USA > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco > History of the San Francisco Committee of vigilance of 1851 : a study of social control on the California frontier in the days of the gold rush > Part 36
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An interesting development of the American trend towards extra-legal institutions took place in Louisiana in 1858 and 1859, but has received little attention from other than local historians. The events then enacted have been commemorated in an obscure volume by Alexandre Barde,33 a French journalist of the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in the district of Attakapas. As settle- ments expanded after the American oceupation, disorders inei- dent to other frontiers appeared among the scattered villages: cattle thieves ravaged the unprotected grazing land ; robbers and incendiaries terrorized the growing towns ; and peaceful citizens met untimely deaths at the hands of desperate marauders.
32 Trimble, Mining Advance, 242-245. Bancroft made a very inadequate survey of these regions in Popular Tribunals, 1, chap. III (see also his History of Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming, 1890, 738). Cutler made seant allusion to them in Lynch-Law. Material may be found in F. Fry, Fry's Traveler's Guide, 1865, pp. 241-245; W. M. Turner, "Pioneer Justice in Oregon," Overland Monthly, XII (1874), 224-230; T. M. Marquett, "Effect of Early Legislation upon the Courts of Nebraska," Nebraska State Historical Society, Proceedings and Collections, ser. 2, I (1894-1895), 104-105; Kansas State Historical Society, Transactions X (1907-1908), 125. 131, 146; X1 (1909-1910), 273; XIII (1913-1914), 261-262; J. E. Parker, "Pioneer Protection from Horse Thieves," Annals of Iowa, ser. 3, VI (1903), 59-62; G. F. Shafer, "Early History of MeKenzie County,"' North Dakota State Historical Society, Collections, IV (1913), 58-61. 33 Alexandre Barde, Histoire des Comités de Vigilance aux Attakapas, 1861. See also H. L. Griffin, "Vigilance Committees of the Attakapas Country, " Mississippi Valley Historical Association, Proceedings, VIII (1914-1915), 146-159.
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One receives from the pages of Barde's Histoire des Comités de Vigilance the impression of a people and a society very dis- similar to the sturdy adventurers and the rugged communities of the Western pioneers. The land itself was a gentle and gracious domain, fringed with quiet bayous, shaded with noble forests, and responsive to cultivation. The colonists were typi- cally French in life and thought. The little hamlets clustered about their simple churches, paid deference to their local eurés, and enjoyed more worldly pleasures with Gallie gaiety and optimism. Their laws were excellent, their magistrates were honorable. But the people were without traditional attachment to the jury system of the American régime; the criminals among them were also of French deseent, and the ties of blood were powerful! When elever advocates appealed to their volatile emotions they refused to convict men of their own race, and the guilty went unpunished.
As a result, the district of Attakapas became a haven for desperadoes and by 1859 their defiance of restraint became open and intolerable. Then, by a curious affiliation with the social precedents of their northern neighbors, the French population which had proved itself so inept in the duties and privileges of American citizenship adopted with vigor the American institu- tion of organized and permanent Committees of Vigilance. One after another, a cirele of neighboring parishes formed these Comités de Vigilance. They were instituted by men of position and respeetability and were based, as were the associations in California, on written constitutions and regulations. Their historian, however, made little or no allusion to any imitation of California traditions. Suspeets were ordered to leave the country ; the defiant were whipped, and two or three murderers were expented.
Barde and his collaborators were personal friends of the Vigilantes and were in thorough sympathy with their work. The
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episodes, however, are substantiated by many citations from the contemporary press. As a source of history on the subject of popular tribunals the volume deserves a place with more familiar narratives ; but in using it one must be alert to detect indieations of an underlying antipathy to the national movement for abolition as well as a determination to suppress crime. The constitution of the earliest Comité, that of Côte Gelée, gave as one of the objects of organization, "Surveillance rigourense des blanes suspects dans leurs rapports avec les hommes de couleur ou les esclaves d'une moralité donteuse."34 After inflicting several well deserved punishments on French outlaws of par- ticular depravity, the Vigilantes shifted their attention to erim- inals who were emancipated Negroes, and to propagandists of liberation suspected of inciting the blacks to discontent and rebellion.
