San Francisco Committee of Vigilance

[2] Founders alleged that the growth in population overwhelmed the previously established law enforcement, and led to the organization of vigilante militia groups.

King, along with many San Francisco residents, was outraged by Casey's appointment to the city board of supervisors and believed that the election had been rigged.

The motivation behind this murder came from King's publishing an article in the Daily Evening Bulletin accusing Casey of illegal activities,[10] and serving a prison term for Grand Larceny in New York.

The president of the Vigilance Committee, William T. Coleman, was a close friend of Governor J. Neely Johnson and the two men met on several occasions working towards the shared goal of stabilizing the town.

Sherman was running a bank when Governor Johnson requested he become the commander of the San Francisco branch of the state militia in order to curb the activities of the Committee.

The vigilantes had thus succeeded in their objective of usurping power from the Democratic Party machine that hitherto dominated civic politics in the city.

Vigilante headquarters in 1856 consisted of assembly halls, meeting rooms, a military kitchen and armory, an infirmary, and prison cells, all of which were fortified with gunny sacks and cannons.

[7] Four people were officially executed again in 1856, but the death toll also includes James "Yankee" Sullivan, an Irish immigrant and professional boxer who killed himself after being terrorized and detained in a Vigilante cell.

It does not matter how bad a man Casey had been, nor how much benefit it might be to the public to have him out of the way, we cannot accord to any one citizen the right to kill, or even beat him, without personal provocation.

The fact that Casey has been an inmate of Sing Sing prison in New York, is no offence against the laws of this State; nor is the fact of his having stuffed himself through the ballot box as elected to the Board of Supervisors from a district where it is said he was not even a candidate, any justification for Mr. Bagley to shoot Casey, however richly the latter may deserve to have his neck stretched for such fraud on the people.

This case of Bagley's has caused us much anxiety, and we should have been pleased to have withdrawn cheerfully his name from the list alluded to, but we cannot conscientiously do more than express our gratification at the assurances we get of his present conduct, in which we trust he will persevere.

Popular histories have accepted the former view: that the illegality and brutality of the vigilantes was justified by the need to establish law and order in the city.

In his memoirs, Sherman wrote: As [the vigilantes] controlled the press, they wrote their own history, and the world generally gives them the credit of having purged San Francisco of rowdies and roughs; but their success has given great stimulus to a dangerous principle, that would at any time justify the mob in seizing all the power of government; and who is to say that the Vigilance Committee may not be composed of the worst, instead of the best, elements of a community?

"[18] A former member of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, physician Max Fifer, moved to Yale, British Columbia at the time of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, and participated in the organization of a Vigilance Committee on the Fraser River in 1858 to address issues of lawlessness and a vacuum of effective governmental authority created by the sudden influx of prospectors to the new British colony.

At the end of the so-called "War", McGowan was convicted by Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie of an assault against Fifer in British Columbia[20] but McGowan's defense statement, which described some of the activities of the San Francisco vigilantes and his own personal experience of vigilantism, impressed and disturbed Begbie who, like Colonial Governor James Douglas was determined to prevent conditions in the goldfields of British Columbia from deteriorating into mob rule.

It had the inscription: "Presented to the Vigilance Committee of the City of San Francisco by the ladies of Trinity Parish, as a testimonial of their approval.