Surgeon In Blue

by Scott McGaugh

  An 1876 Congressional investigation revealed the swindle. Others received reprimands but were not charged with crimes, but Silliman’s reputation did not suffer greatly. Four years later, he became a party to another shady mining venture, this time in New Mexico. He assessed gold ore in Taos and Rio Arriba Counties as equivalent to that discovered in California. Mines in the area never produced substantial quantities of gold and much of it was of marginal quality.

  A decade would pass following Letterman’s departure from the oil industry before California’s oil reserves could be reached and commercialized. By the late 1870s, productive wells near Pico Springs were in operation. Shortly thereafter, major oil production development took place not far from where Letterman and Peckham had searched for oil. One of the earliest oil fields developed by Union Oil was on property once owned by Philadelphia & California Petroleum. By the turn of the century, California had become the nation’s largest oil producer.

  So it was that Silliman’s assessment was ultimately validated long after the Lettermans had moved to San Francisco to begin another new life. After enduring the bloodshed of the Civil War; finding the only love of his life between battles; and embarking on a daring and futile quest in oil exploration, Jonathan Letterman returned to the profession he knew: medicine. The next chapter in his life would be filled with tribute and tragedy.

  11

  COMPASSIONATE CORONER

  “I have done my duty faithfully.”

  The face of San Francisco was continuing to change when Letterman returned there with his growing family in 1866. During the war it had developed into the leading port on the West Coast. More than 100 million dollars of gold and silver had been shipped through it. Waves of immigrants, beginning with the Chinese in the 1840s, flooded into an area whose borders were still marked by swamps and tidal inlets. Dirt streets fed paved thoroughfares that carried construction crews bound for waterfront dredging and fill projects to create more usable land and to control tidal flows. San Francisco was transforming itself from an isolated boomtown to a cosmopolitan city.

  The city was filled with optimism. Its leaders believed the postwar years would be an era of accelerating prosperity. Agriculture had expanded and prospered during the Civil War, while mining appeared to be a permanent cornerstone of the economy. The year the Letterman family arrived, the city government took control of the wharf from private operators. Soon construction crews leveled a hill on Rincon Point to create 300,000 cubic yards of material to fill in the bay in order to create more developable land and municipally controlled shipping facilities.

  The city bought and annexed large tracts of land after ownership disputes were resolved in court. Homes were bought and razed so primary avenues could be widened to accommodate a vibrant commercial district near the waterfront. The bay had become congested with steamer traffic, carrying passengers and freight bound for the East Coast and international destinations such as Panama and China.1

  Exports had doubled the previous two years. Manufactured goods and agricultural products now exceeded gold production. Major construction projects included a mile-long bridge to expand the metropolitan area and a new seawall at a cost of $1.5 million per mile.2 The prospect of a transcontinental railroad reaching the West Coast spawned rampant real estate speculation.

  In the first year following the Civil War, suffrage for African Americans was a dominant national issue as Congress adopted the second of two constitutional amendments, subject to states’ ratification. The Thirteenth Amendment was passed in January 1865, three months before Lee’s surrender, and banished involuntary servitude. The Fourteenth, passed in June 1866, granted citizenship to all persons who were born or naturalized in the United States, and prohibited states from abridging citizens’ life, liberty, or property ownership without due process.

  In San Francisco, however, the paramount post–Civil War issue wasn’t the freedom of former slaves. It was how to control thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of whom had come to California to work on the transcontinental railroad in the Sierras. As the railroad neared completion, newly unemployed Chinese swamped the city in the latter 1860s. Enormous anti-Chinese sentiment simmered there while the rest of the nation coped with newly emancipated slaves.