It is a curious circumstance in the development of our cosmo- politan people that the pages of this forgotten volume, written in an alien tongue by a foreign-born journalist, and descriptive of a society which laeked all Anglo-Saxon inheritances, should present with unexampled vividness the swift, subtle, and danger- ous transformation of the popular tribunals such as had pre- served order on the frontier, into intolerant associations deter- mined to control public opinion and personal liberty of action by the threat of punishment and death. A similar transforma- tion took place elsewhere in the South and Southwest during the years immediately before the Civil War. In Texas. for instance, so-called Vigilance Committees were in active operation against both criminals and abolitionists, while mob lynchings, without any semblance of unprejudiced trial, were constantly inflicted upon unpopular persons, both white and black. 35
34 Barde, Histoire des Comités de Vigilance, 56.
35 See Cutler, Lynch-Law, 119-124; G. P. Garrison, Texas, 1903, 274-275; D. H. Hardy and I. S. Roberts, Historical Review of South-East Texas, 1910, I, 172-176, 385; J. F. Rippy, "Border Troubles along the Rio Grande," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XXIII (1919), 103-104.
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Still further removed from the tribunals of the frontier, with their open trials and their public punishments, were the secret protective societies of the Southern whites during the unhappy days of Reconstruction, when the Knights of the White Camelia, the Ghouls of the Ku Klux Klan, and their confrères of similar societies, rode masked through the night and terrorized carpet- bag official and incautious freedman with outrages that shocked the entire land.36 In that tumultuous period, amid the conflicts and the travail of a younger generation, there emerged such varied problems and relations that the exigencies and the tradi- tions of the frontier were overshadowed by new phases of national development. Thereafter the West became year by year more populous, better policed, less afraid of high-handed violence, and less inclined to elamor for rigorous punishment of crime; while the South, demoralized and embittered by the devastation of the war and confronted by the new terror of emancipated and dan- gerous Negroes, demanded swift and summary retribution upon every colored delinquent, and its mobs inflicted both whipping and death with a recklessness and ferocity that knew no parallel in the annals of the Western pioneers.37
The end is not yet, for the records of every year of the twentieth century are stained with mob lynchings which for a moment horrify the entire country and are then quickly for- gotten.38
36 See J. C. Lester, and D. L. Wilson, Ku Klux Klan, ed. of 1905. A report on the Ku Klux Conspiracy in 13 volumes was made by a Congres- sional Committee, 1871-1872 (Cong. Docs., Ser. Nos. 1484-1496 or 1529- 1541).
37 One of Cutler's charts shows that from 1882 to 1903, 1997 lynch executions occurred in the Southern states, and 363 in the Western, to which California contributed a quota of 31 (Lynch-Law, 184-185).
38 The study of lynching as an evidence of race hatred is particularly developed in Cutler's Lynch-Law, and in reports issued periodically by the Tuskegee Institute. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is also conducting a campaign to arouse public opinion.
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But why must these things be? The necessity for them is not inherent in the temper of the races from which our people have been amalgamated, nor in the forms of civilization which they have evolved elsewhere. Those who have studied the subject seem to agree that lynching. as it is carried on in this country, is a demonstration of group anger that is not characteristic of other nations which have achieved a corresponding plane of social advancement. Other communities with comparable standards may be subject to riots, mob violence, and sanguinary revolutions, but in the ordinary course of non-revolutionary existence they do not decide the fate of suspected criminals by the verdicts of popular tribunals, nor execute men. with deliberate premedita- tion. in open defiance of all restraints of law and order.
Cutler stated categorically that at the time he wrote Europe as a whole was free from the practice of lynching except for certain enstoms prevalent among the peasants of Russia .?? Judge John D. Lawson said of the administration of English law : " For seventy-five years, in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and in the colonies of the British Empire scattered all over the world. among peoples of all races and of all colors, no man's life has been taken by what we call Lynch Law."40 Similar assertions are often repeated by both English and American writers," so that, even if sporadie cases of lynching might be addneed in contradiction. it seems safe to assume that the accepted generalizations are indicative of a fundamental difference between a social organ- ization where mob exeentions are practically unknown and
5º C'utler, Lynch-Law. 3.
40 J. D. Lawson. "Technicalities in Procedure," Journal of Criminal Law. I (1910). 83-84.
41 As by William Roberts, "Administration of Justice in America," Fortnightly Review, new ser. LI (1892), 91-108; H. A. Forster, "Do Our Laws Protect Criminals? Why the United States Leads the World in the Relative Proportion of Murders, Lynchings and Other Felonies, and Why the Anglo-Saxon Countries Not under the American Flag Have the Least Proportion of Murders and Felonies, and Know No Lynchings," American Law Review, LI (1917), 239-248, especially p. 243.
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another social organization where mob executions are of frequent occurrence.
Even upon the respective frontiers there is a contrast of methods and result. In spite of the circumstance that a pioneer chief justice of Montana acknowledged the necessity for popular tribunals on the American frontier, a student of comparative institutions must not ignore the fact that differing methods of social control have protected other frontiers from such dis- turbances as led in this country to the toleration of extra-legal punishment of erime.
In New South Wales, for example, the authorities in 1851 were confronted with the problem of preserving order among the thousands of miners who flocked to the newly discovered gold fields. They accomplished that tremendous task by a force of ten mounted troopers, under the command of a gold commis- sioner who had graduated from Oxford, was a colonist of experi- ence, and had been a police magistrate of Parramatta. This corporal's guard of Englishmen actually kept the peace over their whole territory, devised equitable and .acceptable regula- tions, received and transported incalculable treasure, settled disputes, and gave criminals prompt trials by jury, usually on the scene of their offenses. In one instance of organized resistance, reinforcements were sent to their assistance and the rioters dispersed, but mob law and lynching were unknown.42 There were occasions of serious disorder in Victoria and resist- ance to the collection of licenses. In Sydney, also, many crimes of violence occurred. The San Francisco papers of 1852 spoke of lynch law as "rampant" in the Victoria gold fields.43 and Bancroft said that a Vigilance Committee was contemplated in
42 See Rolf Bolderwood, "Genesis of Gold-Fields Law in Australia," Cornhill Magazine, new ser., III (1897 ). 612-623; A. L. Haydon, Trooper Police of Australia, 1911, especially chaps. 5, 6; Henrietta Huxley, "Gold Diggings at Bathurst, " Nineteenth Century, XLV (1899), 962-972.
43 San Francisco Herald, 1852, May 29, 24, citations from the Sydney Herald of Feb. 23, and the Geelong Advertiser, without exact date.
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Sydney in 1853.44 But the English colonists adopted no prac- tices that were really akin to the popular tribunals of the United States, and various writers plainly assert that such eus- toms have never been tolerated in Australia.45
In the gold fields of British Columbia the authorities cheeked crime and prevented lynching, although the population was very much like that of contiguons territories of the United States in which was waged a long conflict with eriminals before order could be established. Trimble's study of coexistent conditions north and south of the national bonndary showed that during the very days of the Vigilance Committees of Idaho and Montana. the courts of British Columbia were able to achieve prompt and exemplary pimishment of crime and to afford adequate protec- tion to life and property. Wherever the American miners found themselves on British soil they gladly acknowledged the effieieney of the constituted authorities and abandoned their wonted appeal to popular tribunals. The presiding judge of the British district bore witness that although the miners were dominated by C'ali- fornia traditions, they "manifested a great desire to see justice fairly done, and great patience with the difficulties which the magistrates and the judiciary have had to contend with." And again : "There was on all sides a submission to anthority, a recognition of the right. which, looking to the mixed nature of the population, and the very large predominanee of the Cali- fornia element, I confess I had not expected to meet. "40
Trimble's final contrast of the two systems was exceedingly interesting. He said :47
