THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE
T was May 14, 1856. I chanced to be standing at the northwest corner of Washington and Montgomery Streets, watching the world go by. It was a queer world: very much mixed, not a little fantastic in manner and costume; just the kind of world to delight a boy, and no doubt I was delighted.
"Bang!" It was a pistol-shot, and very near me—not thirty feet away. I turned and saw a man stagger and fall to the pavement. Then the streets began to grow dark with people hurrying toward the scene of the tragedy. I fled in fright; I had had my fill of horrors. The pistol-shot was familiar enough: it punctuated the hours of day and night out yonder. But I had never witnessed a murder, and this was evidently one.
When I reached home I was dazed. On the witness stand, under oath, I could have told nothing; but very shortly the whole town was aware that James King—known as James King of William (i.e., William King was his father)—the editor of the Evening Bulletin had been shot in cold blood by James Casey, a supervisor, the editor of a local journal, an unprincipled politician, an ex-convict, and a man whose past had been exposed and his present publicly denounced in the editorial columns of the Bulletin.
This climax precipitated a general movement toward social and political reform in San Francisco. It was James P. Casey, a graduate of the New York state-prison at Sing Sing, who stuffed a ballot-box with tickets bearing his own name upon them as candidate for supervisor, and as a result of this stuffing declared himself elected. Casey was hurried off to jail by his friends, lest the outraged populace should lynch him on the spot. A mob gathered at the jail. The mayor of the city harangued the people in favor of law and order. They jeered him and remained there most of the night. One leading spirit might have roused the masses to riot; but the hour was not yet ripe.
In 1851 a Vigilance Committee had endeavored to purge the politics of the town and rid it of the criminals who had foisted themselves into office. Some ex-members of this committee became active members of the committee of 1856. Chief among them was William T. Coleman, a name deservedly honored in the annals of San Francisco.
James King of William was shot on Tuesday, the 14th of May. He died on the following Monday. That fatal shot was the turning-point in the history of the metropolis of the Pacific. A meeting of the citizens was immediately called; an executive committee was appointed; the work of organization was distributed among the sub-committees. With amazing rapidity three thousand citizens were armed, drilled, and established in temporary armories; ample means were subscribed to cover all expenses. Several companies of militia disbanded rather than run the risk of being called into service against the Vigilantis; they then joined the committee, armed with their own muskets. Arms were obtained from every quarter, and soon there was an ample supply. A building on Sacramento Street, below Battery, was secured and made headquarters of the committee. A kind of fortification built of potato sacks filled with sand was erected in front of it. It was known as Fort Gunny Bags. This secured an open space before the building. The fort was patrolled by sentinels night and day; military rule was strictly observed.
All things having been arranged silently, secretly, decently and in order—the members of the committee were under oath as well as under arms—they decided to take matters into their own hands; and in order to do this Casey must be removed from jail—peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary—and given a lodging and a trial at Fort Gunny Bags.
On Sunday morning, the 19th of May, chancing be under the weather, and consequently at home sitting by a window, I saw people flocking past the house and hastening toward the jail. We were then living on Broadway, below Montgomery Street; the jail was on Broadway, a square or two farther up the street; between us was a shoulder of Telegraph Hill not yet cut away, though it had been blasted out of shape and an attempt had been made to tunnel it. The young Californian of that day was keen-scented and lost no opportunity of seeing whatever was to be seen. Forgetting my distemper, I grabbed my cap and joined the expectant throngs. We went over the heights of the hill like a flock of goats: we were used to climbing. On the other edge of the cliff, where we seemed almost to overhang the jail and the street in front of it, we paused and caught our breath. What a sight it was! It seems that on Saturday twenty-four companies of Vigilantis were ordered to meet at their respective armories, in various parts of the city, at nine o'clock on Sunday morning. Orders were given to each captain to take up a certain position near the jail. The jail was surrounded: no one could approach it, no one escape from it, without leave of the commanders of the committee.
