Charles Trevelyan’s corn: the Treasury secretary and the Irish Famine

Eden Ellis’s 1848 portrait of Trevelyan at the Treasury. Courtesy: National Trust

In the last half century Charles Trevelyan has become the archvillain of the Irish Famine. The Assistant Secretary of the Treasury has been condemned as the man most responsible for British policy between 1845 and 1850 when, under two different governments, one million Irish people died and another million left the country. Academic papers, books, songs and newspapers have held Trevelyan responsible for the British government’s meanness, bigotry and incompetence in Ireland, some seeing it as deliberate depopulation to restructure Irish society in the name of political economy and Protestant evangelism. Robin Haines’s meticulously researched Charles Trevelyan and the Irish Famine (2004) is an important corrective to the accepted history.

Charles Edward Trevelyan came from a wealthy Somerset family of Cornish extraction. Born in 1807, Trevelyan had an Irish grandmother and travelled to Ireland in 1843 to research distant relatives. He was educated in the East India Company training college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire and graduated top of his class. In 1826 he went to India to learn Hindi and Persian at Fort William College, Calcutta and was assigned to the revenue department in Delhi. He was regarded as a young man of outstanding ability and strong civil sense. He gained a reputation for settling local disputes and put his career in jeopardy when he accused a superior of corruption (the case was proven). Trevelyan made an important ally in Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay when he married his sister Hannah Macaulay. Aged 33 in 1840, Trevelyan came home to take the senior role at the Treasury, Assistant Secretary. He served in the role for almost two decades before being appointed governor of Madras. During the Famine years Britain distributed £10,000,000 in government grants and loans to Ireland (0.3pc of GNP) while administering £1,000,000 in private subscriptions. This money was raised under the direction of Dublin Castle, but administrative and fiscal responsibility lay with Trevelyan as the chief treasury official.

In religion Trevelyan was evangelical, which modern historians have often used as pejorative shorthand for “hard-heartedness, cultural insensitivity, humourlessness, and self-righteousness”. Trevelyan believed in the superiority of his Christianity but Haines said he was tolerant of Catholicism and little different from the “relaxed broad-church episcopalianism” of his class. Nor was Trevelyan as powerful as modern texts make him out to be. It was not until later in the 19th century that senior civil servants became policy advisors, acting on reforms proposed by Trevelyan himself. Trevelyan did have considerable discretion, especially as a new inexperienced Whig administration took power in 1846, but he consulted daily with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and had regular meetings with Treasury Lords and other ministers.

Trevelyan was economically orthodox, like the Robert Peel and John Russell governments he served. The Tories and Whigs practised laissez-faire principles of “small government” yet both had interventionist policies in Ireland. One of Trevelyan’s tasks in 1846 was to prove to the British tax-paying public that Irish distress was real and public works served an important purpose. Had the blight struck in the more optimistic 1850s, said Haines, Britain would have been more generous. In the 1840s coffers were low after decades of low taxes and heavy Napoleonic-era debt repayment. Britain was economically depressed leading to a financial crisis in October 1847. Any government spending, especially if it interfered with free markets, stimulated political anxiety, influenced by a press that was critical of Ireland and believed its distress was exaggerated.

In 1846 Trevelyan was vexed at the Times‘ refusal to take the crisis seriously. His attitude was that official measures should not disturb ordinary trade but people should not be allowed to starve. People did starve but disease in overcrowded workhouses killed just as many. Irish officials criticised Trevelyan but Whitehall was caught in bureacratic crossfire between Dublin Castle and Westminster. Many Irish barbs at him were really aimed at Russell and his Treasurer Charles Wood. Dublin Castle even pettily refused to find office space for Trevelyan’s key Irish official Sir Randolph Routh. Trevelyan was never “dictator of relief” and his bosses overruled him if he was too “generous”. Russell was infuriated that 1847 profits from non-potato crops worth £40 million lined landlords’ pockets rather than feed the poor. He thought unlimited government funding would worsen the problem. Even after the second potato failure in 1846, Wood believed that the crisis was exaggerated, despite daily briefings from Trevelyan.

In early 1847 reports of mass death poured in from the west of Ireland. No one knew the exact number as many bodies were interred at night with no burial service. Nearly three quarters of a million people were surviving on public works. Yet Britain was suffering compassion fatigue, and private charity efforts failed to raise much money. The 1847 potato crop had minimal blight but the crop was scanty due to a lack of seed potatoes. Russell knew that Ireland’s distress would continue but instructed Trevelyan to end support of public works. If some regions were fed entirely at government expense, discontent and sedition would result elsewhere, the prime minister reasoned. Landlords would have to sacrifice rents to feed their tenants.

Resistance grew in Ireland against paying the increased poor rate and many Poor Law Unions became bankrupt. The Relief Commission was disbanded, and 22 distressed unions relied on the generosity of the British Association. Following government policy Trevelyan refused to re-open public works. Fever and dysentery struck Dublin and Trevelyan urged staff to move to the suburbs. The situation worsened as English banks folded while disaffected labourers in Clare and Tipperary rioted against the lack of public works. A Clare priest quoted in a letter to Trevelyan said, “Ireland is like a farm that is never manured, all goes out nothing comes in, the end must be exhaustion.”

In January 1848 Whig journal Edinburgh Review published an anonymous piece, The Irish Crisis. Trevelyan wrote it, as colleagues who vetted it, including Russell and Wood, were aware. Trevelyan’s “crisis” was not just the potato failure but the accompanying shortfall of exchequer funding. He saw no irony in believing the crisis ended when the Board of Works and Relief Commissions disbanded, leaving local government in charge. As Haines said, its publication was precipitous and premature, especially as the potato failed again in 1848. But its immediate impact was positive. Renowned Irish priest Father Theobald Mathew complimented it, while British observers thought it was a comprehensive answer to overseas critics.

The final paragraph contains a sentence often used to pillory Trevelyan: “The deep and inveterate root of social evil remained, and this has been laid bare by a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence”. Trevelyan’s “direct stroke” has been interpreted as referring to the Famine, whereas he was referring to the God-given chance for the gentry to save the poor from starving. Haines said Trevelyan meant that having endured the blight, the government had to implement permanent measures to stimulate economic and social advancement.

As 1848 progressed, Trevelyan worried about the threat of insurrection in Britain and Ireland. Chartism was on the march and he advised the government to suspend habeas corpus and arrest its leaders for sedition. He was delighted with a “great & bloody victory” when 40,000 armed police stared down the mainland threat in April, but Ireland remained a concern. A failed rebellion in July was followed by another disastrous potato harvest a month later. Trevelyan argued against government purchase of grain as private trade was bringing in enough.

In the west, people continued to die in large numbers. Trevelyan analysed the figures in mid 1848 and reported that Ireland’s population was down by a million and “emigration was still in active progress.” Yet Trevelyan and the government he served believed they had done a good job, removing unsustainable small holdings. Famine could have been even worse without the government public works program which employed 700,000 people at its peak. Trevelyan told Father Mathew that “although there is still much that is painful & gloomy in the state of Ireland, I am satisfied that a social regeneration is taking place.” The deaths continued into 1849-50 as did support for distressed Poor Law Unions.

History has not judged the Russell government well for allowing starvation and death to devastate an island that was part of the world’s richest economy. Russell’s biographer blames his hatred of Irish landlords and his “Malthusian fear” of long-term relief. Haines said the Whigs were influenced by an empty Treasury. Peel has been better judged by history but a Tory government would have done little better, and were perhaps lucky to lose power when they did.

Trevelyan has been judged more harshly than either prime minister. Haines thinks the onomatopoeic resonance between “Trevelyan” and “Treasury” contributed to the problem. Early Irish historians understood the constraints Trevelyan worked under, but his reputation fell drastically after the publication of two texts in the 1960s.

The first was Jennifer Hart’s 1960 academic article Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury. Haines says Hart relied on a small selection of Trevelyan’s letters to make generalisations which thorough examination of his correspondence does not support. Two years after Hart’s text came Cecil Woodham Smith’s bestseller The Great Hunger. Woodham Smith relied greatly on Hart’s work and her sample letters were guided by Hart.

Hart argued that Trevelyan believed the Irish Famine “was the judgement of God on an indolent and unselfreliant people (and) God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”. This has often been quoted as damning proof of Trevelyan’s uncaring attitude to Ireland. However Haines said it is a misreading of two letters, one to landlord Lord Monteagle, the other to Father Mathew. Haines said Trevelyan’s hostility in letters at this time was not against the Irish poor but against the landlords who were trying to get government expenditure diverted to improve their own estates. Trevelyan’s more common, though less well quoted, directive was to ensure that “the People cannot under any circumstances be allowed to starve.”

Haines accepts that the writing of history is always revisionist and quoting O’Gráda, says shattering dangerous myths is the historian’s social responsibility. John Mitchel’s The Last Conquest of Ireland Perhaps (1861) first brought the view that while the potato caused the blight, the English caused the Famine. A revisionist school led by Robert Dudley Edwards, Roy Foster and Mary Daly reacted against Mitchel’s thesis and their semi-benign view of English involvement became orthodoxy by the 1960s. Influenced by Hart, Cecil Woodham Smith began the post-revisionist school, blaming the British government, and especially Trevelyan for wanting to clear Ireland of its surplus peasantry. Her book drew many admirers with some comparing the Famine to Nazi genocide. British historian A.J.P. Taylor concluded “all Ireland was a Belsen”.

Hart’s paraphrasing has been repeated many times, spreading “proof” that Trevelyan hated the Irish Catholic poor. Yet he was a great friend of Father Mathew and he despised sectarianism, chastening officials who demonstrated anti-Irish or ultra-Protestant tendencies. Haines said that while Hart was not responsible for the way her work was interpreted, it has sustained the caricature of Trevelyan that still largely prevails.

One of the worst examples was Robert Kee’s influential television series Ireland: a history (1980) which presented a grim and ancient Trevelyan (who was only 38 at the time) as a monstrous detail-obsessed dictator of relief. Kee admitted in the accompanying book that he took liberties but for TV purposes “there were more important considerations than being wholly fair to Trevelyan”. Simon Schama repeated the charges against Trevelyan in A history of Britain (2002), not even mentioning the role of politicians in the Famine. Trevelyan’s reputation shattered further with the popularisation of the ballad The Fields of Athenry. Now sung at many sporting events in Ireland and elsewhere, it tells the story of a young woman lamenting the departure of her convict lover to Botany Bay. Its first verse goes:

By a lonely prison wall
I heard a young girl calling
Michael, they have taken you away
For you stole Trevelyan’s corn
So the young might see the morn
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay

Often believed to be a traditional Famine era song, Athenry was written in 1979 by Pete St John and was recorded by Paddy Reilly in 1982. The phrase “Trevelyan’s corn” does not appear in folkloric sources, unlike “Peel’s Brimstone”. Few folk balladeers would have even heard of Trevelyan. Famine interviews collected by the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1930s put the blame on rapacious landlords, not London leaders like Peel, Russell or Trevelyan, whom Cormac O’ Gráda says “were remote and unfamiliar to the underclasses”.

Trevelyan was a contradiction; imperious and self-possessed, but also high-minded, generous and tolerant. He was wedded to 18th century Enlightenment values including the inviolability of private property and free trade but was hardened by the Famine. By 1848 he no longer insisted that “none be allowed to starve”. He believed the only way forward was to institute social welfare and economic advancement to stop it from happening again. Trevelyan was not the tyrant who brought death and suffering to Ireland on an unimaginable scale. Haines said the blight caused the Famine, not the English. It infected not just the tubers but “the fissured subsoil of a vulnerable economy poised to collapse under the weight of an unprecedented natural disaster”. Britain’s responsibility for that economy being so vulnerable is a moot point, but the subject of a different book.

The Politics of Repeal

British and Irish MPs sat in the Houses of Parliament in London during the 1840s. Photo: Author’s collection.

Irish historian Kevin Nowlan wrote his landmark work The Politics of Repeal to examine how the Irish Famine influenced politics in Ireland and Britain. He soon realised that most factors pre-dated the Famine and found that 1841 was a better starting point. This was the year Daniel O’Connell began agitating to repeal the Act of Union, and Robert Peel became prime minister for the second time. O’Connell put Irish Repeal at the centre of British politics and it became Peel’s greatest headache as premier.