44 Popular Tribunals, I, 19.
43 As Edward Dowling, Australia and America in 1892, 1893, p. 58.
46 Trimble, Mining Advance, 154.
47 Ibid., 246-247. Directly in line with this summary of contrasting systems of frontier control is an address on the general subject of lynching by C. C. Butler, who holds that the conditions which provoke such acts of vengeance rarely exist under strong, centralized governments. He character- izes the situations which have incited the people of the United States to
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Reviewing in conclusion, the prominent features of the different governmental forms applied under the British and under the American auspices in the mining advance, we see, on the one hand, government concentrated largely in the hands of an efficient executive, who made laws and organized administration on summary methods; on the other, representative government, under hampering conditions, working tardily and painfully towards order, and meeting local or occasional reinforcement. Under the former society was from the first under control, and there was a tendency to restrain individuals for the benefit of society-a restraint at times verging to over repression; under the latter individualism was feebly controlled from above, but had to generate within itself forces of order, and it tended to undue license hurtful to society. The American system developed a country the more swiftly, the British the more safely. Under both systems strong men labored courageously and well to adjust forms of order to unorganized society.
adopt and continue popular tribunals, as "a part of the price we pay for the full measure of the liberty we enjoy," but he insists that courage and intelligence may devise a cost less deadly, without forfeiting the prize of freedom, or adopting the methods of despotism ("Lynching," American Law Review, XLIV [1910], 200-220).
CHAPTER XX
IN RETROSPECT
Lynch law in some of its later developments has been hastily reviewed in the preceding chapter. for the purpose of setting the local episode of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilanee of 1851 in its proper place as an episode of the wider national life.
The Committee of Vigilance was a confession of failure! To that extent all who have considered it hold the same opinion. But the men who experienced for themselves the disordered days of its existence laid the failure upon unfaithful publie servants who betrayed their trusts; students of a later period blamed the entire body politie which permitted power to pass into ineom- petent or unworthy hands ; and the modern erities, grouping the episode with other manifestations of nation-wide reeurrenee, detect in it a failure of adjustment between the mechanism of social organization and the stress of complex and unusual con- ditions.
When we turn from the special field of California history in the days of the Vigilantes to the recent studies of our national institutions, we find that faults hitherto attributed to local incompetency and corruption are recognized as everywhere latent in our whole scheme of social control.1 Everywhere the dread of autocracy has resulted in the distribution of power among so many state officials that it is well-nigh impossible to hold particular individuals responsible for undesirable conditions. Everywhere the same distrust of centralized authority has been expressed in the loose construction of local organization. Every- where the people must vote for many candidates whose qualifi-
1 See references supra, 75; and Herbert Croly, Promise of American Life, 1909, pp. 317-324.
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cations are practically unknown.2 Everywhere the political machines are frequently able to place unworthy men in office. Everywhere the laws most obviously fail to restrain crime by prompt and effective punishment.3 Everywhere, also, there is the danger that the flagrant miscarriage of justice in the courts may be turned into an excuse for riot and lynching whenever the American good humor and optimism give way under the strain of conditions that suddenly become intolerable.4
Wherever may rest the heaviest responsibility for these acknowledged faults-whether in imperfect organization, or in defective standards of citizenship-we are forced to admit that the practices of our democracy fall far short of the ideals of our people.
It must not be thought. for an instant, that the nation is oblivious or indifferent to the dangers and defects which are
2 See A. M. Kales, Unpopular Government in the United States, 1914, pp. 25-44.
3 The student of early conditions in California should acquaint himself with these current discussions. Valuable keys are furnished by the Index to Legal Periodicals, published by the American Bar Association; Roscoe Pound, Bibliography of Procedural Reform, 1917. See especially W. H. Taft, "Administration of Criminal Law," Yale Law Review. XV (1905), 1-17; Moorfield Story, Reform of Legal Procedure, 1911; W. L. Ransom, "The Organization of the Courts for the Better Administration of Jus- tice," Cornell Law Quarterly, II (1917), 186-201, 261-282: "Report of Committee on Criminal Procedure," Journal of Criminal Law, III (1912), 566-591; Julius Goebel, Jr., "Prevalence of Crime in the United States, and Its Extent Compared with That in the Leading European States, " ibid., III (1913), 754-769; H. E. Willis, "How Shall the People of the United States Reform Their Legal Procedure so as to Make It au Instrument of Justice?" ibid., VI (1915), 533-543; Roscoe Pound, "Causes of Dissatis- faction with the Administration of Justice," American Bar Association, Report, 1906, I, pp. 395-417.
