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 37
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Such influences, and many others, combined to emphasize every weakness inherent in the political system, to accentuate every disruptive force in the community, and to create a situation where the latent menace to the welfare of a group was quickly translated into an obvious menace to a large number of particular individuals.
These endangered individuals had been trained by all the emergencies of the tumultuous life about them to act quickly rather than cautiously, and to decide the most momentons issues of life and death by the light of their own judgment or the hasty vote of a small circle of associates. Unhesitating and intrepid action. prompted by absolute self-confidence, was the only key to success in California and from the moment the immigrant set foot within the state he seemed vitalized with a spirit that removed mountains in hand barrows, raised cities with the swift- ness of magie, and conceived railroad projects that staggered the imagination of the nation. "To say that it was a period of intense excitement does not describe it," remarked one of the pioneers concerning the spirit of '49. "It was a raging, seething. red hot pandemonia. [sic] in which men struggled to accomplish their purpose in the shortest possible time."?
Faced with the defiant triumph of lawlessness and crime. these men who had been schooled in audacity did not establish learned societies to analyze their social situation, nor summon a national congress to suggest remedies for their peril.
They experimented !
7 C. R. Street, "Crossing the Plains in '49," in Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days, Sixteenth Annual Meeting, 1891, p. 24.
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Their experiments, embodied in the Committee of Vigilanee of 1851, were based on a modification of the precedents of the unorganized frontier, and an application of the resultant methods to a society already organized and equipped with the machinery of representative government. They were, to say the least, erude and radical. They were destructive of personal liberty, they inflicted punishment without due process of law. yet they were tolerated by the community because of the general desire for effective protection, and the general recognition of the good sense and sincerity of the Vigilantes.8
In a curious fashion they suggest some of the modern attempts at political reform. Popular participation in the affairs of government, now legalized in certain matters by methods of initiative and referendum, was then illegally forced upon the judicial department of San Francisco by the action of the Com- mittee and the assent of the community. The object now attained by the process of recall was then effected by the expedient of taking over the work of the police officers and magistrates who had failed to preserve order. An approximation to the funda- mental idea of a commission form of government was developed in the various departments of the Executive Committee, with their subordination of responsibility to a few influential officers. A state-wide detective and police ageney was instituted by the sub- committees for the pursuit and arrest of criminals. The Gordian knot of technicalities was severed by the admission of all evidence at its face value and the elimination of the privilege of appeal. Finally, the emancipation of municipal polities from party control was attempted when members of the Committee con- ducted an independent and effective eampaigu at the local election.
$ "Lynch law in some of its manifestations is a form of private initia- tive in the enforcement of law, where the ordinary official machinery for its enforcement has broken down or is manifestly inefficient, though this method of law enforcement is, of course, at the same time a violation of law" (Mathews, State Administration, 414).
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If we compare the work accomplished by the Committee of Vigilance of 1851 with the purpose that incited its formation, we are compelled to characterize it as successful. Under its stern rule the city was for a time delivered from the reign of violence and from the terror of incendiary fires, and the state was so swifty rid of the entthroats and robbers of the Stuart gang that many other brigands took warning from the experiences of that outlaw brotherhood. All this was accomplished with few exhibi- tions of disorder or riot, and no man suffered at the hands of the Committee a punishment heavier than the law imposed for the crimes of which he had been proved guilty. The members of the Committee felt no shame in acknowledging their work while they still ranged themselves under the symbol of the Watehful Eye, nor in later years when they reviewed their services as Vigilantes, and the community which had welcomed their protection in time of need never repudiated their efforts after the emergency had passed.
Yet the Committee of Vigilance was a confession of failure, as is every political scandal, every parody of justice, every lynching throughout the country. It was not. necessarily. the failure of the people to use with honest endeavor the social tools within their grasp. but their failure to perfect the full equipment of tools required in their task of self-government. The realiza- tion of a similar failure is today stirring the whole nation to constructive criticism and to strenuous experimentation.
