San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 | Page 4

ceased to struggle with the spirit of evil ....
One man upon whom public attention was now turned, and whom the people of the City and State began to regard as their champion and deliverer, was James King of William, and he was no common man. He was born in Georgetown, D. C., in January, 1822, and was therefore thirty-four years old at the time of his death. Having received a common school education, he was placed at an early age in the banking house of Corcoran & Riggs at Washington City where he remained many years. His health at length failing from steady application to business and conscientious devotion to his employer's interests, he was induced to seek its restoration in the invigorating climate of California. He arrived in the country just previous to the discovery of gold. The marvelous growth of City and State soon required facilities for the transaction of business, and he became a resident of San Francisco, and established the first banking house in that City. For several years he was eminently successful in business; and his strict honesty and integrity secured for him the abiding confidence and respect of the business community. But the sudden and extreme depression in business in 1855 closed his doors as well as those of many other bankers and merchants. By the surrender to his creditors of all he possessed, even his homestead, which, to the value of five thousand dollars, the laws of California allowed him to retain, and which might well be coveted by him as a home for his wife and six children; every claim against him was promptly met and discharged. Retaining amidst all his reverses, the respect of all who knew him, he engaged as a clerk in the banking house of Adams & Co. where most of his old customers followed him, induced to do so by their confidence in him. After the failure of that firm, he was for some time out of active employment. But compelled by the necessities of a large family to seek it, he determined to establish a daily newspaper and take upon himself the editorial charge of it. For such an undertaking, his large experience in business, his resolute spirit, his sound judgment, his keen insight into character, his lofty scorn and detestation of meanness, profligacy, peculation and fraud, eminently fitted him. The paper, the Evening Bulletin, was first issued on the eighth day of October, 1855. From that day to the day of his death, he devoted all his faculties most faithfully and conscientiously to the exposure of guilt, the laying bare gigantic schemes for defrauding the public, the denouncing villains and villainy in high or low station, and the reformation of the numerous and aggravated abuses under which the community was and had long been groaning. Day after day did he assail with dauntless energy the open or secret robbers, oppressors or corruptors of the people. Neither wealth nor power could bribe or intimidate him. It would be difficult to conceive the enthusiasm with which the People hailed the advent of so able a champion, and the intense satisfaction with which they witnessed his steadfast perseverance in the cause of truth and the right.
At length, on the fourteenth day of May 1856, the anxious fears and gloomy forebodings of his family and friends were realized .... His assassin, James P. Casey, was well-known and of evil repute in the City. Bold, daring, and unscrupulous, his hand was ever ready to execute the plans of villainy which his fertile brain had conceived. Sentenced in New York to imprisonment for grand larceny in the State Prison at Sing Sing for the term of two years, and discharged when that term had nearly expired; he soon after sailed for California. Shortly after his arrival, he was chosen Inspector of Elections in the Sixth Ward of San Francisco. Here he presided over the ballot box, and was generally believed to have accomplished more ballot box staffing, ticket shifting and false returns than any other individual in the City or State. He made, as was generally believed, his office a means of livelihood, and held the City and County offices in his hands to be disposed of in such manner as might best promote his interest or fill his pockets. Year after year by this means he was accumulating money, until he was reputed to have made a fortune, although never known by the people to have been engaged in any honest industrial occupation in California. For the purpose perhaps of adding the levy of blackmail to his other modes of accumulation, he established a newspaper, called the Sunday Times, and without principle, character or education, assumed to be the enlightener of public opinion and the conservator of public morals. During