Today’s Overpowered Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Aaron Bracey was a freed slave who set out for California during the Gold Rush. Bracey quickly earned a reputation as a man you didn’t want to cross. In 1856, he killed a Chinese man he claimed had burglarized his cabin on his small ranch near Auburn. On February 18, 1856, Bracey was engaged in a property dispute with his neighbor James Murphy, an Irish emigrant. No one really knows jus what was said or what occurred during the quarrel, but whatever happened made Bracey fly into a rage, grab a pickax, and strike Murphy in the back of the head. Bracey immediately got a doctor and turned himself over to authorities, explaining to the police that the pickax had accidentally slipped out of his hands. Murphy told the authorities on his deathbed that Bracey had struck him from behind.
Slavery was still legal in America, and many of the miners in the hills were from the Deep South. Murphy was a popular man, and his friends started lingering around the jail calling for Judge Lynch. Sheriff King and Deputy John Boggs deputized a posse to guard the jail. Fifty more citizens of Auburn were asked to be ready to come to the sheriff’s aid if they heard the courhouse bells ringing. At about 2:30 in the morning of February 19, Deputy Boggs spotted a mob approaching the jail. Boggs yelled out to the sheriff and the posse but by the time they stepped outside of the jail, they were surrounded and disarmed by the mob. One officer managed to ring the courthouse bell, but none of the citizen guards came to the rescue.
The mob overpowered the sheriff and took the key to the jail. Aaron Bracey was dragged from his cell and forced to march up the street, as the mob beat him over his head with pick handles and clubs. Father Quinn, a Catholic priest, pleaded with the vigilantes to release the man and let the courts try him, but the frenzied throng was in no mood to listen to a man of the cloth. A handful of vigilantes picked up the priest and threw him over a fence.
Somewhere outside of Auburn, the exact place lost to history, the mob threw a rope over a branch of a pine tree and jerked Bracey into the air. The noose slipped over the terrified man’s face as he dangled in the cold night air. The mob lowered Bracey, readjusted the noose and pulled him back up into the air, where he slowly strangled to death, as a crowd of 200 stood by and watched.
Culled from: California Justice: Shootouts, Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden State
I think you can see just how worthless a Chinese man’s life was considered in Gold Rush California if a black man (whose life was obviously little-valued as well) could kill one and not be punished for it. Sick times, on so many levels.
Oh, and I must add a note that California Justice: Shootouts, Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden State
He must have felt pretty confident, on some level, since he’d gotten away with it once.
I love the angry lynch mobs of yore….people used to be a force to reckon with.