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Current as of August 28, 2020, at 7:30 a.m.
COVID-19 Testing Sites in Florida
  • Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here.

Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step.

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity is giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program: View DEO Dashboard Here.

Florida Department of Health COVID Dashboard: Access dashboard here.

Graphs, Charts, and Real-time Tracking of COVID-19

Data Sources

Data Sources on Social Media

Other Resources
Current Statistics

  • Fatality rate in Florida - 1.8%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .06%
  • 35-44 years old - .21%
  • 45-54 years old - .47%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.5%
  • 65-74 years old - 4.9%
  • 75 and up - 15.9%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 43 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 32% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 21%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 24%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: August 26, 2020 1:58 PM PST

203
vaccines are in development.

26
are now in clinical testing.
The test could be administered in a doctor’s or school nurse’s office and returns results in about 15 minutes

President Trump is expected to announce a $750 million deal to buy 150 million rapid Covid-19 tests from Abbott Laboratories, a White House official said, a move that would substantially expand the nation’s capacity for rapid testing.

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday granted emergency-use authorization to the company for a $5 rapid-response Covid-19 antigen test that is roughly the size of a credit card. The test could be administered in a doctor’s or school nurse’s office and uses technology similar to home pregnancy tests. It returns results in about 15 minutes.

“This is a major development that will help our country to remain open, get Americans back to work and kids back to school,” White House senior adviser Alyssa Farah said.

The announcement comes as the president is expected to tout his response to the pandemic in his speech Thursday evening at the Republican National Convention, where he will formally accept the party’s presidential nomination for the second time.

Abbott said Wednesday it plans to ship tens of millions of the tests in September and expects to increase production to 50 million tests in October. The October total would be roughly double the number of tests performed in the U.S. in July.

Abbott said its data show the new antigen test has demonstrated sensitivity—the percent of positive cases a test accurately detects—of about 97%. Rapid antigen tests are generally thought to be less sensitive than lab-based PCR tests.

The White House has long used a different rapid test created by Abbott to test the president and those who come into contact with him. The company has come under scrutiny for that test. It was forced to revise instructions for use of the test when a preliminary study by a major medical center found that it frequently gave false negative results.

Abbott shares rose more than 8% Thursday afternoon, boosted by the emergency-use authorization and news of the large White House purchase.


In 24 hours, the testing landscape of the United States has transformed.

Yesterday morning, all of the tests for COVID-19—traditional or rapid—that had received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration required an expensive machine and cost around $40 or more. In the afternoon, the pharmaceutical company Abbott announced that it had received FDA authorization to distribute a new type of test. This test requires only a coated-paper card and a small swab, and the scale of its production is stunning: Abbott says it will begin manufacturing 50 million of these tests a month in October. The tests will cost just $5 apiece.

That wasn’t the only news. This morning, the Trump administration announced that it would be purchasing 150 million of these tests from the company. For comparison, states have reported fewer than 75 million tests total over the past six months, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

Many experts have hailed Abbott’s new test as a huge milestone, and a rapid acceleration toward a plan that could give Americans back some sense of normalcy. Deployed widely and often enough, tests like Abbott’s might allow for kids to return to school, office workers to head back to cubicles, and essential employees who have been working throughout the pandemic to have a greater degree of safety. At a time when so many people are desperate to escape the pandemic, this kind of testing holds the tantalizing promise of a pre-vaccine way out of the quagmire.

Abbott’s test itself is not quite the fulfillment of that grand vision, though—at least not yet. Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist who has pushed for the deployment of this kind of rapid test, was not ready to declare that the new era had begun. “This is the type of test that we’ve been waiting for, but may not be the test,” Mina told me.

The fine details of the FDA’s emergency use authorization, the regulatory sign-off that allows a test to be sold, are significant. Antigen tests such as this one detect viral protein and are less sensitive than the gold-standard PCR tests, which detect viral RNA. So, to gain acceptance, Abbott showed data confirming that its test was able to classify a pool of samples in nearly the same way as PCR tests of the same samples. Although its performance was impressive, the number of samples was far smaller than would be tested under normal circumstances—just 102.

