subs. phr. (American).—Orig. Californian: a self-constituted body of men ostensibly for the purpose of administering justice or protecting the public interests in places where the regular authorities were either unable or unwilling to execute the laws: cf. LYNCH-LAW. Hence VIGILANT = a member of such a committee.
1858. Baltimore Sun, 1 July. A hand-bill calling a meeting to form a VIGILANCE COMMITTEE to suppress certain secret movements among the coloured population, and to stop outrages on private property, Governor Wise addressed a letter to Mayor Mayo, adding that he would use force in prohibiting such meeting from being held on the Capitol square. The Mayor in reply states that he considers himself a ‘VIGILANCE COMMITTEE’ enough for him and his comrades, and therefore deems it unnecessary to adopt any unusual measures against the proposed movement.
1858. New York Tribune, 30 Sept. A Protestant congregation was broken up and a part of its members marched on a Sunday from their place of worship to the town jail. The final proceedings of the civil authorities in the case were, according to our American notions of right and law, as gross a violation of justice as VIGILANCE COMMITTEE or lynching mob was ever guilty of.
c. 1859. Annals of San Francisco, 562 [BARTLETT]. Few people abroad, who had been trained from infancy to revere ‘the majesty of the law,’ and who had never seen any crime but what their own strong legal institutions and efficient police could detect and punish, could possibly conceive such a state of things as would justify the formation and independent action of an association which set itself above all formal law, and which openly administered summary justice, or what they called justice, in armed opposition and defiance to the regularly constituted tribunals of the country. Therefore, in other lands, it happened that the VIGILANCE COMMITTEE became often a term of reproach, and people pointed to it as a sign that society in California was utterly and perhaps irredeemably impure and disorganised.
1859. J. W. PALMER, The New and the Old, ii. 73. The first man hung by the San Francisco VIGILANCE COMMITTEE was dead before he was swung up, and the second, Steward, was alive after he was cut down.
1882. ROOSEVELT, Ranch Life in the Far West [The Century Magazine, xxxv. 505]. A little over a year ago one committee of VIGILANTES in eastern Montana shot or hung nearly sixty [horse-thieves]—not, however, with the best judgment in all cases.