  The Anti-Coolie Association, the city’s Democratic power structure, and labor unions coalesced out of commonly held fears that the Chinese would take low-paying jobs away from Caucasians and somehow take control of the city. Hysterical claims of the impending degradation of the white race by hordes of Chinese immigrants surfaced in local newspapers. So, optimism contended with divisiveness when the Lettermans arrived. No longer an isolated outpost populated by miners and traders, it struggled with rapid expansion. During this decade, the city’s population would skyrocket from 58,800 in 1860 to nearly 150,000, making it the tenth largest city in the nation by 1870.3

  A stranger to the city, Letterman established a medical practice in the latter half of 1866. Of course, he was far from an anonymous doctor looking to practice medicine in an emerging West Coast city. Two years earlier, he had been highly praised in Washington when Congress institutionalized his philosophy of battlefield evacuation. Reviews of his Recollections began to be published in national medical journals and regional newspapers.

  He discovered former war colleagues had moved or been transferred to San Francisco, including the former general in chief, Henry Halleck. Halleck had fallen out of favor late in the Civil War and effectively had been exiled to the command of the Division of the Pacific on the West Coast. Although Letterman was a Democrat like McClellan, Halleck’s distaste for McClellan did not extend to Letterman.

  In the months leading up to his family’s move to San Francisco, Letterman’s oil exploration efforts had been the subject of regular updates in San Francisco newspapers, reports that usually characterized him as a medical pioneer in the Civil War.

  About a year after arriving in San Francisco, Jonathan Letterman decided to reenter public service, this time out of uniform. He sought elective office for the first time in his life when he agreed to run for coroner on the Democratic Party ticket. A man whose intellect ruled his life and who carefully corralled his passions, he might have seemed least likely to be an inspiring candidate. His demeanor was quiet and reserved to the point of aloofness, hardly the stuff of politics. But to fill their San Francisco slate, the Democrats needed a candidate for coroner, whose job was to investigate the causes and manner of death, particularly those of suspicious, unexplained, or violent origin. In Letterman they had a medical professional whose qualifications were beyond question. Their candidate carried a distinguished national reputation as a dedicated and honest medical practitioner and innovative administrator. This was an era in which the electorate typically voted for party slates of candidates, and those at the nonpolitical local level—coroner, harbor master, surveyor, justices of the peace, for example—were not expected to be ideologues.

  Letterman made his decision at a time when local politics had grown especially heated and hateful. The Democratic Party was locked in a battle with the Union Party for control of San Francisco and the state of California, where it had wielded power prior to the Civil War and looked to regain it. The Union Party, comprised of Republicans and Union Democrats, sought to retain the political control it had held during the war.

  The Democratic Party slate that Letterman joined was headed by Henry H. Haight, a prominent San Francisco attorney, as their candidate for governor. The former state Republican Party chairman in the late 1850s, Haight had become a Union Democrat during the Civil War when he disagreed with some of Lincoln’s administrative policies. Previously, he edited a “free soil” newspaper in Missouri and was devoutly religious. He agreed to run as the Democratic Party candidate whose platform emphasized economic development, ethnic purity, and reform.

  Letterman had agreed to run for office on behalf of a political party whose platform included a resolution stating: “[W]e believe it impracticable to maintain
republican institutions based on the suffrages of the African Americans, Chinese, and Indians, and that the doctrines avowed by the radical leaders of indiscriminate suffrage, regardless of race, color, or qualification, if carried into practice, would end in the degradation of the white race and the speedy destruction of the government.”4 However, Letterman had served in an army dedicated to preserving the Union and ending slavery, and there is no evidence he supported the Democrats’ strident and overt racism.

