USA > California > California; an intimate history > Part 14
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XIII
THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE OF 1856
WILLIAM T. COLEMAN was born in Cynthiana, Ken- tucky, on February 29, 1824, worked on his uncle's farm and in the lumber-camps of the north, studied at night, and finally made and saved enough to carry him not only through school, but the University of St. Louis; which gave him the degree of Bachelor of Science. He joined the stampede to California, by the Overland route, and arrived in Sacramento in August, 1849. It had been his intention to go to the mines, but he found business conditions in the little town so attractive that he opened a store. It amused him in later years to tell that his principal source of revenue at this time was derived from pies made by himself from his Kentucky aunt's recipe and sold to miners-during their weekly visits to Sacramento with a bag of "dust" to get rid of-for ten dollars apiece. But as he was a young man of great force of character, courage, and persistence, and of strength of will under a modest and reserved demeanor, united to original business abilities, it was not long before he was one of the leading merchants of San Francisco. That was the day when men rose or fell with a rapidity hardly paralleled before or since.
In 1855, despite the panic and general depression, he had demonstrated his faith in the future of California by organizing a line of clipper ships between San Francisco
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and New York, believing that cereals were bound to be produced in enormous quantities in the great valleys of the state and must find a ready market in the East and Europe. Moreover, there was hardly a local issue in which Mr. Coleman did not take an active interest, and, although he never would consent to hold office, he was prominent in every movement for civic reform. To all such projects he contributed liberally, as well as to char- ities, and he had been a member of the first Vigilance Committee. During the five stormy years that had passed since the organization of 1851 disbanded he had risen steadily to an eminence of clean and honorable citizenship in that community whose fierce light per- mitted no man to be misvalued; and as his courage, fair- ness, and gift for leadership were equally recognized it followed as a matter of course that when a new Committee of Vigilance became inevitable he should be its president. He was only thirty-two, but few of those leading citizens, estimable or otherwise, were older.
Sam Brannan relieved his mind to the crowd outside the building in Sacramento Street while the work of organization proceeded within. Mr. Coleman coun- seled that the organization be impersonal, that its mem- bers should be known by their numbers only.
"It is necessary," said he, "that the organization shall be very close, very guarded. We must be very careful whom we admit."
He wrote out an oath of fealty to the organization pledging life, liberty, property, and honor, and swore in those that were present. He then directed that every member take his number and write it in a book with his name and address.
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"Who will be number one?" he asked; and many cried simultaneously :
"You, Mr. Coleman."
Even then he was willing to resign his leadership if some one else was thought better qualified; but opinion was unanimous on this point, and he wrote himself down: "No. I."
The enrolment after this was very rapid, and so many men in addition to the old members of 1851 applied for membership that the Committee was obliged to adjourn to the Turn Verein Hall in Bush Street, and thence to a large wholesale house in Sacramento Street between Davis and Front streets; the old "water-lots" below Montgomery Street having been "filled in" and built upon for some years. Thirty-five hundred men were en- rolled within two days, all sorts and conditions of men being admitted who were above suspicion. Hundreds who could not bring themselves to so radical a departure from "law and order" secretly sympathized with the Committee and sent it liberal donations; such being the noble institu- tion of compromise invented by man! The public, bar- ring the "Law and Order" party shortly to be formed, and the worst element, now furious and apprehensive, supported the new Vigilance Committee from the first, if only because it had complete faith in Mr. Coleman. So did the other cities, and even the mountain communities of the state, mass-meetings of indorsement being held as soon as the news reached them.
However, the Governor of California, John Neely Johnson, notified by Mayor Van Ness, came down post- haste and, arriving in the evening, went at once to the Committee rooms and remained there until two o'clock
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in the morning. Mr. Coleman advised him to take the philosophical view of the inevitable so wisely adopted by Governor McDougal in 1851. He gave him a statement in detail of the abominable wrongs of the city-the looted treasury; the filthy dilapidated streets; the impudent flaunting vice; the lack of police protection for decent citizens, the police being a part of the corrupt political machinery; the stuffing of ballot-boxes. The law, added Mr. Coleman, was a dead letter. It was merely the ob- ject of the Committee to turn San Francisco from a hell into a city fit for decent, industrious, and law-abiding men to live in; and this, Mr. Coleman gently intimated, the Committee purposed to do, governor or no governor. He so won Johnson by his eloquence without rhetoric that the chief officer of the state finally sprang to his feet and slapped him on the back, exclaiming:
"Go it, old boy. But get through as quickly as you can. Don't prolong it, because there is a terrible opposi- tion and a terrible pressure."