The Act of Union dates to 1801 when prime minister William Pitt dissolved the Protestant-only Dublin parliament. Following the 1798 rebellion, Pitt wanted to head off French revolutionary ideas in Ireland and believed political integration and free trade would encourage English capitalists to invest in Irish cheap labour. Pitt promised Catholic Emancipation within the United Kingdom, safeguarded by an overall Protestant majority. However George III’s objections denied Emancipation until Daniel O’Connell won it in 1829. The “Liberator” O’Connell then supported a Whig government in parliament and won modest reforms, including national schools, commutation of tithes, fairer municipal government and Catholic appointments to public office. The Whigs were defeated in the 1841 election and though new prime minister Peel accepted the need for reform in Ireland, O’Connell could not consider an alliance with him. They had a long and acrimonious relationship, almost fighting a duel in 1815 when Peel was Irish Chief Secretary. Peel viewed O’Connell as a violent demagogue while O’Connell derided him as “Orange Peel” reliant on Irish Tories. O’Connell would now concentrate on Repeal of the Union.

The Catholic Church initially showed little enthusiasm for O’Connell’s new Repeal Association. The liberal-minded O’Connell tried to win non-Catholic support and important Repealers including Thomas Davis, William Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel were Protestant. Some Northern Protestant reformers like Sharman Crawford wanted a more federal model, but most Irish Protestants preferred the Union. With the electoral system allowing only the wealthiest to vote, Irish Tories trounced Repealers in the 1841 election.

Initially Peel left management of Irish affairs to the parallel unelected administration in Dublin Castle. The Castle’s top officials were Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary, both Protestants, with the distinction between their roles ill-defined. Peel claimed his government would show no religious favour but Dublin Castle filled key roles with Protestant appointees. Irish issues filtered to the top of Peel’s agenda over the question of funding Catholic education, especially Maynooth College, the Catholic seminary founded in 1795. The college survived with inadequate state funding and the Catholic hierarchy petitioned Peel to increase the grant. Peel saw merit in the proposals but Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary were divided on the issue, so the prime minister ignored the requests. This was dangerous as O’Connell’s Repeal movement was gaining momentum.

Repeal was an elastic concept. O’Connell wanted a Catholic-influenced Irish parliament but was vague about whether a Dublin parliament would be answerable to London. Nowlan says O’Connell’s genius was not precise definitions but his emphatic, simple propositions as symbols of Irish claims. This gave O’Connell wiggle room to negotiate but it meant his views often did not match the expectations of some supporters, especially the group that became known as Young Ireland. That this was an intractable problem, was shown in Young Ireland’s own later split between moderates like Charles Gavan Duffy and William Smith O’Brien and radicals like John Mitchel. Duffy’s and Thomas Davis’s influential Nation newspaper, founded in 1842, had considerable literary quality and was a rallying point for Young Ireland demands for a new nation of Ireland. Young Ireland tried to win over landlords and middle-class Protestants but were no more successful than O’Connell. Young Ireland would remain wedded to British constitutional links, even as it edged towards revolution.

Initially, O’Connell emphasised that only Repeal of the Act of Union would ensure Irish social and economic progress. He criticised the unpopular Irish Poor Law with its rigid workhouse test and wanted security of tenure for small farmers, though he postponed precise fixes to his future Irish parliament. He hosted large popular meetings across the south, which became the “monster meetings” of 1843. In February 1843 he led a three-day Dublin Corporation debate on Repeal and promised to settle for a “dependent parliament”, a moderate position which attracted widescale interest in Britain, and the important support of the Irish middle class including Catholic bishops. O’Connell pledged to gain three million members in three months. The Nation eagerly backed the campaign. O’Connell’s Repeal rent jumped substantially that year as the monster meetings spread belief that “Repeal was coming”. The scale, orderliness, and respectability of his meetings alarmed Dublin Castle which wanted new legislation to repress it. They were supported by the still formidable 80-year-old Duke of Wellington who managed government business in the House of Lords.

Home Secretary James Graham advised Peel to be cautious about changing the law as the British Anti-Corn Law League was organised on the same lines as the Repeal Association. But Peel could not ignore O’Connell and in May 1843 he warned parliament he would “prefer civil war to the dismemberment of the Empire”. O’Connell responded that he was obeying the law and he “set their blustering at defiance”. Dublin Castle dismissed magistrates sympathetic to O’Connell, but that just made the cause more popular.

O’Connell was at the height of his powers, but could not get London to budge. He began to argue for lesser reforms, unwilling to face Peel’s “civil war”. When the Repeal Association announced a final monster meeting at Clontarf, the notice mentioned “Repeal cavalry” and other military terms. O’Connell denounced the notice, but the damage was done and Dublin Castle banned the meeting. The government arrested O’Connell and others on charges of seditious conspiracy. The so-called “Traversers” were charged, convicted and jailed for several months, before the House of Lords overturned the verdict.

Peel had emerged triumphant from 1843 and began to wean Catholic support away from O’Connell. He ordered a commission under Lord Devon to examine Irish land issues, and he supported Catholic causes. Irish charities were run exclusively by Protestants but Peel’s Charitable Donations and Bequests Bill created a new ecumenical board including Catholic bishops. O’Connell opposed the bill as a state bid to control the Church but Peel’s bill passed with support from the moderate archbishops of Dublin and Armagh.

While his organisation was buoyed by his release from prison, O’Connell seemed chastened and backed away from major Irish reform. He courted Federalists like Crawford which alarmed Nation founders Charles Gavan Duffy and, especially, Thomas Davis who wanted “unbounded nationality”. Even when O’Connell abandoned federalism, the Protestant Davis began to find fault with O’Connell over religious matters.

In April 1845 Peel introduced a Maynooth Bill to raise the annual grant. Ultra Tories condemned it and Peel needed Whig support to pass the bill. While it was well received in Ireland, it was followed by the more problematic Academic Institutions (Ireland) bill. The Colleges Bill, as it became known, proposed to establish ecumenical university colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway to complement the Protestant Trinity College in Dublin. Though it was based on the pioneering work of Waterford Catholic MP Thomas Wyse, Peel did not confer with clergy on the bill and both Protestant and Catholic bishops objected to its proposed secular nature. One Protestant Tory MP called them “godless colleges”, a refrain O’Connell soon made his own. As with the Bequests Bill, the Catholic hierarchy was divided. Moderates requested safeguards such as Catholic college appointees, paid chaplains, and penalties for proselyting, which the British government supported. This compromise was unacceptable to firebrand Catholic Archbishop of Tuam John MacHale who called it an “infidel, slavish and demoralising scheme.” The Repeal movement split over the bill. O’Connell decried the lack of a chair in Catholic theology at the colleges while his son John ramped up animosity by criticising Young Ireland supporters of the bill, especially Davis who worried that a Catholic ascendency would replace the Protestant one. As tensions over the bill bubbled, the Devon Commission released its report into Irish land problems. It found that superior prosperity in the north was due to the “Ulster custom” of tenant rights but its response offered nothing new apart from compensation for improvements. Even this modest proposal failed to pass parliament.

In autumn 1845 the first reports appeared of a potato blight in Ireland. Peel became convinced the protectionist British Corn Laws needed repeal, unlike the Act of the Union. His cabinet split on the matter and Peel resigned on December 5. Whig leader Lord John Russell was unable to form government, forcing Peel to change the Corn Laws in an unstable new government with the goodwill of the Whigs but without the support of protectionists. With an early election likely, O’Connell argued that Ireland needed to see what could be “squeezed out” of the Whigs.

The Young Irelanders disagreed, believing they needed not just defy the Tories but stand aloof from the Whigs, who also opposed Repeal. Peel was concerned with a breakdown of law and order in Ireland, not just due to the growing food shortage but because the Orange Order was threatening clashes with Repealers. Peel progressed a drastic coercion bill in tandem with Corn Law reform saying relief measures would be useless if lawlessness prevailed in Ireland. Under the Protection of Life (Ireland) bill, police could be drafted into proclaimed areas, curfews imposed, and collective fines levied to compensate victims of outrage, with penalties of 15-years transportation. The Whigs favoured the bill, but Irish MPs were outraged and obstructed it in parliament. The delay robbed Peel of the urgency he claimed was needed. Once the Corn Laws were passed, Russell’s Whigs joined O’Connell and the Tory Protectionists to defeat the coercion bill on a second reading. Peel’s government resigned and the path opened up for a new alliance between Russell and O’Connell. The potato failure was almost ignored during these debates. Peel had secretly bought American corn and introduced relief measures but his belief was that Irish property should support Irish poverty, a view the Russell government also held. In Opposition, Peel backed government famine measures with little criticism.

As Russell prepared to take power in July 1846, Irish disagreements exploded in public. O’Connell wanted to be rid of political embarrassment to get the best deal from the Whigs and looked for ways to expel Young Ireland from the Repeal Association. He set an elaborate trap with a proposal to insist on the use of peaceful and constitutional methods in the Association’s constitution. While no one was yet proposing the use of force, Young Irelanders objected to the universality of the “peace resolutions”, believing a more militant policy might some day be required. Following a tempestuous meeting where Thomas Francis Meagher made his “Sword” speech, Young Irelanders walked out of the Association.

Most saw this as a victory for O’Connell. Catholic bishops approved, ensuring that Young Ireland would never gain the trust of the religious people of the countryside. But shortly afterwards the potato crop failed a second time. O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs was tarnished as Russell offered little beyond “promises and inadequate expedients”. Their Poor Unemployment Act provided some work but offered little to help people get affordable food. Young Ireland leader William Smith O’Brien took a step backwards after the split but Meagher and Richard O’Gorman wanted to take a more active part in Irish affairs. They took part in a Dublin protest meeting on December 2 with a promise to get organised in 1847.

O’Connell was stung into action. He met Young Irelanders on December 15 but the “peace resolutions” remained a stumbling block. In January Young Irelanders created the Irish Confederation as a new political movement, though O’Brien remained a reluctant leader. The Confederation urged landlords to embrace Repeal and formed Famine committees. The poor, meanwhile struggled through a harsh winter, with three quarters of a million people surviving on inadequate relief works. Treasury secretary Charles Trevelyan implemented government policy with great industry and sense of duty but also with a narrow, doctrinaire approach to state intervention. Russell and Trevelyan believed the Irish gentry were not doing enough. But those same landlords had influence in Whig circles including cabinet members Palmerston and Lansdowne and they ensured that little meaningful change would disturb established interests. Russell proposed to change the law to place the burden of supporting the poor on the Poor Law Unions. Russell’s Soup Kitchen’s Act saved lives in winter but there was no grand scheme to get people out of poverty. He refused to support Protectionist leader George Bentinck’s proposal to fund major railway development in Ireland.

The Repeal Association offered a feeble response, as its great leader was dying. While O’Connell went on pilgrimage to Rome, his son John met with Confederation leaders in May to discuss reunion. He admitted the Whig alliance had failed and wanted Young Ireland to return to the fold but he would not agree to dissolving both organisations and creating a new body. He also refused to stamp out “placehunting” as that would simply give Orange Protestants a monopoly of Irish public offices. His father died in Genoa on May 15 leaving Ireland without a capable leader. O’Connell’s death briefly spurred the Repeal Association in the general election that followed and the disloyal Young Irelanders failed to win any seats except O’Brien in Limerick and his Tasmanian friend Chisholm Anstey in Youghal. Yet it was not clear what the Repeal Association stood for under the younger O’Connell.

Meaningful action on the land question after the Devon Commission was foiled by property interests. The situation was worsened in 1847 by the Quarter Acre clause in the new Poor Law Bill which forced landholders with more than a quarter acre to quit their land to gain relief. Tenant leagues sprang up across Ireland and a new and original thinker’s work appeared in the Nation. James Fintan Lalor’s thesis was that Repeal was irrelevant and land tenure was a “mightier question”. Lalor accepted private land ownership but believed the “ultimate proprietor” was not the Crown but the people of Ireland. He wanted landlords to give tenant security and pledge allegiance to Ireland.

Moderate Young Irelanders including Duffy and the landlord O’Brien were sceptical but a radical wing led by John Mitchel enthusiastically backed Lalor. Mitchel’s proposals to extend land rights were defeated, leaving the Confederation without a cohesive land policy. Devin Reilly attacked the government for allowing export food to leave Ireland during the Famine, leaving a nation “coolly, gradually murdered”. Mitchel and Reilly resigned from the Confederate committee and founded the radical newspaper the United Irishman.

