California’s first decade of statehood was stormy. Besides land disputes and independence movements, the new state contended with vigilance groups, political violence, and military adventurers, called “filibusterers,” interfering in Latin American and Pacific island affairs.
As in the mining camps, California’s cities in the mid-nineteenth century had yet to develop a credible system for administering justice through law enforcement. Again, as in the camps, citizens took matters into their own hands. These “vigilantes” (from a Spanish word meaning “guards”), often led by city merchants, arrested, tried, and summarily punished those they convicted of crimes. Punishments ranged from whippings to ear-cropping, branding, and even hanging. Convictions could not be appealed, nor could clemency be granted.
While California’s first vigilante committee was formed in Los Angeles in 1836, San Francisco, with its own violent crime problem, soon took center stage in that regard.
San Francisco’s lawlessness was largely the handiwork of a disbanded New York regiment, variously called the Regulators or Hounds, led by Lieutenant Sam Roberts. Originally formed to capture runaway seamen, the Hounds became thugs who ran a protection racket, shaking down city storeowners. They portrayed themselves as guardians of public order, in the course of which they hounded Latinos and other foreigners out of California. A notorious instance of this occurred on the evening of July 15, 1849, when they attacked a Chileno encampment in San Francisco, robbing and beating their victims, and murdering a mother and raping her daughter. San Franciscans were furious. Sam Brannan led some 230 militiamen who arrested 20 of the perpetrators, tried them, and meted out punishments of fines, prison, and deportation. Still, problems persisted. The Sydney Ducks, a gang of Australian ex-convicts, sometimes joined the Hounds, who continued to brutalize foreigners and others. In the wake of a beating of a prominent downtown merchant in February 1851 and several fires that smacked of arson, William Tell Coleman and Brannan organized San Francisco’s first Committee of Vigilance in the latter’s office on June 9.
The following day it took custody of John Jenkins, who had been caught stealing a small safe. Jenkins threatened his captors with reprisal from his friends, which doubtlessly steeled the resolve of the committee to punish him quickly. A crowd that had gathered in the plaza that same day witnessed with approval the trial and moonlight hanging of Jenkins. Thus the first person apprehended by the committee was executed within hours of committing a relatively minor crime. In July the committee caught Australian James Stuart, who had escaped the Marysville jail, where he had been incarcerated for the murder of a sheriff. The committee hanged Stuart after securing a confession from him, and in August lynched two more Sydney Ducks, whom Stuart’s testimony had implicated in robberies.
In September the committee, having learned that hundreds of known criminals had left California and others had gone into hiding, ceased its operations. The final tally of its activities included: nearly 90 arrests, 4 hangings, 1 whipping, 28 deportation sentences, 15 turned over to authorities, and 41 released. Five years later, before a legal infrastructure of courts, attorneys, and regard for “rule of law” became sufficiently robust in San Francisco, the citizenry would once again take the law into its own hands.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s example of vigilante activity influenced other communities throughout American California. In the mining town of Downieville a Mexican woman, Josepha Segovia (called Juanita), became the focus and victim of a clash between cultures and sexes. Beginning on the evening of July 4, 1851, and continuing into the early morning hours of the next day the town’s citizenry partied in the aftermath of Independence Day speeches and festivities. Sometime the next morning Josepha killed one of the revelers, Joseph Cannon, who had forcefully entered her adobe hut the night before. Cannon’s friends testified that he had returned only to apologize for having broken down her door in his drunkenness the preceding night. A witness for Josepha, on the other hand, stated that Cannon, on his return, had called her a “whore.” Juanita claimed that Cannon wanted “to sleep with me.” Fearing rape, she pulled out a knife and stabbed Cannon to death. News quickly reached Downieville and a mob soon assembled, chanting “Hang the greaser devils!” Despite her explanation, which may not have been understood by the angry crowd of onlookers, that the killing was in self-defense, she died on the scaffold on July 5. Justice, if that is what it could be called, was swift but assuredly not color-blind.
Wilder and smaller than San Francisco, Los Angeles, too, was the scene of vigilante activity in the early years of statehood. The mayor and city council organized a vigilance committee in 1851. Among those it hanged were three men convicted of murdering Major General J. H. Bean. The innocence of one of the three was proved later.
San Francisco’s vigilance committee of 1856 was larger and better organized than its predecessor of 1851. By 1856 a powerful urban merchant class, generally distrustful of the city’s Irish Catholic-led Democratic officialdom, recoiled at the shooting deaths of General William Richardson and of the editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin newspaper, James King of William (so named to distinguish him from others named James King in Washington, D. C., his birth city).
Richardson’s murder resulted from a confrontation on the occasion of the opening of the American Theater in November 1855. The general’s wife complained about being seated in close proximity to gambler Charles Cora and his mistress, the madam of a notorious brothel. Two nights later, Richardson exchanged heated words with Cora at the Blue Wing saloon. Cora, later claiming that Richardson had reached for a gun, drew his own pistol and fired, killing the general. The gambler was immediately arrested by police.
