Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [116]
San Francisco in the gold rush years was an exciting, strange, turbulent place, a city on the move in every way, growing, bursting at the seams, vibrant, alive. But was it also a festering center of crime? Historians have by no means made up their minds; but the local merchants had, along with many ordinary citizens. To them the city was in the grip of a colossal crime wave.
On February 19, 1851, C. J. Jansen’s store on the corner of Montgomery and Washington streets, in the middle of the business district, was robbed. A man had demanded a dozen blankets, and as Jansen stooped down to get the blankets, he was beaten on the head and knocked unconscious. Two thousand dollars was later discovered missing from his desk.23 The police arrested two suspects, both Australians. A great, angry crowd gathered in Portsmouth Square; a young merchant, William T. Coleman, got the crowd’s attention and recommended that a popular court be set up immediately. The crowd held a “trial” of sorts, choosing three judges from among themselves. Coleman acted as prosecutor, and twelve citizens served as an ad hoc jury.
The two Australians were lucky; they escaped with their necks. At the “trial,” some local lawyers defended them; they pointed out that Jansen could not really identify the robbers, and the “jury” deadlocked, voting nine to three for conviction. A few men “yelled out that the prisoners should be hanged anyway”; but most of the crowd “drifted off. The prisoners were returned to the legal authorities, who tried and convicted both of them.”24
This was the prelude. In June of the same year, a “Committee of Vigilance” was formed. The committee was active for about a month before it disbanded, but it was a busy month indeed. It directed its attention to the “Sydney coves”—Australian criminals—and ended up hanging four of them. One of them was John Jenkins, a man of bad reputation who had been caught in the act of stealing a safe. He was given a “trial” at the vigilante headquarters and sentenced to death. Jenkins was marched to the Custom House, where the locals put a noose around his neck and hanged him on the spot.25 The committee got rid of other bad characters in a less extreme way; twenty-eight of them were simply tossed out of town.26
For five years or so, there were no vigilantes at work in San Francisco. The second vigilance committee took form in 1856. In the background was an incident that occurred in November 1855: an “Italian gambler” named Charles Cora shot and killed a U.S. marshal by the name of Richardson. Cora was arrested and tried, but, as William T. Coleman (a prominent merchant, later a vigilante leader) put it, “all efforts to convict him ... failed.” Some elements in the city were outraged over the general lawlessness, as they saw it, and the “impotence” of the regular law courts. The straw that broke the camel’s back was another dramatic incident: James P. Casey shot and killed a newspaper editor, James King of William, who had been “boldly assailing all evildoers.” At this point, “the engine-bell on the Plaza was rung—the familiar signal of the old Vigilance Committee.” According to an eyewitness report, the mob seized both Casey and Cora, and hanged the two of them from projecting beams rigged on the roof of a building on Sacramento Street.27
The second vigilance committee was a much bigger affair than the first; it had more than six thousand members. The leaders took aim not only at “lawlessness” but also at the local political machine, which was under the thumb of David Broderick, president of the California Senate and “boss” of the Democratic Party, which drew its strength