Hindsight: 149 Years Ago

by Thomas L. Libby

On August 24, 1851, two refugees from Australian penal colonies were sentenced to public hanging by San Francisco's Committee of Vigilance. The law-and-order group, whose members were known as Vigilantes, had been founded earlier that year in response to rampant and unprosecuted crime during the Gold Rush era. (Back then, public safety was an uncertain compromise between military rule and the remnants of Spanish and Mexican colonial structure; the Vigilantes stepped in to fill the void.)

The group soon disbanded, but a second committee re-formed in 1856 when law and order seemed to break down again. This revived "people's court" took on the task of punishing perceived transgressors, and even managed to prosecute and jail a sitting state court justice for attacking one of its militiamen with a bowie knife. Certainly, not everyone supported the rogue organization: William Tecumseh Sherman, who would later gain notoriety as a Union general during the Civil War, opined that the city was "at the mercy of irresponsible masses."

Nevertheless, with more than 6,000 members, the Vigilantes effectively ran San Francisco for a time, and California's Gov. J. Neely Johnson was powerless to stop them. But in pioneering the creation and enforcement of novel local policies, the Vigilantes have inspired civil disobedience, militias, and self-help movements nationwide. And of course, this independent spirit is alive and well in present-day San Francisco, which has devised city laws that are sometimes in conflict with national statutes on such issues as gay marriage, gun ownership, and immigration.

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