VIGILANCE COMMITTEE, in the United States, a self constituted judicial body, occasionally organized in the western frontier districts for the protection of life and property. The first committee of prominence bearing the name was organized in San Francisco in June 1851, when the crimes of desperadoes who had immigrated to the gold-fields were rapidly increasing in number and it was said that there were venal judges, packed juries and false witnesses. At first this committee was composed of about 200 members ; afterwards it was much larger. The gen eral committee was governed by an executive committee and the city was policed by sub-committees. Within about 3o days four desperadoes were arrested, tried by the executive committee and hanged, and about 3o others were banished. Satisfied with the re sults, the committee then quietly adjourned, but it was revived five years later. Similar committees were common in other parts of California and in the mining districts of Idaho and Montana. That in Montana exterminated in 1863-64 a band of outlaws organized under Henry Plummer, the sheriff of Montana City; of the outlaws were hanged within a few months. Committees or
societies of somewhat the same nature were formed in the South ern States during the Reconstruction period (1865-72) to protect white families from negroes and "carpet-baggers," and besides these there were the Ku-Klux-Klan (q.v.) and its branches, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Pale Faces and the Invisible Empire of the South, the principal object of which was to control the negroes by striking them with terror.
See T. J. Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana (Virginia City, 1866) ; H. H. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals (San Francisco, 1887) ; P. Garnett, ed., Papers of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 (Berkeley, Calif., 1910-19) ; Mary Floyd Williams, ed., Papers of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 (Berkeley, 1919) ; Mary Floyd Williams, History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 (Berkeley, 1921) ; and William John McConnell, Frontier Law (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1924).