4 In a vigorous address before the District and County Attorneys Asso- ciation of Texas, H. W. Summers held the faults of legal procedure directly responsible for lynching. "The instinct of protection," he said, "is deeply implanted. Men surrender the right to protect themselves and avenge their wrongs to the state upon conditions, implied if not expressed, that the state will protect them and punish those who do them injury. What if the state doesn't do it?" (American Law Review, XLIII [1909], 455-466). See also Butler, as cited, ibid., XLIV (1910), 200-220; Walter Clark, "True Remedy for Lynch Law," ibid., XXVIII (1894), 801-807; Lawson, as cited, Journal of Criminal Law, I (1910), 63-85.
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asserting themselves with such frequency and boldness. Far from it! The daily papers, the popular periodicals, the profes- sional journals consider them with the most serious attention, learned societies investigate them, national congresses meet to discuss them, schools of social scientists conduct experiments in reform. Some strive to elevate the moral standards of the average man to the point where he will be stimulated to a faith- ful discharge of all his civic duties. Some seek to reduce the duties of citizenship to the point where the average man can faithfully discharge them without a ruinous sacrifice of his personal interests. Some would inerease the power and the responsibility of the specialist and the expert, and some wouldl fetter the hands of efficiency lest they serve the greed of private selfishness. Some are demanding that all questions of import- ance should be decided by the direct verdict of a majority of the sovereign people, and some are discussing the legitimate rights of the minority and asking what might be a workable definition of majority rule when for a moment the social group should consist of one honest traveler and two footpads.5
In California in 1849 and 1850 the strain to which the fabric of American life is always liable was raised to the Nth power. There was no local background of American tradition, and there was an unusual admixture of aliens who were entirely unpre- pared for the privileges and the duties of self-government. Many of these were actively vicious or constitutionally lazy, and differed radically from the type of ambitious peasant who came from Europe to America with the expectation of returning honest labor for the rewards of prosperity. Even with the American majority wonted standards of citizenship were greatly
5 See L. A. Lawrence, Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1913, pp. 9-13. It is interesting to recall that Francis Lieber queried whether in defining liberty the emphasis should be laid on effectuating the will of the majority or on protecting the rights of the minority (On Civil Liberty and Self-Government, ed. of 1891, p. 31).
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affected by the absence of the normal restraints of domestic life, by the general anticipation of return to an Eastern home, and by the intense preoccupation in business of a highly speculative nature.
Owing to the confusion existing over land titles and the peculiar climatic conditions of the country, the people did not attach themselves to the soil, but fluctuated between the placers and the towns. with constant and rapid changes of residence, while the individual settlements had little chance to develop that stabilized public opinion which is the foundation of order under a democratie government. Nevertheless, in spite of the absence of such a constructive spirit within the social groups, and regardless of the fact that they were quite inexperienced in corporate life, the county communities were still entrusted with the heavy responsibilities involved in local autonomy, and the state was not equipped with any machinery whatever that could restrain their eccentricities or correct their mistakes.6 The courts themselves were more or less subject to control by the local electorate, and they were at the same time bound and hampered by those rigid rules of technical procedure that had become an acknowledged evil in the administration of justice throughout the nation.
Many older communities entrenched within bulwarks of American tradition and enlightened in the duties of citizenship have capitulated to the demagogue and the perjurer. Who, then, can be surprised that the reckless stripling of the West, tolerant, sanguine, and self-absorbed, should have been worsted by the same insidious foes. And in truth the selfish and the lawless were not slow to avail themselves of every opportunity they detected in the situation. Adroit and ambitious politicians swiftly accomplished the organization of efficient machines which became permanent
6 "Republicanism, here, may be literally said to have run mad, so ridiculously incapable is it of exercising control over the masses" (Pringle Sham, Ramblings in California [ca. 1860], 69).
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factors beneath the more shifting currents of commercial life. Expert criminals weighed the spoils of pillage against the costs of trials, robbed and murdered as they pleased, and paid expert counsel to entangle the courts in such a maze of technicalities that conviction was impossible and the fear of punishment deterred no man from the indulgence of his predatory impulses.
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