From Obscure Beginnings: Caulfield (Part 1)

By Tierney R. O’Donnell

I first met Henry A. Caulfield because he’d killed a man.

I was researching the history of our house, trying to find out exactly when it was built—depending on the source, the date varies anywhere from 1904 to 1910. I used the City of Sacramento Assessor Map Books to track who owned the land over time, then searched the newspaper records to see if there was any mention of those individuals building a new house. No such luck. But, I did find out some interesting things about the various landowners.

For example, in 1860, the block containing the lot where our house now stands was embroiled in a huge real estate scandal. The Sacramento Bee reported that William Muldrow filed a deed at the Recorder’s Office essentially “giving” the land comprising almost the entirety of the downtown grid to one James N. Murray. Land that was definitely not Muldrow’s to give. The paper exclaimed:

“Who is James N. Murray? Through whom does he claim? Is this a black mail arrangement? Muldrow, William Muldrow! Where did he get the means to buy so much property? Ah! it looks suspicious. There is something in the wind, and those whose property is covered had better scent it out.”¹

The shenanigans of William Muldrow and his compatriots are a whole other story. If you want to learn more, Andrew McLeod has an excellent post titled Betting on Sacramento: The Tale of Sanders and Muldrow on his blog Confluence. I highly recommend taking a look.

Still searching for the elusive builder of our house, I looked through the 1872-73 Assessor Map Book.² In those years, Lucius H. Foote and Edward Cadwalader owned the land. On March 29, 1873, in the Real Estate Transfers section, the Sacramento Bee reported, “L. H. Foote to W. G. English—Block between S and T, Fourth and Fifth streets—$5.”³ After I’d wrapped my head around an entire city block selling for only $5 (approximately equivalent to $162 in 2026) I started looking into this W. G. English fellow. Luckily, his name is so unique that searching for him in the papers was fairly easy.

William Garrison English didn’t own the land he bought from Lucius H. Foote for very long. In May of 1878, English sold part of the S and T/4th and 5th block (including the lot where our house was later built) to Robert Miller.⁴ I had been about to switch tacks and start researching Robert Miller when I noticed that William G. English was in the papers a lot in the latter months of 1878. Curious, I skimmed through the clippings. The word “murder” jumped off the page at me. William! No!

This is how I met Henry A. Caulfield.

Who is Henry A. Caulfield?

Like a movie, I came into Caulfield’s life in medias res. The action had slowed to a crawl. English’s legs extended, mid-sprint. Caulfield’s arm upraised. His finger caressing the trigger.

*Rewind noise.* VOICE OF THE NARRATOR: I’ll bet you’re wondering how we got here…

What’s shocking is that the murder of William G. English is not the most incredible thing about Henry A. Caulfield’s life. When I first found out about the murder, I assumed there would be a few articles about it, an obituary, a notice where to attend the funeral, maybe a trial. Then, eventually, all mentions of Caulfield and his heinous crime would peter out and he’d slip back into the obscurity of the past. I was so wrong.

In a time when the vast majority of people’s lives went unrecorded by history, there is so much information about Caulfield. Both before the murder and after. He seems to have been a kind of local celebrity. I get the impression that if you travelled through time back to Sacramento in the late 1800s, stopped a random person on the street, and said the name “Caulfield,” their eyes would immediately fill with recognition. Researching this man felt like a shock and awe campaign. I was constantly calling out to my husband in the next room and texting my friends, “You will not believe what I just found out about Caulfield!” and “Caulfield’s at it again!” (I’d like to take a brief moment here to thank everyone for not blocking me during this initial period of discovery. My husband, of course, has no escape.)

As much as I was able to find out about Caulfield’s later exploits in Sacramento, his early years are more obscure. His biography in the Illustrated History of Sacramento (1890) is appended to the section on the Squatters’ Riot of 1850 due to his participation in that conflict. (See! I told you English’s murder wasn’t the only fascinating chapter in this man’s history.) From this brief biography we know that Henry A. Caulfield was born in Ireland around 1827 and came to the United States early in life.⁵ Learning that Caulfield was Irish, I felt an immediate kinship with him. My own ancestry is primarily Irish and it’s the part of my heritage that I feel the most connected to. Who would have thought it with a name like Tierney Rhiannon O’Donnell, right?

Other than the year and country of his birth, I couldn’t find anything about Caulfield’s earlier life. I might need to enlist the services of a professional genealogist to help me at some point. We do know one thing about his life prior to coming to California. There was a conflict in New York State in 1844 and, as always seemed to be the case with him, Caulfield was right in the middle of it. A good portion of this post, which will be the first in a series, is about that conflict, even though it took place far away from Sacramento. I think it’s important to delve into because I believe it must have been a very formative experience for Caulfield and may have shaped the course of the rest of his life.

