Vigilance Committees: What the Media Won’t Tell You

      It continues to amazes me how much talk show hosts are paid for how little they know about life –  and how many continue to listen to them opine about things we already know instinctively.  It’s an amazing study in mental masturbation – by both entities. 

     In further evidence of the real character of most Fox commentators, a few pseudo-conservative pundits on Fox News and Fox Business have referred to the mobs invading stores as “vigilantes.”  They are not vigilantes. They are mobs, anarchists, rioters, and organized crime.  Words mean things. 

     Historically Vigilance Committees organized to stop these exact forms of lawlessness – not to commit them.  Vigilance committees followed the law – even when those corrupted elected officials did not.  

     This essay is a continuation of my blog titled “Remedy for Tyranny and Anarchy” dated July 8, 2020.  This is Frank Soule’s description of San Francisco during the Gold Rush of 1849.  The population of San Francisco then was approximately 20,000.  Most dwellings were tents or clapboard shanties.  There were hundreds of saloons and gambling establishments.  Gambling was practically the only source of entertainment – and that caused the usual host of related vices – as it does today.

Frank Soule’ et al:  San Francisco During and After the Gold Rush, The Annals of San Francisco, 1855;  Annals of America Vol. 7, p. 492

            “The Vigilance Committee agreed to suspend indefinitely further operations regarding crime and criminals in the city.  The old extensive chambers in Battery Street were relinquished and new rooms “open to all times, day or night, to the members,” were taken in Middleton and Smiley’s buildings, corner of Sansome and Sacramento Streets.  During the preceding three months, this association had been indefatigable in collecting evidence and bringing the guilty to justice.  It had been formed, not to supersede the legal authorities but to strengthen them when weak; not to oppose the law but to sanction and confirm it. 

     The members were mostly respectable citizens who had, and could have, only one object in view – the general good of the community.  They exercised an unceasing vigilance over the hidden movements of the suspected and criminal population of the place and unweariedly traced crime to its source, where they sought to stop it.  They had hanged four men without observing ordinary legal forms, but the persons were fairly tried and found guilty, while three, at least, of the number confessed to the monstrous crimes and admitted death to be only a due punishment.  At this small cost of bloodshed, the Vigilance Committee freed the city and country of many reckless villains who had long been a terror to society.  When these had disappeared, outrages against person and property almost disappeared too, or were confined to petty cases.  The legal and municipal authorities now acquired what previously they lacked, sufficient power to master the remaining criminals; and the Committee, having no longer a reason for continued action, gladly relinquished the powers they had formerly exercised. 

     Grand juries, instead of offering indictments against them, only praised in the usual reports their useful exertions, while, like all good citizens, they lamented their necessity. 

     Judges occasionally took offense at the terms of such reports and sought to have them modified, but the grand juries were firm.  Judge Levi Parsons applied to the Supreme Court to have certain obnoxious sentences in one of these reports struck out; but his petition was refused.  People felt that there was much truth in the repeated declarations of the grand juries, and they hailed with delight their expressions of implied confidence in the Vigilance Committee.  The weak, inefficient, and sometimes corrupt courts of law were denounced as strongly by the juries as by that association itself.  In one report the grand jury said:

“The facilities with which the most notorious culprits are enabled to obtain bail, which, if not entirely worthless, is rarely enforced when forfeited, and the numerous cases in which, by the potent influence of money and the ingenious and unscrupulous appliance of legal technicalities, the most abandoned criminals have been enabled to escape a deserved punishment meets with their unqualified disapprobation.”

     But the worst days were over, and comparative peace was restored in society.  Therefore, the Vigilance Committee ceased to act.  The members, however, did not dissolve the association, but only appointed a special or executive committee of forty-five to exercise a general watchfulness and to summon together the whole body when occasion should require.  This was shortly afterward done in one or two instances, when, instead of being opposed to the authorities, the members now firmly supported them by active personal aid against commotions and threatened outrages among the population.  They had originally organized themselves to protect the city from arson, murder, and rapine, when perpetrated as part of a general system of violence and plunder by hardened criminals. 

     In ordinary crimes, and when these stood alone and did not necessarily lead to general destruction, the Vigilance Committee did not interfere further than as good citizens and to merely aid the ordinary officials whose duty it was to attend to all cases of crime.  When, therefore, some six months later, a body of 2,000 excited people sought to “lynch” the captain and mate of the ship Challenge for cruelty to the crew during the passage from New York to San Francisco, the Vigilance Committee, instead of taking the side of the enraged multitude, firmly supported the legal authorities. 

     On many occasions, both before and after this time, the Committee were of great service to the authorities.  At their own cost, they collected evidence, apprehended criminals and delivered them into the hands of legal justice.  When the city offered a reward of $2,000 to any person who would give information which might lead to the apprehension and conviction of an incendiary, the Committee offered a reward of $5,000 for the same services.  The members gave large contributions to hasten the completion of the public jail; and, in many ways, by money, counsel and moral aid, and active personal assistance, sought earnestly to raise the character of the judicial tribunals and strengthen their action. 

            There could not be a greater calumny uttered against the high-minded men than to represent, as was frequently done in other countries and in the Atlantic states, the members of the Vigilance Committee as a lawless mob who made passion their sole guide and their own absolute will the law of the land.  Necessity formed the Committee and gave it both irresistible moral and physical force.  One might as well blame a drowning wretch for clinging to a sinking brother, or to a straw, as say that the inhabitants of San Francisco did wrong – some in joining the association and others in not resisting but applauding its proceedings. 

            People out of California could know little at best of the peculiar state of society existing here; and such as condemned the action of the Vigilance Committee positively either knew nothing on the subject or they outraged the plainest principles of self-preservation.  We all defend the man who, with his own hand, violently and unscrupulously slays the midnight robber and assassin because he would otherwise lose his own life and property, and where the time and place make it ridiculous to call for legal protection.  So also should we defend the community that acts in a similar manner under analogous circumstances.  Their will and power form new ex tempore laws, and if the motives be good and the result is good, it is not very material what the means are…