UC Davis

Carrie Skyler AlexanderMay 2021 History

Buying Time: Negotiating Boundaries of Delay inProperty, Taxation, and Crime in California, 1850-1860 Abstract This dissertation examines evolving strategies and boundaries of delay, or “buying time,” in property ownership in nineteenth-century California. Drawing on literature in American cultural and environmental history, American expansion, and United States governance, this dissertation demonstrates that property ownership often did not lead to what many nineteenth-century Americans envisioned as “permanent prosperity” for themselves and the nation. While property ownership remained a main driver of United States policy and expansion, strategies for property acquisition often centered on postponing or avoiding ownership, displacing the costs of ownership, maintenance, and governance onto others. In the tenuous and volatile markets of California in the Gold Rush, property was seldom secure. Instead, property was a game of “buying time” in which success often depended on out-waiting and out-lasting economic competitors and governments from one year to the next. This dissertation uses the term “buying time” to highlight the socially negotiated nature of delay in 1850s California. Delay was not a simple matter of postponing or choosing to wait to invest or to pay taxes. Most acts of delay required the approval or acquiescence of landlords, tenants, government officials, neighbors, business associates, and others in the community. Even the wealthy investor, Thomas Oliver Larkin, tacitly sought approval from one of his closest business associates for his delay in property acquisition. As more individuals increasingly implemented strategies of delay, such as local tax delinquency and evasion of federal customs taxes, cities such as San Francisco enforced tax laws with increasing sophistication and rigidity, creating cyclical recessions, which in turn synchronized crime with the annual tax calendar. These circumstances revealed the flaw at the heart of property in San Francisco. Because property in cities like San Francisco depended on continual investment to maintain infrastructure such as streets and wharves and the artificial land they had built in waterfront districts, property holders depended heavily on local and federal governments to facilitate these investments and the taxes and markets that sustained them. At the same time, governments tended to overvalue property on which taxes were assessed, leading to seizure and sale of property for taxes. This, in turn, left subsequent investors or the city in possession of unprofitable properties that were, in many cases, sinking and especially costly to maintain due to the continual effects of currents, tides, and mud. These costs often made property ownership untenable, compelling many Californians to develop strategies, even violent ones, for accessing the benefits of property while postponing and evading the costs.