One of the vital and perplexing problems of the hour is the control of the constantly recurring mob clamor for illegal exe- cutions. Each act of lawless lynehing is sternly condemned by the country at large, and is usually defended by local champions on the ground of special and urgent necessity. In discussing the subject it has been said :9
9 Forster, as cited, American Law Review, LI (1917), 239-248.
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In Retrospect
To understand popular tribunals and lynchings, the attitude of the vigilantes and their responsible supporters and neighbors is of more weight than that of the outlaws or the formal legalistic critics of the vigilantes who confine their activity to destructive criticism and make no attempt to remedy the underlying causes that have led to popular tribunals, popular justice or extra legal criminal justice in forty-four of our forty-nine continental states and territories.
It is doubtful if there exist any records in which the "attitude of the Vigilantes and their responsible supporters" can be more thoroughly studied than in the archives of the Committee of Vigilance, which in this volume have been given a concrete sum- mary and a background of local history. The acts of that illegal tribunal were deliberate and cautious, they were quite removed from the influence of racial antagonism between black and white, and they made no sentimental appeal on the ground of punishing revolting crimes against women. Taken as a whole they present a series of episodes in which a well defined national tendency can be reviewed with extraordinary fullness and unbiased judg- ment.
It seems almost an injustice to associate even remotely the self-restrained members of the Committee of Vigilance with a blood-crazed mob that reverts to the vengeance of savages, and some of the differences between them are absolutely fundamental. It is unquestionably true that the precedents established by the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance have led other unorganized communities to interpose a quasi-representative and permanent body of responsible men between defiant outlaws and an out- raged public, and to effect salutary punishment of crime with a minimum of disorder and cruelty.10 But it is equally true that
10 An interesting article by George Kennan entitled "A Russian Experi- ment in Self-Government," seems to invoke the very specters of the Vigi- lantes in an account of the "Amur California, " in a No Man's Land of Manchurian gold fields. The placers were discovered in 1883 and were quickly thronged with cosmopolitan miners and escaped Siberian convicts. Pandemonium resulted, and after tentative experiments a popular organiza- tion was effected in February, 1885: organic laws were adopted, officials
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the very restraint of the members of the Committee of San Fran- cisco, the wide scope of their work, and the tolerance aecorded to them by a large and intelligent center of population have tended to endow with the dignity of an accepted national insti- tution those emergency methods which the Vigilantes borrowed from revolutionary or pioneer communities. Even now their example is often eited by restive and irresponsible members of well established societies who in times of supposed erisis are moved to express hysterieal racial antagonism or sporadie protest against the chronie shortcomings of their judicial system.
From whatever angle it may be viewed, the faet must be recognized that the work of the Committee of Vigilance was too spectacular to sink into oblivion, and that it still exercises a distinct influence upon the popular mind. It has therefore seemed important that its history should be presented in detail, based on the authentie records of its daily doings, stripped as far as might be possible of false glamour and false condemnation, and fairly related to the causes which engendered it.
The body of men who styled themselves the Committee of Vigilance of San Francisco were men who believed in the su- premacy of law. Many of them had extemporized law when denied the ordinary protection of established society and had formulated law when the opportunity for self-organization ar- rived. They had appointed representatives to execute the law, after the manner of American citizens, and no survey of their work has yet proved that as citizens they consciously betrayed their eity and state to violence and corruption. But when the laws they had created failed to protect them from the onslaughts
chosen, and the penalties of death and flogging were administered with rigor. Order was quickly enforced, and for nearly a year the isolated republic conducted its own affairs with marked success, but perished in a week before a hostile movement of the Chinese government, which saw with apprehension the introduction of unwelcome neighbors and customs upon its borderland (Atlantic Monthly, LXXX [1897], 494-507).
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In Retrospect
of criminals, they put the immediate welfare of the community above their allegiance to the formulated laws, and did to the outlaws among them the things that seemed right in their own eyes.
