James King on Gambling: Editor, Enemy, Matryr
An editor of San Francisco's Daily Evening Bulletin, James King, led the anti- gambling hysteria of 1855 and 1856 in a newspaper campaign against municipal corruption.
A banker who had been bankrupted by the statewide depression of the mid-1850s, King took avidly to journalism, where, using sensation and controversy to the fullest, he built a leading newspaper by touting the need to establish social and fiscal respectability in San Francisco.
Much of his success resulted from spiteful attacks in prominent city figures, and 'his particular bete noire', his 'pet villain', was the gambler.
James King launched his campaign against gamblers in late November 1855, upon reporting the killing of General William H. Richardson, a federal marshal, by the dealer Charles Cora.
Cora reputedly had come to San Francisco from the old Southwest, where he was said to have grown up in Natchez-under-the-Hill and become a 'lucky' faro dealer.
An Italian gambler and paramour of one of the town's leading madams, Charles Cora stood for all the things that the Bulletin opposed, and in King's eyes his arraignment for murder provided the city with an opportunity to put all undesirable citizens on notice that their day had passed in San Francisco.
Convinced from the outset that Cora was guilty of murder, the editor stated that the gambler 'must and will be hung.'
He also proceeded to warn all of Cora's associates, including the Democratic sheriff who reportedly used to run a gambling hall, that any efforts to liberate the prisoner would be met with intransigent popular force.
If the gambler somehow escaped from confinement or conviction, King feared, San Francisco would be rent by forces of the good and evil competing for control of the city.
Cora's trial ended in a hung jury. The gambler was held over for retrial, but to King, it seemed that he had escaped.
Less passionate observers believed that Cora's counsel, hired by the gambler's lover, had convinced enough jury that the accused had actually shot Richardson in self-defense.
The Bulletin viewed things differently, however. Alleging that justice had been corrupted by 'the money of the gambler and the prostitute'.
King believed that right would ultimately prevail over wrong, either through the courts, or through popular tribunal.
Complications soon made matters worse for gamblers by tainting them even more thoroughly as suspected allies of the corrupt political machine in California.
During the early months of 1856, United States Senator John B. Weller recommended that President Franklin Pierce select James McDuffie as the new federal marshal, replacing the man Cora had shot.
The Bulletin attacked the Democrats' candidate by publishing reports that McDuffe had worked in 1850 and 1851 as a dealer in a Marysville gambling saloon where he had met Charles and Belle Cora.
With this information King immediately jumped to the conclusion that Cora had shot Richardson so that his friend McDuffie, another sharpie, could fill the vacancy.
It seemed that the gamblers were colluding with the Democrats to take control of the state.