Background
William Tell Coleman was born on February 29, 1824 near Cynthiana, Kentucky, United States. His father was Napoleon B. Coleman, a lawyer and at one time a member of the legislature.
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William Tell Coleman was born on February 29, 1824 near Cynthiana, Kentucky, United States. His father was Napoleon B. Coleman, a lawyer and at one time a member of the legislature.
Coleman was but nine when his father died, a bankrupt; and thereafter, with few opportunities for schooling, he had to work for the support of the family. At fifteen he went to Jacksonville, where he was employed by an uncle, one of the chief engineers for a system of railroads projected by the State; but the collapse of the State’s program the following year threw him adrift. At St. Louis he found work in the lumber trade, leaving it two years later to enter St. Louis University as a preparation for the career of a lawyer.
In 1849 Coleman decided on an overland journey to California. With his brother he arrived at Sutter’s Mill, August 4 and at once engaged in the buying and selling of cattle, making also some ventures in real estate. For several months he kept a store at Placerville, and later, with two partners, at Sacramento. In June 1850 he closed the Sacramento store and with one of his partners started the merchandising firm of William T. Coleman & Company in San Francisco. He was for a time a member, and sometimes the presiding officer, of the executive committee of the Committee of Vigilance of 1851, where he opposed the extremism of Sam Brannan and others. Though resigning from the executive committee after two months’ service, he continued to be a member of the general organization and also of its mysterious and shadowy Committee of Thirteen which five years later was to bring another vigilance movement into being.
In 1852, he made his home in New York, where he established an eastern branch of his firm. He returned to San Francisco in January 1856, to find that social conditions had relapsed into a state similar to that which preceded the citizens’ uprising of 1851. The assassination of James King of William, editor of the Bulletin, by a New York ruffian, James Casey, on May 14, brought on a new crisis. A call from the old Committee of Thirteen was published, and on the following day a new Committee of Vigilance was formed, and Coleman was made president of its executive committee. In an article in the Century Magazine, published thirty-five years later, he makes the doubtful statement that absolute authority was given him and that without this grant of power he would not have accepted the place. The Committee began work promptly.
On May 18 the sheriff, realizing the popular strength of the movement, surrendered Casey and another murderer, Charles Cora, to the Committee. They were put on trial on the 20th, found guilty on the 21st, and publicly hanged on the 22nd. For three months the Committee, with every evidence of general approval, though facing the proclamation of Governor Johnson, who on June 3 declared San Francisco County in a state of insurrection, continued its work of trying criminals. On August 18, after having hanged four of them, exiled twenty-three, and frightened many others into leaving the city—a record curiously similar to that of 1851, it held a great parade and then disbanded. Coleman again became’ a resident of New York City, remaining there for several years.
At the conclusion of the Civil War he returned. On December 16, 1865, he received the complimentary vote of 26 legislators for the United States senatorship. He was frequently besought to accept public office, but always declined. During the anti-Chinese agitation of 1877, which brought on rioting and some destruction of property, he came to the front as the head of a Committee of Safety. Arming his volunteers at first with weapons from the War Department, but immediately thereafter discarding these arms and substituting hickory pick-handles, he organized a large force for the preservation of order. It was a brief episode, for the danger, which had become acute on July 23, had passed by the 26th, and by the 28th the Pick-Handle Brigade was dissolved.
In the months immediately preceding the national campaign of 1884 he was enthusiastically supported for nomination as a presidential candidate by Charles A. Dana in the New York Sun. In 1886 his house failed with large liabilities. Though by a temporary adjustment the creditors were paid at forty cents on the dollar, Coleman declared that he would in time pay every one in full, a promise he fulfilled in the year before his death. He died in San Francisco, survived by his widow and two sons.
The dedication of the second volume of the historian’s Popular Tribunals (1890) addresses the Vigilante as “the chief of the greatest popular tribunal the world has ever witnessed”; and the work praises him in high terms.
Coleman was described by Bancroft as “tall, large, symmetrical in form, with a high intellectual forehead and eyes of illimitable depth and clearness” and of a presence “always imposing. ”
In August 1852, in Boston, Coleman married Carrie M. Page.
