American and Catholic: The premature synthesis of the San Francisco Irish

The tension between the terms American and Catholic,, is at least as old as the 1840s, when large numbers of Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States. The attempts of American Catholics through the succeeding 130 years to resolve that tension has spawned, in our day an increasingly sophisticated body of American Catholic history. But since the tension has been so pervasive, engaging theological, philosophical, political, and social issues, there seems to be little danger that we shall ever fully comprehend it (and thus put the historians concerned with it out of business!) One of the most important complicating factors is the fact that Catholic has never been a univocal term in American history. Although the public image of the American Catholic Church has been, until recently, that of a monolithic fortress, ruled by larger-than-life bishops and cardinals, historians are discovering that there has always been a constant series of struggles and rivalries behind the seemingly placid walls. The present essay is an attempt to investigate one type of those struggles, the unequal contest between two of the ethnic groups which make up American Catholicism. Its thesis is that the stimulation of ethnic hostility was an integral part of the effort of one American Catholic group to resolve the tension between the terms American and Catholic. The evidence for the essay comes from one city during one particular period of time: San Francisco during the Progressive Era. Neither the city nor the time was randomly chosen. San Francisco was selected because it was, from the eastern perspective which tends to dominate American historical writing, on the edge, remote, removed from the constant swirl of politics, ecclesiastical and national. But on a more mundane level, San Francisco was a typical American city. It had its rich, such as the railroad barons, as great a percentage of immigrants in its population as Chicago or Philadelphia, its political bosses like Chris Buckley or Abe Ruef, its scandals and its violence. By 1890 it was the eighth largest city in the country. Despite the claims of its more fervent boosters, past and present, it must be admitted that, besides its location, there was little to distinguish San Francisco from most other American cities at the turn of the century. Doubtless the evidence in this essay suffers from an excessively local focus; on the other hand, the American experience has been the sum of seemingly disparate local occurrences. A city removed yet representative: by looking at it, perhaps we can see through the national mirror a bit less darkly

The Recovery of the First History of Alta California: Antonio María Osio’s La historia de Alta California

The transformation of Alta California was as sudden as it was unexpected. From a population of less than 15,000 gente de razón [literally, people with the capacity to reason, meaning people born into Christianity; that is, any non-Indian people] in the mid-1840s, it contained over 100,000 inhabitants in 1850 and almost a quarter of a million two years later. Swarming over the landscape, hostile to the system of land ownership and use that had developed over the previous half century, the newcomers, imbued with their longstanding belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority, went where they willed and took what they wanted. The Californios [any Mexican raised, or later, born and raised in California] adopted various strategies to meet this invasion. Some participated in the institutions set up by the conquerors, sitting in the 1849 Constitutional Convention and in the early state legislatures. Others prepared to defend themselves through North American courts and land commissions. Others withdrew from public life and public view, in the hope that they would be left alone. Others left and returned to Mexico. This paper tells the story of another strategy, one man\u27s attempt to preserve a world through the creation of history and autobiography. On April 4, 1851, in the city of Santa Clara, Antonio María Osio, who had been a bureaucratic functionary and officeholder in Mexican California for two decades, presented Father José María Suárez del Real with a densely written one hundred and ten page manuscript. In a cover letter, Osio told Suarez del Real that what the priest had asked him to do, write the history of California, was beyond his ability. But he had decided, Osio said, to write a letter, a relación of events since 1815 and especially of what I have known and seen since 1825

The Inflation of an Overdone Business: Economic Origins of San Francisco Vigilantes

Although most Americans would probably spontaneously associate the word --vigilante·· with the wild west, cattle theives, range wars, and the like. the largest vigilante movement in American history was urban in location and commercial in character. In San Francisco in the summer of 1856, six thousand vigilantes, led by the city\u27s mercantile upper crust, established a de facto government. Claiming that crime was too often unpunished and politics too often corrupt, the importers and wholesale merchants of San Francisco organized a private police force which hanged four men and forced another thirty or so to leave the city. (Contemporary San Franciscans would doubtless agree that this was heavy punishment indeed!) The businessmen claimed that they were reluctant vigilantes, public-minded citizens forced by crisis to step outside the letter of the law to preserve its spirit. The voice of a whole people, stated the vigilantes in a public address, ·\u27demanded union and organization as the only means of making our laws effective. 1 For about a century, most historians tended to accept the vigilantes\u27 version of events. Recently, however, a series of investigations has cast serious doubt on the vigilante picture of gold rush San Francisco as a crime-ridden and corrupt city. It is now fairly clear that, in fact, there was no crime wave which forced supposedly virtuous citizens to resort to lynch law. Nor does it seem that the political life of the city was terribly corrupt and venal, even by nineteenth century standards. Current scholars are therefore casting about for alternative explanations of San Francisco vigilantism. There is little agreement among them. Roger Lotchin, for instance, attempts to preserve a variant of the \u27·public interest interpretation. In his view, San Francisco vigilantism was an effort of the self-perceived legitimates to impose stability and order on the colorful, lawless metropolis. Peter Decker takes a more group-oriented view. He maintains that the businessmen-vigilantes were attempting to maintain if not regain, occupational status. Richard Maxwell Brown, the leading historian of American vigilantism, somewhat combines the two approaches by arguing that the vigilantes were interested in restoring confidence in San Francisco\u27s municipal and financial stability. 2But there has been as yet little systematic effort to relate the structure of the market in which San Francisco businessmen operated to the phenomenon of organized violence. In my view, this is unfortunate, for the vigilantes\u27 actions are largely explainable by the terms of such an investigation