The streets glistened with bayonets. It was as if the city were in a state of siege; so indeed it was. The companies marched silently, ominously, without music or murmur, to their respective stations. Citizens—non-combatants but all sympathizers—flocked in and covered the housetops and the heights in the vicinity. A hollow square was formed before the jail; an artillery company with a huge brass cannon halted near it; the cannon was placed directly in front of the jail and trained upon the gates. I remember how impressive the scene was: the grim files of infantry; the gleaming brass of the cannon; one closed carriage within the hollow square; the awful stillness that brooded over all.
Certificate of Membership, Vigilance Committee, 1856
Two Vigilance officials went to the door of the jail and informed Sheriff Scannell that they had come to take Casey with them. Resistance was now useless; the door of the jail was thrown open to them and they entered. At their approach Casey begged leave to speak for ten minutes in his own defense,—he evidently expected to be executed on the instant. He was assured that he should have a fair trial, and that his testimony should be deliberately weighed in the balance. This act of an outraged and disgusted people was one of the calmest, coolest, wisest, most deliberate on record. Law, order, and justice were at bay. Casey, under guard, walked quietly to the carriage and entered it. In the jail at the time was Charles Cora, a man who had murdered United States Marshal Richardson. He had been tried once; but then the jury disagreed—as they nearly always agreed to in those barbarous days. Hanging was almost out of the question. Cora was invited to enter the carriage with Casey, and the two were driven under military escort to Fort Gunny Bags.
On the day following, Monday, James King of William died. On Tuesday Casey was tried by the executive committee. John S. Hittell, the historian of San Francisco, says:
"No person was present at the trial save the accused, the members of the Vigilance Committee, and witnesses. The testimony was given under oath, though there was no lawful authority for its administration. Hearsay testimony was excluded; the general rules of evidence observed in the courts were adopted: the accused heard all the witnesses, cross-examined those against him, summoned such as he wanted in his favor, had an attorney to assist him, and was permitted to make an argument by himself or his attorney, in his own defence."
Casey and Cora were both convicted: their guilt was beyond the shadow of a doubt.
On Wednesday James King of William was laid to rest at Lone Mountain. The whole city was draped in mourning; all business was suspended; the citizens lined the streets through which the feral cortége proceeded, or followed it until it seemed interminable.
As that procession passed up Montgomery Street and crossed Sacramento Street, those who were walking or driving in it looked down the latter street and saw, two squares below, the lifeless bodies of James P. Casey and Charles Cora dangling by the neck from two second-story windows of the headquarters of the Vigilance Committee. Justice was enthroned at last.
"The Vigilance Committees of San Francisco in 1851 and 1856," as Hittell says, "were in many important respects unlike any other extra-judicial movement to administer justice. They were not common mobs: they were organized for weeks or months of labor, deliberate in their movements, careful to keep records of their proceedings, strictly attentive to the rules of evidence and the penalties for crime accepted by civilized nations; confident of their power, and of their justification by public opinion; and not afraid of taking the public responsibility of their acts."
The committee of 1856 was never formally dissolved. The reformation it had accomplished rendered it inactive. Some of the worst criminals in California had been officials. A thousand homicides had been committed in the city between 1849 and 1856, and there were but seven executions in seven years.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the author of "Two Years before the Mast," who spent the greater portion of two years—1834-35—on the coast of California, and who revisited the Pacific coast in 1859, observes:
"And now the most quiet and well-governed city in the United States is San Francisco. But it has been through its seasons of heaven-defying crime and violence and blood; from which it was rescued and handed back to soberness and morality and good government by that peculiar invention of Anglo-Saxon republican America—the solemn, awe-inspiring Vigilance Committee of the most grave and respectable citizens; the last resort of the thinking and the good, taken only when vice, fraud, and ruffianism had entrenched themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage, and ballot."
San Francisco was undoubtedly the most disreputable city in the Union. It is now one of the most reputable. As I think of it to-day there is no shudder in the thought. And yet I saw James King of William shot; I saw Casey and Cora transferred from the jail to the headquarters of the Vigilance Committee; and I saw them hanging as the body of James King of William was being borne by a whole city, bowed in grief, to his last resting-place. And my venerated father was a member of that never-to-be-forgotten Vigilance Committee of San Francisco in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty-six.