Hibernian Chronicle: Vigilante justice in San Francisco

San Francisco in the years following the gold rush was a pretty rough place and shootings seemed an everyday occurrence. But the killing of James King occurred at a moment of rising anti-Irish sentiment and as a result touched off a wave of recrimination that would be felt for years to come.
Few people, Irish or otherwise, lived in San Francisco before the great gold rush of 1849. The population stood at approximately 1,000 when word arrived in the east that gold had been discovered in California.
Americans greeted the California gold strike with frenzied enthusiasm. Thousands left farms and workshops to board ships headed for San Francisco. By 1852 the sleepy trading post was a bustling boomtown of 35,000. The newcomers were a heterogeneous lot and included native-born Americans, free blacks, and Mexicans, as well as many immigrants from Europe. The most numerous of the latter were the Irish, numbering 4,200 by 1852.
Regardless of their origins, the great majority of early San Francisco residents were single men in their twenties and thirties, few of whom planned to settle permanently. They made the arduous journey to California in search of riches, which they intended to bring back home. As a result they created a rough and raucous society that was awash in money, alcohol, crime and violence.
Justice was ignored, or administered by self-appointed posses. In 1851, for example, citizens formed a Vigilance Committee to destroy a gang of ruffians known as the Sydney Ducks. They hanged four and drove scores more from the city limits. Most of the gangsters it turned out were of Irish ancestry.
As the initial madness of the gold rush subsided by the early 1850s, San Francisco began to take on a more settled and civilized aspect. Streets were laid out and permanent housing was constructed as thousands of fortune seeking miners gave up the gold fields and turned to more traditional occupations (and sent for their wives back east). Likewise, chaos and lawlessness gave way to city government and a political system.
It was the latter development that ultimately led to extraordinary events of 1856. Politics in San Francisco, like virtually every American city at this time, was intensely partisan and often violent. As the Irish, the city’s largest ethnic group, began to acquire political power, nativism reared its ugly head. The Irish were accused of employing violence and ballot-box stuffing to win elections and then, once in office, of corruption and nepotism. Political nativism reached a fever pitch in 1854-56 with the rise of the American Party, known to most people as the Know Nothings.
One of the leading voices calling for reform in San Francisco was James King, editor of the Bulletin. He avoided overt nativism, but his denunciations of the Democratic party and government corruption were thinly disguised attacks on the city’s Irish. On May 14, 1856 he took aim at James P. Casey, editor of the Sunday Times and a county supervisor, accusing him of having once been “an inmate of Sing Sing prison, New York” (which was probably true) and of gaining his election to county supervisor by stuffing ballot boxes. Enraged, Casey confronted King that evening and shot him.
The incident galvanized San Francisco’s emerging native-born Protestant establishment. They immediately formed a second Vigilance Committee comprised of several hundred men (none of them Irish) and pledged to rid the city of its trouble-makers by any means necessary. On May 20, six days after the shooting, King succumbed to his gunshot wound and was made an instant martyr to the cause of reform by the supporters of the Vigilance Committee. Two days later, following a huge public funeral for King, members of the Vigilance Committee broke into the city jail and seized Casey and another man being held for an earlier high-profile murder. After a hasty “trial,” both were hanged before a massive throng.
Over the next few months the Vigilance Committee ruled San Francisco with an iron fist, conducting searches without warrants, arresting people at will (including a state supreme court justice), and suspending habeas corpus. They hanged two more men and exiled several dozen more from the city, nearly all of whom were Irish Catholics. As R. A. Burchell put it in his study of the San Francisco Irish, “when the dust had settled in the aftermath of the committee’s work, it was discovered that it had performed a very neat surgical operation on the body politic and removed by hanging, imprisonment, and exile some twenty-nine presumably cancerous members, who were, however, very noticeably Democrats almost to a man, to a large degree of Irish extraction, [and] Roman Catholic in religion.”
The city’s Irish population and others who took a dim view to the Committee’s vigilantism formed a Law and Order Party. But the Vigilance Committee was only brought under control when the governor of California declared San Francisco in a state of insurrection and threatened to send in the militia. The Vigilance Committee soon disbanded and reconstituted itself as the People’s Party, which dominated the city’s politics for the next decade. The worst episode of nativist violence in the west had passed.
Despite this rather inauspicious beginning, the Irish in San Francisco went on to become a dominant force in the city’s economy and politics. By the 1860s the Hibernia Savings and Loan was the most powerful bank on the west coast and in 1867 Frank McCoppin of County Longford was elected Mayor. Today the Irish legacy is preserved in the names of the city’s main thoroughfares, such as Brannan, Downey, O’Farrell, Hayes, O’Shaughnessy, McCoppin, and Phelan Streets.

Learn more at www.edwardtodonnell.com/irish.htm

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK

May 11, 1900: “Gentleman” Jim Corbett loses the heavyweight crown to James Jeffries in the 23rd round.

May 12, 1789: The Society of St. Tammany is founded in New York. It later becomes the basis of the Irish-dominated Tammany Hall political machine.

May 14, 1974: The Ulster Workers Council declares a general strike, a move that soon brings down the government recently established under the Sunningdale agreement.

HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES:

May 13, 1906: Playwright Samuel Beckett is born in Dublin.

May 14, 1893: World War I flying ace for the British RAF, George McElroy, is born in Donnybrook, Co. Dublin.

May 16, 1882: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick is born in Yorkshire, England.