Also, the FDA’s authorization allows Abbott’s test to be used only on people with symptoms of COVID-19 within seven days of the onset of their symptoms. It cannot be used to test people at any time, an approach that is often called screening. Mina said that limits the test’s potential, because it can’t be used to detect people who carry the virus but don’t show symptoms, and asymptomatic and presymptomatic people are thought to transmit a substantial percentage of infections.

Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease researcher at Scripps Research, noted that Abbott developed an app to go along with the test that would provide proof that a person had recently tested negative. To Andersen, this is clear evidence that “Abott didn’t just have symptomatic diagnostics in mind here, but also screening of asymptomatic people.” Symptomatic people are much more likely to have the virus, decreasing the chance of a false positive. For asymptomatic people, even in an area with lots of infections, Andersen worried that Abbott’s test isn’t accurate enough, and would generate a substantial number of false positives. (In May, Abbott was embroiled in a controversy over the sensitivity of another one of its rapid tests, Abbott ID Now.)

Andersen and Mina both offered up prospective solutions to increase the test’s sensitivity. For example, a future version of the test could look for two viral targets. Or two tests could be packaged together, one of which would be a slightly more expensive test that you’d take if you got a positive on the first. That is to say, many questions remain about the test, about Abbott’s strategy, about the Trump administration’s distribution of the tests, and more.

To process the potentially big news, I reached out to Abbott’s lead scientist on the project, John Hackett, to address some of the questions about how the new test might be deployed, improved, and criticized. I’ve condensed and lightly edited our conversation for clarity. Abbott’s FDA authorization might be limited right now, but the company’s vision is clearly bigger than its current regulatory status.

Alexis C. Madrigal: How do you see these tests being used?

John Hackett: This project was built around the concept: What do we need to start to move our society back to normal? How do we get people back to work? How do we ensure these workforces will be as safe as possible? How do we get people back to school? That was the goal.

So we really did want to have tests that could be as broadly distributed as possible.

Madrigal: Fifty million tests a month is a huge number. That’s more than twice the number of tests the U.S. completes in a month. How did you ramp up production so massively?

Hackett: This was the challenge of this program. We needed some sort of reliable testing that could be affordable and that doesn’t require instrumentation. You need scale. The more frequently you could test people, frankly, even tests with lower sensitivity would be very effective at identifying people quickly and slowing the spread. As we were developing the test, there were people working in parallel looking at supply chain and logistics. Abbott took a lot of risk—hundreds of millions of dollars were spent building two new manufacturing facilities focused solely on those tests. We hoped we could come to a solution that would be where we needed it from an overall accuracy perspective, but if you weren’t building capability simultaneously, there was no way it could be the answer.

Madrigal: With the current sensitivity of the test, there are some questions about it as a screening test. The [emergency use authorization] doesn’t allow that yet. What would you have to do to roll this out as an FDA-authorized screening test?

Hackett: The FDA is starting to create templates for over-the-counter-type testing. We’re looking at that. And trying to explore the challenges. When you think about going to home testing, there are a lot of factors involved. This test is very easy to use; there’s no question. But you’d have to worry about how people store them. Are they sitting in their hot car? This test will be a major step, but we do have to continue to explore others.

Madrigal: So right now this test still needs to be done in some kind of a facility. But when I look at the number of tests you’re able to produce, it makes me think that at-home testing is where you’re ultimately driving, even if you aren’t allowed to do screening in general yet. Is that true?

Hackett: This is really a critical first step. The first primary thought was being able to do tests where people gather: a workplace is a good example, or a school. There, you can have a health-care provider—it doesn’t have to be a doctor, could be a school nurse, an occupational health specialist—who would use [the test] with very limited training. Any facility that has a CLIA certificate [in this case, a kind of waiver] for testing in a new-patient setting would be capable of using this.

