Colonel David L. Smoot (1835-1900): From Confederate Leader to San Francisco District Attorney

Smoot Family Gravestone

Plot 37

David Lowe Smoot was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1835 and rose to prominence during the Civil War as a Confederate officer. He commanded a regiment in the Virginia artillery and earned the honorific “Colonel,” by which he was known the rest of his life. Like many Southern men of his generation, Smoot’s loyalties during the war would forever mark his public reputation.

One telling episode occurred when Smoot and a companion attempted to run the Union blockade with a cargo of whiskey aboard the sloop Bonita. Intercepted by the U.S. steamer Eureka while making for Maddox Creek, Virginia, they tried to throw their cargo overboard before capture. Both men were arrested and lodged in Washington’s Old Capitol Prison.

Wool Cap made by Smoot while POW

After the war, Smoot resumed his legal career in Virginia, but in July 1876 he and his family left Alexandria for San Francisco. The Alexandria Gazette reported his departure with regret, describing him as “a gentleman of much popularity and legal ability.” Once in California, Smoot quickly integrated into the Bay Area’s legal community. Within three years he had been elected District Attorney of San Francisco (1880–1882), the office responsible for prosecuting criminal cases. While his term produced no landmark trials remembered today, his election underscored the respect he had won in his adopted city despite his Confederate past.

Following his time as DA, Smoot moved across the Bay to Oakland, where he practiced law until the 1890s. He later retired to Hayward, but remained active in fraternal and civic circles, particularly the Masons. He died in February 1900 at the age of 65 at the East Oakland home of his son-in-law Benjamin Harvey. 

Smoot never publicly renounced his Confederate allegiance, at least in the records that survive, and his life presents a striking contrast: a onetime Confederate colonel captured smuggling whiskey through a blockade, later serving as the elected chief prosecutor of San Francisco. Today, he is remembered less for any enduring legal legacy than as an emblem of how former Confederates remade their lives far from the South in the decades after the Civil War.

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Sources: San Francisco Call, Feb. 12–13, 1900; Alexandria Gazette, July 31, 1876; Virginia Chronicle notice re: capture of the sloop Bonita; SeekingMyRoots genealogy files, Oakland Tribune, Find a Grave