Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [117]
The political nature of these vigilance committees seems plain. “Taking the law into one’s own hands” is a phrase that expresses two thoughts: first, that the action is private, the action of individuals or groups (or mobs) who seize for themselves the state’s role as enforcer of law. But equally important is the second idea, that it is law that one is taking into one’s hands—not vengeance, not whim, not personal opinion, but law. Thus the vigilantes came, as they saw it, not in defiance of law, but in fulfillment. The Vigilance Committee of Payette, Idaho, drew up a constitution and bylaws. It gave all accused persons the right to a trial by a jury of seven members; a majority could “render a verdict—which was final.” Three punishments were allowed: banishment, horsewhipping (“to be publicly administered”), and capital punishment. Vigilantes, as we noted, sometimes ran “trials,” heard witnesses, and reached verdicts. There were, to be sure, not many acquittals at these “trials.”28
The vigilante movements enjoyed, in the main, rave reviews from those who wrote about them at the time; mixed to bad reviews in our day.29 Hubert Bancroft, the nineteenth-century author of Popular Tribunals, was a devoted fan of the vigilantes; he called the movement a “keen knife in the hands of a skilful surgeon, removing the putrefaction”; he even dedicated one of the volumes of his work to William T. Coleman, leader of the San Francisco vigilantes. To Bancroft, the law had been “sick,” and his “beloved rough-necks” had brought about a “speedy and almost bloodless cure.”30
Another famous account of the vigilantes, Thomas Dimsdale’s Vigilantes of Montana (1866) is another out-and-out apologia, written in a style that manages somehow to be both stilted and purple. Dimsdale was an Englishman who landed in Virginia City, Montana, in 1863. By the following year he had become superintendent of public instruction for Montana Territory. In Montana, “swift and terrible retribution was the only preventive of crime”—this was Dimsdale’s faith. The vigilantes put an end to the “reign of terror” and restored law and order, which once had been “as powerless as a palsied arm.” In the process, admittedly, more than a hundred lives were “pitilessly sacrificed and twenty-four miscreants ... met a dog’s doom.”31
Dimsdale’s book recounts these various “dooms” in detail. He gives us, for example, the arrest and execution of Captain J. A. Slade, a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed hell-raiser who made himself unpopular by galloping through the streets with his buddies, breaking up bars and using “insulting language to parties present.” Once, Slade led his horse into a saloon, and, “buying a bottle of wine, he tried to make the animal drink it.” The vigilance committee warned him to behave himself, but Captain Slade paid no attention. Finally, in a fit of foolish bravado, he threatened a prominent vigilante, cocking a derringer at his head.
This was too much for the committee. They “arrested” Slade, who realized, too late, what deep trouble he was in, begged for his life and invoked “his dear wife” in a plea for sympathy. A friendly messenger rode “at full speed” to Slade’s ranch to warn his wife of what was about to happen. She sprang into the saddle and “urged her fleet charger over the twelve miles of rough and rocky ground.” But it was too late: “stern necessity” had dictated the execution of Slade, and he was hanged. The body was carried to the Virginia Hotel and laid out “in a darkened room.” At that point, Slade’s wife arrived “at headlong speed, to find ... that she was a widow.” According to Dimsdale, the execution of Slade “had a most wonderful effect upon society.... Reason and civilization ... drove brute force from Montana.”32
John