The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, refounded…
August 1856 CE
The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance had originally formed in 1851; the catalyst for its formation was the criminality of the Sydney Ducks.
It had been revived in 1856 in response to rampant crime and corruption in the municipal government of San Francisco, California.
The need for extralegal intervention was apparent with the explosive population growth following the discovery of gold in 1848.
The small town of about nine hundred individuals had grown to a booming city of over two hundred thousand very rapidly.
This overwhelming growth in population made it nearly impossible for the previously established law enforcement to regulate any longer, which resulted in the organization of vigilantes.
The Committee of Vigilance was reorganized on May 14, 1856 by many of the leaders from the first one and adopted an amended version of the 1851 constitution.
Unlike the earlier Committee, and the vigilante tradition generally, the 1856 Committee was concerned with not only civil crimes but also politics and political corruption.
The catalyst for the Committee was a murder, in the guise of a political duel in which James P. Casey shot opposition newspaper editor James King of William.
King, along with many San Francisco residents, was outraged by Casey's appointment to the city board of supervisors and believed that the election had been rigged.
The motivation behind this murder came from King's publishing in the "Daily Evening Bulletin", an article accusing Casey of illegal activities.
The combination of the political unrest surrounding the election and the article resulted in Casey's shooting of James King.
The 1856 Committee was also much larger than the Committee of 1851, claiming six thousand in its ranks.
The Committee had worked very closely with the formal government of San Francisco.
The president of the vigilance committee, William T. Coleman, is a close friend of Governor J. Neely Johnson and the two men had met on several occasions working towards the shared goal of stabilizing the town.
Another important figure at this time who will later come to make a name for himself in the Civil War is William T. Sherman.
Sherman was running a bank when Governor Johnson requested he become the commander of the San Francisco branch of the state militia.
Sherman had accepted the position two days before the murder of King by Casey.
Political power in San Francisco is transferred to a new political party established by the vigilantes, the People's Party, which will ruled until 1867 and eventually be absorbed into the Republican Party.
The vigilantes had thus succeeded in their objective of usurping power from the Democratic Party machine that had hitherto dominated civic politics in the city.
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