Revolt at Mission San Gabriel, October 25, 1785: Judicial Proceedings and Related Documents

In this section, we present English translations of the Spanish documents which relate to the planned Mission San Gabriel uprising in 1785. The documents come from two sources, the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City and the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library. The documents from the Archivo General are located in ramo Provincias Intern.as, tomo 120, expediente 2. Our translation follows the order in which the documents are presented in this source. The first paragraph is the title page of the expediente. The documents follow as they are arranged, with one exception: the questions which the interrogator posed to the four witnesses are only listed once in the documents. The witnesses\u27 answers are preceded by a brief phrase, a la primera, (to the first [question]), a la segunda (to the second [question]), and so forth. For ease of reading, we decided to repeat the questions before each answer given by each of the witnesses. The Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library documents are taken from the California Mission Documents collection. The numbering of these documents has changed since the 1947 publication of Fr. Maynard Geiger\u27s volume Calendar of Documents in the Santa Barbara Mission Archives. Archive-Library Director Lynn Bremer has posted new finding guides with the updated numbers online at http://www.sbmal.org/ histdocs.html. We regret that space limitations make it impossible for us to present the Spanish text along side our English translation. We are working to make the Spanish text available online, and, if we are successful, we will provide you with the web link by way of the Correo, the CMSA electronic newsletter

What They Brought: the Alta California Franciscans Before 1769

For a long period beginning in the nineteenth century, historians of California generally characterized missionaries during the Spanish and Mexican eras in one of two ways: as heroic agents of civilization or nefarious purveyors of destruction. The heroic interpretation became dominant in works influenced by the Spanish Revival movement, and it was also evident in the writings of the great Franciscan historians Zephryn Engelhardt, Maynard J. Geiger, and Francis F. Guest, all of whom based their work on the trove of documents at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library. In the 1980s and 1990s, the nefarious interpretation became especially pronounced, due to a number of books that appeared in connection with the controversies surrounding the proposed canonization of Junipero Serra and the commemoration of the Columbus quincentenary.1 In the past fifteen years, however, mission historians have consciously shifted their perspective to focus on Indians. ln this new framework, the missionaries have been, very properly, de-centered. They tend to be regarded as an important set of people who-along with soldiers and settlers-made up part of the context and shaped part of the environment in which native Californians were active agents. As one set of actors among many, they were shaped in complex ways by all those with whom they interacted. Thus it is possible to see them in a more nuanced light.2 This essay is in that vein, for we endeavor to move beyond celebration or condemnation. Using Junipero Serra as an exemplar, we seek to determine how a person\u27s identity as a Spanish Franciscan might affect both his choice to become a missionary in New Spain and how he lived out that choice. For Serra and his religious brothers, one of the most exciting things about Alta California was that they were in the first group of Spanish colonists to arrive there. They believed that elsewhere in New Spain, settlers, soldiers, and officials had oppressed the native peoples and inhibited the spread of the gospel. They thought that Alta California offered them a chance to set things right. They idealized Alta California as a fertile and inviting field. These missionaries did not realize that their assessment was deeply colored by the militant religious suppositions they had brought from early modern Spain and by their struggles with other Spanish colonists over how to treat indigenous peoples, a question that had divided religious and civil authorities in New Spain since the early sixteenth century. They viewed Alta California and its inhabitants through a lens that owed far more to the history of Spain and central Mexico than to anything or anyone that actually existed in Alta California. What Junipero Serra wanted to accomplish with the native peoples of Alta California was shaped by what he and his order had learned from their experiences in Mallorca, Mexico City, the Sierra Gorda, and Baja California. We chose to focus on Serra because he was father president of the Alta California missions, because his activities produced a rich documentary record, and because he has come to symbolize the entire California missionary enterprise. However, a cautionary note is in order. Serra\u27s voice was not the only missionary voice. Indeed, even during his lifetime, his views were far from unchallenged. In 1771 his former student and closest missionary companion, Francisco Pal6u, wrote to Mexico City to criticize Serra for wanting to establish too many missions too quickly. In 1775 his religious superior in Mexico City, exasperated by Serra\u27s tendency to act without sufficient consultation, publicly chastised him and severely limited his powers in a strongly worded letter that he sent to all the California missionaries. We can learn much about the missionary experience by examining Serra- but not everything. His fellow missionaries could and did disagree with him. Tensions within the missionary community were more common than is often realized.