Ireland descended further into the mire. Relief schemes lapsed and many poor law unions became bankrupt, a situation worsened by a London financial crisis due to over-extended banks. Rural Irish people expressed their anger by refusing to pay rent. Troops were called out to support rent collectors, as landlords began largescale eviction of smallholders. By November 1847 agrarian outrages were a serious problem and Irish Lord Lieutenant Clarendon demanded a new coercion bill. The Crime and Outrages (Ireland) Bill enabled Clarendon to proclaim disturbed districts and draft in additional police but he believed it did not go far enough.

Confederate leaders Duffy and O’Brien had not opposed the bill, causing disquiet among younger supporters such as Meagher and O’Gorman. Having left the fold, Mitchel was less circumspect. Following Lalor, Mitchel was convinced Ireland’s political and social structure needed radical change. In February 1848 his United Irishman mocked the Lord Lieutenant as “Butcher Clarendon”.

The relationship between the Whig government and the Repeal Association was also fracturing. John O’Connell contacted Confederate moderates to seek reconciliation. Again reunion negotiations stalled over placehunting and the format of a combined organisation. When O’Connell’s brother Daniel resigned as Waterford MP to accept a British consular position, Meagher contested the February by-election against a Repeal candidate, hoping the contest would determine whether O’Connellites or Confederates would prevail in Ireland. But Meagher’s hometown support was mainly among those without the franchise and a Whig-aligned third candidate defeated both Repeal factions.

The disappointment both sides of the Repeal movement felt was replaced by exciting news of the overthrow of the French monarchy that same month. The near bloodless and classless revolution impressed Irish moderates and radicals alike. Many believed that a fearful Britain would capitulate to a united Irish call for Repeal supported by republicans in the new French government like Interior Minister Ledru-Rollin. Even the conservative O’Brien called for the formation of an Irish guard while Meagher demanded admission to the court of St James as Irish ambassadors. Both were charged with sedition for these statements. Once released on bail they joined a Confederate Irish mission to Paris.

New foreign minister Lamartine’s “Manifesto to Europe” seemed to encourage democratic movements across the continent, but the British embassy leaned on him not to support revolution in Ireland. Lamartine overruled Ledru-Rollin ensuring cordial Anglo-French relations was the top priority. The Irish mission got only vague words of sympathy. As Mitchel said, “Lamartine has let us know distinctly we must rely on ourselves.”

As Young Ireland statements became warlike, Clarendon urged more coercive action though the government turned down his request to suspend habeas corpus. In April the government did pass the Crown and Government Protection Bill to get around antiquated and harsh Treason laws. The law introduced a new statutory offence of treason-felony by which capital offences, including speeches, could be dealt by transportation.

In May, O’Brien, Meagher and Mitchel faced court on the more minor charge of sedition. O’Brien and Meagher were acquitted after juries could not agree on a verdict. But Clarendon dropped the sedition charge against Mitchel and tried him under the new treason-felony legislation. The sheriff packed the jury with unsympathetic Protestants and the defence had no argument against the open defiance Mitchel had shown in his newspaper. He was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. The verdict brought Repealers closer together with even John O’Connell calling Mitchel an Irish martyr. By early June the two sides agreed to dissolve the Repeal Association and Irish Confederation to form the new shortlived Irish League.

Yet Young Irelanders continued to secretly plan for an uprising. Dublin Castle infiltrated their meetings and Clarendon told London of a possible revolution around autumn harvest time. After Duffy and other newspaper editors were arrested on treason-felony, Meagher held a meeting on Slievenamon mountain urging followers to arm themselves. In mid-July Clarendon finally convinced Russell’s government to suspend habeas corpus. Young Ireland leaders dispersed, and with no clear plan of action, a ragtag army under O’Brien was defeated by armed police at Ballingarry. Though O’Gorman also led skirmishes in Limerick and John O’Mahony raided barracks in Tipperary and Waterford, the revolution was over.

O’Brien, Meagher and others were charged with high treason, which proved an embarrassment for the government when they were found guilty. The punishment of being “hung, drawn and quartered” could never be carried out but the prisoners refused to accept the lesser sentence of transportation. In July 1849, the government passed the Transportation for Treason (Ireland) Bill to force them to accept the sentence. Fintan Lalor led one final assault on a Waterford barracks in September. Though it too was a failure, many of those involved would become leaders of the Fenian movement in the next decade.

Repeal was dead but so were millions of Irish people. The Famine exhausted Ireland, with food shortages accompanied by cholera. Landlords, many in deep debt, responded with large-scale evictions. Though Russell wanted to introduce measures to relieve tenants, it was again defeated by cabinet vested interests. In a rare enlightened measure in 1850, the government extended the Irish electoral franchise which quadrupled the number of voters. A united group of 48 Irish members led by Duffy was elected to parliament in 1852, devoted to fixing the land question. It proved no more disciplined than the Repeal Party and quickly broke up. Nowlan believes Fenianism was the most striking outcome of the British government failures of the 1840s but there was also the tentative beginnings of reform that would convince later prime minister William Gladstone to champion Irish land rights and home rule.

Selective memory: The Voice and Anzac Day

The 2019 Anzac Day service in Cloncurry. Photo: Author’s collection

During my time as a journalist across Queensland (2009-22), I attended dozens of Anzac Day services, on and before the day. Whether they were held at cenotaphs, schools, aged homes, churches or cemeteries, they all commemorated Australia’s many war contributions and all followed a similar format: military-style marching, speeches, hymns, prayers, anthems, the ode, a minute of silence, reveille, and the laying of wreaths. I respected and enjoyed the solemnity of these occasions and I’m proud of the service my eldest daughter gives as a member of the Australian Defence Force. But the part of Anzac Day I enjoyed most was the camaraderie after the event, the chatting and catching up with old and new friends. As a journalist I took great delight in finding out news that was often unrelated to the day itself. I’m not alone in enjoying the aftermath of Anzac ceremonies, as packed pubs on the day prove.

In recent years, there has often been a pleasing inclusion of a Welcome to Country at Anzac Day ceremonies. Welcome to Country is performed by a local Indigenous person to acknowledge and give consent to events taking place on their traditional lands and has become a staple of many public gatherings. Like Anzac Day itself, Welcome to Country serves as a polite but important reminder of how our past continues to influence the present, a “lest we forget” that wars were things that did not just happen overseas.

But that development is now in peril. Last year Australia held a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first people of Australia and to create a new body subject to parliamentary laws called the ATSI Voice to make representations to parliament on related matters. At the time I outlined my reasons why I was voting “yes”. However there was politicial division and the referendum failed with a 60 percent “no” vote. Only the ACT was in favour and my state of Queensland recorded the highest no vote of 68%. I was disappointed, but it was the will of the people. As someone who has long supported some form of treaty between black and white Australia, I believe we could still achieve Indigenous justice in other ways.

What I failed to foresee was a sullen triumphalism from many in the “no” camp, and demands for more action. Not content with winning the referendum, many now want to shut down any form of Indigenous identity, including the Aboriginal flag, Welcome to Country and smoking ceremonies. I was reminded of this on the first Anzac Day since the referendum. Someone in my social network shared a popular blog post called Welcome to Country violates principles of commemoration by a man named Charlie Lynn. I’d never heard of the 79-year-old Lynn but he has an impressive CV as a Vietnam veteran and a Liberal Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Council between 1995 and 2015. He has received honours in Australia and PNG, chaired many community and business groups, founded the Kokoda Youth Leadership Challenge and was a talented ultra marathon runner.

His opinion on Anzac Day was therefore worth reading and more troubling because of it. Lynn begins uncontroversially by saying that for the previous 32 years he had attended the Anzac Day service at Bomana Cemetery. Situated outside Port Moresby, Bomana is where many Australians were buried from the New Guinea campaign of the Second World War. The cemetery, he said, reflected “principles of equality, uniformity and commemoration in perpetuity.” I imagine it is a beautiful, poignant and highly relevant place to conduct an Anzac Day service.

This year Lynn was in Australia and attended Anzac Day services in his home town of Camden, New South Wales. He said he was proud of its conduct, that was, however, “UNTIL . . . it was hijacked by an aboriginal activist who was not satisfied with the privilege she had been granted to give a brief ‘welcome to country’.” Lynn said the microphone was “captured” by a woman named Aunty Glenda, “who apparently works for Centrelink (and was apparently paid $300) for the occasion, then went into a black-armband rant reminding us that their fathers were ‘invaders’ who had ‘massacred aborigines’, and that we now living on stolen land which ‘always was and always will be’ aboriginal land‘.”

Lynn said “Glenda from Centrelink” was unaware of those who sacrificed their lives to “save her people from the fate suffered by the Chinese population when they were invaded by the Japanese in 1937.” Lynn also claimed she was unaware that thousands of Australians died in the Papuan campaign and many relatives were sitting in the audience “she was berating.” He said that if she had served in the military she “would have learned that the only colour that counts to servicemen and women is the colour of their uniform” and her “intervention” was an insult to her RSL hosts and a proud Camden community. Lynn said he walked out on the speaker. “I did not wait to hear the full extent of her disgraceful rant. I removed my medals from my jacket and adjourned to the Crown Hotel for a quiet beer to settle down.” It’s not clear whether or when he returned to the Anzac Day service.

Lynn now wants to RSL to ban all “‘Welcome to Country’ speeches, ceremonies, and similar tirades from all Anzac Day services as they represent a violation of the principles of commemorations.” He outlined those principles as uniformity, equality, and “commemoration in perpetuity”. Uniformity covered the design of war cemeteries and of Anzac Day ceremonies, roughly the format I mentioned earlier: “prayers for the fallen, hymns, guest speakers, laying of wreaths, Last Post, a Minutes Silence, and Reveille”. Equality meant “no precedence in acknowledging one race above all others.” Lynn did not define what commemoration in perpetuity meant but said that if “aboriginal activists are permitted to infiltrate Anzac services by establishing ‘Welcome to Country’ as a bridgehead to become a norm, our sacred day will surely suffer the fate of Australia Day in years to come.”

There’s a lot to unpack in Lynn’s passionate piece, which I’ll get to in a moment. But almost crowding it out, was the pile-on response I saw on Facebook. A handful of commenters disagreed but they were drowned out. Mostly, there was a torrent of anti-Indigenous sentiment, none of it very new. “Yes they whinge and moan, but are happy to take the coin,” said one. “Scrap this welcome to country crap,” said another. “Im totally over these minority Indigenous who claim to represent the Indigenous Aussies from all over this country who used to regularly massacre each other while stealing the women!” said a third. “They don’t respect our heritage so why should we care about theirs,” said a fourth. “Wake up to fuking reality, every country on the planet has been invaded and colonised in some way. Get over it,” a fifth said.

On it went, a litany of complaints that could have been lifted from Pauline Hanson’s 1996 playbook with a very 21st century addition about “wokery”, the current shibboleth du jour for those detesting any measures towards inclusion. One revealing comment was “This Bullshit was supposed to stop with the NO vote…Aunty Marcia said,” accompanied by a picture of pro-Voice Indigenous academic Marcia Langton with text underneath “vote no and you won’t get a welcome to country again”. What Langton meant was if the Voice failed, non-Indigenous Australians would feel too ashamed to ask traditional owners to do a Welcome to Country. However, opponents treated it as a personal promise and demanded she never conduct another welcome to country again.

I am not blaming Charlie Lynn for the racist nature of these comments. Nevertheless there are several problems with his blog post and I will pay him the respect of addressing them. Firstly the event was not “hijacked” by an Aboriginal activist. As Lynn said, Camden RSL invited Aunty Glenda to speak and possibly paid her for the privilege (I can’t confirm this). It’s also possible her speech was not brief. I have attended many Anzac Day ceremonies where speakers gave long, boring and waffling speeches. Attendees might yawn, look at their watches, and wonder when will this end, but I’ve never seen anyone walk out. Imagine Lynn’s anger if an Aboriginal person had walked out of an Anzac Day service – to the pub, no less – if they were bored or confronted by a white speaker’s remarks. Lynn also queried Glenda’s title of respect, Aunty, by enclosing it in quotes and allowed readers to assume she was a dole-bludger with his repeated “Glenda from Centrelink” association.

