LeBaron: Before Civil War, William Sherman sent to Sonoma to wrest power from unruly mayor

Four sailors and an army officer, all armed, knocked on a door and took the town’s only elected official as their prisoner. There was resistance, but when one of the sailors’ pistols fired by accident, the official surrendered.

So what are we talking about here - a kidnapping, a terrorist plot, a practical joke gone awry?

The town is Sonoma. The year is 1847. The officer is Lt. William Tecumseh Sherman, destined 15 years hence to be a Union hero in the Civil War.

His prisoner is John Nash, described by an early historian as “an illiterate, well-meaning old man who referred to himself as ‘chief justice’ and attached great importance to his office.”

Sherman had come from Monterey to arrest Nash on orders from the military governor of California, the United States having claimed the territory upon declaration of war with Mexico in ’46.

Nash’s crime was his refusal to yield his position as “alcalde” to new appointee Lilburn W. Boggs, an experienced politician, a former governor, a man with friends in high places.

‘Secret mission’

We’ll get to the conclusion of Nash’s story anon. But first, to get a true sense of the history of this region, we share Sherman’s 170-year-old “travelogue” of this “secret mission” from Monterey to the pueblo of Sonoma, which was, according to a letter sent to the high command, “in a dangerous state of effervescence” caused by the alcalde dispute.

Lt. Sherman, 27, was a West Point graduate newly embarked on a military career. He must have kept a journal, because his 1886 “Memoirs of William T. Sherman By Himself” include a precise narrative of his California adventures 50 years before.

When word of the Sonoma dust-up reached Monterey, Sherman was dispatched to Sonoma to capture the recalcitrant alcalde and “bring him in.”

Getting there would be at least half the fun.

Sherman tells of the trip in his memoir: “I took one soldier with me, Private Barnes, with four horses, two of which we rode and the other two we drove ahead. … The first day we reached Gilroy and camped by a stream near three or four adobe huts. … The next day, toward night we approached the Mission of San Francisco and the village of Yerba Buena, tired and weary - the wind as usual blowing a perfect hurricane, and a more desolate region it was impossible to conceive of.”

Sherman sought out a West Point classmate, Capt. John Folsom, the quartermaster for the Yerba Buena troops. He resisted offers to invest in Folsom’s plan to divide the village into lots, writing that he “actually felt insulted that he should think me such a fool as to pay money for property in such a horrid place as Yerba Buena.”

Folsom, he said, had no boat to lend him for the voyage to Sonoma so Sherman boarded the battleship Columbus, anchored in the bay, borrowed a longboat, a midshipman who claimed to know the way to Sonoma “and everything about it,” eight sailors and a naval officer named McLane.

Precautions were taken - secret meetings in the captain’s cabin etc. - to guard the truth of his “secret mission.”

Sherman again: “We sailed directly north, up the bay and … reached the mouth of Sonoma Creek about dark, and during the night worked up the creek some twelve miles by means of the tide, to a landing called Embarcadero.

“To maintain the secrecy, McLane and I agreed to pretend to be on a marketing expedition to pick up chickens, pigs, etc. for the ship’s mess…

“Leaving the midshipman and four sailors to guard the boat, we started on foot with the other four for Sonoma Town, which we soon reached.

It was simple open space around which were some adobe houses, that of General Vallejo occupying one side.”

On another was an unfinished two-story adobe building occupied as a barrack for Company C of Stevenson’s regiment.

Capt. John Brackett was in command of those New York Volunteers, a colorful lot of erstwhile Tammany Hall operatives recruited in the toughest sections of New York City.

Nash won’t step down

They had arrived in Sonoma four months earlier and settled in, quite literally. Many of them had enlisted for a free ride to a new life in California. One even brought his bride on the trip around The Horn. Brackett was using his ample spare time to build a house on the plaza.

The military had arrived in Sonoma in bits and pieces, first being Navy Lt. Joseph Warren Revere who hauled down the Bear Flag, declared the 23-day California Republic at an end and raised Old Glory in July of 1846.