We recognize there could be value in home testing, and we’ll continue to look at this. There are concerns. When you go to home testing, how effective is the sampling a person does? That’s the importance of why we chose a nasal swab [which just goes in the nostril] instead of nasopharyngeal [which goes way up in the nose]. It’s night and day in terms of pain. And you do need a trained health expert to do nasopharyngeal. We’ll explore other pathways to getting more testing to the people who need it.

Madrigal: One complication with widespread antigen testing is that it’s blurring the national picture of the pandemic. These tests aren’t really being reported, so even though this type of test is valuable, they’re currently creating a hole in the data. Have you given some thought to the data-reporting side of this?

Hackett: People testing are supposed to report positives. For example, if you were an employer using a test like this, that is the responsibility of the health group. We have created the Navica app, a complementary mobile app that goes with the test. We weren’t using it for that purpose, but it is one that allows the person to get a digital health pass.

We were thinking about: How can you lock in testing a test result and be able to verify that you were, in fact, tested? If you were an employer, you could know the employees have done the testing at whatever interval you wanted to do the testing. The default setting for that is seven days, but that could be modified.

Madrigal: Take my kids’ school as an example. It wants to do rapid testing. How would the school go about getting your tests and doing this testing? How would it actually work?

Hackett: We at Abbott do testing of critical staff. This is the sort of thing that can be set up. You need some health-care providers and to figure out what is the interval of testing that would achieve what your goal is overall or what you think is appropriate. Then it is really just organization. Again, I think that’s where the Navica app would be a real plus. If you went into a school building, they could just check; it would be like a boarding pass. And if, unfortunately, you were positive, you’d get a message to quarantine and see your doctor.

Madrigal: But that sounds like broad screening to me, not diagnostic testing of someone with symptoms.

Hackett: Well, that comes back to the health-care provider. For this test, you still need, in essence, a prescription, saying that these individuals are suspected or they have symptoms. This test, the indication is for seven days or less after the onset of symptoms.

Madrigal: How do you improve a test like this? How do you take the basic components and say “This is how we’re going to get to this sensitivity and this specificity”?

Hackett: Well, this is a situation where, obviously in this outbreak, there has been very little time to react. We haven’t had the normal time frames that we would to develop tests like these. There was a tremendous amount of work that went into the process, every level of this.

What protein of the virus should we target? Then, looking at the reality in this format, during the extraction process off of the swab, you need to be able to separate the proteins that are part of that virus in order to be able to detect them. So would you choose spike or nuclear protein? What type of swab? Abbott’s got a long history of this in the infectious-disease area. You can go back to 1985; we had the first FDA-approved test for HIV. This is part of our history.

Intellectuals are supposed to speak truth to power. Unfortunately, some seem to be more interested in saying what everyone expects them to say, which only reinforces the status quo. Thankfully, a few scholars are resisting this trend, fighting for what is true rather than what is popular.

Case in point: a recent Hoover Institution paper by economists John Cogan, Daniel Heil and John Taylor, which makes the case for a reduction in spending now in order to positively impact the economy.

It's refreshing to see their research, considering that we live in a world where pundits and even economists bend over backward to make the case that more debt is not a problem and that more fiscal stimulus is desirable. Never mind that the arguments that intellectuals offer to defend these claims aren't supported by the academic literature. Consider the mistaken notion that more spending will stimulate the economy and somehow reduce the debt burden of the policy in the first place. Research overwhelmingly confirms that, for a variety of reasons, the return of government spending on economic growth is much less than the money spent.

Then there's the argument that interest rates are low and hence, it's a good time to take on more debt—despite the chance that variable interest won't always be that low. But more debt, even at low rates, still means more interest payments. Before COVID-19, the United States paid close to $400 billion in interest payments annually, or 8 percent of our budget. It's only going to get worse now. Japan, for instance, has a massive amount of debt, despite its 0 percent long-term interest rates. Its debt repayments are its second-largest budget item.