As for the Japanese massacres of Chinese people in the Nanking campaign, these did happen. But there is no evidence to suggest that the Japanese would have treated Indigenous people worse than non-Indigenous had they invaded Australia. I don’t know if Aunty Glenda was aware of Nanking, but she would likely aware that more than 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples served Australia in the First World War, more than 4000 in the Second World War, and 300 more served alongside Lynn in the Vietnam War. They were not passive observers dependent on white saviours nor are they now “infiltrators” at Anzac Day services. Indigenous Australians helped protect their country from the fate of Nanking.

Lynn is correct to say Indigenous people in the military would have learned “that the only colour that counts to servicemen and women is the colour of their uniform.” However he neglects to note that they would have been reminded of other things that count as soon as they returned to mufti. Lynn, meanwhile, fails his own three principles of commemorations tests. Far from uniformity, Anzac Day is the classic “invented tradition” which has undergone constant change. In early years it was a purely religious ceremony. No cinemas, racecourse, hotels or sporting venues could open on the day so there was no sulking in the pub if you didn’t like what you heard. As for equality, it did not exist for black people under the law until long past the war that Lynn invokes. The government actively enforced the White Australia Policy in the 1940s. Aboriginal people remained non-citizens, subject to drastic restrictions on their lives and movements, hidden away in poverty-stricken reserves, missions and shantytowns, suffering ill health, and treated with lack of respect and racist condescension whenever they mixed with the white population, with the exception of the sports field. In places near the warfront like Burketown, Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homelands without consent. Lynn’s undefined third principle “commemoration in perpetuity” is less preservation of a “sacred day” than an attempt to prevent the future from learning from the past as his lament about “the fate” of Australia Day (another contested invented tradition) shows.

Yet the past is where the hurt lies, something Lynn acknowledges when he described Aunty Glenda’s welcome as a “black armband rant”. The custom of wearing black armbands to denote mourning, grief, and loss comes from the Egyptian era and was passed down through the Romans. Oddly, while this seems an obvious fit for a solemn occasion like Anzac Day, I can’t remember ever seeing them worn on that day. Aboriginal people wore them on the 150th anniversary of colonisation in 1938 and presented a petition to King George VI to “mourn the death of the many thousands of Aborigines who were brutally murdered (and) mourn the loss of our land and the rape of our women by the white invaders.” But its Australian meaning was forever changed 30 years ago, just as Bill Stanner, Lyndell Ryan, Noel Loos, Henry Reynolds and other Australian historians joined a worldwide movement to document the dispossession, exclusion and marginalisation of colonised peoples. Not everyone was happy with this revisionism. Professor Geoffrey Blainey wrote that his generation grew up on the “Three Cheers” view of history which saw Australia largely as a success. He said in 1988 Australia moved “from a position that had been too favourable to an opposite extreme that is decidedly jaundiced’ and ‘gloomy’.” Blainey’s interpretation was a big influence on the Howard government’s approach from 1996 and the culture and history wars that followed.

It is fitting and proper that history should be contested. It is, after all, a matter of perspectives and there is no single right answer. Anzac Day’s “Lest we forget” invites us to remember all perspectives, including that of Aunty Glenda, rant or not. Her full name is Glenda Chalker, a Camden-born Dharawal woman of the Cubbitch Barta Clan. In her speech she probably spoke about the Appin massacre of April 1816 where at least 14 Aboriginal men, women, and children were murdered by British soldiers and the Camden Park area where her ancestors were forcibly removed to. Chalker wants to see a plaque at the site, which she helped preserve from developers. However she acknowledged to the ABC in 2022 that not everyone was “happy with what we have achieved”. Presumably these are the same people that would now demand Chalker and her mob “wake up to fuking reality”. The tragedy of the 2023 Voice Referendum is the stridency of those now who feel emboldened to roll back even those small achievements. Never mind Black Armband, Three Cheers is becoming Three Jeers. I hope the RSL matches the referendum result and treats Lynn’s suggestions with a polite but emphatic “no”.

Joseph Denieffe: Kilkenny’s other Fenian founder

Two Kilkenny Fenians: Joseph Denieffe (left) and James Stephens.

The city of Kilkenny is the birthplace of two of the men most responsible for the birth of the Irish-American Fenian movement, though they did not know each other there. Ireland in the early 1850s was a grim place, exhausted by years of famine, politically inept, and bereft of its 1848 revolutionary leaders who scattered to America, Australia and France. These included James Stephens who escaped to Paris after the Ballingarry fiasco. Fellow Kilkenny man Joseph Denieffe would have heard of Stephens’ exploits. At 15 he was too young to fight in 1848, but three years later he left economically-depressed Ireland to try his luck in New York.

Denieffe published his account of the first 12 years of the Irish Fenians half a century later. Recollections of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood appeared serially in the New York monthly The Gael in 1904 and came out in book form in 1906. Seán Ó Lúing, who wrote the introduction to the 1968 edition, said the best accounts of the Fenians came from America. The memoirs of Denieffe, Devoy, O’Donovan Rossa and Luby all pointed to the complementary nature of Irish and American Fenianism and both organisations were called Fenians. However, when Denieffe was arrested he could swear to British authorities without lying that he was not a Fenian. In Ireland they were officially the IRB, which stood interchangeably for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or as Deneiffe preferred to call it, the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood.

Denieffe begins his story in New York when he made contact with Michael Doheny and John O’Mahony. Cashel solicitor Doheny was a famous Young Irelander who escaped to Paris in 1848 with James Stephens, before ending up in New York. O’Mahony fought his own failed rebellion in late 1848 in county Waterford and Tipperary before also escaping, following Stephens’s path to Paris and then Doheny’s to New York.

In 1855 O’Mahony and Doheny organised the Emmet Monument Association in New York, drilling Irishmen once a week. It was named for 1803 patriot Robert Emmet, whose final speech from the dock instructed no-one to write his epitaph until Ireland “takes her place among the nations of the earth”. During the height of the Crimean War, the EMA hoped that Russia might aid Ireland gain its independence. Denieffe was working as a tailor’s cutter in New York and joined the EMA as soon as he heard about it. However Denieffe got a letter in June 1855 saying his father was near death. Before leaving for home, he asked Doheny who he should report to in Ireland. To Denieffe’s surprise, Doheny replied: “We have no one there as yet. So we give you carte blanche to do what you can.” Doheny and O’Mahony intimated to Denieffe that 30,000 armed Irish-Americans would lead an Irish rebellion in September that year.

Denieffe returned to Kilkenny where he found his father was recovering. He mentioned the EMA to local Nationalist John Haltigan, foreman printer at the Kilkenny Journal. Haltigan was enthusiastic and he and Denieffe began recruiting in Kilkenny and Callan. Haltigan also gave him a letter of introduction him to Dubliner Peter Langan who ran a lumber yard in Lombard St. Langan’s yard was the de facto headquarters for disaffected Dublin nationalists, and when Denieffe went there, he addressed a gathering of nationalists including 1848 men Philip Grey (who died shortly afterwards) and Thomas Clarke Luby. All present promised to cooperate with the American mission. Denieffe returned to Kilkenny where he waited in vain for the promised September revolution. The EMA disintegrated when Russia lost the Crimean War.

The disappointed Denieffe found work as a tailor’s cutter in Belfast where he had cordial relations with his “Orange brothers”. But by 1857 Denieffe had enough of Ireland. He was preparing to head back to America when he got a letter from Haltigan in Kilkenny. Haltigan said that James Stephens had returned home from Paris, and wanted to meet Denieffe in Dublin. At Langan’s, Denieffe found that Stephens was “fully informed” of affairs in Ireland and America. He convinced Denieffe not to leave Ireland. Denieffe returned to Belfast but kept in touch with Stephens. At Christmas 1857 Stephens asked him to come to Dublin as he had a proposition. Meeting again at Langan’s, Stephens read out a letter he had received from Doheny and O’Mahony in New York. They asked Stephens if Ireland could be organised for revolution, would he undertake to do it, and if so, how much money would he require. Stephens then read out his response, saying Ireland was ripe for revolution and agreeing to organise it. The cost: one hundred pounds a month for three months. This letter was too dangerous to send by mail, so Denieffe had to take it to New York.

Denieffe immediately left for Liverpool and took a steamer to Halifax, Nova Scotia and another to Boston before arriving in New York by train. He sought out Doheny who eagerly read out Stephens’ response. That evening Denieffe also met O’Mahony and the rest of their committee. While he awaited their response to Stephens, he stayed at the home of Sligo-born Michael Corcoran, a custom house official and captain in the Irish-American 69th Regiment of the New York National Guard, which would play a prominent role in the civil war. Irish American newspapers were opposed to revolution in Ireland and fundraising was slow. It took two months to raise $400 which was worth just £80, well short of what Stephens asked for. Denieffe proposed to take that back with the balance to be sent later.

Denieffe went to Dublin and on St Patrick’s Day 1858 the IRB was born at Langan’s yard. Stephens was the commander (Denieffe called him “Captain”) while second-in-charge Luby, Langan and Denieffe also took oaths to “solemnly swear allegiance to the Irish Republic, now virtually established.” They went on a recruiting mission across Ireland, their most notable success being to convert O’Donovan Rossa’s “Phoenix National and Literary Society” in west Cork. But no money came from America. Stephens sent Denieffe across the Atlantic again and he raised just £40. Denieffe told Stephens not to rely on America. “They have been humbugged so often they have lost confidence,” he said.

They continued Irish recruitment, mainly in the south. Stephens and Denieffe had success in Waterford with wheelwright John Dillon becoming the city’s Fenian “head centre” helped by influential legal clerk Denis Cashman, who later teamed up with John Boyle O’Reilly in Australia and Boston. Stephens decided to visit America for himself. He arrived in New York in October 1858 hoping to tap into the New York Irish Directory’s large fund of cash set up to support the 1848 rising. He failed to convince leading Directory members Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel but raised £600 and successfully started up an American subsidiary organisation under O’Mahony. O’Mahony named it the Fenians for his love of old Irish legends including Na Fianna. Stephens returned to Paris in 1859 and Denieffe joined him there for four months, befriending Tipperary 1848 veteran John O’Leary, who gave him a tour of Quai d’Orsay bookshops. Running out of money, Denieffe returned to Ireland, where he said, “work progressed slowly”. In America there were rumours of a Fenian split.

In 1860 John O’Mahony came to Ireland and Denieffe escorted him to Langan’s for a meeting with Stephens. Denieffe and Langan were the only witnesses as Stephens tore into O’Mahony. Why was the American organisation splitting up, he asked, and why were they not sending sufficient funds to Ireland? Denieffe said O’Mahony failed to give satisfactory answers. Stephens reproached him for his shortcomings, feebleness, and insincerity. “I dragged you out of obscurity and put you in a position you never dreamed of,” he said. O’Mahony was humiliated and before returning to New York he asked for Denieffe’s support. “No, the man who serves Ireland best will be the one I stay by,” Denieffe said. For now, that meant Stephens.

In 1861, Young Irelander Terence Bellew MacManus died in San Francisco and Californian Fenians wanted to send his body to Ireland. Stephens had reservations, worried it might spark premature revolution. But MacManus was hailed across America, so Stephens formed an Irish reception committee. IRB members greeted the coffin in Cork. Denieffe said veteran Young Irelanders including John Martin (who shared transportation and Australian exile with MacManus) tried to take over in Dublin. MacManus’s sister sided with the IRB and Stephens’ men managed the triumphant procession to Glasnevin cemetery watched by thousands. Though Dublin’s Catholic Archbishop Paul Cullen denied use of his churches, and excommunicated the IRB as a secret society, Stephens was the most jubilant man in Ireland, according to Denieffe.

While this was a high point in Fenian support, revolution seemed as far away as ever. Denieffe said they needed fortitude and perseverance to navigate between the British government on one side, and hostile Irish political opponents on the other. Denieffe went into business, establishing a gentlemen’s tailoring firm in Dublin. He mourned the New York death of Doheny in 1862 and the Dublin death of Peter Langan in 1863. With little money coming from America due to the civil war, the Fenians were destitute. Stephens wasn’t doing much either, causing dissention in the ranks. The “Captain” was enthused by a proposal to start a Fenian newspaper and the Irish People was launched in November 1863. John O’Leary became editor, Rossa was business manager, Haltigan was the printer and Charles Kickham, Luby, and others wrote articles. The paper had a good circulation but Rossa was a poor business manager and it never made a profit. They were also now out in the open and detectives hovered near the office.