  His Union Party opponent was incumbent coroner Stephen Randall Harris, a former mayor of San Francisco in the early 1850s who had returned to politics in 1864. An ambitious reporter new to San Francisco, Samuel Clemens, lobbied for his appointment as coroner to complete the term of his predecessor, who had died in office. In 1865, voters then elected Harris to the post. At the head of the Union slate was George Gorham, as its candidate for governor. Although his party was stalwartly anti-Chinese, Gorham took a pragmatic approach to the issue. He foresaw a future of economic trade with China and noted at the state party convention: “[L]et me suggest that the Chinese now in our midst and those who may come hereafter, must either work, steal, beg or starve. It would be difficult to make an argument to show that the creation of so large a number of street beggars, or of thieves, would be compensated by the fact that none but men of the European race were permitted to earn a livelihood in California. As to starvation, the mere word makes me shudder. So, after all, if we would not have the Chinaman steal, beg, or starve, he must be allowed to work.”5

  On September 4, 1867, voters carried the Democrats and with them Letterman into office on largely white supremacy sentiment. Letterman received 10,509 votes to 7,000 for Harris. Only the county clerk and surveyor’s local races produced a wider margin of victory.6 Mary appeared pleased with the result when she wrote her father, “Dr. Letterman has made his debut in politics and was elected coroner. . . . He found many influential friends in all parties and got many Republican votes. General Halleck was especially kind and is very influential here. The Democrats are encouraged with their victory and a prominent Republican admits ‘it was a first.’”7

  As Letterman prepared to take office six weeks later, on Sunday, October 27, Mary rose early and dressed for a 9:00 a.m. Catholic mass service. Letterman was long accustomed to Mary’s devotion to her faith and likely anticipated a routine Sunday morning in the Letterman household. With no warning, convulsive pain erupted from deep within Mary’s stomach. She reflexively vomited and crumpled to the floor. Severe cramps and diarrhea followed, leading Letterman to think cholera had struck her. Acute gastroenteritis became more prevalent in San Francisco during the summer and fall, usually due to contaminated food or water, and residents frequently called it “summer’s complaint.” Typical treatments at the time were laxatives, calomel, and natural diuretics such as smartweed.

  They failed to ease Mary’s pain as convulsions gripped her body. Concern changed to worry as Letterman sent for two friends, one of whom was a doctor. They, too, grew alarmed and one, prominent undertaker Atkins Massey, spent the night with the Lettermans.8 It became a night of unbearable agony as Mary suffered. After the vomiting subsided in the early hours of October 28, Jonathan saw clouds of pallid death spread across her face. His wife of four years faded with each passing hour. Mary spoke little at the end, only saying she was prepared to die if it was God’s will, and asked Jonathan to raise their small daughters, one-year-old Ann Madeline and three-year-old Mary Catherine, as Catholics. She also asked that if Letterman remarried, it would be to a Catholic.

  At 3:00 a.m. on Monday morning Mary died, eleven days after her thirty-fourth birthday. After being responsible for more than 100,000 sick and wounded soldiers, Jonathan Letterman had misdiagnosed his wife’s condition. As he treated her for cholera, she slowly bled to death internally. An autopsy the following day revealed a decayed blood vessel near her womb. Letterman buried his wife on October 29 at Lone Mountain Cemetery, a graveyard atop a five-hundred-foot hill in western San Francisco.9

  In three weeks Letterman would become coroner. The father of two young girls faced a life of practicing medicine during the day and holding coroner’s inquests at night. There were no relatives nearby to take care of his daughters. His widowed mother, Anna, was sixty-seven years old. His brother William also was a doctor who had served in the Civil War as a contract surgeon. Now thirty-five years of age, unmarried, and in private medical practice in Baltimore, William was developing a second career as a coal geologist and West Virginia land acquisition agent for firms in Boston, Baltimore, and New York. His other brother, Craig, was an unmarried farmer in Duffau, Texas. Neither were candidates to replace a lost mother.

  Letterman turned to his wife’s family, the only relatives he knew who had the ability to care for his daughters. Mary’s brother, Charles Carroll Lee, was a doctor who had served as an assistant surgeon in the Union regular army in the Civil War. Lee had taken Letterman to the Needwood family home in 1863, where Letterman met his future wife. Charles and his wife, Helen, had moved to New York City in 1867 and had a twoyear-old daughter, Sarah. Mary had been close to Charles, and it seemed natural that Jonathan would turn to his brother-in-law, a man he knew well and who had substantial family resources. Cassie and Madeline would be raised by the Lee family in privileged surroundings.

