Greater Britain

Matters now went from bad to worse: five times San Francisco was swept from end to end by fires known to have been helped on, if not originally kindled, by incendiaries in the hope of plunder; and when, by the fires of May and June, 1851, hardly a house was left untouched, the pious Bostonians held up their hands, and cried “Gomorrah!”

Immediately after the discovery that the June fire was not an accident, the Vigilance Committee was formed, being self-appointed, and consisting of the foremost merchants in the place. This was on the 7th of June, according to my friend; on the 9th, according to the Californian histories. It was rumored that the committee consisted of two hundred citizens; it was known that they were supported by the whole of the city press. They published a declaration, in which they stated that there is “no security for life or property under the … law as now administered.” This they ascribed to the “quibbles of the law,” the “corruption of the police,” the “insecurity of prisons,” the “laxity of those who pretend to administer justice.” The secret instructions to the committee contained a direction that the members should at once assemble at the committee-room whenever signals, consisting of two taps on a bell, were heard at intervals of one minute. The committee was organized with president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, sergeant-at-arms, standing committee on qualifications, and standing committee of finance. No one was to be admitted a member unless he were a “respectable citizen, and approved by the Committee on Qualifications.”

The very night of their organization, according to the histories, or three nights later, according to my friend Mr. A – , the work of the committee began. Some boatmen at Central Wharf saw something which led them to follow out into the Yerba Buena cove a man, whom they captured after a sharp row. As they over-hauled him, he threw overboard a safe, just stolen from a bank, but this was soon fished out. He was at once carried off to the committee-room of the Vigilants, and the bell of the Monumental Engine Company struck at intervals, as the rule prescribed. Not only the committee, but a vast surging crowd collected, although midnight was now past. A – was on the plaza, and says that every man was armed, and evidently disposed to back up the committee. According to the Alta Californian, the chief of the police came up a little before 1 A.M., and tried to force an entrance to the room; but he was met, politely enough, with a show of revolvers sufficient to annihilate his men, so he judged it prudent to retreat.

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.

The public spirit with which the merchants came forward and gave time and money to the cause of order is worthy of all praise, and the rapidity with which the organization of a new government was carried through is an instance of the singular power of our race for building up the machinery of self-government under conditions the most unpromising. Instead of the events of 1856 having been a case of opposition to law and order, they will stand in history as a remarkable proof of the law-abiding character of a people who vindicated justice by a demonstration of overwhelming force, laid down their arms, and returned in a few weeks to the peaceable routine of business life.

If, in the merchant founders of the Vigilance Committees of San Francisco we can see the descendants of the justice-loving Germans of the time of Tacitus, I found in another class of vigilants the moral offspring of Alfred‘s village aldermen of our own Saxon age. From Mr. William M. Byers, now editor of the Rocky Mountain News, I had heard the story of the early settlers’ land-law in Missouri; in Stanton‘s office in Denver City, I had seen the records of the Arrapahoe County Claim-club, with which he had been connected at the first settlement of Colorado; but at San José, I heard details of the settlers’ custom-law – the Californian “grand-coûtumier,” it might be called – which convinced me that, in order to find the rudiments of all that, politically speaking, is best and most vigorous in the Saxon mind, you must seek countries in which Saxon civilization itself is in its infancy. The greater the difficulties of the situation, the more racy the custom, the more national the law.