Down with the Rent

In 1844, Caulfield enlisted in the Emmet Guards in Albany, New York.⁶ (Albany is the capital of New York State. I only mention it in case you forgot, definitely not because I forgot.) Caulfield would have been around seventeen at the time. The Emmet Guards (also spelled “Emmett Guards”) were volunteer militia companies, composed mainly of Irish immigrants, which formed in various locations across the US in the nineteenth century. Tom Foley, who studies the history of the Emmet Guards, described them as “an ‘unofficial police force’” that stood “between the Irish immigrant class and threats to their citizenship.”⁷ The name is a tribute to Robert Emmet, an Irish national who was executed in 1803 for leading a rebellion against British rule.⁸

The year that Caulfield joined up, the Albany Emmet Guards were sent into Hudson, New York to help quell the “anti-rent agitation” going on in that area.⁹ The two camps of combatants were the tenant farmers who worked the land, called “Anti-Renters” or “Down-Renters”¹⁰ and the landowners, called “Up-Renters.”¹¹ This conflict had its roots in the colonial land settlement practices dating back to the seventeenth century. It’s an old story: wealth in the form of land ownership being hoarded in the hands of the few at the expense of the many against the backdrop of the fable that the land was “fairly bought” from the Indigenous Peoples who were actually unjustly coerced, enslaved, murdered, and forcibly removed from their ancestral lands.¹²

This particular version of that story centers around what are now the counties of Albany, Rensselaer, and Columbia in the State of New York. The land was successively colonized by the Dutch, the English, and, after the Revolution, by the Americans. Huge tracts of land were owned by families who had “purchased” the land from Indigenous Peoples and then rented it to white settlers “on long or even on perpetual leases” in what was called the “leasehold system.”¹³

The terms of these leases were practically feudal in nature. For the privilege of working the land, tenants would both pay rent (either in money or in goods like agricultural products) as well as provide additional services to the landlord.¹⁵ The annual rent could include ten to fourteen bushels of wheat per every one hundred acres, four fat hens, plus one day’s service with horse and wagon for each farm the size of one hundred and sixty acres.¹⁶ Leases could include additional provisions such as requiring tenants to plant certain crops, to build and maintain specific structures, and to give the landowner “the first right of purchasing at a reasonable price all fruits, grain, and stock”¹⁷ the tenant grew on the land. There was even a requirement that tenants were not allowed to host “any stranger or non-resident longer than forty-eight hours, in order that the neighborhood may not become charged with the maintenance of poor and vagrant strangers.”¹⁸ Imagine your landlord calling you up and saying, “Hey, sorry. Your mother-in-law has been here over forty-eight hours and she’s gotta go.” Maybe you’d agree with them. But, they shouldn’t have the power to make you give her the boot.

If a tenant wanted to give up their lease and transfer it to someone else (called “alienating”), they would only receive three-quarters of the selling price of the land they and their families had developed for generations. The other one-quarter would be paid to the landowner. These were called “quarter-sales”¹⁹ and would happen each time a tenant alienated their claim to the lease. So a landowner could continually receive payment of one-quarter the price of a piece of land that they already owned every time the land transferred from one tenant to another. That would be like a having to find a new person to rent your apartment before you could move out and being required to pay the landlord one-quarter of your security deposit, even though you’d vacuumed all the baseboards and even cleaned out the refrigerator.

In many cases, the landlords’ income from rents, quarter-sales, and other profits was exempted from taxation while the tenant farmers paid taxes to support the local and state governments. Hmmm. A small percent of the über-rich not having to pay their taxes. Why does this sound familiar?

For the people who worked these farms, the painful legacy of these unfair leases ran deep. Even as late as the 1880s, residents of Albany County had living memories of “seeing the road in the vicinity of the manor house blocked up with long lines of wagons in from the country with wheat and chickens to pay their rent, or with loads of wood, which were generally accepted in lieu of the ‘one day’s labor’ required by the leases.”²⁰ I sympathize with the tenant farmers. I imagine the pain they felt being denied the fruits of their labors and living subject to the whim of the landlords. And, it must also be acknowledged that these white farmers had the privilege of owning land and passing it to their children. The Indigenous Peoples and the enslaved Africans and their descendants were not granted that privilege. So it’s hard to see the tenant farmers complain of being degraded “from the rank the God of nature destined all mankind to move in, to be slaves and vassals”²¹ when other people were experiencing actual slavery.