I wish reporters and economists would stop asserting, like the Wall Street Journal recently did, "the example of Japan has shown that debts can rise for a long time, well above 200 percent of GDP, without sparking a fiscal crisis." Really? I would have thought that Japan's two decades of no growth and wage stagnation could be considered a crisis.

Moreover, Japan is quite different than the United States and can get away with more overall debt than we could. That's because most Japanese securities are held in the Social Security trust fund that's owned by the government. This means that net public sector debt is actually significantly lower in Japan than in the United States.

Enter the new paper by Cogan, Heil and Taylor, which finds that, when faced with an inevitable debt explosion in our future, the only viable and desirable option is for Uncle Sam to limit expenditures as a share of GDP, around the 20 percent ratio that prevailed before the pandemic. The authors find that this approach avoids the "potentially large increase in future federal taxes." Better yet, they actually find that the policy would boost both short- and long-term GDP.

This research will be added to decades of empirical evidence that spending-based consolidations are expansionary in the long term and, sometimes, can boost growth in the short term, too. However, my excitement with the paper is actually rooted in their scholarship and methodology, not just their conclusions.

Here's why: The traditional objection against spending cuts is that they hurt demand (consumption), but this study shows that a reduction in spending actually increases consumption in the short run and into the long run. That's because, in the same way people tend to increase their savings during a recession due to fear of the future, consumers also consider the long-term tax implications of today's spending measures. They'll increase their spending and investment habits in anticipation of future tax cuts—or, at the very least, no future tax hikes. The result is that the growth in output resulting from the spending restraint is driven primarily by consumption, which should be politically salient. The authors, however, also highlight that, as expected, investment reacts positively in the long run.

At a time when flawed arguments for more government spending and more debt are reemerging, this paper goes against the big government status quo and offers a blueprint for us to not only regain control of our spiraling debt but also do so in a way that will boost short- and long-term economic growth by boosting demand and then investment.


As debate over whether to reopen schools has raged on, most people have focused on the wisdom of sending kids back to school as the nation continues to work to get the coronavirus pandemic under control.

Folks worried about reopening are concerned about the health of students, teachers, and staff — as well as all those people's families — and want to make sure that reopening will not exacerbate the COVID crisis.

Advocates for reopening say that remote learning isn't enough: Kids need to be back in school, they say, because they learn better with in-person instruction. Those advocates also note children need the social aspect of schools and that many kids need the services and protections many schools provide.

But what about the economic impact of keeping schools closed? How much damage will closed schools have on the U.S. economy.

A report this month from Barron's examined those questions and came up with a troubling answer: Keeping schools closed may well cost the U.S. economy more than $700 billion.

The Barron's report started with an ominous note: "The only thing standing between a recovery and a double-dip recession might be the back-to-school season."

As the new school year starts, Barron's noted, 56 million students from kindergarten to 12th grade are facing all sorts of new challenges — most are going to have to use distance learning, which presents unique academic challenges, while others will face the challenge of dealing with COVID regulations within their schools.

But those challenges might just pale in comparison to the economic challenge of not returning to in-class instruction.

"The risks to reopening schools are clear — they could become a new epicenter for Covid-19," Barron's said, "but the costs of keeping schools closed could be even higher."

Just how much higher?

Barron's says the U.S. would be looking at $700 billion in lost revenue and productivity, which would be 3.5% of GDP, Axios said.

The impact closed schools will have on the economy is connected to our nation's decision to have schools act as child care so that parents can go to work. With kids at home, parents are being forced to give up work hours or quit their jobs altogether.

According to the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, working parents account for about one-third of the nation's workforce, Axios noted.