When a new State began to be “settled up” – that is, its lands entered upon by actual settlers, not landsharks – the inhabitants often found themselves in the wilderness, far in advance of attorneys, courts, and judges. It was their custom when this occurred to divide the territory into districts of fifteen or twenty miles square, and form for each a “claim-club” to protect the land-claims, or property of the members. Whenever a question of title arose, a judge and jury were chosen from among the members to hear and determine the case. The occupancy title was invariably protected up to a certain number of acres, which was differently fixed by different clubs, and varied in those of which I have heard the rules from 100 to 250 acres, averaging 150. The United States “Homestead” and “Pre-emption” laws were founded on the practice of these clubs. The claim-clubs interfered only for the protection of their members, but they never scrupled to hang willful offenders against their rules, whether members or outsiders. Execution of the decrees of the club was generally left to the county sheriff, if he was a member, and in this case a certain air of legality was given to the local action. It is perhaps not too much to say that a Western sheriff is an irresponsible official, possessed of gigantic powers, but seldom known to abuse them. He is a Cæsar, chosen for his honesty, fearlessness, clean shooting, and quick loading, by men who know him well: if he breaks down, he is soon deposed, and a better man chosen for dictator. I have known a Western paper say: “Frank is our man for sheriff, next October. See the way he shot one of the fellows who robbed his store, and followed up the other, and shot him too the next day. Frank is the boy for us.” In such a state of society as this, the distinction between law and lynch-law can scarcely be said to exist, and in the eyes of every Western settler the claim-club backed by the sheriff‘s name was as strong and as full of the majesty of the law as the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Byers told me of a case of the infliction of death-punishment by a claim-club which occurred in Kansas after the “Homestead” law was passed allowing the occupant when he had tilled and improved the land for five years, to purchase it at one and a quarter dollars an acre. A man settled on a piece of land, and labored on it for some years. He then “sold it,” which he had, of course, no power to do, the land being still the property of the United States. Having done this, he went and “pre-empted” it under the Homestead Act, at the government price. When he attempted to eject the man to whom he had assumed to sell, the club ordered the sheriff to “put the man away,” and he was never seen again. Perhaps Mr. Byers was the sheriff; he seemed to have the details at his fingers’ ends, and his later history in Denver, where he once had the lynching rope round his neck for exposing gamblers, testifies to his boldness.

Some of the rascalities which the claim-clubs were expected to put down were ingenious enough. Sometimes a man would build a dozen houses on a block of land, and, going there to enter on possession after they were complete, would find that in the night the whole of them had disappeared. Frauds under the Homestead Act were both many and strange. Men were required to prove that they had on the land a house of at least ten feet square. They have been known to whittle out a toy-house with their bowie, and, carrying it to the land, to measure it in the presence of a friend – twelve inches by thirteen. In court the pre-emptor, examining his own witness, would say, “What are the dimensions of that house of mine?” “Twelve by thirteen.” “That will do.” In Kansas a log-house of the regulation size was fitted up on wheels, and let at ten dollars a day, in order that it might be wheeled on to different lots, to be sworn to as a house upon the land. Men have been known to make a window-sash and frame, and keep them inside of their windowless huts, to swear that they had a window in their house – another of the requirements of the act. It is a singular mark of deference to the traditions of a Puritan ancestry that such accomplished liars as the Western landsharks should feel it necessary to have any foundation whatever for their lies; but not only in this respect are they a curious race. One of their peculiarities is that, however wealthy they may be, they will never place their money out at interest, never sink it in a speculation, however tempting, when there is no prospect of almost immediate realization. To turn their money over often, at whatever risk, is with these men an axiom. The advanced-guard of civilization, they push out into an unknown wilderness, and seize upon the available lots, the streams, the springs, the river bottoms, the falls or “water-privileges,” and then, using their interest in the territorial legislature – using, perhaps, direct corruption in some cases – they procure the location of the State capital upon their lands, or the passage of the railroads through their valleys. The capital of Nebraska has been fixed in this manner at a place two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest settlement. A newspaper appeared suddenly, dated from “Lincoln City, center of Nebraska Territory,” but published in reality in Omaha. To cope with such fellows, Western sheriffs must be no ordinary men.

Thanks to the Vigilance Committees, California stands now before the other far-western States. Rowdyism is being put down as the God-fearing Northerners gain ground. It may still be dangerous to stroke your beard in a bar-room at Placerville or El Dorado; “a gentleman in the loafing and chancing line” may still be met with in Sacramento; here and there a Missourian “Pike,” as yet unhung, may boast that he can whip his weight in wild cats, – but San Francisco has at least reached the age of outward decorum, has shut up public gaming-houses, and supports four church papers.

In Colorado lynch law is not as yet forgotten: the day we entered Denver the editor of the Gazette expressed, “on historical grounds,” his deep regret at the cutting down of two fine cottonwood-trees that stood on Cherry Creek. When we came to talk to him we found that the “history” alluded to was that of the “escape up” these trees of many an early inhabitant of Denver City. “There‘s the tree we used to put the jury under, and that‘s the one we hanged ’em on. Put a cart under the tree, and the boy standing on it, with the rope around him; give him time for a pray, then smack the whip, and ther’ you air.”