But Governor Johnson was not what you would call a man of iron purpose. He underwent a change of heart before night. In truth, there was much to daunt all but the strongest, although, judging by his final words to Mr. Coleman, he already had experienced "pressure."
But men were deserting by the score from the militia companies on guard at the jail and joining the Vigilantes; and William T. Sherman, who was major-general of the second division of the California militia, and had been chosen captain of the citizens' posse about the county jail, refused to serve under Sheriff Scannell or in any capacity save that of major-general. He obtained an interview with the governor shortly after the long con-
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ference in Mr. Coleman's office, and, having drawn an alarming picture of the state of the public mind, demon- strating that the Committee roll of membership was in- creasing every hour, and that the great bankers, John Parrott, William C. Ralston, and Drexel, Sather & Church, were covertly supporting it, persuaded the gover- nor that a stand must be made for law and order, and that the only thing to do was to enter into a treaty with William T. Coleman and other members of the Committee.
Sherman was a better soldier than diplomatist. He seems to have been a signal failure whenever he attempted the office of intermediary. All Mr. Coleman would con- cede was that the executive should place a guard of ten men inside the jail; otherwise he proceeded with the mo- mentous business in hand exactly as if the governor slept in Sacramento. For the present there was but one law in the city, and he was at the head of it.
Meanwhile James King of Wm., although he rallied once or twice, was slowly dying. He had been removed to a room in the Montgomery Street block, where the best of surgeons and nurses, besides the members of his family, were in constant attendance.
Charles Doane had been elected chief marshal of the Vigilance Committee's military forces. Of the fifteen hundred men he had put under arms and drilled, many had seen service in the Mexican War, others had belonged to disbanded militia companies. These helped to drill the raw recruits, and between enthusiasm and concen- tration of purpose this little army at the end of three days might have been composed of war veterans.
King was shot on the 14th. On Sunday, the 18th, Marshal Doane, having notified the Committee that his
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forces were ready for active and immediate service, Mr. Coleman sent word to the governor, who was at the International Hotel engaged in constant and futile con- ference with Sherman and others, that the Committee was about to act. At noon the companies started by three separate routes for the jail. They marched up Kearney, Dupont, and Stockton streets-King opened his eyes as he heard the slow steady tramp of many feet, and apparently understood what was about to happen- and when they converged at the jail fell into position as precisely as if they had rehearsed their parts on the spot. It was a brilliant day; the steel bayonets flashed in the May sunshine. Before the doors of the jail a cannon was pointed, and a gunner was beside it. On the hills above, on all the roofs near by, in the adjacent streets, stood dense masses of silent people. Now that men of high authority were acting, there was no impulse among lesser men to expend themselves in vain emotions.
A carriage drove^ip and Mr. Coleman and Miers F. Truet ascended the, steps of the jail in full view of all. Sheriff Scannell, standing behind the wicket of the jail door, refused entrance. Mr. Coleman pulled out his watch and gave Scannell five minutes. The gunner beside the cannon lit the fuse. Every man in the crowd took out his watch and counted the minutes. The gunner waved his fuse. Precisely as the five minutes expired the door opened and Mr. Coleman and Mr. Truet entered.
They found Casey brandishing a knife and screaming hysterically, but upon being assured that he would have a fair trial he surrendered and went quietly out to the carriage between the president and his associate. Mr. Coleman quickly suppressed with a wave of his hand the
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cheer that greeted his arrival at the head of the steps, and drove off amidst an intense and ominous silence to headquarters. The carriage returned shortly after, and Cora was led out in the same manner and driven down to Sacramento Street, and then the troops reformed and marched back to protect "the fort."
From the roof of the International Hotel in Jackson Street, Governor Johnson, Mayor Van Ness, and William T. Sherman were helpless onlookers at this extraordinary spectacle; the law-and-order forces, under R. Augustin Thompson, numbered only one hundred and fifty. Sher- man estimated that there were at least ten thousand people within rifle-shot of the jail. It was an impressive sight from first to last: Marshal Doane on his white horse, the invincible ranks of earnest young volunteers, the carriage driving up with the man upon whom a people had conferred the power of a Tsar, the cowed trembling figures of the murderers hurried out and away, the black mass of people covering Telegraph Hill to the top, brightened with the gay shawls and bonnets of women of every degree.
The trial of Cora began on May 20th. He was per- mitted to choose his own counsel and asked Miers F. Truet and T. J. L. Smedley to undertake his defense. The executive committee sat in the long upper front room before a table. There were armed guards on the stairs and on the roof and parading the square before the building.
Cora, facing those serious implacable faces, hardly could have forborne to contrast them with the packed juries of his experience; and Mr. Coleman, a man of imposing appearance and great dignity, must have seemed to him a grotesque contrast to the tobacco-chewing, shirt-
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sleeved judges of the San Francisco courts. And in a moment he trembled. Marshal Doane entered hastily and announced the death of James King of Wm., and added that the most intense excitement pervaded the city. He was directed to inform the people that the trials were in progress, but that the Committee must proceed with the utmost deliberation and that every witness would be carefully examined.
James King of Wm. died at half past one on Thursday, May 20, 1856. Every building in the city-save the gambling-houses and the saloons-was immediately draped in black; all business ceased. The bells of the churches and engine-houses tolled, and in the harbor craft of every sort displayed their flags at half-mast. No other private citizen has ever received such a tribute; the crowds that packed the streets with crêpe on every arm not only were manifesting their profound respect and grief for the man who had attempted to reform his miserable city single- handed, but a deep affection for the man himself. It was only 1856, he had lived among them but seven years, but, as has been observed, men in those days lived by lightning, and virtue that could not be hid under a bushel was re- garded with awe and reverence. They knew also that if he could have lived to round out his threescore and ten he would have spent it in the public service; and per- sonally he seems to have been one of the most lovable of men. In all the other towns of the state the people, although few had known him save as a public character, paid him a similar tribute. Stores and public buildings were draped with black, mass-meetings were held, and services in the churches.
The Committee of Vigilance sat almost continuously
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for two days and two nights listening to the evidence for and against Casey and Cora. No two scoundrels ever received a fairer trial. They were unanimously pro- nounced guilty and sentenced to be hanged on Friday, the 23d, at twelve o'clock.
On Thursday King's funeral took place, and once more all the world was in the street and on the housetops, a point of vantage lost to the present generation. It was an imposing cortège that left the Unitarian Church on Stockton between Clay and Sacramento streets after the services. The Masons, Royal Arch Chapter, in full regalia, led the procession. Following, four abreast, were the officiating clergymen and surgeons; then came the hearse drawn by four white horses and attended by fourteen pall-bearers, ten coaches filled with the family and friends and the men employed on the Bulletin; then the Society of California Pioneers in regalia, members of the press, Sacramento Guards in uniform, San Francisco Fire Department, St. Mary's Library Association, three hundred and twenty draymen on horseback, the Steve- dores Association, the German Benevolent Society, Turn Verein Association, a delegation of colored men, and forty carriages of citizens. The procession was a mile long and accompanied for a part of the distance by practically the remainder of the decent population of the city. It moved slowly out Bush Street toward Lone Mountain Ceme- tery, and no doubt the population would have escorted it the entire way, but suddenly a rumor spread, coming whence no one ever knew, and some ten or twelve thousand of those not in the funeral procession began to melt back- ward; finally, when beyond sound of the solemn music, they broke into a run.
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The executive committee had determined to execute Cora and Casey on that day while all the town was marching toward the cemetery, thus avoiding a possible disturbance on the morrow.
The condemned men were informed of their fate. Two Catholic priests were with them; and one, Father Michael Accolti, went at once for Arrabella Ryan and married her to the man whose name she had assumed long since. She was now legally Belle Cora, and perchance found some consolation in being a widow.