One man in Ireland was trying to bring revolution closer. Athy-based John Devoy was a former French Foreign Legionnaire who conducted large-scale Fenian recruitment among the military, including John Boyle O’Reilly. One regiment wanted to start a revolt but Stephens told them to cool their heels. Denieffe heard rumours that frustrated Fenian leaders wanted to remove him. The pressure on O’Mahony also intensified as the civil war wound down, with some American Fenians wanting to divert attention to a Canadian invasion. In September 1865 Irish American editor P.J. Meehan arrived in Dublin to see Stephens. Meehan told Denieffe he had mislaid papers and money he had brought from America. They both went to Westland Row station and Kingstown Harbour to hunt for the papers. However a messenger boy found them at Kingstown and they ended up with police. Within days Dublin Castle raided the Irish People office, destroyed the printing equipment, and arrested staff. Denieffe was arrested at home as was Stephens. Both were held at Richmond Bridewell. After three weeks, Denieffe obtained bail, swearing he was not now or ever a Fenian (saved from lying by O’Mahony’s naming whim of the American faction).

Denieffe joined Devoy’s plot to help Stephens escape with the help of a friendly jailer and false keys. Two days later Stephens held a secret meeting of all Dublin head centres including Denieffe. Stephens asked all present: “Shall we strike now or wait?” Denieffe said he would support American delegates who wanted immediate action. Everyone else present agreed except one man, Denis Cromien, who voted for delay. Denieffe said Stephens was relieved opinion was not unanimous and endorsed Cromien’s proposal to wait. “Stephens plainly did not want to fight,” Denieffe said, “I made up my mind that he did not want to proceed any further.” Denieffe said Stephens’ usefulness ended that night. It was a savage conclusion, though Stephens’ biographer Desmond Ryan doubts the meeting took place at all, given the massive manhunt the British had launched after the escape. In any case, Stephens escaped to Paris and preparation for an Irish revolution went on without him.

Denieffe appeared in court in November but the case against him collapsed and he walked free. The arrests continued in 1866 as Devoy’s military ring was infiltrated, and the two competing American wings both led disastrous incursions into Canada. Yet Denieffe said “the feeling of resistance” remained strong in Ireland. Colonel Thomas Kelly returned from America with civil war veterans to lead the IRB, giving the movement new vigour. A revolution was set for February 1867 to coincide with an attack on Chester Castle to gain war materiel. The Chester attack was foiled by an informer and the Irish rebellion was delayed. On March 5, 800 IRB men attacked Tallaght in Co. Dublin, while Dungarvan man J.F.X. O’Brien led another contingent in Cork. The rebellion quickly failed and Denieffe watched disconsolately as the captured Tallaght rebels were paraded through Dublin.

With police arresting all Fenians and informers set to testify against him, Denieffe hurriedly left for Liverpool and and boarded a ship for Canada. Police came aboard as the ship pulled into Moville to collect the Irish mails. Hearing they were searching for political suspects, Denieffe hid below deck. He was not located and arrived safely in Quebec before heading to New York. Sailing down the Hudson, Denieffe considered the state of the Fenian revolution. It had failed, he believed, because Stephens and O’Mahony never worked in harmony. Though both were unfit for the task, it was mainly O’Mahony’s fault for being surrounded by “an imbecile pack” who impeded the movement. Nevertheless Denieffe believed Ireland had stood up for her rights for the first time since the Famine. “It was no longer a corpse on the dissecting table,” he said.

Denieffe settled in Springfield, Ohio and moved to Chicago in 1887. He was active in Devoy’s wing of Clan na Gael in both cities. He died of heart failure on April 20, 1910, aged 77. He remained until the end, as his memoir said, “a reliable, faithful friend and staunch lover” of the country of his birth. The Irish Republican Brotherhood survived him, and under leaders such as Michael Collins, played a significant role in the Irish War of Independence a decade later.

Killing Remarks: the British press and the Irish Famine

“Ejectment of Irish Tenantry” Illustrated London News December 16, 1848.

When the potato crop failed across Europe in 1845, nowhere was more vulnerable than Ireland where two million people depending on the crop for survival. The situation was compounded by a second failure in 1846 and a third in 1848. It led to demographic collapse. By 1852 one million Irish people were dead while another million had emigrated, mainly to Britain and America. This was a gigantic failure of will on the part of the British government which ruled Ireland from London. American historian Leslie Williams’ Daniel O’Connell, the British Press and the Irish Famine explores one of the reasons for that failure: the British press’s poor view of Ireland in general and Daniel O’Connell in particular.

Ireland had been united with Britain for almost half a century, but it was an unequal union. Ireland’s Protestant-only parliament dissolved itself in 1800 but most power remained in the hands of a Protestant elite supported by Tory governments in London. Irish Catholics led by brilliant barrister Daniel O’Connell used the courts to challenge Protestant domination. He founding the Catholic Association in 1823 and achieved Catholic Emancipation six years later. In parliament O’Connell worked for further reforms in alliances with the British Whigs. That ended when the Tories returned to power in 1841. O’Connell began advocating repeal of the Act of Union. It wasn’t just the government he had to fight, the Times newspaper and editor John Delane also had a deep loathing of O’Connell. As O’Connell held mass meetings throughout the Repeal year 1843, the Times dismissed his movement as “agitation” and believed the “Repeal rent” was merely excuse to enlarge O’Connell’s personal fortune. This negativity descended into generalised racial attacks. The Times believed that Britain had bestowed “kindnesses” on Ireland which was met by distrust and ingratitude.

The weekly Punch also turned its famous political cartoons against the Liberator. It often showed the ogre O’Connell holding a bag labelled “rint” (the mispelt “rent” a signifier of inferior class and ethnicity) while he feasted on his ignorant “pisantry” (punning on worthless “pissants”). When Tory prime minister Robert Peel banned O’Connell’s Clontarf meeting in 1843 and subsequently arrested him, Punch portrayed O’Connell as “the Irish Frankenstein” losing control of the violent Repeal monster. The Times and Punch continued the attack on O’Connell during his trial, but the more sympathetic Illustrated London News drawings showed him as a dignified leader. An all-Protestant jury found O’Connell guilty but his jail sentence was overturned on appeal to the House of Lords. Punch portrayed him as a little boy crying “I will have Repale”.

Determined to weaken O’Connell’s hold on Ireland, Peel formed a royal commission headed by the Earl of Devon into the conditions of Irish land occupation. Though dominated by landlords, the Devon Commission took its job seriously, interviewing a thousand witnesses and publishing detailed findings in early 1845. The report avoided radical reform but criticised landlords for subdividing holdings at ever increasing rents while lessees had no security of tenure. Even this was too much for the Times which blamed the Irish for their impoverishment. The newspaper sent Thomas Campbell Foster to investigate, dubbing him its “Irish Commissioner” as if he was a corrective to the government body. His letters ran from August 1845 to January 1846 and though this was exactly when the potato blight made its first appearance, Campbell concentrated on “agrarian outrages”, attacks and murders of officials by desperate Irish peasants. While Forster (and the Devon Commission) correctly identified that peasants got no compensation for land improvements, he preferred to blame their “their own apathy and indifference” and believed the answer was an English-style grain industry. His letters home reflected British moral superiority.

By October 1845 many British and Irish papers were reporting the blight but Campbell focused on Irish violence. On November 1 he finally acknowledged “rotten potatoes” but was still critical that Limerick was holding an All Saints Day fair with “thousands of people idling in the street”. Campbell condemned Irish apathy saying “they will do nothing till starvation faces them.” With calls to keep Irish agricultural produce at home to compensate for potatoes, the Times worried there would be less supply to England and the grain price would rise. It believed the problem would be solved by the repeal of the Corn Laws, tariffs on foreign grains which kept food prices high. This was the policy of the opposition Whigs and anti-protectionist the Economist founded in 1843 to promote free trade. Protectionist newspapers preferred to downplay the famine, the Scotsman believing Irish distress was only a “repeal cry”. Neither side wanted English money to be spent on Irish relief and the closer Ireland came to catastrophe the more London papers focused on the impact to England.

Peel resigned in late 1845 but Whig leader Lord John Russell could not form a government. Peel resumed power and tried to implement Corn Law repeal. The Tories split between Peelists and protectionists as the government wobbled on for six months. When O’Connell voted with Whigs and Tory Protectionists to defeat an Irish Coercion Bill, Peel’s government was doomed. While O’Connell wanted another alliance with a Whig government, the Times warned the Whigs would soon tire of “unprofitable concessions and rejected advances”.

Punch preferred to delight in Irish political troubles thanks to a split in the Repeal organisation with the Young Ireland faction opposed to the Whig alliance. “A gentleman in difficulties” showed the farmer O’Connell unable to control his Young Ireland shoat while another cartoon showed a “monkey faced” Young Ireland leader and MP William Smith O’Brien selling bullets, blunderbusses and pistols to an equally simian “Paddy”.

Irish people were starting to die in numbers, but it was not bullets and blunderbusses killing them. The sympathetic Illustrated London News reported of men, women and children perishing in Galway “of diseases brought on by misery and destitution”. As a particularly cruel winter set in, deaths rose sharply. In December even the Times noted that in Skibbereen, Co. Cork entire families were dying “in every wretched hovel” with rats devouring the corpses. Yet the same paper in the same month claimed there was “grand national embezzlement” with a million Irish paupers “feeding and clothing themselves on the bounty of the British nation”. It said England must be “freed from the dragchain of Irish improvidence” and like prime minister Russell, believed Irish landlords should take responsibility for the crisis. Neither Russell nor the Times distinguished between sympathetic landlords who lived on their lands from absentee landlords who allowed unscrupulous middle men and agents a free hand in Ireland. Many senior Whigs were large property owners in Ireland including foreign minister Lord Palmerston and Lord of the Treasury Marquess of Lansdowne.

In January 1847 the government extended the Irish Poor Law to allow for outdoor relief in the form of soup kitchens but insisted the cost be borne from local rates. As Black ’47 took hold, the Times said Ireland’s normal state is destitution, describing the worst famine in a century as business as usual. When Tory protectionist leader George Bentinck proposed a famine relief scheme to build Irish railways, the Observer accused him of promoting Ireland “at the expense of John Bull’s pockets”. Only the Illustrated London News showed understanding. Its reports and drawings from West Cork in February showed scenes of growing horror with sparsely-attended funerals every hundred yards.

When Smith O’Brien demanded action in parliament, the government blamed Dublin Castle. Russell’s hands were tied by opponents to Irish aid within his government. In March he proposed a new Poor Law for Ireland to grant outdoor relief to able-bodied poor at landlords’ expense. He saw it as a transition from a land of indolent potato-growers to grain-fed day labourers reliant on seasonal wages from landholders. As Williams wrote, it would result in thousands pushed onto the roads and workhouses to die.

Yet the villain, according to Punch, remained Daniel O’Connell. Though the Liberator was dying in early 1847, Punch’s cartoons still saw him as a charlatan “rint” collector outwitted by Russell’s Irish policies. Ireland’s great statesman was demeaned as a fat old man in a ridiculous hat taking money from paupers. O’Connell’s final impassioned speech at Westminster was accorded little respect. Parliament, he said, was ignorant “of the real state of horror in which Ireland is plunged.” O’Connell died en route to Rome in May 1847, the Times blaming the Liberator for his own death for neglecting the advice of Paris doctors. While the world mourned a great statesman, the Times called him a “perfect demagogue” whom few Englishmen would “believe one single statement to be correct.”

As 1847 potato harvest approached, British papers claimed that Ireland was recovering. In Punch‘s cartoon “Consolation for the Million, a British breadloaf congratulated the Irish potato for looking so well. But while the blight receded in 1847 the government had refused to distribute seed potatoes. Only one seventh of the usual crop was planted, bringing a harvest far too small to feed starving millions. The death rate increased while many western Poor Law Unions went bankrupt. A famine financial appeal led by the Queen fell on deaf ears, the Economist said because Britain’s own poor were suffering and “the Irish do not deserve famine relief”. Newspapers turned their attention to agrarian crime and the murder of Major Denis Mahon in Roscommon overshadowed all other considerations. British reports portrayed Mahon as a sympathetic landlord though he had evicted 900 people that year. When a Catholic priest unwisely compared Mahon to Cromwell, papers suggested the Church was fomenting revolution. “The priest sends out his Thug upon a sacred mission,” the Times thundered.

