It 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.
[Illustration: 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.