Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [119]
Many vigilante outbursts cannot be labeled as spontaneous popular uprisings—or, for that matter, as mob action. Nor can their members be described generally as roughnecks, if this implies something about class origins. Some vigilante groups were, in fact, very much movements of elites, insofar as there were elites in their communities at all. The San Francisco vigilance committee of 1851, for example, was described at the time as the “salt of San Francisco,” a group of “first class men.” This was the judgment of contemporaries; modem research does not disagree. The movers and shakers were, for the most part, merchants. The committee was, in fact, “a businessmen’s club.”38 The 1856 committee, too, was dominated by merchants and business interests. The ordinary voter, the man on the street, had elected the political machine that the 1856 committee so bitterly opposed.
In his classic account, Dimsdale complained that the law had been impotent, before the vigilantes got moving. “No matter what may be the proof, if the criminal is well liked in the community, ‘Not Guilty’ is almost certain to be the verdict of the jury.”39 Bancroft is even more explicit: “the establishing of courts tended to encourage crime rather than to prevent it.” He speaks of “demagogues” on the bench, court officers who are “ruffians.” “The juries of the interior,” he says, were willing to “hang a thief,” but not to convict a murderer. But the jurors were “summoned from the hangers-on about courtroom, men fit for nothing else, scarcely able to live by their wits, and yet too lazy to work.” These “old familiar faces” blossomed “under the genial influence of strong drink... . They did nothing but sit in the jury box, the same person sometimes serving several times in one day.”40 John Clay claimed that convictions for rustling were impossible; and, to the “Eastern man or woman,” who “will exclaim ‘Dreadful!’” with regard to vigilantes, he asked what they would do if in their “quiet New England town,” at home in their “vine-clad or rose-covered cottage,” burglars broke in and helped themselves, yet no jury would convict. If the burglar returned, wouldn’t you, as a “man of spirit” simply “take down your shotgun and let him have it”?41
But when we are told that juries refused to convict, we are naturally led to wonder: Who were these jurors, really, and why did they let defendants go? The answer is: they were members of the community, and they had their own set of norms. But these were not elite norms. Thus many of the vigilante movements were in fact elite revolts. They were cases of culture conflict, and the winners, as is often the case, were the men who wrote the history books as well.
Many of the vigilante leaders expressed what Richard Maxwell Brown has described as the “loathing of upper-level men for the lower element—the contraculture—of the frontier.”42 The members made no attempt to hide their vigilance work. The vigilantes, in general, never wore masks. Why should they? Some of them were, and others became, extremely prominent in their states. William J. McConnell, “captain” of the vigilantes in Payette, Idaho, became a U.S. senator and then a governor of Idaho.43 Dr. John E. Osborne of Rawlins, Wyoming, who had skinned the corpse of Big Nose George Parrott (a notorious outlaw hanged by the vigilantes)—he tanned the skin and made it into objects, including a pair of shoes that were exhibited for years in a Rawlins bank—later became governor of Wyoming,44aj
In the East, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, “law and order” had become at least partly professionalized. There were police forces and detective squads in all the cities. The engine of criminal justice, for all its creaking gears and rusty levers, did work, more or less, as a part of the general machinery of government.ak In the West, justice was still a community matter—or, at least, a matter for the community of adult men. The regular