In Denver we were reserved upon the subject of Vigilance Committees, for it is dangerous sometimes to make close inquiries as to their constitution. While I was in Leavenworth a man was hanged by the mob at Council Bluffs for asking the names of the Vigilants who had hanged a friend of his the year before. We learned enough, however, at Denver to show that the committee in that city still exists; and in Virginia and Carson I know that the organizations are continued; but offenders are oftener shot quietly than publicly hanged, in order to prevent an outcry, and avoid the vengeance of the relatives. The verdict of the jury never fails to be respected, but acquittal is almost as unknown as mercy to those convicted. Innocent men are seldom tried before such juries, for the case must be clear before the sheriff will run the risk of being shot in making the arrest. When the man‘s fate is settled, the sheriff drives out quietly in his buggy, and next day men say when they meet, “Poor – ‘s escaped;” or else it is, “The sheriff‘s shot. Who‘ll run for office?”

It will be seen from the history of the Vigilance Committees, as I heard their stories from Kansas to California, that they are to be divided into two classes, with sharply-marked characteristics – those where committee hangings, transportations, warnings, are alike open to the light of day, such as the committees of San Francisco in 1856, and the Sandwich Islands in 1866, and those – unhappily the vast majority – where all is secret and irresponsible. Here, in San Francisco, the committee was the government; elsewhere, the organization was less wide, and the members, though always shrewdly guessed at, never known. Neither class should be necessary, unless when a gold rush brings down upon a State the desperadoes of the world; but there is this encouragement even in the history of lynch law: that, although English settlements often start wild, they never have been known to go wild.

The men who formed the second Vigilance Committee of San Francisco are now the governor, Senators, and Congressmen of California, the mayors and sheriffs of her towns. Nowadays the citizens are remarkable, even among Americans, for their love of law and order. Their city, though still subject to a yearly deluge from the outpourings of all the overcrowded slums of Europe, is, as the New Yorker said, the best policed in all America. In politics, too, it is remarked that party organizations have no power in this State from the moment that they attempt to nominate corrupt or time-serving men. The people break loose from their caucuses and conventions, and vote in a body for their honest enemies, rather than for corrupt friends. They have the advantage of singular ability, for there is not an average man in California.

CHAPTER XXII.

GOLDEN CITY

THE first letter which I delivered in San Francisco was from a Mormon gentleman to a merchant, who, as he read it, exclaimed: “Ah! so you want to see the lions? I‘ll pick you up at three, and take you there.” I wondered, but went, as travelers do.

At the end of a pleasant drive along the best road in all America, I found myself upon a cliff overhanging the Pacific, with a glorious outlook, seaward toward the Farallones, and northward to Cape Benita and the Golden Gate. Beneath, a few hundred yards from shore, was a conical rock, covered with shapeless monsters, plashing the water and roaring ceaselessly, while others swam around. These were “the lions,” my acquaintance said – the sea-lions. I did not enter upon an explanation of our slang phrase, “the lions” which the Mormon, himself an Englishman, no doubt had used, but took the first opportunity of seeing the remainder of “the lions” of the Golden City.

The most remarkable spot in all America is Mission Dolores, in the outskirts of San Francisco City – once a settlement of the Society of Jesus, and now partly blanket factory and partly church. Nowhere has the conflict between the Saxon and Latin races been so sharp and so decisive. For eighty or ninety years California was first Spanish, then Mexican, then a half independent Spanish-American republic. The progress of those ninety years was shown in the foundation of half a dozen Jesuit “missions,” which held each of them a thousand or two tame Indians as slaves, while a few military settlers and their friends divided the interior with the savage tribes. Gold, which had been discovered here by Drake, was never sought: the fathers, like the Mormon chiefs, discouraged mining; it interfered with their tame Indians. Here and there, in four cases, perhaps, in all, a presidio, or castle, had been built for the protection of the mission, and a puebla, or tiny free town, had been suffered to grow up, not without remonstrance from the fathers. Los Angeles had thus sprung from the mission of that name, the fishing village of Yerba Buena, from Mission Dolores on the bay of San Francisco, and San José, from Santa Clara. In 1846, Fremont the Pathfinder conquered the country with forty-two men, and now it has a settled population of nearly half a million; San Francisco is as large as Newcastle or Hull, as flourishing as Liverpool, and the Saxon blanket factory has replaced the Spanish mission. The story might have served as a warning to the French Emperor, when he sent ships and men to found a “Latin empire in America.”