The outlet added that child-care needs in the wake of the nation's response to COVID last March, which closed schools across the country, meant that 13% of those working parents lost their jobs or cut back their hours. And those who did not have to give up work have found themselves considerably less productive: The average working parent has lost eight hours a week of productivity with kids at home during the pandemic.

Misty Heggeness, a visiting scholar at the Minneapolis Fed, told Axios, "Even if you're lucky enough to have a teleworking situation, it's really hard to work at full capacity when you're essentially acting as a teaching assistant."

Scientists at the Lawson Health Research Institute and Western University in Canada have identified why some patients become sicker than others with COVID-19 and why life-threatening blood clots can form. Their discoveries may lead to potentially new treatments for critically ill patients.

According to Science Daily, the two back-to-back studies uncovered significant information that can help healthcare workers understand and treat COVID-19. In the first study, researchers found six molecules that can be used as biomarkers to predict the severity of the illness and if patients can survive treatment in the intensive care unit. The team noted that being able to tell how sick a patient may become can help doctors chart a more appropriate treatment path and have important conversations with family members.

“When a patient is admitted to ICU, we normally wait to see if they’re going to get worse before they get better,” said Dr. Douglas Fraser, the lead researcher from Lawson, according to CTV News. “To improve outcomes, we not only need new therapies, but also a way to predict prognosis on which patients are going to get worse.”

In the second study, they discovered in blood samples that COVID-19 patients have elevated levels of three molecules that could trigger blood clots. According to CTV News, blood clots can be a major complication that occurs in the blood vessels in the lungs of the most critically sick COVID-19 patients. By identifying these molecules, doctors may be able to administer platelet inhibitors to stop platelets from sticking, according Science Daily.

“Through our combined findings, we hope to provide tools to better predict which patients will become most severely ill and treatments for both hyperinflammation and blood clots,” said Fraser.

The temporary collapse of authority in many American cities, and the proposals of “defund the police” advocates to make that collapse permanent, has illustrated a timeless truth: When government authority dissolves, people will form their own armed enforcers of order. You will not get a peace-and-love utopia: You will instead get vigilante justice, posses, and lynchings. It will not be pretty; in Kenosha, Wis., it has already led to one well-publicized shooting.

More force still will be needed to retake control. Come back with me to San Francisco in the 1850s to see how Americans learned this lesson once before.

San Francisco grew quickly from a late start. Europeans only reached the Bay Area in 1769, and the first permanent, civilian, non-Native American settlement dates only to 1835. The American conquest of California in 1847, and the gold rush in 1848-49, changed that in a heartbeat, turning a ramshackle town of 150 people in 1846 into a boomtown city of 25,000 in 1849, then 50,000 in 1853.

Some of the new San Franciscans came in search of a fresh start.

Convicts and Irish rebels absconded there, sometimes under assumed names. In 1850, California began the first of many turns in its history against controversial immigrants, passing an Importation of Criminals Act targeting ship captains who smuggled in convicts without papers.

The law’s chief target was Australia; its reputation as a penal colony preceded it, and not always unfairly. In February 1851, as highway robbery, violent gangs, and disorder proliferated, citizens formed the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, with the scheming ex-Mormon newspaperman Sam Brannan manipulating events to put himself at its head. The Committee’s ad hoc “trials” and public hangings, which helped popularize the term “vigilante,” prominently targeted known or suspected Australians. In May 1851, the city was further devastated by the latest in a series of fires; suspected arsonists were arrested, strengthening the hand of the Vigilance Committee.

To regain control from both the criminals and the vigilantes, the city’s conservative law-and-order elements turned to San Francisco’s first mayor, a towering 31-year-old Pennsylvanian named John W. Geary. Geary had fought in the Mexican War and served as military governor of Mexico City and was not a man to be trifled with. But he had a soft spot for the Irish rebels: The first to arrive, T. J. McManus, was greeted as a hero by Geary, Brannan, and Lieutenant Governor David Broderick upon his arrival in 1851.

