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...