page_title: Lansford Hastings
section_title: Later years
hierarchical_section_title: Lansford Hastings / Later years
caption_attribution_description: English: Petition by the residents of the western division of the proposed territory of Arizona, addressed to President Abraham Lincoln, and signed by John C. Fremont (among others). The handwritten manuscript petition asks that Lincoln appoint residents of the territory to provisional government offices. The petition also requests that attorney Lansford W. Hastings, a respected Arizona attorney, receive a government appointment as well.[1]
context_page_description: Lansford Warren Hastings was an American explorer and Confederate soldier. He is best remembered as the developer of Hastings Cutoff, a claimed shortcut to California across what is now the state of Utah, a factor in the Donner Party disaster of 1846. He was a Major in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.
context_section_description: After serving as a captain in the California Battalion during the Mexican War, Hastings again took up the practice of law. He married Charlotte Toler in 1848 and was a delegate to the 1849 California Constitutional Convention. In the late 1850s he moved his family to Yuma, Arizona, where he served as postmaster and as a territorial judge. During the Civil War, Hastings sided with the South. In 1864, he travelled to Richmond, Virginia, where he met with Confederate President Jefferson Davis to gain his support for a plan to separate California from the Union and unite it with the Confederacy. Upon meeting him, President Davis promoted Hastings to the rank of Major in the Confederate States Army, and asked him to assemble a military unit in Arizona, with the aim of defending California. However, the so-called Hastings Plot came to little, as the war ended early the following year.
  After the end of the war, many disgruntled former Confederates left the United States to establish colonies in Brazil. Hastings visited the region, made arrangements with the Brazilian government, and wrote The Emigrant's Guide to Brazil (1867) to attract potential colonists. He died at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in 1870, possibly of yellow fever, while conducting a shipload of settlers to his colony at Santarém.
caption: Petition to President Abraham Lincoln by citizens of Arizona, as well as John C. Frémont, seeking an appointment for Lansford Hastings. Ca. 1863.
exif: {}