Mariano Vallejo, the Californio commander north of San Francisco Bay, had been released from the Bear Army’s captivity at Sutter’s Fort.

He came home to a pueblo with half-a-hundred ragtag American adventurers and the extended Vallejo and Carrillo families. The Mexican soldiers had gone south to fight with General Castro against the Americans.

But Sonoma was still the acknowledged seat of government in Mexico’s “La Frontera del Norte” and its “alcalde”(roughly translated as a combination of mayor and justice of the peace) was a man to be reckoned with.

Incumbent Alcalde Nash had been appointed to the job by either the Bear Flag party or Capt. Brackett, depending on your source.

Gen. Vallejo, fresh from imprisonment and understandably grumpy, had found an American friend in Boggs, who was, as California immigrants go, a VIP.

He had served as governor of Missouri in the 1830s. His term of office was fraught with controversy.

It was Boggs’ executive order that forced the Mormons to leave their Nauvoo settlement. He and his family came west after an attempt on his life, attributed to a renegade Mormon.

With his wife, Panthea, who was a granddaughter of Daniel Boone, and their large family, he crossed the plains in 1846 in a wagon train that traveled for a time with the ill-fated Donner Party but kept to the beaten path when the Donners veered off on the disastrous Hastings cutoff.

The Boggs arrived at Sonoma in that cold winter and General Vallejo gave them shelter in his Petaluma Adobe and promptly appointed the governor alcalde in Nash’s stead and set about instructing him in the role. Boggs, it is said, tutored Vallejo on the U.S. Constitution.

But Nash refused to step down and declined to turn over the trappings of the office and the official justice court records.

When Brackett’s threats failed to move him out of office, the letter went to Monterey and resulted in Sherman’s “secret mission” to arrest Nash and see that order was restored.

Pistol discharged

Sherman took a circuitous route to the arrest.

He writes: “I got an old soldier whom I had known in Third Artillery, quietly to ascertain the whereabouts of Nash, who was a bachelor stopping with the family of a lawyer named Green.”

Learning that Nash wasn’t home and wouldn’t be back until evening, Sherman went off to buy chickens and eggs. “We then visited Governor Boggs’ family and that of General Vallejo …

“About dark I learned that Nash had come back and then, giving Brackett orders to have a cart ready at the corner of the plaza, McLane and I went to the house of Green. Posting an armed sailor on each side of the house, we knocked at the door and walked in. We found Green, Nash and two women at supper. I asked if Nash were in and was first answered ‘No,’ but one of the women soon pointed to him and he rose.

“We were armed with pistols and the family was evidently alarmed. I walked up to him and took his arm and told him to come along with me. He asked me ‘Where?’ and I said, ‘Monterey’ ‘Why?’ I would explain that more at leisure.

“Green put himself between me and door and demanded, in theatrical style, why I dared arrest a peaceable citizen in his house. I simply pointed to my pistol and asked him to get out of the way, which he did. …We passed out, Green following us with loud words which brought the four sailors to the front door and I told him to hush up or I would take him prisoner also.

“About that time one of the sailors, handling his pistol carelessly, discharged it and Green disappeared very suddenly. We took Nash to the cart, put him in and proceeded back to our boat. The next morning we were gone.”

Before they reached Yerba Buena, Nash had seen the error of his ways and proclaimed his willingness to yield.

“Having gone so far,” writes Sherman, “I thought it best to take him on to Monterey.”

There he was released on his promise to hand over the papers, provided a horse and sent home to Sonoma. Sherman writes that he never saw Nash again.

In the months ahead, Sherman would learn of the discovery of gold and travel north once more, meet Stephen Smith at his Bodega sawmill and visit Gen. Vallejo on a “military” mission to Coloma to inspect the new-found riches.

He would complete his California posting at war’s end, stationed in Sonoma, now a bustling new town in a territory en route to statehood.