While Cora sat in jail awaiting trial, King editorially attacked James Casey, who had recently won election to the San Francisco county board of supervisors. Casey was known to be part of the state’s reputedly corrupt Democratic regime, headed by David Broderick. When King revealed in the Bulletin that Casey had been imprisoned in New York’s Sing Sing prison, the latter shot and killed the editor in the street.
On the day of the shooting, William Tell Coleman, a San Francisco merchant whose fleet of clipper ships amassed him a fortune in maritime trading, organized the Committee of Vigilantes of 1856. The group included many of the city’s leading businesspersons. The fact that some equally prominent citizens formed the Law and Order Party, to counter the vigilantes, shows that the rule of law had by then secured a strong foothold in the developing city. Nevertheless, four days after the shooting of King 2,500 armed vigilantes stormed the county jail, apprehending Cora and Casey. On the day of King’s funeral, the committee publicly hanged both men.
Nicknaming their headquarters Fort Gunnybags, the committee held together for three months, virtually displacing the city’s law enforcement officials. Appeals from Law and Order advocates, so called because they insisted on courtroom trials and due process, resulted in Governor J. Neely Johnson proclaiming San Francisco to be in insurrection. After a few violent altercations between vigilantes and Law and Order men, led by state Supreme Court Justice David S. Terry, the committee disbanded in August 1856. In its three months of operations, it had hung four accused murderers, including Cora and Casey, and issued deportation orders to 30 others, warning that execution awaited any returnees. Most historians agree that California’s vigilantism must be understood within the context of the violent times: one observer noted that more than half of the members of the first state legislature in 1850 appeared for their duties “with revolvers and bowie knives fastened to their belts.” Most also agree that vigilantes shortchanged due process.
A number of politicians, like vigilantes and gangs, remained untamed in the 1850s. The most publicized instance of this was the Gwin-Broderick feud. Both were Democrats who had come to California in 1849 to get elected to the U. S. Senate. So end their similarities.
David C. Broderick was 29 when he arrived in California, after doing his political apprenticeship in New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall machine. Fifteen years younger than his rival, William M. Gwin, Broderick had little formal education, spoke against slavery, and was impulsive by temperament. He became San Francisco’s first major political boss, and led the Free Soil wing of the Democratic Party statewide. That faction opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. In 1850 Broderick won a state senate seat, thereby positioning himself for a U. S. Senate bid in the near future. Gwin, on the other hand, had been a Congressperson from Mississippi, and was a well-educated lawyer with proslavery views, though he voted to ban servitude in California at the 1849 constitutional convention. He led the Chivalry or “Shiv” faction of the state’s Democratic Party.
The intraparty feud erupted in 1854 when Broderick began jockeying to replace Gwin as U. S. Senator. Gwin’s term would expire the following year and he sought reelection. One year before the 1855 election the two rivals became so deadlocked in their respective bids for the Democratic nomination that neither prevailed, nor could anyone else run. Consequently, one of California’s two Senate seats remained vacant for two years.
The feud so paralyzed the Democrats that the Know-Nothings briefly gained control of the state’s government. They constituted a national party, and were so called because when people inquired about their agenda, party members replied that they knew nothing. The aim of the Know-Nothings was to stop the flow of immigrants, especially the Chinese, into the United States. A strain of anti-Catholicism, usually played down, was also in evidence among party members.
In 1857 both of California’s U. S. Senate seats were open, and members of that chamber were selected by state legislatures. One of those two seats, however, came with only a four-year term, instead of the prescribed six years. This was because two years earlier, as noted, one California seat went unfilled. Broderick used all of his tricks and leverage in the party to bully Gwin into agreeing to run for the four-year seat, leaving the six-year seat available for himself. For instance, Gwin was made to promise that he would not seek any federal appointments for his supporters; otherwise, Broderick would use his influence to prevent Gwin from even receiving the four-year Senate term. When President James Buchanan learned of Broderick’s schemes, he gave prized government positions to Gwin’s supporters, rejecting Broderick’s recommendations for office and thereby incensing him. In a Senate speech, Broderick lashed out at both Buchanan and Gwin, attacking the president for supporting a proslavery government in the Kansas Territory. The extent to which Broderick’s criticisms were based on principle, as opposed to his own shameless ambition, remains uncertain.
The clash between the two Senate aspirants entered its final stage in the California elections of 1859, though the political fallout would continue for years afterward. Those in the Broderick camp referred to themselves as Douglas Democrats (Democrat Stephen Douglas authored an 1854 measure giving Kansans and Nebraskans the opportunity to block the spread of slavery within their jurisdictions when they applied for statehood). Still, the Gwin faction won most of the state offices. Shortly after the election, former California Supreme Court Chief Justice David S. Terry challenged Broderick to a duel for having denounced him publicly during the recent election, in which Terry lost his campaign to remain on the court after the imminent expiration of his old term. On September 13, 1859, the two met in a San Mateo County ravine to settle matters with their pistols. Broderick’s bullet missed its mark, while Terry’s lodged in Broderick’s chest, killing him and any chances of reconciliation between the opposing sides in California’s Democratic Party. The pro-southern views of the Gwin faction were not shared by the majority of the state’s electorate before the duel; this was even more the case after Broderick’s “martyrdom” to the antislavery cause.
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