That, as I understand it, was the spirit of the men who constituted the Committee of Vigilance. It is not a spirit which has been confined to a single decade of United States history, to a single section of the frontier, or even to the whole frontier region as distinguished from the areas of denser population. Of whatever vice or virtue it may be the outward and visible sign, it is a spirit which is still alive in the land, and with which reckoning must be made by those entrusted with the responsi- bilities of social leadership. It is capable of developing tremen- dous dynamic energy, and under provocation will assert itself with destructive ferocity unless restrained by physical force.
But the curbing of this spirit, which has manifested itself from the time of the Regulators to the yesterdays of 1920, is not so much a matter of heavy-handed restraint as of the elimination of provocation. The realization of the fact that such men as Stuart, Adams, and Jimmy from Town, time and again defied the people in their very courts created the impulse that moved Brannan and Bluxome and Coleman and Payran to teach those rascals a wholesome fear of the wrath of the community, and made the men of San Francisco listen with stern approval to the tapping of the Monumental bell. The realization of the fact that the most vicious criminal can today evade swift and certain punishment creates the impulse that now draws within the circle of lynchers men, and even women, whose lives are normally gentle and humane. If that conviction were destroyed, the will to lynch might remain as a social danger, but it would be so universally condemned by the better element of the people that both preventive and punitive measures might be adopted for its suppression.
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It is not the province of the historian of the Committee of Vigilance to prophesy what steps must be taken before the people may regard their political institutions as safeguards against cor- ruption, and their courts as temples of justice rather than as sanctuaries for the fugitive from righteous punishment. In this Year of the Independence of the United States one hundred and forty-five the precedents of the past are not to be accepted as unerring guide posts towards the future development of Amer- ican democracy. Old issues are swiftly sinking into oblivion, and new problems are arising that will test afresh the elasticity of our institutions and the temper of our people. But in spite of every failure of our political system, in spite of civie lassitude, in spite of standards of thought and action divergent from the past, in spite of commercial greed, of evasion of laws, of mob frenzy and brutal lynchings, one may say with confidence that our people still strive to carry on within the borders of their land the unending struggle between the constructive and de- structure forces of society. For this reason no effort is wasted or ill-advised that seeks to set clearly before their minds the actions and reactions which transmute subtle and primary elements into the visible phenomena of their daily lives.
The Committee of Vigilance of 1851 was a phenomenon that has been visible and familiar to every reader of California his- tory, but its vital significance has largely been obsenred by its atmosphere of picturesque melodrama and its detachment from historical criticism. It was the confession of the failure of aver- age men to control the unusually disruptive forces in their special community by the restraining influences of the form of govern- ment commonly practiced in the United States. It was also an experiment in correction, reflecting existing theories of popular sovereignty, and forecasting less explosive experiments of a later day. For a short time its influence in San Francisco and in California was undoubtedly productive of public quiet and
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In Retrospect
safety. When another and more acute crisis arose in San Fran- cisco in 1856, the framework of the Committee of 1851 formed the nucleus of a much larger body which brought under the discipline of its secret tribunal men of power and influence, and established practical and permanent political reforms. In other pioneer communities, as Colorado, Montana, and Nevada, the exercise of lynchi law common to all the American frontier bor- rowed from the precedents set by the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance a decorum of procedure, and an element of restraint that prevented some of the worst evils incident to such an irre- sponsible code.
But with all this to its credit, the Committee of Vigilance was not a beacon light on the pathway of constructive reform ; and as an experiment the real force of its lesson has been ob- scured, because the lawlessness and danger of its methods have diverted its critics from attention to the inherent weakness of organization that originally caused the breakdown of govern- ment in California. More than this-it must also be acknowl- edged that as an influence in American life surviving the emerg- encies of unprotected frontiers, the Committee, itself, became a menace to organized society, for the sincerity of the men who formed it, and the partial if temporary success of their efforts have diverted many of their admirers from a true valuation of the destructive measures which they employed. Yet in view of our own experiences in inefficiency, and our laborious and pro- crastinating efforts at improvement, it seems fair to place the emphasis of significance on the structural weakness and conse- quent breakdown of a social system rather than on the errors of those who experimented with readjustment.
