Books>Review
Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California
University of Nevada Press
High murder rates have always been considered an indication of a society in turmoil and nineteenth-century California was no exception. A rapidly growing population, booming mining camps, insufficient or nonexistent law-enforcement personnel, and many ethnic groups with differing attitudes toward the law and personal honor created a situation in which violence was common and legal responses varied broadly.
Clare V. McKanna, Jr., has published widely on the history of criminal justice in the West. For Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California, McKanna studied coroners’ inquest reports, court case files, prison registers, and other primary sources, as well as numerous printed sources, to analyze patterns of homicide and the vagaries of the state’s embryonic justice system. The nature of crimes, he discovered, varied with the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims, as did trials and sentencing patterns. Marginalized individuals, like the state’s diminishing Indians, fared worst, and Hispanics, whose traditional legal system differed in important ways from the imported practices of the new white majority, did little better. Homicide in the Chinese community was largely confined to fellow Chinese and was often prompted by rivalries among various secret societies. Whites, coming from a number of backgrounds, carried their own conception of honor and their own predilections toward violence.
In this major work on homicide, the author presents a vivid, carefully detailed portrait of a society in flux, where ancient Spanish and Chinese legal practices collided with English common law and the “Code of the West,” where greed, poverty, and downright meanness created tensions that frequently led to bloodshed. The text, enhanced with testimony from contemporary sources and illustrated with period photographs, is an engaging and richly intelligent study of a frontier society where the law was neither omnipresent nor frequently, impartial.
“Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California is a significant contribution in the field. It is based on exhaustive research, carefully analyses, and apt interpretation of the data. Most importantly the American Indian, usually invisible in scholarly work on the criminal justice system, is visible, prominent, and important in the analysis.” Gordon Morris Bakken, editor of Racial Encounters in the Multi-Cultural West
“Many books have emphasized the legalized violence against minorities in the Gold Rush era, but not one has tried to do what Clare V. McKanna, Jr. has managed in looking at a fifty-year period. By comparing data, counting cases, and examining outcomes, his work has put homicide among various groups into perspective and will be the standard by which other studies are judged.” Martin Ridge, coauthor of Westward Experience: A History of the American Frontier
“The subject of race, homicide, and the justice system is always timely. Given its combination of age and complexity, the California study is especially important, and Clare V. McKanna, Jr., has told it with his usual care and flair.” Roger Lane, author of Murder in America: A History
“This is excellent legal history; an important contribution to a growing body of literature on the social history of crime in Nineteenth-Century America. Clare V. McKanna, Jr. has done a masterful job of weaving complex ethnic history into the history of homicide and crime. It is well written, well thought-out, and well argued–a great read.” Sidney L. Harring, Professor of Law, CUNY Law School