Their plans rested on the cooperation of Colonel ( Brevet Brigadier General) Albert Sidney Johnston, headquartered in Benicia, California, who commanded all the Federal troops of the Department of the Pacific. Secession Crisis on the West Coast ĭuring the secession crisis following Lincoln's election as President of the United States in 1860, a group of Southern sympathizers in California made plans to secede with Oregon to form a ' Pacific Republic'. Attempts by the Confederacy to buy or seize ships for commerce raiding on the West Coast were thwarted by alert Union officials and the Pacific Squadron.

The last of these commerce raiders, CSS Shenandoah, fired the last shot of the war in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska.

Operations were directed against Confederate irregulars in California and strong garrisons were placed in Southern California and southern New Mexico Territory to control the region which had strong secessionist sympathies.Ĭonfederate States Navy warships operated in the Pacific Ocean, but the naval operations did not succeed in interrupting commerce to the Eastern United States. Union and Confederate regular forces did not meet directly within the Pacific Department except in New Mexico Territory. The operations of Union volunteer troop detachments, primarily from California, some from Oregon, and a few companies from Washington Territory, were directed mostly against Indigenous Americans in the theater. The theater was encompassed by the Department of the Pacific that included the states of California, Oregon, and Nevada, the territories of Washington, Utah, and later Idaho.

The Pacific coast theater of the American Civil War consists of major military operations in the United States on the Pacific Ocean and in the states and Territories west of the Continental Divide.

Union navy in the civil war