Talk:San Francisco Committee of Vigilance

message: This article doesn't even metion the 1851 Committee, which was specifically founded to FIGHT racial attacks (on Chileans). As Stewert noted in his book on the 1851 Committee, "Committee of Vigilance" -- the overwhelming ideological makeup was abolitionist. Four of the 800 members of the 1851 Committee became Union Army generals, another was a colonel killed at Gettysburg. 
Their primary opponents were the "Chivs" -- the so-called "Chivalry Democrats" e.g., the pro-south faction in the state. The Irish pols simply aligned themselves with the Chivs.
Exactly who were the 1851 guys racist against? Australians?Scott Adler 03:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV Stub

message: This article on the vigilance movement needs serious expansion.  The vigilance movement was not limited to San Francisco and extended well beyond the gold rush and into the continental railroad construction.
While there probably was racism involved, you hear slightly different stories.  I have personally read (from a book I conside to be pretty good, and not fiction) that the chinese were exempt from being hanged.  Get the snot beaten out of them yes, but for some reason this book on the Tong wars claimed no chinese was ever lynched for any reason. ?????--71.193.3.242 02:59, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Needs Expansion

message: At the very least there should be documentation of ant alleged racist action. Based upon the links, we're taking the word of a retired alternative ecologist versus the San Francisco City Museum. ~
----
I agree, this is quite poorly sourced at the present time.
Also, the ecologist source appears to take the conspiratorial view of history.  For instance, most of the historical sources that it references are presented to the reader not as available facts, but as examples of alleged "pro-vigilante propaganda of the era".  While we should certainly not censor such a valuable alternate perspective, it should nevertheless be presented alongside of some more mainstream interpretations.
I am editing the half-sentence on Casey, to make it agree more with the historical sources from both websites (in spite of the ecologist source's claim that the historical sources are propagandist in nature).  I am changing "Casey, a newspaper editor, had been involved in a duel as the result of an accusation of libel", to, "Casey had murdered a rival newspaper editor, shortly after the man published an editorial exposing Casey's criminal record in New York."  Perhaps an additional sentence could be added by someone, detailing yet keeping separate the conspiratorialist viewpoint. FrederickU 07:20, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: I removed "federal" from the description of the shipments (there were three) of arms the Vigilants seized in the week of June 15–22. Bancroft’s Popular Tribunals is rather unclear on the source of the arms, but Gen. Wool’s correspondence with Washington has been preserved and he was expressly forbidden to take a side in the conflict or to make Federal arms available to either side. (He then had to explain to the governor why his promise of aid wasn't really a promise of aid.) Sherman was disgusted by the failure of the federal arsenal to assist in the matter. There was the suspicion that some of the arms that the Law and Order party tried to ship across had been stolen from the Federal Arsenal (see C.E. Wetmore’s June 19 letter to the Vigilance Committee), and the shipments clearly weren't authorized by the federal government since the guards on the shipment that Wetmore exposed had been worried that word would get back to Gen. Wool.
Unless there is some source that contradicts Gen. Wool’s correspondence and refusal to help, I think it is best to leave the source vague since the arms were almost certainly either from the State or stolen from the Arsenal, but were not a federal action.
I'd be interested in discussing this issue, as the precise source of the arms matters for my own research.
-Fenevad (talk) 08:14, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Federal shipment? 

message: In February 2015, an unsigned editor added a new paragraph to the beginning of the Controversy section. This paragraph had multiple errors of fact and formatting and contained no sources. I did some brief research and found no sources to support the information written in that paragraph; in fact, a glance at online copies of newspaper accounts and trial transcripts suggest that much of what was in that paragraph was incorrect. I've removed the entire paragraph. Clockster (talk) 14:00, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unsourced paragraph in Controversy removed