A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856

Part 1

Produced by David Schwan

A SKETCH OF THE CAUSES, OPERATIONS AND RESULTS OF THE SAN FRANCISCO VIGILANCE COMMITTEE IN 1856

By Stephen Palfrey Webb

1874

Stephen Palfrey Webb was born in Salem on March 20, 1804, the son of Capt. Stephen and Sarah (Putnam) Webb. He was graduated from Harvard in 1824, and studied law with Hon. John Glen King, after which he was admitted to the Essex Bar. He practiced law in Salem, served as Representative and Senator in the Massachusetts Legislature, and was elected Mayor of Salem in 1842, serving three years. He was Treasurer of the Essex Railroad Company in the late forties.

About 1853, he went to San Francisco, where he resided several years, serving as Mayor of that city in 1854 and 1855. It was during this time that he witnessed the riotous mobs following the Gold Rush of 1849, and upon his return Salem made notes for a lecture, which he delivered in Salem; and later, with many additions, prepared this sketch, probably about 1874. He was again elected Mayor of Salem, 1860-1862, and City Clerk, 1863-1870. He died in Salem on September 29, 1879. On May 26, 1834, he married Hannah H. B. Robinson of Salem.

There have been several accounts of the activities of the Vigilance Committee, but this is firsthand information from one who was on the ground at the time, and for this reason it is considered a valuable contribution to the history of those troublous days. It certainly is a record of what a prominent, intelligent and observing eye-witness saw regarding this important episode in the history of California. The original paper is now in the possession of his granddaughter, Mrs. Raymond H. Oveson of Groton, Massachusetts.

Many of the evils which afflicted the people of San Francisco may be traced to the peculiar circumstances attendant upon the settlement of California. The effect all over the world of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 was electric. A movement only paralleled by that of the Crusades at once commenced. Adventurers of every character and description immediately started for the far away land where gold was to be had for the gathering. The passage round Cape Horn, which from the earliest times had been invested with a dreamy horror, and had inspired a vague fear in every breast, was now dared with an audacity which only the all absorbing greed for gold could have produced. Old condemned hulks which, at other times, it would not have been deemed safe to remove from one part of the harbor to another, were hastily fitted up, and with the aid of a little paint and a few as deceptive assurances of the owners, were instantly filled with eager passengers and dispatched to do battle, as they might, with the storms and perils of the deep during the tedious months through which the passage extended. The suffering and distress consequent upon the packing so many human beings in so confined a space; the miserable quality and insufficient quantity of the provisions supplied; the weariness and lassitude engendered by the intolerable length of the voyage; the ill-temper and evil passions so sure to be roused and inflamed by long and forced companionship without sympathy or affection, all tended to make these trips, for the most part, all but intolerable, and in many cases left feelings of hate and desire for revenge to be afterwards prosecuted to bloody issues.

The miseries generally endured were however sometimes enlivened and relieved by the most unexpected calls for exertion. A passenger described his voyage from New York to San Francisco in 1849, in company with several hundred others in a steamer of small size and the most limited capacity in all respects, as an amusing instance of working one's passage already paid for in advance. The old craft went groaning, creaking, laboring and pounding on for seven months before she arrived at her destination. Short of provisions, every sailing vessel that was encountered was boarded for supplies, and almost every port on the Atlantic and Pacific was entered for the same purpose. Out of fuel, every few days, axes were distributed, and crew and passengers landed to cut down trees to keep up steam for a few days longer. He expressed his conviction that every point, headland, island and wooded tract on the coast from the Cape to San Francisco had not only been seen by him, but had resounded with the sturdy blows of his axe during the apparently interminable voyage. His experience, with the exception of the axe exercise, was that of thousands.

The extent to which the gold fever had impelled people on shipboard may be judged by the facts that from the first of January, 1849, five hundred and nine vessels arrived in the harbor of San Francisco; and the number of passengers in the same space of time was eighteen thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two. Previous to this time, one or two ships in the course of a year found their way through the Golden Gate and into the beautiful harbor of San Francisco in quest of hides, horns and tallow, and gave languid employment to two or three Americans settled on the sand hills, and engaged in collecting these articles of trade and commerce. In the closing days of 1849, there were ninety-four thousand, three hundred and forty-four tons of shipping in the harbor. The stream of immigration moved over the Plains, likewise; and through privation, fatigue, sickness, and the strife of the elements, passed slowly and painfully on to the goal of their hopes.

