At one o‘clock, the bell of the engine-house began to toll, and the crowd became excited. Mr. Brannan came out of the committee-room, and, standing on a mound of sand, addressed the citizens. As well as my friend could remember, his words were these: “Gentlemen, the man—Jenkins by name—a Sydney convict, whose supposed offense you know, has had a fair trial before eighty gentlemen, and been unanimously found guilty by them. I have been deputed by the committee to ask whether it is your pleasure that he be hanged.” “Ay!” from every man in the crowd. “He will be given an hour to prepare for death, and the Rev. Mr. Mines has been already sent for to minister to him. Is this your pleasure?” Again a storm of “Ay!” Nothing was known in the crowd of the details of the trial, except that counsel had been heard on the prisoner‘s behalf. For another hour the excitement of the crowd was permitted to continue, but at two o‘clock the doors of the committee-room were thrown open, and Jenkins was seen smoking a cigar. Mr. A—— said that he did not believe the prisoner expected a rescue, but thought that an exhibition of pluck might make popular with the crowd, and save him. A procession of Vigilants with drawn Colts was then formed, and set off in the moonlight across the four chief streets to the plaza. Some of the people shouted “To the flagstaff!” but there came a cry, “Don‘t desecrate the Liberty Pole. To the old adobe! the old adobe!” and to the old adobe custom-house the prisoner was dragged. In five minutes he was hanging from the roof, three hundred citizens lending a hand at the rope. At six in the morning, A—— went home, but he heard that the police cut down the body about that time, and carried it to the coroner‘s house.
An inquest was held next day. The city officers swore that they had done all they could to prevent the execution, but they refused to give up the names of the Vigilance Committee. The members themselves were less cautious. Mr. Brannan and others came forward of their own proper motion, and disclosed all the circumstances of the trial: 140 of the committee backed them up by a written protestation against interference with the Vigilants, to which their signatures were appended. Protest and evidence have been published, not only in the newspapers of the time, but in the San Francisco “Annals.” The coroner‘s jury found a verdict of “Strangulation, consequent on the concerted action of a body of citizens calling themselves a Committee of Vigilance.” An hour after the verdict was given, a mass meeting of the whole of the respectable inhabitants was held in the plaza, and a resolution approving of the action of the committee passed by acclamation.
In July, 1851, the committee hanged another man on the Market Street wharf, and appointed a sub-committee of thirty to board every ship that crossed the bar, seize all persons suspected of being “Sydney Coves,” and reship them to New South Wales.
In August came the great struggle between the Vigilants and constituted authority. It was sharp and decisive. Whittaker and McKenzie, two Sydney Coves, were arrested by the committee for various crimes, and sentenced to death. The next day, Sheriff Hays seized them on a writ of habeas corpus, in the rooms of the committee. The bell was tolled: the citizens assembled, the Vigilants told their story, the men were seized once more, and by noon they were hanging from the loft of the committee-house, by the ordinary lifting tackle for heavy goods. Fifteen thousand people were present, and approved. “After this,” said A——, “there could be no mistake about the citizens supporting the committee.”
By September, the Vigilants had transported all the “Coves” on whom they could lay hands; so they issued a proclamation, declaring that for the future they would confine themselves to aiding the law by tracing out and guarding criminals; and in pursuance of their decision, they soon afterward helped the authorities in preventing the lynching of a ship-captain for cruelty to his men.
After the great sweep of 1851, things became steadily worse again till they culminated in 1855, a year to which my friend looked backed with horror. Not counting Indians, there were four hundred persons died by violence in California in that single year. Fifty of these were lynched, a dozen were hanged by law, a couple of dozen shot by the sheriffs and tax-collectors in the course of their duty. The officers did not escape scot free. The under-sheriff of San Francisco was shot in Mission Street, in broad daylight, by a man upon whom he was trying to execute a writ of ejectment.
Judges, mayors, supervisors, politicians, all were bad alike. The merchants of the city were from New England, New York, and foreign lands; but the men who assumed the direction of public affairs, and especially of public funds, were Southerners, many of them “Border Ruffians” of the most savage stamp—“Pikes,” as they were called, from Pike‘s County in Missouri, from which their leaders came. Instead of banding themselves together to oppose the laws, these rogues and ruffians found it easier to control the making of them. Their favorite method of defeating their New England foes was by the simple plan of “stuffing,” or filling the ballot-box with forged tickets when the elections were concluded. Two Irishmen—Casey and Sullivan—were their tools in this shameful work. Werth, a Southerner, the leader of Casey‘s gang, had been denounced in the San Francisco Bulletin as the murderer of a man named Kittering; and Casey, meeting James King, editor of the Bulletin, shot him dead in Montgomery Street in the middle of the day. Casey and one of his assistants—a man named Cora—were hanged by the people as Mr. King‘s body was being carried to the grave, and Sullivan committed suicide the same day.
Books were opened for the enrollment of the names of those who were prepared to support the committee: nine thousand grown white males inscribed themselves within four days. Governor Johnson at once declared that he should suppress the committee, but the City of Sacramento prevented war by offering a thousand men for the Vigilants’ support, the other Californian cities following suit. The committee got together 6000 stand of arms and thirty cannon, and fortified their rooms with earthworks and barricades. The governor, having called on the general commanding the Federal forces at Benicia, who wisely refused to interfere, marched upon the city, was surrounded, and taken prisoner with all his forces without the striking of a blow.
Having now obtained the control of the State government, the committee proceeded to banish all the “Pikes” and “Pukes.” Four were hanged, forty transported, and many ran away. This done, the committee prepared an elaborate report upon the property and finances of the State, and then, after a great parade, ten regiments strong, upon the plaza and through the streets, they adjourned forever, and “the thirty-three” and their ten thousand backers retired into private life once more, and put an end to this singular spectacle of the rebellion of a free people against rulers nominally elected by itself. As my friend said, when he finished his long yarn, “This has more than archæologic interest: we may live to see a similar Vigilance Committee in New York.”
For my own part, I do not believe that an uprising against bad government is possible in New York City, because there the supporters of bad government are a majority of the people. Their interest is the other way: in increased city taxes they evidently lose far more than, as a class, they gain by what is spent among them in corruption; but when they come to see this, they will not rebel against their corrupt leaders, but elect those whom they can trust. In San Francisco, the case was widely different: through the ballot frauds, a majority of the citizens were being infamously misgoverned by a contemptible minority, and the events of 1856 were only the necessary acts of the majority to regain their power, coupled with certain exceptional acts in the shape of arbitrary transportation of “Pikes” and Southern rowdies, justified by the exceptional circumstances of the young community. At Melbourne, under circumstances somewhat similar, our English colonists, instead of setting up a committee, built Pentridge Stockade with walls some thirty feet high, and created a military police, with almost arbitrary power. The difference is one of words. The whirl of life in a young gold country not only prevents the best men entering the political field, and so forces citizens to exercise their right of choice only between candidates of equal badness, but so engrosses the members of the community who exercise the ballot as to prevent the detection of fraud till it has ruled for years. Throughout young countries generally you find men say: “Yes! we‘re robbed, we know; but no one has time to go into that.” “I‘m for the old men,” said a Californian elector once, “for they‘ve plundered us so long that they‘re gorged, and can‘t swallow any more.” “No,” said another, “let‘s have fresh blood. Give every man a chance of robbing the State. Shape and share alike.” The wonder is, not that in such a State as California was till lately the machinery of government should work unevenly, but that it should work at all. Democracy has never endured so rough a test as that from which it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden State and City.