Dirty Deeds: Land, Violence, and the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee by Nancy Taniguchi (review)

It has been more than a decade since any historian has taken up the subject of the San Francisco Vigilance Committees, violent movements that shook the frontier city in 1851 and 1856. Hubert Howe Bancroft and Theodore Hittell, late nineteenth-century historians of California, wrote the classic accounts of San Francisco vigilantism, seeing it as a noble effort to fight frontier lawlessness. Works by Ethington, Senkewicz, Decker, and Lotchin later challenged these accounts, locating the origins of the vigilante movements in the financial, ethnic, religious, and political rivalries of Gold Rush San Francisco.¹ The sources and subjects thoroughly examined, there seemed little left to add, until Taniguchi made a startling discovery at the Sutro branch of the California State Library—a copy of the minutes of the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee.

Relying on these detailed minutes, long believed to be lost, Taniguchi offers a new angle for understanding the 1856 Vigilance Committee, the second of two related vigilante movements in the city. A struggle over valuable waterfront property, she argues, was a significant factor motivating the leaders—or “executives”—of the 1856 committee. Among the many abductions, secret trials, banishments, and executions carried out by the Committee, the arrest of former San Francisco County Supervisor Alfred A. Green was key. Green had recently come into possession of the so-called Pueblo Papers, documents showing that the city was formerly a Mexican pueblo. Amid the complex legal battles over California land claims in the wake of the Mexican-American War, the Pueblo Papers offered important evidence in determining the legal ownership of valuable land on the waterfront. As it turns out, they bolstered the property claims of several of the executives of the Vigilance Committee. Most of the victims of the committee were political allies of their nemesis, David Broderick, California’s leading northern Democrat who held some of the competing claims to the waterfront.

With Green in the Committee’s custody, the executives demanded that he turn over the Pueblo documents. After much wrangling, Green secured his freedom by agreeing to sell the papers to the executives for $12,000. Later, after years of legal proceedings, the executives prevailed in the courts. Ironically, as Taniguchi points out, theirs was a pyrrhic victory since the completion of the railroad shifted the economic action away from the waterfront in the years to come.

Although Taniguchi provides an important missing piece to understanding the puzzle of vigilantism, it is not clear how central the land issue was to the larger vigilante phenomenon. Taniguchi’s complicated account provides little evidence that the land conflict was critical to the outbreak of vigilantism in 1856, given the other political, ethnic, and religious tensions dividing the city. Moreover, the executives’ determination to secure the Pueblo Papers seems to have grown as their public support declined and their financial debts rose. Was maintaining title to the waterfront lands a crucial motivation for the Vigilance Committee or a secondary strategy of the executives to redress their growing financial losses?

Either way, we still learn relatively little about the motivations of the thousands of other San Franciscans who rallied to the Committee’s public meetings, parades, and executions in the spring and summer of 1856. Nor was land an issue—as far as we know—in the earlier 1851 vigilance committee, which otherwise bore many similarities to the second outbreak in 1856. Although Taniguchi does not discuss these issues, her exciting archival discovery and careful reconstruction of the Committee’s connection to the land issue is an important contribution that future historians of frontier San Francisco will have to address.