reformer Rosecrans obtained possession of a large tract of land.
At the end of 1885, a direct transcontinental railroad link to greater Los Angeles was made by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Boom of the Eighties was soon ushered in. Rosecrans sold a large section of his ranch to the brothers-in-law Emil d’Artois and Walter L. Webb, who in spring 1887 as the boom rocketed toward its frenzied peak, established the townsite of Rosecrans.
D’Artois and Webb aggressively marketed the tract, a necessity given the competition that seemed everywhere in the region, and advertisements promised the usual run of superior advantages in climate, soil, water and more in that they claimed was “The Best Offer Ever Made To The Public!”
A mammoth hotel was promoted as was the building of an electric streetcar line. Not quite 800 lots of 6,000 square feet each were offered for a mere $50, with 40% percent down in cash and the rest payable at $5 monthly at no interest, while lots of 5-20 acres were also available. The owners boasted that “once seen, all parties will find that, for cheapness, desirability and true merit, this land has positively no rival in the real estate market of to-day.”
By July, the lots doubled in price and readers of ads were given “fair warning” as the hotel was to begin soon and “a magnificent new town is assured” with the streetcar line assured for operation in the fall. It was said that 567 lots were sold in the western section of the tract, with more than one-third slated to have houses built on them—even if exaggerated, this showed the extent of speculation.
D’Artois and Webb further promised an “immense profit” to investors and implored readers to “see our land, look at our books, and you will not buy elsewhere” because “we sell rapidly and need no brass bands or paid boomers to inveigle the unwary into buying at big prices.” As the fall dawned, the pair offered lots at $240 each, but announced an incentive with two dozen “elegant villa residences,” costing the duo $60,000 offered free randomly among buyers—this perhaps being an effort to limit the effects of “flipping” lots for a quick profit.
The 16 October 1887 edition of the Los Angeles Herald included a short article that insisted that “Rosecrans will soon be the scene of more than the usual amount of activity” with plans said to be ready for 45 houses and “several brick blocks” for commercial development with kilns (ovens) being built to handle 400,000 bricks. It was asserted that the town “will be to Los Angeles what Alameda or Oakland is to San Francisco,” though these latter two burgs became wildly varied in size and importance.
Five days later, the paper ran a lengthier description of the town, stating that the tract comprised well above 15,000 acres, with the bigger claim that it would be like “what Brooklyn is to New York” in comparison to this area. Vermont Avenue was the eastern boundary and the sea was the western edge, while the prose rose to flights of fancy with the insistence that,
To stand on one of the eminences of the town of Rosecrans and take in this vast territory with the fine view obtained from any part of it, and attempt to figure out the possibilities that crowd themselves upon the imagination, is enough to bewilder a common mortal.
The purest artesian water, soil to provide the best of orchards and vineyards, landscaping along streets, some of which were to be 80 or 100 feet wide—including Ballona Avenue, this being Slauson Avenue, to extend to the “Ballona Harbor” or where Marina del Rey is—and the $20,000 hotel expected to be completed in two weeks, were all featured.
The boom, of course, went bust and, like so many of its counterparts during this era, during which William H. Workman was the Angel City’s mayor, Rosecrans failed. The namesake continued his work with the Department of the Treasury until ill health led to his resignation in spring 1893 after he spent much of the winter trying to recuperate at Santa Monica and at his ranch on the Rosecrans tract.
Notably, there was something of a redemption of Rosecrans’ reputation in his later years, despite occasional issues such as a critical letter by Garfield, released after the president’s 1881 assassination, though he spoke highly of his commander even as he opposed orders and philosophy, and a well-publicized conflict with General Benjamin Butler, who, however, had plenty of enemies on his own.
In February 1889, Congress voted to retire Rosecrans as a Brigadier General, a restoration of rank from a quarter of a century prior. The Times, so hostile a decade prior, issued several features of him later in his life, including a June 1895 paean to “Gen. Rosecrans’ Bravery” during several campaigns during the war. This continued until the end of his life three years later and included something of a reappraisal of Chickamauga when the thirtieth anniversary of the battle was commemorated that year.
The 18 January 1896 edition of the Times featured a piece on “the ideal California home of Gen. Rosecrans” which was considered “a model semi-tropic ranch” with citrus, apricots, apple, nectarines, plums and pomegranates planted. Carl managed the ranch and a daughter resided there, as well (Eliza died in 1883) and the article continued that,
Here in the peaceful vale, in the odor of perpetual bloom, and surrounded by an orchestra of singing birds winter and summer, lives the old hero who rode among the battered and beaten ranks at Chickamauga, sheering the men and checking the tide of defeat as best he could . . . He is now a feeble old man; but his name, mentioned today in bivouac or camp-fire, starts in the memories of the “old boys” the marching columns, the wheeling regiments, the swaying battalions, the sentinel’s challenge, and the shrill lipped bugles once again.
The reverie went on unabated about Rosecrans residing “in the treasure house of hallowed memories” and claimed that “as he sits on his petal-strewn veranda, embowered in wisteria and honeysuckle,” he could hear the marching of soldiers and the beating of military drums while seeing the hospital tents as he pondered the “other agencies which helped to make that crimson path which led up to the nation’s surcease of sorrow, and the freedom of the slave.”
In 1897, reports were published in the local press about Rosecrans’ written efforts to promote the Wilmington/San Pedro port over that of the Southern Pacific’s Santa Monica during the “Free Harbor Fight.” One April missive was directed at President McKinley and exhorted the chief executive that “as your old commander, watching your career with pride . . . I feel constrained to write you . . . [about] the immediate improvement of San Pedro Harbor,” while denigrating “the selfish methods of one corporation, led by Collis Huntington, [and which] endeavored to thwart the wishes of our people.”
Rosecrans mentioned his work as an engineer and added his “having over twenty-seven years ago studied this local harbor matter,” which led him to the unequivocal conclusion that San Pedro/Wilmington was the only logical place for federal investment in a regional port facility. He concluded by imploring McKinley to lead the way for the imminent implementation of work “as your old commander, and life-long friend, and as one who voices the wishes of our people” and extended his wishes “that yours may be a brilliant and patriotic administration.” Like Garfield two decades before, sadly, McKinley fell to an assassin’s bullet, dying in 1901.
Rosecrans contracted pneumonia and succumbed on 11 March 1898, being hailed for his war service and also noted for his investment in Los Angeles, with the controversies attending both left unmentioned. Today, he is usually only remembered, if but few know the connection, through the nearly 30-mile east-west thoroughfare that runs from Fullerton in north Orange County to the Pacific at Manhattan Beach.
Based on the incidents detailed in this blog, General William Rosecrans appears to be narrow-minded and vindictive. His opposition to providing a pension to the destitute Grant in his later years was not due to moral courage but rather stemmed from long-standing grudges from their early military careers. This trait was consistent with his actions of seizing land in California through cunning and unscrupulous means.
Hi Larry, what is among the many fascinating aspects about the Civil War were the varying personalities and conflicts among the leadership of both the Union and Confederate armies and, certainly, the grudges held by Rosecrans towards Grant and others were significant. He was, however, widely liked and admired by many of his subordinates and, as is often the case, his mixed reputation seemed to have evolved into a more positive one over time. He was certainly a complicated figure, as most of the generals were.