Breaking Point

What does all of this have to do with Henry A. Caulfield, you ask? I promise, we’re getting there. Discontent over the leases grew over time, manifesting in petitions to the Legislature to investigate the validity of the land titles and even bursting out into “tumultuous assemblages” and “some disorder”.²² Things really came to a head after the death of Stephen Van Rensselaer on January 26, 1839. Stephen had been “remiss in the collection of rents, and in the case of favorite tenants, and those who had suffered misfortune or otherwise had difficulty in meeting the regular payments, he was in the habit of allowing the rent to run on almost indefinitely.”²³ This generosity unfortunately did not continue after Stephen’s death, his heirs preferring to collect all rents and arrearages with “full vigor.”²⁴

From 1839 to 1841, there were multiple standoffs where the tenants banded together to resist the serving of writs, the Sheriff and his men were rebuffed, someone with the incredible name of Major Bloodgood got involved, the state militia was called out, and “personal outrages were committed,”²⁵ whatever that means. The tenants, as well as friends and neighbors sympathetic to their plight, formed anti-rent associations throughout the leasehold districts.²⁶ They functioned like unions, collecting membership fees, lobbying the Legislature, and representing and protecting the interests of the tenants.

One of the anti-rent associations’ methods was less benign than sending representatives to legislative committee meetings. Some Association members would form bands of “Indians” using fake names, carrying guns, and dressing themselves up in calico dresses and “sheepskin covering for the head and face, apertures being left for the eyes, nose and mouth, and the outside sometimes decorated with a pair of horns or a horse’s tail.”²⁷ In these guises they would attack land offices and harry those carrying papers on the landowner’s behalf. This description uncomfortably aligns with the similarly racist tactics of the Boston Tea Party and the later Ku Klux Klan. Again, I acknowledge the validity of the tenants’ suffering. But, that does not excuse appropriating representations of other oppressed peoples. Go with something more neutral like the blow-up frog costumes the protestors wore in Portland. I don’t think the frogs minded, though maybe it’d be polite to check with them, just in case. Though it’s painful, I believe it’s important to talk about these kinds of things happening in the past and to acknowledge that they were, are, and always will be wrong.

In the summer of 1844, these bands “several times assaulted the sheriff of Columbia county [sic], took his papers away from him and burned them, and eventually two inoffensive private citizens were murdered in the course of the disorders.”²⁹ Two of the “Indian” participants calling themselves “Big Thunder” and “Little Thunder” were arrested and locked up in the Hudson County jail. Later, as a result of these activities, a bill was passed by the New York Legislature in 1845 to “prevent persons appearing disguised and armed.”³⁰ With everything going on in this country right now, with masked assailants murdering citizens in the street, it’s heartbreaking that this kind of issue remains unresolved after almost two-hundred years.

On the Side of Law and Order

Fearing reprisals and a jail-break attempt, the Sheriff and town authorities requested back-up. Among the groups who came to their aid were the Emmet Guards who marched out on December 25, 1844. See? I told you we’d get back to Caulfield eventually.

Caulfield, “then on the side of law and order, went to Columbia to aid in putting down the Down-renters. This class of people killed the Under-Sheriff of Delaware county [sic] and resisted the Sheriff in any kind of process against them.”³¹ Numbering from fifty to sixty muskets,³² the Emmet Guards were under the command of Captain John Osborn.³³ They assisted county officials with rounding up and arresting anti-rent association members and with maintaining “the supremacy of the law at any and every hazard.”³⁴ I think that anyone who knew Caulfield in his later years would have found it hard to imagine him as a champion of the supremacy of law. One newspaper in January 1845 reported “the Emmet Guards have this morning 62, together with officers, musicians, &c, to the number of 76. This speaks well for the Emmets.”³⁵ It seems funny to me that a militia would travel with its own musicians, but maybe that was normal? I can’t help but wonder if Caulfield might have been one of them, marching along playing a fiddle or a hornpipe.

Sadly, I couldn’t find any specific mentions of Henry A. Caulfield in the New York articles about the Emmet Guards. I did find an interesting tidbit about one of his compatriots which showed that their assignment was not without danger. On January 8, 1845, Private Flanagan of the Emmet Guards was standing sentinel outside the military headquarters at Hudson House.³⁶ It was about two o’clock in the morning.³⁷ A man on horseback slowly approached Flanagan’s position and refused to answer Flanagan’s hails.³⁸ I imagine the eeriness of the scene. In my mind, it plays like a horror movie. A dark street. A man silently moving closer. The only sound his horse’s hooves on the pavement. Until, suddenly, the man on horseback “wheeled his horse and fired, at this moment a person sprang from the yard nearly opposite and sung out…‘is he dead?’ “³⁹

Flanagan, who was not dead, fired at his equine assailant and charged at the man on foot with his bayonet flashing. Both men escaped.⁴⁰ The ball had passed within three inches of Flanagan, passing through one of the heavy pillars of the colonnade and lodging in the corner of the house.⁴¹ I’m sure Flanagan shared this story with his fellow Emmet Guards back in the barracks. I imagine a young Caulfield sitting on the edge of a bunk listening intently. What was he feeling? Was he angry? Excited? Remember, he was only seventeen or so at the time. Knowing how feisty he was in his later years, I can only imagine what a hellion he must have been as a young man. As he listened to Flanagan’s story, did Caulfield wish that he’d been the one on duty that night? Maybe he cracked his knuckles and flexed his shoulders, wishing for a chance at the two cowards who had snuck up in the dark. Maybe he thought it would have gone down differently if he’d been the one holding the bayonet. Was there a part of him that secretly felt the anti-renters might be in the right? As an Irishman, I wonder how it sat with him to be on the side of the landlords and the ruling class.