  A devastated and lonely Jonathan Letterman took office in November 1867. Just as he had done in the army, he had to separate anguish from duty. The local government provided neither a dedicated office nor a morgue for the city coroner. He practiced medicine during the day and remained on call when a body was discovered in suspicious or unexplained circumstances. Letterman also was responsible for determining the cause and manner of death in cases in which a doctor had not been present. He had the authority to hold inquests in which a jury was impaneled and testimony given, resulting in a verdict that could assign responsibility and influence how a deceased’s property was handled. Letterman also was responsible for identifying unknown bodies and making burial arrangements for the unclaimed. With minimal local government resources at his disposal, he asked for favors from Massey and other undertakers when he needed to hold a body pending an autopsy, an inquest, or identification. A veteran of battlefield improvisation, Letterman improvised as coroner.

  Night inquests were common, often two in a single evening and frequently attended by newspaper reporters. Most were straightforward and reflected the common lives and tribulations of local residents, and the jury rendered prompt rulings upon evidence presented by Letterman and eyewitness testimony. The following newspaper account, from Letterman’s second term as coroner, gives a typical account of the proceedings.

  Coroner Letterman held two inquests last evening. In the case of Elbert Brandt, Otto Johnson, local police officer, testified he heard the report of a pistol, and on the southwest corner of Taylor and Lombard Streets found the deceased lying on the sidewalk, shot through the head and holding a pistol in his right hand. He lived but a few minutes.

  Henry Lot testified that he was walking on Taylor Street, between Greenwich and Lombard Streets, about nine o’clock in the evening, with a girl whom Brandt was courting, when they met him and walking along together. Brandt asked the girl why she did not talk to him, but she made no reply. He then told her that that was perhaps the last time she would see him alive. I told him he must not talk that way; if the girl did not like him he should do no such thing. He said he was crazy to-night, but would not be to-morrow. We then separated and that was the last time I saw him.

  VERDICT: The Jury found that Elbert Brand was a native of Germany, aged 27 years, and came to his death from suicide, by shooting himself through the head with a pistol, on or about June 6th, 1871.

  In the case of Murray Mitchell, the Jury found that he was a native of Scotland, aged 60 years, and that he came to his death from suicide, by cutting his throat with a razor and jumping into a well, on or about the 29th of May, 1871.10

  Profound depression and a chronic
stomach ailment made his new career more challenging. He had lost his wife and had sent his children to distant relatives with minimal prospects of seeing them in the near future. Persistent dysentery, the signature ailment of Civil War veterans, sapped his energy and potentially could become life threatening. Nearly 300,000 Union army soldiers had suffered from acute and chronic dysentery in the Civil War.11 Legions of veterans like Letterman faced physical and emotional problems in the years following the war. One postwar study revealed that nearly four in ten Civil War veterans suffered both physical and mental issues. Nearly one in five had heart ailments.12

  Within a year of being elected, Letterman assumed additional responsibilities. In November 1868, Governor Haight appointed Letterman surgeon general of California’s militia, with the rank of colonel. The militia had been reorganized by California’s legislature two years earlier to become the state’s national guard. Staff organization, training requirements, and equipment and arms provisions were codified. A more formal state military structure required a medical professional to oversee military medical aspects of a new militia. No one in California was better qualified for the position than Letterman.

  As Letterman neared the end of his first two-year term, he issued a report to the Board of Supervisors that demonstrated he had developed a remarkably accurate view of his adopted city. He estimated the city population at 150,000 a few hundred more than what the U.S. Census Bureau would give as the city’s population less than a year later. His report revealed Letterman’s shock at the living conditions of many of those residents, perhaps reminiscent of the squalid army camps he encountered when he took medical charge of the Army of the Potomac.