William Tecumseh Sherman and the 1856 San Francisco Committee of Vigilance
 

 
      In 1853 William Tecumseh Sherman resigned his captain’s commission in the United States Army in order to follow a civilian-banking career in California.  The Gold Rush offered the lure of fabulous wealth, and to pursue this golden dream a group of investors in Missouri made Sherman the managing partner of Lucas, Turner & Co., a new San Francisco bank.  Faced with the limited communications of the 1850’s, Sherman had to be prepared to make crucial decisions on his own without conferring with the bank’s senior partners in Saint Louis.  In the face of bank runs, unscrupulous businessmen and corrupt politicians, Sherman relied on the same calculating courage that later propelled him to fame during the Civil War.  Despite his lack of business experience Sherman was able to successfully navigate his bank through the turbulent, unregulated economy of 1850’s San Francisco.  By 1857, however, the Saint Louis partners had come to realize that the hoped-for enormous profits of the San Francisco venture were illusory, and they closed the bank, paying off all creditors.

      Some Gold Rush banks, most famously Wells, Fargo & Co., did manage to turn an ample profit and were able to endure.  Other bankers, such as the uniquely-named James King of William, were neither so lucky nor so wise in their investments.  King of William opened his bank in 1849 and later merged with Adams & Co. and took over the management of that firm.   Unfortunately, during a business panic in early 1855 Adams & Co. went bankrupt and James King of William lost not only his fortune but his reputation as well.  Setting out to make a new name for himself, King of William took the job of editor for the Evening Bulletin newspaper.  King used his paper to publish scathing articles that described in detail the immoral political and business practices then prevailing in San Francisco, which he blamed for the failure of his bank.  King’s articles were inflammatory and in them he openly challenged his ever-growing number of enemies to physical confrontations.  Not surprisingly, one of King’s foes took him up on his offer.  On the evening of May 14th, 1856 the youthful County Supervisor James P. Casey gunned down King of William on Montgomery Street.

      The response to the shooting of James King of William was immediate and overwhelming.  Once before in 1851 San Francisco’s mercantile class took the law into its own hands, forming a “Committee of Vigilance” and conducting their own arrests, trials and punishments of criminals.  The fact that their actions were in direct violation of the U.S. Bill of Rights did not seem to bother the Vigilantes of 1851, nor did their preferred punishment, lynch-mob hanging, seem to them an excessive penalty for non-violent petty criminals.   While James King of William lay dying, the Vigilance Committee reconstituted itself and soon had several thousand members enrolled and under arms. James P. Casey surrendered himself to the sheriff at the San Francisco County Jail, which also held a professional gambler who had killed a U.S. Marshal (most likely in self-defense).  San Francisco’s civil authorities looked on nervously as the Committee’s power grew, and the governor of California, J. Neely Johnson, called on William T. Sherman, who had recently accepted a part-time appointment as a major general in the California Militia, to take charge of upholding the rule of law in San Francisco. 
 

      Sherman found the county jail to be poorly suited to defense and surrounded by armed Vigilantes.  The sheriff’s posse pleaded with Sherman to stand at their head but he responded that it was not his place to take command of the city’s law enforcement and insisted that he “was Major General or nothing.” Sherman’s intent was to use the militia (an early version of the National Guard) to prevent the Vigilantes from taking over San Francisco as they had done in 1851.   Governor Johnson came down to San Francisco from the state capital at Sacramento, and he and Sherman made a deal with the Vigilantes that ensured that the trials of Casey and Cora (the marshal-killing gambler) would be left in the hands of the law.  The Vigilantes promptly broke their word and stormed the jail, capturing Casey and Cora.  Casey and Cora were tried by a secret court and executed by hanging on May 22nd.

      Sherman meanwhile was planning a waterborne assault on the fortified warehouse the Vigilantes were using as a headquarters on Sacramento Street.  Anticipating the later amphibious campaigns he and General Ulysses S. Grant would conduct on the Mississippi River and its tributaries during the Civil War, Sherman wanted to use a U.S. Navy ship to transport his militia to the San Francisco waterfront.  Sherman was stymied, however, when Commodore David Glasgow Farragut, commanding the naval base at Mare Island, declared that he had neither the authority nor an available warship to carry out Sherman’s plan.  Sherman was further hamstrung by the refusal of Army General John Ellis Wool to issue rifles to Sherman’s militia recruits.  In disgust at his powerlessness, Sherman resigned his militia commission and returned to his bank. 

      Over the course of the summer of 1856 the Committee of Vigilance proceeded to hang or exile individuals it identified as being criminals.  Some historians have pointed out how virtually all of the Committee’s victims were of Irish Catholic descent and prominent in the politics of the Democratic Party.  It would appear that behind the Committee’s façade of reform their lurked a sinister grab for power on the part of San Francisco’s anti-immigrant mercantile class.  Some have also seen the federal government’s refusal to interfere in San Francisco’s civil insurrection in 1856 to have provided an example that encouraged the southern states to secede from the Union five years later.   Sherman took the lessons of 1856 thoroughly to heart, being ever after suspicious of mobs and bureaucrats.  In 1865, when accepting the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston’s army, Sherman wanted to let the Confederate soldiers take their weapons back to the arsenals in their home states, rather than turning them over to the Union forces.  At the time Sherman was heavily criticized for this potential re-arming of the South, but given what he had seen of mob rule and anarchy in San Francisco nine-years before, it is understandable that Sherman would want every state to have weapons on hand so as to be able to maintain themselves in the face of potential riots he feared might ultimately destroy the American way of government. 

       “[The Vigilance Committee] wrote their own history, and the world generally gives them the credit of having purged San Francisco of rowdies and roughs; but their success has given great stimulus to a dangerous principle, that would at any time justify the mob in seizing all the power of government; and who is to say that the Vigilance Committee may not be composed of the worst, instead of the best, elements of a community? Indeed, in San Francisco, as soon as it was demonstrated that the real power had passed from the City Hall to the committee-room, the same set of bailiffs, constables, and rowdies that had infested the City Hall were found in the employment of the ‘Vigilantes;’ and, after three months’ experience, the better class of people became tired of the midnight sessions and left…”   (Sherman’s Memoirs)