Not all new Californians were welcomed or protected by the law. There were only about 500 Chinese immigrants among the original gold rushers, even though Canton was as close as Sydney to San Francisco. The first Chinese arrivals were treated as a welcome curiosity and honored in San Francisco’s 1850 parade celebrating statehood. But some forty ships set sail in 1850 for the state the Chinese called Gum Shan, or “Gold Mountain.” By 1851, there were 25,000 Chinese in California, and between 1852 and 1860, about 6,000–7,000 Chinese immigrants arrived every year. Californians remained acutely aware of how quickly their sparsely populated state could become majority Chinese, given that China’s population at the time exceeded 400 million people after four centuries of rapid growth.

A tax on foreign miners, repealed in 1851, was reinstated to discourage Chinese miners. In 1853, a Chinese miner named Ling Sing was gunned down in an armed robbery by George Hall, shot in the back at least 15 times. An 1850 California statute provided that “no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against, a white man.” A divided California supreme court used the statute to throw out Hall’s conviction. Hundreds of murders such as Ling Sing’s would go unpunished before the statute was repealed in 1872. An unintended side effect was that justice was left, if at all, to vigilantes. In 1857, three white men were strung up by white vigilantes after a series of murders of Chinese victims.

In May 1856, the San Francisco vigilantes returned. By then, Geary had returned east; by midsummer, President Franklin Pierce appointed him territorial governor of “Bleeding Kansas.” While the 1851 Vigilance Committee had been formed to stamp out anarchy, the 1856 Committee arose more from public mistrust that a corrupt city government would adequately prosecute the murders of a crusading journalist and a U.S. Marshal. After the suspects were hanged by the vigilantes, the mayor appealed to J. Neely Johnson, California’s newly elected governor.

Thirty years old and elected on the anti-immigrant American Party (or “Know-Nothing”) ticket, Johnson was stepping not only into a potentially explosive situation, but also into a political rupture in the state’s previously dominant Democratic Party. David Broderick, a pugilistic son of Irish immigrants who would be elected to the Senate that fall, was aligned with opponents of slavery but also stood atop the corrupt San Francisco machine. Broderick’s foes in the law-and-order faction were mainly pro-slavery men of Southern disposition (they styled themselves “the Chivalry”) and disdain for appeals to the mob. The Vigilance Committee’s populist anti-corruption stance was most closely in tune with Johnson’s political base, but he saw it as an intolerable challenge to civil authority.

With Geary gone from the scene, Johnson turned for advice and assistance to another tough-minded conservative Democrat, a 36-year-old banker and former Army officer: William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman had been sent to California as a 27-year-old lieutenant during the Mexican War, only to discover that the six-month trip around Cape Horn had delivered him too late for any fighting. A year later, Sherman was on hand when the first miners from Sutter’s Mill brought their discoveries to the military governor in Monterey. With more money than war to be made in California, he eventually left the Army for business, but his military background commanded respect in San Francisco and beyond. When the 1856 Vigilance Committee crisis erupted, Sherman had just been appointed Major General of the California militia.

Sherman’s sympathies at the time were decidedly Southern, but more importantly, throughout his career, Sherman always sided firmly with law and order and legitimate authority. In May 1856, he believed that a show of overwhelming force by the militia up front would head off bloodshed. Johnson and Sherman met with the commander of the Mare Island naval base, David Farragut, who insisted that he could not directly aid the militia without orders from Washington, but agreed to dispatch a ship “for moral effect.” Believing that General John Wool, the local Army commander, had agreed to supply arms and ammunition to Sherman’s militia, Johnson then declared San Francisco to be “in a state of insurrection.” Sherman met with members of the Vigilance Committee, who warned of “terrible” consequences, and he bluntly ordered them to “remove your fort; cease your midnight councils; and prevent your armed bodies from patrolling the streets.” But Wool got cold feet and informed Johnson and Sherman that he could offer no assistance without a direct order from President Franklin Pierce.