Uncertainty on the Mission Frontier: Missionary Recruitment and Institutional Stability in Alta California in the 1790s

The Alta California missions have been at the center of the historiography of Spanish California for over a century. The history of Alta California, for instance, has often been presented as beginning with a sacred expedition and the expansion of the mission system served as a convenient symbol to chart the spread of the Spanish colonial presence along the Pacific coast. 1 In the 1980s, the combination of two controversial events, the beatification and potential canonization of Fray Junipero Serra and preparations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus\u27s voyage, intensified public interest in the effects of the missions in California and elsewhere. The literature that ensued, often impassioned and both polemical and scholarly in nature, has benefitted the study of colonial California in a number of ways.2 For example, since the quincentennial touched both North and South America, it imbued the study of the California missions with a much greater realization that these institutions were a part of a wider evangeli cal enterprise in the New World in general and New Spain in particular.3 Bolton\u27s concept of the borderlands has been revived in a more sophisticated form and it offers new ways of conceptualizing and understanding the encounters among Europeans, mestizos, and indigenous peoples throughout the U.S. Southwest and elsewhere.4 Also, all throughout the region, detailed study of the mission records, combined with a close sensitivity to oral traditions, has allowed anthropologists, ethnographers, and historians to reconstruct the lives and experiences of Native Americans, including Native Californians, with much greater precision and nuance than ever before.5 California scholars are now themselves engaging in the type of family reconstitution that has enlivened and enriched the study of colonial New England over the past three decades.

The Representation of Junípero Serra in California History

Junipero Serra was the subject of the first published book written in Alta California. In September 1784, a week or so after he had celebrated Serra\u27s funeral Mass, Francisco Palóu, Serra\u27s former student and closest friend, returned to his post at Mission San Francisco de Asis. He spent the next months writing Serra\u27s biography which he entitled Historical Account of the Life and Apostolic Labors of the Venerable Father Fray Junipero Serra. Palóu took this manuscript with him when he returned to Mexico City in the summer of 1785. He circulated it among a number of his companions at the Colegio de San Fernando. At their suggestion he added a final chapter that dealt with Serra\u27s virtues. The completed book was published by the Mexico City publishing house of Don Felipe de Zuniga y Ontiveros in 1787.1 Palóu had a number of purposes in writing this biography. One was personal. Junipero Serra had been his teacher, mentor, and friend. Palóu\u27s preservation of his memory in this volume was an act of personal homage, what the ancient Romans might have called pietas. The relationship between Palóu and Serra had been extremely close. At the beginning of the final chapter Palóu spoke of the intimate friendship and love I owed him from the time they first met in Mallorca almost half a century before. Palóu was the first person to whom Serra had confided his desire to go to America as a missionary. They worked together in the Sierra Gorda for eight years. They were slated to go to Texas together but the destruction of Mission San Saba in 1758 by a Wichita, Comanche, and Caddo force thwarted that assignment. They both worked out of the Colegio de San Fernando for the next eight years. They spent a year close to each other in Baja California before Serra left for Alta California in 1769. When the Franciscans transferred the Baja California missions to the Dominicans in 1773, Serra begged Palóu, then in Baja California, not to go back to Mexico City. He hoped, he wrote, that Palóu would go to Alta California so that we should live and die there together. They spent considerable time together at Mission San Carlos before Palóu founded Mission San Francisco in 1776. When the two were at Santa Clara a few months before Serra\u27s death, Palóu wrote that Serra shed many tears; nor did I shed any fewer tears, for I feared this would be the last time we would see each other. For Palóu, writing Serra\u27s biography was an act of devotion to his closest companion. He presented Serra as a dedicated and selfless priest, impelled only by love for all of God\u27s children, to spread the message of salvation and civilization to the farthest corners of the globe.

Religion and Non-Partisan Politics in Gold Rush San Francisco

For nearly a century, many historians of gold rush San Francisco seemed intent on standing Santayana\u27s celebrated axiom on its head: the more they studied the past, th emore they tended to repeat it. Specifically, historians who studied the great 1856 vigilance committee tended to imitate their subject and divide into two armed camps. In 1856, the pro-vigilance Chronicle thundered, This community must be purged from its dregs, the creatures, whoever they are, who have poisoned the fountains of society and made the place as loathsome as a charnel house. Most subsequent historians, led by Hubert Howe Bancroft, took to Fort Gunnybags. They argued that the pervasive presence of crime and political corruption in San Francisco left law-abiding citizens no other choice but to step outside the letter of the law to preserve its spirit

Many and Brilliant Lights

In celebration of our 50th anniversary, we are proud to announce the publication of Many and Brillian Lights, edited by Robert Senkewicz. Discover 50 treasures of the Archive-Library with essays from 30 historians, archeologists, museum professionals, musicians, and more!https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1358/thumbnail.jp