Whatever might be the meed of praise or censure that the world should pass upon their deeds, the Vigilantes awaited the verdict unflinchingly, meeting with open faces the friends and foes upon their city streets, and setting their names to the records
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of their work, that men in other places and in other days might read and understand. They usurped power, but they exercised it without tyranny. They avenged crime, but they did so with- out cruelty. They disregarded the laws which had been formu- lated for the public good, but they felt themselves bound in solemn responsibility to the people who, behind those laws, repre- sented to their minds the symbol of ultimate sovereignty.
To that self-imposed responsibility they were consistently faithful. They appealed unto the People. Let the People take warning from their errors, but give tribute to their sincerity and daring.
APPENDIX
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
The following notes have been compiled from accessible sources,1 with the purpose of showing the type of men who made up the rank and file of the Committee of Vigilance of 1851. Members of particular prominence are mentioned in the chapter on organization, and many more might be noted with interest and profit if the limits of this volume permitted. It would be a valuable addition to the archives of the Committee if relatives of Vigilantes would contribute biographical data to be filed with the original documents in the Bancroft Library.
The names are arranged in the order of signature to the constitution. A second number printed in brackets indicates a variation in the identi- fication number used by the sergeant-at-arms (see supra, p. 192 note 10).
5. Of. George J. Oakes we know little, except that he was a member of the firm of Endicott, Green and Oakes, was a foreman of the Empire Engine Company Number 1 (Broderick's), that he served on the Executive Committee until the date of his death, October 26 or 27, 1851, and that the Committee sent to his mother an eloquent letter of condolence which was probably the most gentle document indited "In behalf of the Committee of Vigilance of San Francisco." The fire companies and the Vigilantes paraded at his funeral, and the rooms of the Committee were draped in mourning in deference to his memory (Papers, 681-686; Herald, 1851, Oct. 28-30).
9. James C. Ward, a former member of Stevenson's Regiment, served on the Executive Committee and sometimes filled the place of secretary or chairman. In 1854 he acted as president of the San Francisco and Mission Plank Road (Herald, April 27). At a later period he was a notary public, and became quite wealthy. Swasey said he was a man of education, and possessed some literary ability (Early Days, 272). In 1878 he published his "Recollections" in the San Francisco Argonaut. He died in Massa- chusetts in 1883.
1 The Constitution and By-Laws of the Society of California Pioneers, as revised in 1912, has been followed for dates of arrival in California, and the California Blue Book for 1907 has furnished records of members of the state legislature. Other sources of information are mentioned in the text.
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12. The name of R. S. Watson, of Macondray and Company, made little impression on the archives of the Committee. Josiah Royce knew him in later years, and learned interesting details of the Jansen affair, of Feb- ruary, 1851, and of the inception of the Committee of Vigilance. Watson, under the pseudonym of "Justice," made the stirring suggestions in the Alta of June 8, that greatly promoted the organization of the Committee (see infra, p. 456, and Royce, California, 412-421). His ideals of duty may be inferred from the fact that he risked his life, on a stormy day, to deliver the anchor he had promised to a departing vessel (Knower, Adventures, 131).
14. Edward A. King, a sea captain, arrived in California in November, 1846. He was successively an agent for underwriters, a lumber dealer in Monterey in 1848, and harbor master of San Francisco in 1849. A copy of a table of arrivals made from his records for the Society of Pioneers furnishes valuable and unique statistics for the period of his administration (see supra, p. 123; Bancroft, California, IV, 700. The register of the Society of California Pioneers corrects Bancroft's date of arrival).
24 [20]. James T. Ryan was prominently identified with lumber inter- ests in Humboldt County, where he was a partner of James R. Duff, Vigi- lante number 169. He served as a Democratic state senator, 1860 and 1861, and died at Vallejo, February 6, 1875 (Carr, Pioneer Days, 442; San Francisco Chronicle, 1915, Oet. 3, Magazine p. 6).