In Conclusion, For Now

What I find so interesting about this early incident in Caulfield’s life is how it feels like a mirror image of his later involvement in Sacramento’s “Squatters’ Riot” of 1850. In New York, Caulfield was a member of the Emmet Guards, acting under the orders of the Governor on behalf of the landed aristocracy against the citizens who had murdered the Under-Sheriff. A mere six years later in California, we find Caulfield fighting against the government and the landowners on the side of the citizenry in a conflict that resulted in the death of the Sheriff (spoiler alert). The parallels feel unreal. What kind of topsy-turvy Wonderland mirror did Caulfield fall through? Did seeing the government crack down on the people of New York give him a distaste for authority? Or was that rebellious streak always there and the anti-rent conflict only cemented it further? We’ll never know all the details. But I’ve found that, even from the grave, Henry A. Caulfield always has another surprise to keep us guessing.

Bibliography

1. “Real Estate.” The Sacramento Bee. February 18, 1860. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-sacramento-bee/146184112/. ↩︎
2. Sacramento City Assessor. “City of Sacramento Assessor Map Book, 1872-1873.” Center for Sacramento History. https://archive.org/details/SacCityMapBook1872-1873/mode/2up. ↩︎
3. “Real Estate Transfers.” The Sacramento Bee. March 29, 1873. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-sacramento-bee/146206664/. ↩︎
4. “Real Estate Transfers.” The Pacific Bee. May 25, 1878. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pacific-bee/146197376/. ↩︎
5. Davis, Winfield J. 1890. An Illustrated History of Sacramento County California. The Lewis Publishing Company. https://lccn.loc.gov/02002234. ↩︎
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7. Lucier, Grace. “Worcester Historical Museum to host historic Emmet Guard lecture.” Worcester Magazine, 2019. https://www.worcestermag.com/story/news/2019/06/26/worcester-historical-museum-to-host-historic-emmet-guard-lecture/4815389007/. ↩︎
8. Cline, Lawrence E. Rebels on the Niagra: The Fenian Invasion of Canada, 1866. State University of New York Press, 2018. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781438467535-004/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOopcIJFt0b_hXqoHwNl1gjBzqov1hnq-qPGfo8xyMpOdCCZDBjIJ. ↩︎
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30. Cheyney, Edward Potts.The Anti-rent Agitation in the State of New York, 1839-1846. Porter & Coates, 1887. https://books.google.com/books?id=j13OAAAAMAAJ&dq=emmett+guards+new+york&source=gbs_navlinks_s. ↩︎
31. “A Pioneer’s Recollection.” The Pacific Bee. July 5, 1888. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pacific-bee/168244021/. ↩︎
32. “Farther and Interesting from Albany.” The Evening Post. December 30, 1844. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-evening-post/190207288/. ↩︎
33. “From Hudson Gazette of Dec. 31.” New York Daily Herald. January 2, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/new-york-daily-herald/190207710/. ↩︎
34. “The Anti-Rent Difficulties.” New York Daily Herald. January 25, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/new-york-daily-herald/190211987/. ↩︎
35. “Affairs in Hudson.” New York Daily Herald. January 9, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/new-york-daily-herald/190211183/. ↩︎
36. “Another Anti-Rent Outrage.” The Evening Post. January 10, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-evening-post/190212474/. ↩︎
37. “An Attempt to kill one of the Emmet Guards.” The Poughkeepsie Eagle. January 18, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-poughkeepsie-eagle/190212639/. ↩︎
38. “An Attempt to kill one of the Emmet Guards.” The Poughkeepsie Eagle. January 18, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-poughkeepsie-eagle/190212639/. ↩︎
39. “An Attempt to kill one of the Emmet Guards.” The Poughkeepsie Eagle. January 18, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-poughkeepsie-eagle/190212639/. ↩︎
40. “An Attempt to kill one of the Emmet Guards.” The Poughkeepsie Eagle. January 18, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-poughkeepsie-eagle/190212639/. ↩︎
41. “The Latest Anti-Rent News.” New York Daily Herald. January 11, 1845. https://www.newspapers.com/article/new-york-daily-herald/190213393/. ↩︎