Wooden platforms a yard long had been run out from the second-story windows fronting on Sacramento Street, and provided with hinges at the outer edges of the window- sills. These platforms were held in a horizontal position by cords fastened at their outer ends, passing up to beams projecting directly overhead from the roof of the building. To these beams were attached ropes with nooses and slip-knots already prepared. Below in a hollow square stood the Committee troops, under Marshal Doane, with their muskets on their shoulders. There was also a de- tachment on the roof, in front of the great alarm-bell of "Fort Vigilance." At each end of the block a cannon was in place. No attempt was made at rescue, however, and the crowd that rapidly collected and blocked all the neighboring streets or climbed to the tops of the business buildings, were bent on seeing vengeance done.
The condemned men emerged from the windows at a little after one o'clock. They wore shapeless white gar- ments, and their arms were pinioned. Each was accom- panied by a priest, and for the moment both seemed to be firm. But almost immediately Casey broke into an excited tirade, proclaiming that he was no murderer;
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attributing his present position to the faults of early education in one breath and glorifying his mother in an- other, he adjured each newspaper in turn not to call him a murderer. Finally he broke down completely, scream- ing: "Oh, my poor mother! My poor mother! How her heart will bleed at this news. It is her pain I feel now. But she will not believe me a murderer. I but resented an injury. Oh, my mother! My mother! God bless you. Gentlemen, I pardon you. God will forgive you. I know He will forgive me. O God, with the accumulated guilt of my twenty-nine years have mercy on me! Oh, my poor mother!" The priest attempted to persuade him to pray, but in vain. He continued to fill the crowd below with pity and admiration for the good mother of a bad man until his legs were strapped together, the noose adjusted, and a white cap drawn over his face and head. Cora had stood unmoved; nor did he protest when he, too, was strapped and covered. At twenty-one minutes past one the signal was given, the cords holding up the platforms were cut from above, and the two white- hooded men swung off into space.
As they had repented and been received back into the Catholic Church, the Mission Dolores could not refuse them burial in its hallowed ground. They were hurried out in the night by Belle Cora and a few friends and buried by torchlight in a corner of the cemetery that holds Luis Argüello.
XIV
THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE AND DAVID S. TERRY
THE Committee of Vigilance remained in continu- ous session for six months. They hanged two other murderers, Joseph Hetherington, an Englishman, and Philander Brace, a desperado from New York; forcibly expelled from California all on their famous "black list," packing them off by wholesale on steamers and sailing- vessels. Each was given a fair trial. It was soon under- stood by the most desperate as well as by the most dis- approving that the Committee was implacable, and that it would not adjourn until the city was as clean as was humanly possible. All things being relative, it would be clean.
The net result of the long session was two murders as against over one hundred in the previous six months; the passing of the current joke-"a man every morning for breakfast"; a complete reform of local politics; and as peaceable and decent a state of affairs for something like twenty years as San Francisco could stand without instant dissolution.
But, although the steady processional advance of this strange tribunal's high accomplishment was like a Greek drama in its secret sinister atmosphere of blind justice and crushing inevitableness, and its achievements were phenomenal considering that mere men held the scales
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and worked for the regeneration of one of the wickedest cities on earth, it was beset with dangers every step of the way and compelled to exert every resource of its composite brain to save its own life.
The Southerners, who for the most part formed the Law and Order party, were against the Vigilance Com- mittee practically to a man. Their excuse was that it was every good citizen's duty to uphold the law in all cir- cumstances, but their real reasons were so well known that in private life they did not hesitate to express them. Apart from the smoldering resentment against the Northerners for declaring California a free state at the constitutional convention, and the fact that were it not for one man, David C. Broderick (also a Democrat), the politics of the state would be entirely in their hands, there was a lively fear that those men who were making history down by the water-front in their impregnable "fort" might develop into a strong political power, able to retain a permanent control of the state. And for the present the Vigilance Committee actually was the only power in California. Not a politician dared to raise his head. The governor had issued an absurd proclamation declaring the city of San Francisco in a state of insur- rection, that further paralyzed the Southern party in any attempt toward future adjustment.