Williams was among many modern historians who unfairly blamed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Trevelyan for Britain’s cold-hearted response. The Peel and Russell governments were responsible for the Irish situation. Trevelyan efficiently followed government policy at all times and was sympathetic to Ireland. Nevertheless he ran the day-to-day operation with a miserly iron hand. In early 1848 Trevelyan wrote about its “success” in the Whig journal Edinburgh Review. He believed the famine was over and the Irish would be transformed by the experience. Potatoes were too easy to grow, permitting too much leisure time, which offended Victorian moralism. Potato cultivation also disturbed the hierarchical relationship between classes and Irish smallholders were more akin to South Sea Islanders than “the great civilised communities”. Such independence, said Trevelyan, led only to “poverty, discontent and idleness.” The feeding of the Irish was less important than re-ordering their lives. The blight was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” and now that it had exhausted itself, Irish peasants would become obedient bread-eating agricultural labourers, curing their indolence while serving their masters.

Not everyone was convinced by Trevelyan’s rosy view. The Irish Lord Lieutenant wrote privately they were “a long way from those halcyon days with which Trevelyan winds up his article.” After the third potato failure in 1848, landlord Monteagle suggested the Edinburgh Review ask Trevelyan to write another article called “The Relapse”. But even after the third failure, British newspapers were still blaming the Irish for their problems. The Times said the Irish were “sitting idle at home, wishing death to the Saxon, and laying everything that happens on the Saxon’s door.” Young Irelanders, already radicalised by Britain’s famine response, were encouraged by news of a successful uprising in France. By July even the moderate Smith O’Brien was threatening revolution. The government mobilised the army and removed habeas corpus in Ireland. Smith O’Brien’s rebellion came to a miserable end at Ballingarry, where his ragtag army were defeated by 50 well-armed policemen in a strong defensive position. Though the Times dismissed the rebellion as a “great sham”, it demanded participants be treated as “enemies and traitors”. The papers keenly followed the treason trials of Smith O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus and O’Donohoe and it was not until they were sentenced to death (later commuted to transportation) that newspapers returned to the ongoing agony of the Famine.

On December 16, 1848, the Illustrated London News printed the powerful illustration “ejectment of Irish tenantry” where a woman begs a mounted landlord to spare her cabin while soldiers with fixed bayonets look on. A vast and necessary social change was taking place in Ireland, the ILN said, but it was accompanied by “an amount of human misery that is abundantly appalling.” While the soldiers were an uncomfortable reminder that social change in Ireland was being carried out at the barrel of a gun, the press continued to see Ireland’s debt-ridden landlords as the cause of the problem. Russell’s government passed an encumbered estates act in 1847 but sales were tied up in the Courts of Chancery. When Peel proposed an encumbered estates commission to bypass the courts, Punch pictured him as the new St Patrick “turning the reptiles out of Ireland”. The Times imagined a new plantation of Ireland, though ironically their own anti-Irish reporting turned off likely British investors.

Starvation continued in 1849, but like modern media, the press were absorbed by royalty when the Queen announced a visit to Ireland. Punch imagined Victoria as fashionably-attired Britannia paying “a morning call” at the ragged hut of Hibernia, who tells her, “Sure Sisther, it’s not what you’ve been accustomed to exactly, but anyhow you’re welcome”. Victoria’s tour of eastern cities steered well-clear of famine-affected areas, but the visit helped bring more knowledge of Ireland to English readers. When the royal yacht reached Waterford Harbour, Prince Albert took a steamer up the river to the city “so famous for butter and bacon and Young Irelandism“, a Times dig at Waterford-born Thomas Francis Meagher, then on his way to exile in Van Diemen’s Land. The paper believed that the royal visit was the “concluding chapter of the history of Irish rebellion”. As steam travel and railways reduced the tyranny of distance, the ILN even promoted Irish tourism such as “Excursion to Killarney” though it had to gloss over ruined and abandoned houses along the way, “the very picture of desolation”. At late as Christmas 1849, the paper was still offering “illustrations of the new Poor Law” showing starving shoeless women searching for potatoes in a field in the middle of winter while Kilrush “in-door paupers were obliged to go to bed without dinner”.

By 1850, said Williams, Ireland was completely transformed by “blight, bureaucracy and the press”. The British government failed to prioritise humanitarian concerns and evaluated relief efforts not on effectiveness but on “theoretical correctness, administrative convenience, economic ‘soundness’ and political acceptability”. The British press were unable to keep up with the long-running saga with its constantly shifting dynamics and failed to grasp the depth of the tragedy. Some courageous journalism from the ILN aside, Irish events were reported primarily for their impact on England. Distancing from the tragedy was inevitable and even today, most Western media consumers are spared the horrors of Third World famines. Compassion fatigue sets in and after a time, people dying day after day ceases to become “news”. It was easy to blame the Irish for their own problems because they were lazy, dirty, lying, improvident or violent. By unstated contrast, the British had the exact opposite traits: industrious, clean, truthful, thrifty and law-abiding. The “killing remarks” of Williams’ title were rooted in this subconscious concern for validating British values.

Allan Pinkerton: the private eye, the president and the Baltimore Plot

The original Pinkerton logo with the unblinking eye and the tagline “We Never Sleep”.

Allan Pinkerton was not the first American detective, but was perhaps, the most famous. Scottish-born Pinkerton worked as detective for the Chicago police department before starting the Pinkerton detective agency in the 1850s. The Pinkerton Agency’s unblinking eye logo and motto “We never sleep” gave birth to the instantly recognisable nickname “private eye” for detectives. Pinkerton was the model for the hardboiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Pinkerton’s biggest moment came just before the civil war when he exposed a plot in Baltimore to kill president-elect Abraham Lincoln, as Daniel Stashower’s The Hour of Peril explores.

Pinkerton was born in 1819 in the poverty-ridden Gorbals area of Glasgow. His weaver father died young and Allan learned the craft of barrel-making from Glasgow cooper William McAuley. He travelled around as a tramp cooper, joined the cooper’s union and became Glasgow’s “most ardent Chartist”. In 1838 the Chartist movement presented its people’s charter demanding universal suffrage, equal pay and other democratic reforms. After Parliament imprisoned leaders and rejected a petition signed by a million people, the movement fractured with many demanding violent action.

Pinkerton attended a protest rally in Newport, Wales where Chartists ran into a military contingent who killed 22 and arrested many others. Pinkerton said he escaped, “more like thieves than honest men” though the experience helped him “reach a nobler and happier condition of life.” He became a Chartist leader and in 1842 authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. Friends hid him for months before he followed Chartist escapees to America.

Allan married his 15-year-old girlfriend Joan Carfrae and they moved to Chicago where he got a job making barrels at a brewery. Wanting to start his own business, they moved west to the auspiciously named Dundee, Illinois, founded by Scottish farmers. The hard-working Pinkerton set up shop as Dundee’s “ONLY AND ORIGINAL COOPER”. By 1846 he employed eight men. An avid reader, he was enthralled by escaped slave Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and he became an ardent abolitionist. The American Anti-Slavery Society put him to work on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of meeting points, back channel routes and safe houses which ferried runaway slaves to the north. The name came from a disgruntled slaveholder whose slaves had disappeared, reportedly saying, “the damned abolitionists must have a railroad under the ground.” Though harbouring fugitive slaves was illegal, Pinkerton’s log cabin became an important stop on the line north to Wisconsin and Canada.

One day Pinkerton became curious about an island on a local river which he believed was used by criminals. After sneaking onto the island and watching men at a campfire, he told the sheriff. A posse discovered a counterfeiting ring and Pinkerton was the hero of the hour. When another suspicious stranger arrived in Dundee, shopkeepers asked Pinkerton to investigate. Pinkerton was hesitant but when they said he could catch the intruders red-handed, he was convinced, believing he could become “a great detective”. He posed as a “country gawker” and gradually got into the stranger’s confidence. The man’s name was John Craig and he wanted a local accomplice in a lucrative scheme.

Pinkerton agreed to pass on Craig’s counterfeit bills and alerted the sheriff to the coming transaction, who provided genuine cash for the handover. But Pinkerton bungled the transfer and could not prove Craig accepted the money. Pinkerton doubled the bluff and asked Craig for more counterfeit money. They arranged to meet in a Chicago hotel and he tipped off constables. Pinkerton demanded Craig show him the money in advance, claiming he’d involved a lawyer. Craig feigned ignorance and Pinkerton signalled for a constable to make the arrest. Craig protested his innocence and had the support of onlookers. Pinkerton’s flimsy evidence was never tested in court as Craig mysteriously escaped prison. It seemed to confirm his guilt and Pinkerton was a hero again. Before long, he became Dundee’s deputy sheriff. His cooperage days were over. All the success that followed, he said, was “owed to John Craig.”

Pinkerton moved to Chicago to become deputy sheriff of Cook County in 1847. He moved quickly through the ranks, first to sheriff and then becoming Chicago’s first detective, known for his strength, daring and incorruptibility. In 1853 Pinkerton survived a shooting from behind, fortunate his arm took the blow. His survival added to his mythical reputation. He became a special agent for the Postal Service and went undercover to investigate money that routinely went missing in the mails. He befriended a corrupt employee and got him charged only to find out he was the city’s postmaster’s nephew. Desperate to find evidence and with his own career on the line, Pinkerton found a picture-frame at the man’s boarding house with thousands of dollars of incriminating bank drafts. The Chicago Press hailed Pinkerton as a detective without equal. Buoyed by praise, Pinkerton decided to go out on his own.

He later claimed he started the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850 though the post office exploit did not happen until 1853. Either way, he was in the right job in the right place at the right time. As America expanded westward, Chicago boomed as a railway and shipping hub, spurring a new crime: train robbery. Pinkerton was ideally placed to track offenders across state boundaries as frontier justice was transforming into national authority. With no secret service until 1865, Pinkerton made up the rules as he went along. His principles were based on his Chartist roots and the example of great French detective Eugene-Francois Vidocq (the inspiration for Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Miserables). Pinkerton followed Vidocq enthusiastically in his use of disguises and cover identities. He worked with Illinois Central Railroad and while he did not meet company lawyer Abraham Lincoln, he became friends with senior executive George McClellan, a relationship that would tarnish his reputation after McClellan led the Union Army in the civil war.

The Pinkerton logo with its stern unblinking eye began to appear in correspondence, advertisements and legal documents. Pinkerton’s first employee was talented businessman George Bangs. Bangs ran the growing operation allowing Pinkerton to concentrate on managing his team of detectives. His most resourceful subordinates were 32-year-old Englishman Timothy Webster, a shrewd and courageous detective, and 22-year-old widow Kate Warne. Warne desperately wanted to be a detective and convinced a doubtful Pinkerton that a woman could “worm out secrets that are impossible for male detectives”. She quickly became an integral part of the operation, and managed her own team of female operatives. Warne proved her mettle in a 1858 case when she persuaded the wife of a corrupt employee of a mail express company to reveal where he had hidden packages of stolen money. The employee was still confident he could beat the charges in court only to realise with horror that a cellmate he had blabbed to was another Pinkerton employee. He pleaded guilty.

Despite the stiffer penalties of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Pinkerton remained a supporter of the Underground Railroad. John Brown was a “bosom friend” and regular visitor to his house in Chicago. Pinkerton supported Brown’s incursions into “Bleeding Kansas” and in 1859 Brown tried to incite a slave rebellion with his notorious raid on Harpers Ferry federal armoury. Brown was overwhelmed by marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee and hanged, despite the efforts of Pinkerton and others to win a reprieve. Brown’s Raid heightened hatred between north and south. By the time Lincoln won the presidency 12 months later, secession fever was acute. In four months, seven deep south states left to form the Confederacy. Border slave states like Maryland remained in the Union, but were vulnerable. Pinkerton regularly visited the south and knew that many southerners wanted Lincoln killed. So did Lincoln. He received death threats in the mail and heard of plans to kill him as he journeyed from his Springfield, Illinois home to Washington for the inauguration.

Lincoln had other concerns including the Confederate threat to seize Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbour. Republican Senator William Seward, whom Lincoln had defeated for the presidential nomination and would become secretary of state, urged Lincoln to come to the capital early. This was difficult. Lincoln planned a grand tour of the northern cities that elected him, involving a long and difficult railroad journey across many different lines. The owner of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s 500 miles of track was believed to be sympathetic to the rebels. Friends urged Lincoln to travel with a strong armed force, but he wanted to avoid the appearance of war.

