"Vigilance committee" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a loud demonstration against Logan by the mob, that always gathers about where a man is captured by his fellows—the wolves that come up when the wounded buffalo falls. There was talk of a vigilance committee and of lynching. ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... soon found its way to Mr. Mackenzie at Lewiston.[80] He at once returned to York, and lost no time in instituting proceedings against eight of the aggressors who had constituted themselves a vigilance committee at his expense. He brought a civil action for damages, and erelong these incipient "Regulators of Upper Canada" began to realize that they had acted with some precipitation and foolhardiness. It seemed probable that they would be mulcted ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... to be made of fugitive slaves is a subject which every day presents itself. The camps and even head-quarters are filled with runaways. Several negroes came from St. Louis as servants of staff-officers, and these men have become a sort of Vigilance Committee to secure the freedom of the slaves in our neighborhood. The new-comers are employed to do the work about camp, and we find them very useful,—and they serve us with a zeal which is born of their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... Independence, as will be seen by the following historical reminiscence: "On the capture of Washington by the British forces, it was judged expedient to fortify without delay, the principal towns and cities exposed to similar attacks. The Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia waited upon three of the principal Colored citizens, namely, James Forten, Bishop Allen, and Absalom Jones, soliciting the aid of the people of Color in erecting suitable defences for the city. Accordingly two thousand five hundred Colored ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... was posted up in every street and at every street corner; the tricolour replaced the white cockade, everyone being obliged to wear the national emblem or none at all, the city was proclaimed in a state of seige, and the military officers formed a vigilance committee and a ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the law, but it has not helped us. Such little law as we have here is entirely in the hands of the enemy. We must now assume the direction of our own affairs. Many of you have already served in a vigilance committee, and you all know the purpose of such an organization. My idea is to form one now to take possession of Crawling Water and run Moran and his hired bullies out of the county. Between us, we can muster about a hundred men; more than enough to turn the trick, and the quicker we get ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... several accounts of the activities of the Vigilance Committee, but this is firsthand information from one who was on the ground at the time, and for this reason it is considered a valuable contribution to the history of those troublous days. It certainly is a record of what a prominent, intelligent and observing eye-witness saw regarding ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... were strolling down the avenue beyond the markethouse, you got a ducking from a sudden shower that ceased quite as unceremoniously as it had begun. There was excitement in the bungalow that night because of its invasion by a hostile monkey. An impromptu vigilance committee finally succeeded in ejecting the unwelcome visitor, persuading him of the superior advantages of ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... Christianity about that time, has had much to do with subsequent happy results. At that time the 800,000 bondmen in the British Isles had not seen the beginning of the end of their sufferings—at that time, 20,000 who are now free in Canada, were in bonds—at that time, there was no Vigilance Committee to aid the flying slave—at that time, the two powerful Anti-Slavery Societies ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... the polls, and for some years Mr. Arthur served in that capacity at a voting-place in a carpenter's shop, which occupied the site of the present Fifth Avenue Hotel. When, in 1856, the Republican party was formed, Mr. Arthur was a prominent member of the Young Men's Vigilance Committee, which advocated the election of Fremont and Dayton. It was during this campaign that he became acquainted with Edwin D. Morgan, and gained his ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... now professed great alarm for their fishing-grounds. Men on the gold-bars were jostled and hustled, and pegs marking limits were pulled up. A danger lay in the rows of saloons along the water-front—the well-known danger of liquor to the Indian. So the miners at Yale formed a vigilance committee and established self-made laws. The saloons should be abolished, they decreed. Sale of liquor to any person whomsoever was forbidden. All liquor, wherever found, was ordered spilled. Any one selling liquor to an Indian should be seized ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... four insurgent counties, two hundred in number, assembled in convention, having Judge Cook, of Fayette county, for their president, and Albert Gallatin, afterward a distinguished officer of the federal government, for their secretary. The business was in charge of a vigilance committee of sixty. Near the place of meeting, which was upon a commanding eminence under the shade of trees, stood a liberty-pole, bearing a placard with the words, "Liberty and no excise! No ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... store is a forest extending for six miles back to the Medicine Lodge Hills. As soon as it became known in the neighborhood of the missing man's dwelling that he had been seen in Nolan there was a marked alteration in public sentiment and feeling. The vigilance committee went out of existence without the formality of a resolution. Search along the wooded bottom lands of May Creek was stopped and nearly the entire male population of the region took to beating the bush about Nolan and in the Medicine Lodge Hills. But of ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... lecturer came to town. The meeting was well attended. A vigilance committee of provocateurs and business men was in the audience. At the close of the lecture those gentlemen started to pass the signal for action. Elmer Smith sauntered down the aisle, shook hands with the speaker and told him he would walk to ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... a legal tribunal; but it was justice conscientiously administered, without law—an action necessary under the circumstances. Its justification was fully equal to that of similar services performed by the Vigilance Committee, in San Francisco, within a year preceding. It was a matter the necessity of which was deplorable, but the execution of which was imposed upon those who were on the spot and uncovered ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... observed with the others. In South Carolina "a cargo of near three hundred slaves was sent out of the Colony by the consignee, as being interdicted by the second article of the Association."[25] In Virginia the vigilance committee of Norfolk "hold up for your just indignation Mr. John Brown, Merchant, of this place," who has several times imported slaves from Jamaica; and he is thus publicly censured "to the end that all such foes to the rights of British America ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... this country is a "vigilance committee," and we need it badly, and we need it right away, and this committee should be instructed to impeach every public official who endeavors to usurp the law in favor of ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... opposite sidewalk, near the Tombs prison. As he approached me, I ventured a remark to him which at once enlisted his interest in me. He took me to his home to spend the night, and in the morning went with me to Mr. David Ruggles, the secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee, a co-worker with Isaac T. Hopper, Lewis and Arthur Tappan, Theodore S. Wright, Samuel Cornish, Thomas Downing, Philip A. Bell, and other true men of their time. All these (save Mr. Bell, who still lives, and is editor and publisher of a paper called the "Elevator," in San Francisco) have finished ...
— Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass • Frederick Douglass
... disbanded, and, in consequence, the parties of tories and horse-thieves sprang into renewed strength, and threatened to overawe the courts and government officers. Immediately the leaders among the whigs, the friends of order and liberty, gathered together and organized a vigilance committee. The committee raised two companies of mounted riflemen, who were to patrol the country and put to death all suspicious characters who resisted them or who refused to give security to appear before ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... caused still more active and energetic measures to be adopted by the Anti-League. A vigilance committee was appointed, consisting at first of three, and afterward of five men, who were to serve one month, and then be relieved by other five, each member taking his turn, until all had served. The duty of this committee was to keep a constant watch upon the movements of all suspected characters; ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... than bread, and women were so scarce that one day when they found a girl's shoe on the trail they fitted a gold heel to it and put it up in camp to worship. But sentiment wasn't exactly their long suit, and any little difficulties that cropped up were straightened out by the vigilance committee—and a rope. One day a saddle, or maybe it was a gun, that didn't belong to him, was found among this man Steele's traps, and though he swore that some one had put it there for a grudge, the committee thought that ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... old plaza about which the city was built, Spanish fashion, had seen many things. There in the first burst of the early days the vigilance committee used to hold its hangings. There in the time of the sand lot riots Dennis Kearney, who nearly pulled the town down about his ears, used to make his orations which set the unruly to rioting. In these later years Chinatown laid on one side of it and the Latin quarter ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the State seceded, he was visited by a number of men who called themselves a vigilance committee. They were fierce-looking fellows, armed ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... put the climax to his misfortunes, the "road-agents" attacked him next morning, when, the "ornery cayuses" becoming unmanageable, Sam was forced to surrender the treasure-box, and the passengers their bullion. The excitement in Lucky-dog was intense. A vigilance committee, secretly organized, lay in waiting for the offenders, and, after a week or two, made a capture of a well-known sporting-man, whose presence in camp had for some time been regarded with suspicion. ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... explorations over the other recently acquired territories, and built Virginia City, the capital of Montana, with the gold derived from the alluvium of a river channel which they excavated; and its inhabitants were the founders of an institution called the Vigilance Committee, with "Lynch law," and by it ruled supremely for many years. But their surface diggings, by the manual operations alone of multitudes, were soon exhausted in every direction, and then their energies and powers of invention were dedicated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... is the place where through passengers change cars and board North-bound trains from the far South. Wilson for the past few days had been the rendezvous for a well-organized vigilance committee, who had vied with the ruffians at Goldsboro in offering violence to citizens driven out of Wilmington. The leader of this gang was a young farmer by the name of Bull. That afternoon Mr. Bull and quite a number of his fellow-committeemen ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... A Vigilance Committee, composed of sixteen members of the Right, charged with impressing unity upon this trinity of parties, and charged with the task of carefully watching the Left, such was this precaution. The Left at first had confined itself to irony, and borrowing from me a word to which people then attached, though ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... mean anything as far as I've ever been able to make out," Mr. Liggins said. "Looks like a cross between a secret order card and a notice from the vigilance committee. And them words on the top I take to be some foreign language, but I never went to school enough ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... of the camp. Crimes against property and life seem to have been infrequent at first, but the unparalleled wealth toled in and developed a criminal class, which the rudimentary government could not control. San Francisco formed in 1851 a vigilance committee of citizens, by which crimes could be more summarily and surely punished. The pioneer banking house in California began business at San Francisco in January, 1849. The same month saw the first frame house on the Sacramento, near ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... There's a sight of talk about the doin's of them faro an' keno sharps. The boys is gettin' kind o' riled, fur they allow the game ain't on the square wuth a cent. Some of 'em down to the tie-camp wuz a-talkin' about a vigilance committee, an' I wouldn't be surprised ef they meant business. Hev yer heard about the young feller that come in a week ago from Laramie an' set up a ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... hand, when forced to be out of nights. The Mayor and City Council were powerless. City marshals and deputies they hired in bunches, but all to no purpose. Each fresh lot of appointees were short-lived, literally or officially—mostly literally. Finally, a vigilance committee was formed, made up of good citizens not a few of whom were gun experts with their own bit of red record. But nothing came of it. The predatories ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... region which had just become a part of the United States as a result of the War with Mexico, were largely unorganized and without regularly constituted government. The bad element did as it pleased until the better people got tired. Then a "vigilance committee" would be organized, which would either drive out the undesirables, as in this story, or would execute the ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson |
