Shadow and Light. Gibbs Mifflin Wistar
or separate it from its comparative. What would I have others do to me? Pride, interest, adverse contact, all with specious argument may strive to dissipate the comparison, but the pulsations of a common humanity, keeping time with the verities of God never ceased to trouble, and thus the moral pebble thrown on the bosom of the hitherto placid sea of public opinion, like its physical prototype, creating undulations which go on and on to beat against the rock and make sandy shores, so this our earnest but feeble protest contributed its humble share in the rebuilding of a commonwealth where "a man's a man for all that."
The committee above named, with G. W. Dennis and James Brown, the same year formed a company, established and published the "Mirror of the Times," the first periodical issued in the State for the advocacy of equal rights for all Americans. It has been followed by a score of kindred that have assiduously maintained and ably contended for the rights and privileges claimed by their zealous leader.
State conventions were held in 1854, '55 and '57, resolutions and petitions passed and presented to the Legislature of Sacramento. We had friends to offer them and foes to move they be thrown out the window. It is ever thus, "that men go to fierce extremes rather than rest upon the quiet flow of truths that soften hatred and temper strife." There was that unknown quantity, present in all legislative bodies, composed of good "little men" without courage of conviction, others of the Dickens' "devilish sly" type, who put out their plant-like tendrils for support; others "who bent the pliant servile knee that thrift may follow fawning" – all these the make-weight of a necessary constituent in representative government conservatism. The conservative majority laid our petition on the table, most likely with the tacit understanding that it was to be "taken up" by the janitor, and as such action on his part is not matter for record, we will in this happier day with "charity to all," over this episode on memory's leaf, simply wrote "lost or stolen."
Among the occasions continually occurring demanding protests against injustice was the imposition of the "poll tax." It was demanded of our firm, and we refused to pay. A sufficient quantity of our goods to pay tax and costs were levied upon, and published for sale, and on what account.
I wrote with a fervor as cool as the circumstances would permit, and published a card from a disfranchised oath-denied standpoint, closing with the avowal that the great State of California might annually confiscate our goods, but we would never pay the voters tax. The card attracted attention, the injustice seemed glaring, the goods were offered. We learned that we had several friends at the sale, one in particular a Southern man. Now there was this peculiarity about the Southern white man, he would work a Negro for fifty years for his victuals and clothes, and shoot a white man for cheating the same Negro, as he considered the latter the height of meanness. This friend quietly and persistently moved through the crowd, telling them why our goods were there, and advising to give them a "terrible letting alone." The auctioneer stated on what account they were there, to be sold, asked for bidders, winked his eye and said "no bidders." Our goods were sent back to our store. This law, in the words of a distinguished Statesman, was then allowed to relapse "into innocuous desuetude." No further attempts to enforce it upon colored men were made.
CHAPTER V
A rush to newly discovered gold fields bring in view every trait of human character. The more vicious standing out in bold relief, and stamping their impress upon the locality. This phase and most primitive situation can be accounted for partly by the cupidity of mankind, but mainly that the first arrivals are chiefly adventurers. Single men, untrammeled by family cares, traders, saloonists, gamblers, and that unknown quantity of indefinite quality, ever present, content to allow others to fix a status of society, provided they do not touch on their own special interests, and that other, the unscrupulous but active professional politician, having been dishonored at home, still astute and determined, seeks new fields for booty, obtain positions of trust and then consummate peculation and outrage under the forms of law. But the necessity for the honest administration of the law eventually asserts itself for the enforcement of order.
It was quaintly said by a governor of Arkansas, that he believed that a public official should be "reasonably honest." Even should that limited standard of official integrity be invaded the people with an honest ballot need not be long in rectifying the evil by legal means. But cannot something be said in palliation of summary punishment by illegal means, when it is notorious and indisputable that all machinery for the execution of the law and the maintenance of order, the judges, prosecuting attorneys, sheriff and drawers of jurors, and every other of court of law are in the hands of a despotic cabal who excessively tax, and whose courts convict all those who oppose them, and exonerate by trial the most farcical, the vilest criminal, rob and murder in broad day light, often at the bidding of their protectors. Such a status for a people claiming to be civilized seems difficult to conceive, yet the above was not an hypothesis of condition, but the actual one that existed in California and San Francisco, especially from 1849 to 1855. Gamblers and dishonest politicians from other States held the government, and there was no legal redress. Every attempt of the friends of law and order to elect honest men to office was met at the polls by vituperation and assault.
One of the means for thinning out the ranks of their opponents at the polls they found very efficient. It was to scatter their "thugs" along the line of waiting voters and known opposers, and quickly and covertly inject the metal part of a shoemaker's awl in the rear but most fleshy part of his adversary's anatomy, making sitting unpleasant for a time. There was usually uncertainty as to the point of compass from which the hint came to leave, but none as to the fact of its arrival. Hence the reformer did not stand on the order of his going, but generally left the line. These votes, of course, were not thrown out, for the reason they never got in. It diminished, but did not abolish the necessity of stuffing ballot boxes. In the West I once knew an old magistrate named Scott, noted for his impartiality, but only called Judge Scott by non-patrons of his court, who had never came within the purview of his administration, to others he was known as "old Necessity," for it was said he knew no law. Revolutions, the beneficial results of which will ever live in the history of mankind, founded as they were on the rights of human nature and desire for the establishment and conservation of just government, have ever been the outgrowth of necessity.
Patient in protest of misgovernment, men are prone to "bear the ill they have" until, like the accumulation of rills on mountain side, indignation leaps the bounds of legal form and prostrate law to find their essence and purpose in reconstruction. At the time of which I write, there seemed nothing left for the friends of law, bereft as they were of all statutary means for its enforcement, but making a virtue of this necessity by organizing a "vigilance committee" to wrench by physical strength that unobtainable by moral right. There had been no flourish of trumpets, no herald of the impending storm, but the pent up forces of revolution in inertion, now fierce for action, discarded restraint. Stern, but quiet had been the preparation for a revolution which had come, as come it ever will, with such inviting environments. It was not that normal status, the usual frailties of human nature described by Hooker as "stains and blemishes that will remain till the end of the world, what form of government, soever, may take place, they grow out of man's nature." But in this event the stains and blemishes were effaced by a common atrocity.
Sitting at the back of my store on Clay street a beautiful Sunday morning, one of those mornings peculiar to San Francisco, with its balmy breezes and Italian skies, there seemed an unusual stillness, such a quiet as precedes the cyclone in tropical climes, only broken occasionally by silvery peals of the church bells. When suddenly I heard the plank street resound with the tramp of a multitude. No voice or other sound was heard but the tramp of soldiery, whose rhythm of sound and motion is ever a proclamation that thrills by its intensity, whether conquest or conservation be its mission. I hastened to the door and was appalled at the sight. In marching column, six or eight abreast, five thousand men carrying arms with head erect, a resolute determination born of conviction depicted in linament of feature and expression.
Hastily improvised barracks in large storehouses east of Montgomery street, fortified by hundreds of gunny sacks filled with sand, designated "Fort Gunney," was the quarters for committee and soldiers. The committee immediately dispatched deputies to arrest and bring to the Fort the leaders of this cabal of misgovernment. The effort to do so gave striking evidence of the cowardice of assassins. Men whose very name had inspired terror, and whose appearance in the corridors of hotels or barrooms