Thus pouring into California in every direction and by every route, this strange and heterogeneous mass of men, the representatives of every occupation, honest and dishonest, creditable and disgraceful; of every people under the sun, scattered through the gulches and ravines in the mountains, or grouped themselves at certain points in cities, towns and villages of canons or adobe. Perhaps never in the world's history did cities spring into existence so instantaneously, and certainly never was their population so strangely diverse in language, habits and customs. Of course gamblers of every kind and color; criminals of every shade and degree of atrocity; knaves of every grade of skill in the arts of fraud and deceit abounded in every society and place. In these early times gold was abundant, and any kind of honest labor was most richly and extravagantly rewarded. The honest, industrious and able men of every community, therefore, applied themselves strictly to business and would not be diverted from it by any considerations of duty or of patriotism. Studiously abstaining from politics; positively refusing to accept office; shirking constantly and systematically all jury and other public duty, which, onerous in every community, was doubly so, as they thought, in that new country, they seemed never to reflect that there was a portion, and that the worst, of the population, who would take advantage of their remissness, and direct every institution of society to the promotion of their own nefarious purposes.

Absorbed in their own pursuits, confident that a short time would enable them to realize their great object of making a fortune and then leaving the country, the better portion of the community abandoned the control of public affairs to whoever might be willing or desirous to assume it. Of course there was no lack of men who had no earthly objection to assume all public duties and fill all public offices. Politicians void of honesty and well-skilled in all the arts of intrigue, whose great end and aim in life was to live out of the public treasury and grow rich by public plunder, and whose most blissful occupation was to talk politics in pot houses and groggeries; men of desperate fortunes who sought to mend them, not by honest labor, but by opportunities for official pickings and stealings; bands of miscreants resembling foul and unclean birds which clamor and fight for the chance of settling down upon and devouring the body to which their keen scent hag directed them; all were astir and with but little effort obtained all that they desired. The offices were thus filled by rapacious and unscrupulous men. The agents who had helped to elect them, or impose them upon the people by fraud, were supported and protected in their villainies; and in the consciousness of impunity for crime, walked the streets heavily armed and ready on the instant to exact a bloody revenge for an interference with their infamous schemes, or an attempt to bring them to merited punishment.

In San Francisco the effects of all this were visible at an early period in the prevalence of crime and outrage; in the laxity with which offenders were prosecuted; in the squandering of public property; the increasing burden of taxation; and the insecurity of life and property. Now and then when the evils of the system weighed with the most depressing effect upon the business part of the community, some spasmodic effort for a time produced a change. But a temporary check only was applied. The snake was scotched, not killed. The ballot box upon whose sanctity, in a Republican government must the liberties of the people depend, was in the hands of the pliant tools of designing politicians, or of desperate knaves ready to bargain and sell the result of the election to the party or individuals who would pay the largest sum for it. By such infamous arts had many officials of law and justice been placed in situations of trust and power. Could it reasonably be expected that they would honestly and fairly apply the law to the punishment of the friends who had given them their offices, when they added to these crimes against society, the scarcely more flagrant ones of robbery and murder? If it was possible, the people did not believe it would be done. They saw enough to convince them that it was not done. They saw an unarmed man shot down and instantly killed in one of the most frequented streets of the city while endeavoring to escape from his pursuer. They saw the forms of trial applied in this clear case, and after every quibble and perversion of law which ingenuity could devise had been tried, the lame and impotent conclusion arrived at of a verdict of manslaughter, and a sentence for a short period to the State Prison. They saw a gambler, while quietly conversing with the United States Marshal in the doorway of a store on Clay Street, draw a revolver from his pocket and slay him upon the spot. They heard that gamblers and other notorious characters, his associates and friends, had raised large sums; that able lawyers had been retained for his defense; and then that his trial had ended in a disagreement of the Jury, soon to be followed, as they believed, by a nolle prosequi, and the discharge of the red handed murderer. They saw an Editor, for commenting on a homicide in the interior of the State, committed by a man claiming to be respectable, and followed by his acquittal in the face of what appeared to be the clearest evidence of his guilt; assaulted by the criminal in a public street in San Francisco, knocked down from behind by a blow on the head from a loaded cane, and beaten into insensibility, and, as seemed, to death; while three of the assailant's friends stood by, with cocked revolvers, threatening to slay anyone who should interfere. Again they saw the farce of trial resulting, as every one knew it would, in acquittal. At length, so confirmed and strengthened were villains by the certainty of escape from punishment, that they did not even trouble themselves to become assured of the identity of their victims. A worthy citizen in going home through Merchant Street between eight and nine o'clock in the evening was approached from behind by a person who, pressing his arm over his shoulder thrust a knife into his breast. Luckily the knife encountered in its passage a thick pocket memorandum book which it cut through, and but for which, he would have lost his life. The intended assassin undoubtedly mistook him for another person whom he somewhat resembled. A few days after a gentleman passing by the Oriental Hotel heard the report of a pistol, and was sensible of the passage of a ball through his hat in most uncomfortable proximity to his head. A person immediately stepped up to him saying, "Excuse me, I thought it was another man."

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