Allan Pinkerton with Abraham Lincoln after the battle of Antietam in 1862. Library of Congress.

In early 1861 the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad boss, Samuel Felton, heard rumours of a plot to disrupt the inauguration. Felton informed top army general Winfield Scott who was aware of the threat. However the ineffectual outgoing Buchanan presidential administration took no action. Though Congress held an inquiry, it too foresaw no interruption of government functions. Felton believed that only one man could prevent Lincoln’s likely assassination. On January 19 he made an urgent plea to “celebrated detective” Allan Pinkerton.

Pinkerton was quickly on the case. Felton told him it was part of a plot for Washington to fall into rebel hands. With six more states now joining the Confederacy, war was looming and Maryland’s legislature was debating whether to join it. Lincoln would have to pass through Baltimore on his way to Washington but was unlikely to receive a cordial welcome and there was no reception committee. Three lines converged on Baltimore and Pinkerton knew Felton’s railroad had to remain open to connect the capital to the north. With the inauguration just five weeks away, Pinkerton dispatched a large team to Baltimore, urging Felton to keep the operation secret.

Baltimore was then America’s fourth largest city. A centre of German and Irish immigration, its neighbourhoods were ruled by gangs like the Plug Uglies, Rip Raps and Blood Tubs who needed little provocation to turn violent. Pinkerton posed as a Southern stockbroker and distributed operatives including Warne and Webster across the city. They heard angry talk against the new president from pro-southern fire-eaters. Lincoln released his travel schedule to Washington, a complicated criss-crossing journey over 2000 miles on 18 railroads. Lincoln would travel in “open and public fashion” and arrive in Baltimore on February 23. He would only be in the city for two and a half hours to change trains to Washington at a different station, but that was time enough to carry out any plot. Lincoln’s small entourage included two army officers and self-appointed bodyguard, burly lawyer Ward Lamon.

In Baltimore, Cypriano Ferrandini’s barber shop was a centre of secessionist gossip. Ferrandini told Pinkerton that he wanted Lincoln dead to save the Union and he would be prepared to die to carry out the assassination. Pinkerton sent an urgent telegram to his old Chicago acquaintance and Illinois Senator Norman Judd, who was with the Lincoln delegation in Cincinnati. Judd believed the threat but wanted more information. These were jittery times. The electoral college was in session in Washington and though the New York Times worried about “the blowing up of the Capitol,” it concluded peacefully and ratified Lincoln’s win.

While Lincoln continued eastwards, Pinkerton met Baltimore’s police marshall George Kane. Appointed in 1860, Kane had stared down the mobs but advised against a procession in Lincoln’s honour. Though he guaranteed the president-elect’s safety through Baltimore, Pinkerton doubted his loyalty to the north. Then Pinkerton heard of a plot to blow up the railway bridge at Havre de Grace north of Baltimore. His operative Harry Davies was accepted into Ferrandini’s secret society, and heard Ferrandini say Lincoln would never become president. The society drew lots to see who would commit the murder. Pinkerton ordered Kate Warne to meet Lincoln’s party in New York and give Judd the latest information. Warne sent a cryptic telegram that read “today they offer ten for one.” This meant betting dens had ten to one odds against Lincoln surviving Baltimore.

In Washington, politicians gathered for a Peace Convention led by former president John Tyler. The convention failed but it heard more rumours of a Baltimore plot against Lincoln. Army chief Scott sent word to New York and police superintendent John Kennedy was posted to the case, unknown to Pinkerton. Kennedy also doubted Kane’s loyalty and dispatched three undercover detectives to Baltimore. Like Pinkerton’s team, they infiltrated Baltimore secret societies and believed a plot was in place. With Lincoln due in Baltimore in two days time, Scott asked Senator Seward to convince Lincoln to change his plans. Seward sent his son Fred to find Lincoln in Philadelphia, while Pinkerton was on the same mission.

Pinkerton met railroad boss Felton in Philadelphia and told him about the weight of evidence. They agreed that Lincoln needed to pass through Baltimore secretly a day earlier than planned. That day, Lincoln arrived in Philadelphia to enthusiastic crowds. Pinkerton met Judd to appeal for Lincoln to leave on the 11pm train that night. But Judd and Pinkerton could not see Lincoln until almost 10:30pm. Lincoln refused to go. The following day he was due to celebrate George Washington’s birthday at Independence Hall before visiting the state legislature at Harrisburg. If Pinkerton found new information, he might be persuaded to go to Washington directly from Harrisburg. When Lincoln went back to his room, he found a similar request from Fred Seward. Lincoln told Seward about the Pinkerton meeting, and asked if he got his information from a different source. Lincoln said he would make a decision the following morning. Pinkerton worked through the night to revise the timetable with station changes in Philadelphia and Baltimore and the added complication of the four-hour detour to Harrisburg.

The following morning, Lincoln kept his appointment at Independence Hall and paid tribute to the Founding Fathers. “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it,” he said, few realising how ominous the words were. Afterwards Lincoln told Judd he would follow their plan once finished in Harrisburg. He left for Pennsylvania’s state capital at 9:30am.

In Harrisburg Lincoln spoke at Pennsylvania’s general assembly. He met governor Andrew Curtin, and told him of the plot. Afterwards the full travelling party met in secret to discuss the plan. Senior military officer Colonel Edwin Sumner called it a “damned piece of cowardice” and wanted to bring in cavalry. But that would cause further delays. Lincoln said that unless there were other reasons besides fear of ridicule, he would carry out Pinkerton’s plan. However there was only room for one person to accompany Lincoln in the revised plan. Sumner and Lamon both believed they should be the one.

After dinner Lincoln sneaked out the Governor’s back door draped in a shawl. Lamon followed him into a carriage and as Sumner prepared to board, Lamon gave the signal to go, leaving the hoodwinked colonel behind. Incognito, Lamon and Lincoln boarded the 11pm train to Philadelphia and sat in the dark alongside a fake package Pinkerton put on board with the instructions it must go through to Washington. This would help ensure the connection would wait for the Harrisburg train. Pinkerton anxiously awaited their arrival in Philadelphia in the dead of night. He gave himself the codeword of “Plums” while Lincoln’s undignified name was “Nuts”. The plan called for Lincoln’s sleeper car to be unhitched and pulled to the other station for the second leg to Baltimore but the train arrived early in Philadelphia. Rather than wait around, “Plums” commandeered a carriage, while “Nuts”, masked by his shawl, was guarded by the armed Lamon. The carriage meandered around Philadelphia’s outskirts until it was time to board the train to Baltimore. Washington was still four hours away. Kate Warne was aboard and had secured the rear half of the final car, encouraging Lincoln to remain out of sight in a berth behind drapes. Pinkerton gave the conductor the tickets, claiming the “sick man” had retired for the evening. They anxiously crossed the Havre de Grace bridge, which was lined by Pinkerton’s signalling watchmen. They arrived in Baltimore at 3:30am.

Warne left them at Baltimore, no longer needed as “the sister of the invalid”. Railroadmen hitched the carriage to a team of horses which took it to the station for Washington, a mile away. The unaware city, thought a relieved Pinkerton, “was in profound repose”. Then they were delayed by a late arriving train. They remained stuck in Baltimore as dawn broke. Pinkerton worried the disguise would fail in daylight. Finally they got under way for the last 38 miles to the capital.

Waiting at Washington’s station was Lincoln’s old friend Illinois Congressman Elihu Washbourne. The apprehensive Washbourne thought Lincoln missed the train until he saw three stragglers in the last carriage and recognised Lincoln’s “long, lank form”. He reached forward saying, “Abe, you can’t play that on me” but an alarmed Pinkerton pushed him back. As he was about to lash out again, Lincoln cried “Don’t strike him, Allan! It is Washbourne.” Pinkerton backed off and sent a telegram to Felton that “Plums arrived here with Nuts”.

Fruity nicknames aside, it was Pinkerton’s finest hour. But Stashhower writes that the Washbourne incident was a portent of things to come. Pinkerton and Lamon, both haughty men, had fallen out over how best to protect Lincoln. Now Pinkerton had assaulted an important congressman. He also argued with the even more influential Senator Seward over Scott’s plan to send troops to Baltimore had Lincoln not agreed to the early departure. Pinkerton’s cover was blown in reports of activities in Baltimore headed by “a gentleman of Vidocquean repute”. And Lincoln suffered, with newspapers dismissing the plot as fanciful and suggesting he skulked into Washington in cowardly fashion. Lincoln’s precautions were vindicated a month later when war broke out and northern troops were killed as they passed through Baltimore.

When George McClellan took command of the Army of the Potomac in July, Pinkerton became his old friend’s chief of intelligence. Operating as “Major E.J. Allan”, he adapted his civilian skills and operatives went behind enemy lines reporting on troop and artillery movements. He exposed Washington socialite Rose Greenhow as a spy though his own man Webster was hanged in Richmond as an enemy spy. Pinkerton even conducted aerial reconnaissance using 15-year-old son William to scout enemy positions from a hot air balloon.

But McCllellan failed to press Union advantage, using Pinkerton’s information of inflated enemy numbers as excuse for inaction. Pinkerton’s reports were flawed but McClellan needed little excuse to exaggerate the size of the Rebel army. As McClellan’s reputation suffered, so did Pinkerton’s. He was dismissed after McClellan’s own dismissal in late 1862 and sat out the rest of the war in Chicago. In 1867 he was stung by Superintendent Kennedy’s account of the Baltimore Plot which claimed to know nothing of Pinkerton’s connection. Though Pinkerton wrote his own account a year later, he was also offended by Ward Lamon’s unflattering recollections which appeared in 1872. Lamon found a letter in which Pinkerton had called him a “brainless, egotistical fool” and took revenge by claiming Lincoln regretted the midnight ride through Baltimore as the danger was “purely imaginary”. Lamon said the conspiracy was a total fraud invented by Pinkerton. The flabbergasted Pinkerton decided on a new memoir but suffered a devastating stroke. Then the Chicago Fire of 1871 burned down his office, taking all his case files and records. His sons William and Robert took over the business but when an undercover operation went wrong and an eight-year-old boy was killed, Pinkerton’s tactics were reviled as barbarous and he was considered a vigilante. The harshest criticism came when Pinkerton’s men infiltrated the Molly Maguires, a shadowy group of Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania’s coalmining region whom some viewed as defenders of union rights but others saw as saboteurs, kidnappers and murderers. Several Mollies were hanged on detectives’ evidence. Pinkerton’s agency had become strikebreaking hired guns of big businesses. One critic said that the former Scottish Chartist now “preyed upon social freedom in America”.

In 1883 Pinkerton published his wartime memoirs The Spy of the Rebellion claiming he had redeemed his pledge to ensure Lincoln’s safe arrival in Washington. He believed that if Lincoln had allowed him to provide security, the 1865 assassination would not have happened. Pinkerton too was dead within 12 months after a bizarre and painful accident. Out walking, he tripped and fell, biting his tongue severely. He became infected and died three weeks later on July 1, 1884, just before his 65th birthday. His agency survived, among their number, author Dashiell Hammett. In 2003 Pinkerton’s was taken over by Swedish security services firm Securitas AB. In 2022 Securitas AB returned to his home territory when it partnered with a firm to provide an on-demand private security force in Chicago. Unblinking eye or not, Pinkerton was surely smiling in his grave.

Gympie days

Another weekend, another round of parkrun tourism, or so I hoped. This weekend’s plan was to get the Brisbane suburban train all the way to the end of the line in Gympie, stay overnight, do the Victory Heights trail parkrun in the morning and get the bus home (the train timetables did not align for a return by rail). So after over three hours of slow rattling we got into Gympie North station around lunchtime Friday. The weather was overcast with rain forecasted, as I found my nearby Airbnb and walked 3km into town. I crossed fingers the parkrun would not be cancelled.

On the way, I passed Gympie station, which is prettier than the functional Gympie North and much closer to town, but is sadly no longer on the main line. A station first opened here in 1881 to connect Gympie’s goldfields with the port of Maryborough and within 10 years there was a connection to Brisbane. The current building, designed in Pagoda style with multiple layered eaves, dates to 1913 and is the largest timber railway station in Queensland. Gympie’s station became neglected with the rise of car travel and in 1989 Queensland Rail built Gympie North in an 8km diversion on the newly electrified Brisbane-Rockhampton route. Freight stopped coming through Gympie by 1995. The station got a new lease of life in 1998 when QR leased it to the Mary Valley Heritage Railway. The Valley Rattler steam train now plies the route to Amamoor.

