By Brandon Claycomb

Special to the Reporter

When the Civil War began, it took a month to travel by boat and the Panamanian railroad from the Washington Territory to Washington, D.C. That distance and the region’s small population ensured that few territorial soldiers would serve with the Union armies in the east. However, the war did come to Washington eventually in the form of Union veterans who founded the politically influential lodges of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR).

Issaquah’s most prominent Civil War veteran was George Tibbetts, who settled in 1872 along the creek that still bears his name. Tibbetts had been only 16 years old when he enlisted with the 4th New Hampshire infantry in 1861, and he stayed with that regiment until the end of the war except for seven months spent in Confederate prisons. Like so many others, he then headed west, stopping in Missouri long enough to marry before continuing on to Oregon and then Washington.

As he began his many successful business ventures, including a farm, a store, a hotel, and a coach line, Tibbetts also helped organize the first of the nearly one hundred GAR posts that would eventually form around the state. Members of these posts transformed their military camaraderie into business and political relationships that lasted for decades.

Issaquah’s GAR meetings hint at two of the changes the war wrought locally. First, there was the matter of shifting partisanship. Washington had initially leaned Democratic, in part because Presidents Pierce and Buchanan offered territorial appointments as favors to men who had helped elect them back east. (One such appointee, Gov. Richard Gholson, actually deserted his office following President Lincoln’s election in order to agitate unsuccessfully for secession in his native Kentucky.)

After the war, immigrating Union veterans helped turn Washington into a long-time Republican stronghold. The town leaders who met at Issaquah’s GAR post probably did not invariably support Republican candidates, but like GAR members across the country, a sizable majority likely answered the call to former soldiers to “vote as you shot.”

A second effect of the Civil War was the rise in status of African-Americans like Clark Harris. Social and legal equality would continue to be denied black Americans for many decades more, and if the war ended slavery, it did not end prejudice. Still, African-American veterans at least sometimes joined their white fellows to commemorate their shared service to their country, and this inclusion shows some of the progress won by the successful fight to preserve the Union.

 

Brandon Claycomb is a volunteer with the Issaquah History Museums.

 

To learn more about the Civil War’s impact in the Pacific Northwest, attend Territorial Voices: A Civil War Reader’s Theater at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 12 at the Historic Issaquah Depot, 78 First Ave. N.E. The event, sponsored by the Issaquah History Museums, is free and open to the public.