26 [22]. George H. Howard was a Democratic assemblyman, 1865-1866. 35 [31]. James F. Curtis, a native of Boston, and a "Territorial Pioneer " of 1850, was a partner of J. D. Farwell (see note on Farwell, number 89). He assisted in arresting the first prisoner of the Committee of Vigilance, served on the Executive Committee, and was active in the reorganization of 1856. Subsequently he was for two years chief of police in San Francisco. He became a brigadier general in the Federal army in the Civil War, and commanded the national guard of Idaho during the riots at the Coeur d'Alene mines in 1892 (Alta California, 1858, November 7 %; 833; 11 %; 1877, Aug. 27 1/5 ; Popular Tribunals, II, Index; G. E. French, "Coeur d'Alene Riots," Overland Monthly, ser. 2, XXVI (1895), 32-40; biographical note, ibid, 109).
44 [40]. James C. L. Wadsworth was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, and came to California in 1847, as a sutler in Stevenson's Regiment. In 1848 and 1849 he worked in the southern mines, then established himself in business in Stockton and was elected second alcalde in the spring of 1849. Later he engaged in banking in San Francisco. He was a member of Broderick 's fire company and was one of the first to suggest the forma- tion of the Society of California Pioneers. Later he held important posi- tions in Nevada mining companies, was appointed secretary to the State Board of Harbor Commissioners in California in 1883, and subsequently
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Biographical Notes
served as a commissioner of insurance. He was a staunch Democrat, a loyal Union man, and a prominent Mason. He dictated a brief statement which has a place in the Bancroft collections (Swasey, Early Days, 242-245; Alta, 1864, April 13 11; San Francisco Call, 1883, March 22 34 ; 23 3%).
55 [51]. Dr. Victor J. Fourgeaud was born in Charleston, South Caro- lina, February 1, 1816. He was educated in France and in South Carolina (Swasey, Early Days, 274). He undertook the overland trip in 1847, and had the courage to take with him his wife and child. He published several descriptions of California which may be called the first steps in the advertisement of the state (Eldredge, California, III, 181-182. Extracts reprinted in In Memoriam [of] Dr. Victor J. Fourgeaud, by the Society of California Pioneers). One of the earliest authoritative announcements of the discovery of gold was made in a long article on the advantages of California which he published in the California Star, April 1, 1848, but the author's career as a miner was quickly terminated by illness. He was conspicuous in the rising against the Hounds, but took no important part in the activities of the Committee of Vigilance, although his early member- ship gives interesting proof of the attitude towards the society of a quiet, scholarly man whose family was already in the city. He was a Republican member of the state assembly in 1857. Obituary, Alta, 1875, Jan. 3 %.
83 [79]. Jesse Seligman, was senior member of a firm of importers, and subsequently established a banking house (Colville's Directory, 1856; Eldredge, California, V, 446).
89 [85]. James D. Farwell and his partner, James F. Curtis (number 35) were merchants. They suffered in the fire of May, 1851, but were not ruined, because their store was built over the water, and in anticipation of such a catastrophe, they always kept lighters alongside, and so salvaged most of their stock before the building was destroyed. Farwell was not an important member of the Committee of '51, but played a larger rôle in that of '56, which he entered as a "sacred duty" although conscious of the heavy responsibility assumed by such a defiance of established law (see his MS Statement; Popular Tribunals, Index).
92 [88]. Jacob Primer Leese was a representative of the old régime, as he arrived in California in 1833, was naturalized as a Mexican citizen, married a daughter of the Vallejo family, and was the father of Rosalía, the first white child born in Yerba Buena. He was alcalde of Sonoma in 1844-1845, acted as a sub-agent for Larkin in 1846, and was elected in 1847 as a member of the Sonoma town council. He was a bold man, but had little education and ultimately lost the fortune he had made in trade and mining, as well as that inherited by his wife (Bancroft, California, IV, 710-711; Annals, 171; Leese, "Reminiscences," Alta, 1865, March 30, p. 1).
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