“Master of Ceremonies”: The World of Peter Biggs in Civil War–Era Los Angeles

Abstract

This article reconstructs the life and times of Peter Biggs, a free African American man in 1850s and 1860s Los Angeles, revealing the social and economic niche that he fashioned between the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War. Biggs’s little-known biography illuminates a forgotten moment in the temporal and spatial history of American racial construction. In April 1865, a group of pro-Confederate Angelenos was arrested for celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and transported to the local Union headquarters at Drum Barracks. One man stood out from the group. Identified in newspaper accounts as “Peter Biggs, a negro,” the free African American barber was, according to one memoir, placed in the charge of six Union cavalrymen and “made to foot it” some twenty miles south to Drum Barracks, with “an iron chain and ball attached to his ankle.” The ball and chain highlighted this former slave’s “uncertain position” in Civil War Los Angeles, and yet, Biggs appeared “unfazed” to passers-by. Having already proclaimed his “ardent attachment to the cause of Secession,” Biggs gave “three cheers for Jeff Davis” when meeting acquaintances along the road.1 How might historians understand the actions of this former slave and free black barber in Civil War Los Angeles?