John F. Godfrey

John Franklin Godfrey (June 23, 1839 – June 29, 1885) was a sailor, a soldier and officer in the U.S. Civil War, a city attorney of Los Angeles, California, and an attorney in private practice who, among other activities, represented people arrested for operating businesses on Sundays.

Personal John Franklin Godfrey was born on June 23, 1839 in Bangor, Maine, the son of John Edwards Godfrey, a Central Maine lawyer. Young Godfrey attended Bangor High School. and two years later he married again.

Godfrey died suddenly on June 29, 1885, leaving a wife and four or five children. A memorial service attracted nearly every lawyer in the city, and burial took place in the family plot.

Vocation Sailing and sheepherding Instead of attending college, Godfrey became a merchant sailor at about age 15 at first against the wishes of his parents, "but with their final consent that he might try the life for a year." He shipped on the Young Eagle to New Brunswick and Liverpool, England, thence on the Northland to New Orleans and Texas. In another ship he sailed as far as Buenos Ayres in South America. Having pursued sailing for two years he left ship there and became a sheepherder. Eventually, "in partnership with several other Americans—his brother among the number," he secured the leasehold of a large estate and "the proprietorship of a band of sheep."

Military Carte de visite of Lieutenant Colonel Godfrey by J. P. & F. W. Hardy 1864 At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Godfrey returned to the United States and at age 21 he enlisted as a private in the First Maine Cavalry, but in two weeks he had secured an appointment as a first lieutenant in the First Maine Battery, Light Artillery. In August 1862, Godfrey received an order from General Butler in New Orleans detaching him from the battery and giving him permission to raise a company of cavalry in the city. He applied for a captaincy of one of them, and received the order to raise the company (Company C, 1st Louisiana Cavalry, US). As Captain of Company C, Godfrey, had participated in a large number of expeditions, skirmishes and battles against the Confederates in Louisiana, including the Siege of Port Hudson (May 23 - July 9, 1863), and the Battle of Clinton (June 3, 1863). By 1864 he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel with the Second Maine Cavalry. He resigned from the Army in summer of that year because of ill health.

One of his clients was the Total Wreck Mining Company, which was seeking a patent. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in a successful urging of this claim, and returned with J.M. Requa of New York, the company president.

Godfrey was active in the California Democratic Party as early as August 1876. That December, he was elected Los Angeles city attorney on the Democratic and People's tickets, and in 1878 he was reelected on the Workingman's ticket. Also in 1878, he was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for California's Second Constitutional Convention. In 1880 he received the Greenback-Labor nomination for Congress in California's 4th district, but lost the election.

Godfrey and Stephen M. White represented a group of defendants who in 1882 were prosecuted for having violated the Sunday closing laws that had been in effect in Los Angeles for the preceding nineteen years. Answering a prosecution against saloonkeeper Jacob Phillipi, who had "knowingly and willfully" kept his business open on Sunday, Godfrey argued that the law was being enforced only against "one class" of business, that of saloons, and he compared the prosecution to that of the burning of witches in Salem, Massachusetts. The jury was unable to return a verdict, seven for conviction and five for acquittal, and it was dismissed.