Wool noted that Pierce had pointedly failed, six months earlier, to authorize federal assistance to the militia in Kansas (an event that led to the resignation of the governor and his replacement with Geary). Wool read the Washington tea leaves correctly: Six weeks later, Pierce’s Secretary of State, William Marcy, responded in denial: “The President will not allow himself to believe that the prevalence of rash councils and lawless violence still continues in San Francisco. He confidently trusts that the Citizens of California, who have suffered themselves to be betrayed by whatever inducements, into violations of the public peace, of so dangerous a character, will already have resumed their obedience to the laws . . .” The Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, waited until early September to respond, and ordered Wool to stay out of state affairs but to concentrate his troops to protect federal forts “for the protection of the property and officers of the United States against lawless violence or revolutionary aggression.” (This would not be Davis’s view of federal forts five years later.)

A disgusted Sherman resigned, saying that he had been placed “in a false position” and decided “that I would thenceforth mind my own business and leave public affairs severely alone.” Sherman added that, after hearing “the extreme ideas of Judge Terry” and others around Johnson, he “felt my moderate ideas must stand in the way of those vigorous steps which you in your judgment deemed necessary.”

Extreme measures would be the hallmark of Judge David Terry’s long and stormy career. Terry, a hulking, six-foot-three, pro-slavery Texas Democrat who had fought at Monterey in the Mexican War, had risen to the California Supreme Court with Know-Nothing support. He went to San Francisco with Governor Johnson’s blessing to parley with the vigilantes, armed with a writ of habeas corpus for the two dead men and a double-barreled gun, pistol, and bowie knife. Unsurprisingly, this went badly, resulting in a melee that ended with Terry held captive by the Vigilance Committee and put on “trial” for stabbing one of the armed vigilantes, Sterling Hopkins, in the neck with the bowie knife. The city’s law-and-order forces, without militia support, were compelled to surrender and turn over their arsenal to the Vigilance Committee.

For nearly a month, as Hopkins’s survival hung in doubt, the governor and the Committee both faced the dreadful prospect that vigilantes acting outside the law would hang a sitting Justice of the state’s Supreme Court. The Sacramento business community begged Johnson to back down, in a letter signed by (among others) Leland Stanford and Wells, Fargo & Co. The Texas legislature passed a joint resolution asking Pierce to “restore the supremacy of the law in California,” which was presented in the Senate by Sam Houston. One of Johnson’s closest aides noted Terry’s uncompromising stance even in this extremity: “Judge Terry would infinitely prefer swinging from the window of the Committee Rooms, than resigning his office.” In time, Hopkins survived, Terry was allowed to escape to Farragut’s ship, and the state used the pretext of conflict with Native Americans to beg for its guns back.

The political fallout and animosity would linger. In 1859, after taking office as Chief Justice, Terry shot Senator Broderick dead in a duel outside San Francisco. Terry resigned from the bench, replaced as California’s Chief Justice by Stephen Field, another Gold Rush-era arrival in California. The Democratic coalition in the state cracked up, split hopelessly along lines that paralleled the national Democrats under Pierce and James Buchanan. Lincoln beat divided opposition to win California with just under a third of the vote in 1860, four years after California icon John C. Frémont drew just 19 percent as the Republican candidate. Stanford was elected California’s first Republican governor in 1861, after carrying just 9 percent of the vote in 1859. Sherman and Geary, by now Republicans, went on to serve as Union Army generals. Terry saw action as a colonel of Texas cavalry with the Confederate forces at Chickamauga. In 1889, Terry assaulted Justice Field and was gunned down by U.S. Marshals, an incident that brought the vigilante-era debates full circle when Field’s U.S. Supreme Court colleagues ruled in In re Neagle that the Marshals could not be tried in California state courts for acting on federal authority.

Californians learned the hard way that vigilante justice and the demands of the mob are no substitute for police and courts of law. Let us hope we do not need that lesson again.