The Southerners who adventured into California in and shortly after 1849, either to improve their fortunes or to find a sure and quick means of gratifying their political ambitions, were for the most part gentlemen, well edu- cated, more or less accomplished, and all experienced in politics; in the South of that day politics was the ruling passion. Few of these men went to the mines; and the
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stalwart immigrants from the North and West, farmers, mountaineers, mustered-out soldiers, who invested their gold-dust in the country that fascinated them, sent for their families and became the solid business men, me- chanics, and farmers of the state, stood in awe for many years of these suave, urbane, occasionally fire-eating and always well-dressed gentlemen from the most aristocratic section of the Union. They were forced to admit that the Southerner's experience of life and politics was as superior as his manners, and if at first they did not realize the subtlety with which the stronger party so often gained its ends they were in no doubt whatever as to the effects. Before this keen, clever, but too heterogeneous mass "found itself," the Southerners, born leaders, and with politics the paramount interest in their lives, had control of both San Francisco and California.
Of these William M. Gwin was the leader. The first long-term Senator from the state, he planted a friend in every one of its federal offices, not only gratifying his sense of noblesse oblige, but "making himself solid" against fu- ture emergencies. "I leave for California to-morrow," he had said to Stephen A. Douglas on the eve of departure from New York. "It will become a state, and I shall be back in a year bearing my credentials as United States Senator." This prophecy he fulfilled to the letter, and during both terms of his incumbency he was an ornament to the state and of some use. But his career is too bound up with that of Broderick to be enlarged upon further in this chapter.
The Thorntons, Crittendens, Lafayette Maynards, Gwins, Bowies, Howards; the Maxwells, MacMullens, and McNutts (the "Three Macs"); the Shorbs, Hitchcocks,
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Kelloggs, Kips, Louis McLanes, Athertons, McKinstrys, Hollidays, Kings, Gordons, Randolphs, Thibaults, Selbys, Parrotts, Redingtons, Macondrays, Otises, Maillards, Fairfaxes, Bebcocks, Poetts, Scotts, and the Hall McAl- listers-either Southerners themselves or high in favor with the dominant party-are a few of the names still remembered that played so great a social rôle in the '50's and '60's, before the Civil War put many of them out of politics. It was many years, however, before the Southerners in San Francisco lost their social supremacy; they ruled as long as they had any money left, and gave a tone to that city of many epochs that is still a tradition if not a guide. Of all those Southern women that ruled society as inexorably as their husbands led in law, politics, or business, admitting and excluding as they chose, Mrs. Hall McAllister was the most brilliant, individual, and accomplished. Although her husband, so soon at the head of the California bar, was not a Southerner, she was; her position was unchallenged, not only because of her birth and gift for leadership, but because even in those days a New Yorker of family estimated himself as highly as any Southerner. Moreover, Mr. McAllister had no political aspirations.
Not all the Northerners by any means belonged to the Vigilance Committee or even helped it in secret, and in its ranks were a few who were above sectional distinctions in this far-off land. William T. Coleman himself was a Kentuckian-and a Democrat. Men from the North and the West, however, that had stood aloof at first were con- verted after they realized that nothing but a return of Cal- ifornia to her old haunts under the Pacific could retard the progress of the Committee of Vigilance or interfere with
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its ultimate success. Admiral Farragut, stationed at Mare Island, had declined to bombard the town and exterminate the "insurrectionists," and Major-General Wool, commanding the Pacific division of the United States army, and stationed at Benicia, refused to furnish the governor with arms and ammunition. Sherman made desperate efforts to raise companies of militia to oppose the formidable and ever-growing military forces of the Vigilance Committee; but, as nearly all his old men had gone over to the enemy, and as the new recruits were for the most part contemptible in numbers and character, and as the governor could not be brought to see reason, he resigned in disgust. Governor Johnson even sent two influential men, R. Augustin Thompson and Ferris For- man, to Washington to solicit the aid of the President in restoring California to its lawful owners. The President declined to interfere, and the Vigilance Committee grew in power daily.
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