Gold was first found 4km south of Gympie in 1867 and Scottish prospector William Ferguson named the area Monkland for a locality west of Glasgow. By 1873, there were shops and four hotels to serve the goldrush and the railway station was added in 1889 on the Brisbane line. Like Gympie station, it was bypassed a century later though the Valley Rattler still trundles through.

Goldrush memories are preserved in the nearby Gympie Gold Mining and Historical Museum. The tagline outside reads “the town that saved Queensland” and that’s not too much of an exaggeration. When Queensland left New South Wales in 1859, the parent colony took the treasury leaving the northerners broke. Unemployment was high, railway works had stopped, and the Bank of Queensland failed, leaving the new colony to survive in hand-to-mouth fashion. Then the Brisbane Courier announced in 1867 the discovery of gold at “Gympy Creek”. Prospectors poured into the region and found large deposits of gold. Within 12 months, Gympie had 30,000 people. Queensland’s unemployment problem vanished overnight.

The Upper Mary River goldfield was officially proclaimed in 1867 in a 25 square mile radius. But the finds were so good, the radius was expanded to 120 square miles in 1877. By then the alluvial gold was exhausted. Shallow and deep reef mining commenced and by 1881 intensive gold mining marked a new era of wealth and prosperity. While payable gold ran out by the 1920s, there is still a fossicking area nearby. The museum’s No 2 South Great Eastern shaft is accessible via a reconstructed gantry. It contains an operational boiler house and steam powered winding engine, air compressor, generator and anciliary machinery.

The museum also features exhibits from the timber industry, dairy, agriculture, gems, transport, and military and social history including the relocated cottage of early Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher. Fisher, aged 10, came to Australia with his Scottish family during Queensland’s goldrush. He moved to Gympie in 1888, worked in the mines and was a trade unionist and Labor party activist. He help found the Gympie cooperative, and in 1891 became secretary of the Gympie Joint Labour Committee. He was elected to Queensland’s assembly as the member for Gympie before winning the seat of Wide Bay in the first federal election in 1901. He became Labor leader in 1905 and served three terms as prime minister in 1908-09, 1910-13 and 1914-15.

Near the museum is Lake Alford, an important bird sanctuary, named for neighbour Frank “Tiny” Alford (nicknamed in Australian fashion because he was very tall) who helped develop the park. This was a swampy area which Gympie Council drained and filled with water. The lake is home to numerous bird species. The signature black swans (Cygnus atratus) are completely black except for the red bill and white flight feathers on their wings while chicks are light grey.

I wandered down a wet track to the Mary River. The river rises at Booroobin west of Landsborough and flows north through Gympie and Maryborough before emptying into the Great Sandy Strait near Fraser Island. The river was important to the Gubbi Gubbi people who called it “Moocooboola” (not to be confused with Mooloolaba which has a different root). The Gubbi Gubbi named a tributary creek for the gimpi-gimpi, the fearsome stinging tree found across the region. Europeans encroached onto Gubbi Gubbi lands in 1842 and found what they called the Wide Bay River. Five years later NSW governor Charles FitzRoy renamed it for his wife Mary. Settlers were attracted to the rich cedar which they threw into the river and exported to Sydney via Maryborough. After gold transformed the region, the Gubbi Gubbi were reduced by massacres and disease and were eventually forced into reservations at Fraser Island and Cherbourg.

The first Gympie Volunteer Fire Brigade was formed in 1876 but lapsed before re-forming in 1901 with a fire station built in 1902. The current magnificent brick and concrete fire station dates to 1940. The station is believed to be haunted by the ghost of a fireman who died in a fall from the lookout on the tower in 1943. In 2023 the state government announced plans to build a new station south of town.

Gympie was gazetted as a town on January 26, 1880 and a reserve for a town hall was soon created. The original town hall and clock tower dates from 1890 and witnessed the creation of Gympie city in 1905. As gold production declined, Gympie transformed into an agricultural service centre. The building received a makeover in 1939 with a post office and reception hall added. It was heritage listed in 2011 for its original structure representing the importance of a highly profitable gold mining town and its 1930s extension reflecting Gympie’s evolution as the service town of an important dairy and agricultural district.

The town centre winds its way up from the river along flood-prone Mary Street. The Cullinane brothers started a drapery business in 1868, a year after the town was founded. They established a large presence on both sides of the street selling everything from dress material and accessories to china, linen and household goods. Gympie’s worst flood was in 1893 with a peak of 25.45 metres, inundating many businesses to the rooftops in lower Mary Street. On November 6, 1939 Cullinanes’ store burnt down with damage estimated at £60,000.

The influx of money and yield of gold was reflected in the redevelopment of upper Mary Street during the 1880s and 1890s. Derry-born architect Richard Gailey built the neo-classical Bank of New South Wales in 1890–1891 to replace a branch on the goldfields. In 1940 the bank sold the building to Widgee Shire Council which administered the rural area around Gympie. In 1993, Widgee amalgamated with the city of Gympie and the building became the Cooloola Shire Council Chambers. In 2008, Cooloola, Kilkivan and part of Tiaro were amalgamated into Gympie Regional Council. The building is now the Gympie Regional Council Chambers. It is heritage listed as “physical evidence of the evolution of Gympie gold mining, a major contributor to the wealth of Queensland”.

Around the corner on Channon St is the original courthouse and now home to the Australian Institute of Country Music. Irish-born Henry Edward King was appointed gold commissioner for Wide Bay in 1867 and conducted business on the Gympie goldfields until a Court of Petty Sessions was established in 1868. A new court was erected on Channon St in 1876 and it became the land office when the court house moved up the road in 1893. It continued to be used by state departments until 2002 when Cooloola Shire took it over and made the building available to the AICM.

Across the road is the old bank building. The Queensland National Bank established a timber branch here in 1872, and enjoyed the gold bonanza, purchasing over 6000 ounces in its first three weeks. Three years later the current brick building was erected. When Gympie’s commercial centre moved to eastern Mary St the bank sold the building. It was used by industries until Widgee Council bought it in 1990. It is now used as council offices.

Further up Channon St is the new courthouse. In the 1890s local MP Andrew Fisher pushed for a larger replacement to the old courthouse. In 1900 colonial architect Alfred Barton Brady, who designed Brisbane’s old Victoria Bridge, selected the site and commissioned fellow architect John Smith Murdoch to design the building in Federation Free style. The building was designed to be seen from across town and the clock tower dominated the landscape. It has been heritage listed as a significant landmark with high quality design and workmanship.

Gympie’s third important colonial-era bank building is the Royal Bank of Queensland. A great fire in 1891 destroyed many timber buildings on Mary St and this neoclassical single-storey building was one of many permanent structures erected the following year. The Royal Bank was established to help Queensland farming and mining investors who could not get loans with other banks. In 1922 the Royal merged with the Bank of Northern Queensland to become the Bank of Queensland and then merged with the National Australia Bank in 1948. NAB closed this branch in 1979 and it became commercial premises, and offices for the Gympie Muster. It is heritage listed as a “good example of a masonry structure in a classical style”.

The following morning I went out to Victory Heights Trail Network, which comprises 60 hectares of eucalypt forest and 25km of mountain biking trails. It also hosts Gympie’s parkrun. While Saturday was perfect for running, the damage had already been done and Gympie Regional Council asked organisers to cancel it to give the course time to dry out. I sadly trudged the 3km back to town to get my bus home.

I had breakfast at a Mary Street cafe and admired the nearby “Lady of the Mary” statue. The statue honours British aristocrat Lady Mary Fitzroy, who moved to Australia when her husband Charles Fitzroy was made governor of NSW in 1846. In 1847 Fitzroy renamed the Wide Bay River and Maryborough in her honour. A few months later, Lady Mary was killed in a carriage accident in Sydney. The 2017 statue imagines her dipping her feet in the Mary river, which she never saw.

The parkrun cancellation gave me more walking time and I checked out St Patrick’s Church. Many Irish Catholics joined the Gympie gold rush and priests followed them, with the first Mass in the new town in 1868. Gympie’s early churches were basic affairs until the massive sandstone St Patrick’s was constructed on a prominent spot on Calton Hill in 1883. The architect was prolific Scottish-born government architect Francis Drummond Greville Stanley, who also built Brisbane’s GPO, Roma St station, Toowoomba’s courthouse and post office, and some of Charters Towers’ grand buildings. Queensland’s first Catholic archbishop Robert Dunne officially opened St Patrick’s in 1887. It is heritage listed as a good example of 1880s church architecture, “influenced by Gothic revival styles and of the ecclesiastical work of the prominent Queensland architect, FDG Stanley.”

It is appropriate that a city associated with country music was once called Nashville. A Memorial Park monument celebrates Wiltshire-born James Nash “who discovered the Gympie Goldfield 16th October 1867.” Nash emigrated to Sydney aged 23 and became a labourer and NSW gold prospector. Nash moved to Calliope, Queensland in 1863 then to Nanango. He was attracted by the news of a £3000 government reward for a new gold field, and set off from Nanango to Gladstone. As he came down from Imbil, he thought the Mary River might be payable. Nash found quantities of gold and reported his findings in Maryborough. Within a month, the port town was full of excited prospectors “off to the diggings” at what was soon dubbed “Nashville, Gympie Creek”. However the miserly colonial government haggled with Nash before granting only £1000 after twelve months’ debate while the field quickly shed his name and became Gympie. Though Nash and his brother earned £7000 from their claims, they lost their winnings in poorly-performing mining stock and an ill-fated drapery store. The government finally helped the near penniless Nash in 1888 it made him the local powder-magazine keeper at £100 a year. He died in 1913 in Gympie, aged 79, suffering from bronchitis and asthma.

The bus back to Brisbane stopped at a service station in Traveston, 20 minutes south of town. In the car park was a glorious piece of 1980s Queensland kitsch. The 13-metre-tall Matilda was the kangaroo mascot for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. Matilda became a favourite when she was wheeled into the opening ceremony, turned her head, wiggled her ears and winked at the crowd. In 1984 Matilda was placed alongside the Pacific Highway at Wet N Wild, Oxenford. Matilda Fuel Services bought the namesake kangaroo in 2009 for their Tugun outlet but the massive marsupial breached Gold Coast planning regulations. The owners moved her to another travel centre at Kybong, 20km south of Gympie. Anticipating the Gympie bypass, the Traveston Service Centre was opened 5km away in 2020 and Matilda made the short hop south down the Bruce Hwy. She gave me a sly wink before sending me on my way home.

America’s frontier: The end of the myth

The Washington Memorial in Washington DC as seen from the Jefferson Memorial. Photo: Author’s collection

The seductive idea of America’s frontier was that it was never ending. As historian William Appleman Williams wrote in 1966, American expansion exhilarated because it could be projected to infinity. From George Washington to Barack Obama, the American political class steadily upped the ante pushing global engagement as a moral imperative. Then came Donald Trump. “I want to build a wall,” he said, and America’s racism and extremism had nowhere else to go. Trump was not America’s first racist president. Andrew Jackson drove a slave coffle and oversaw ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. Woodrow Wilson cultivated the Ku Klux Klan in his electoral coalition, while Nixon won the Neo-Confederate vote in 1968 thanks to his “southern strategy”. But the country no longer has a “divine, messianic” crusade to hold it together. America, says Greg Grandin, in his 2020 book of that title, is at The End of the Myth.

Grandin says British North America was conceived in expansion from Europe’s religious wars. Native Americans had to get out of the way or be murdered or enslaved. As Benjamin Franklin said, America’s vastness allowed for endless expansion and markets growing with supply. “We are scouring our planet,” Franklin said, “by clearing America of woods.” Then came the first worldwide war, not of 1914 but of the 1750s when Britain and France fought for control of India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas. In North America both countries deployed standing armies, settler militias and indigenous allies. British rangers learned to live, dress and kill “like the Indians”.

Britain won the war and inherited an enormous swathe of forest land from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. But it could not reconcile local interests. Britain issued a 1763 proclamation prohibiting European settlement west of the Appalachians, which suited indigenous allies. But settlers like the rangers saw it as a violation of their right to move west. As authorities dithered, settlers moved west anyway, forming militias and terrorising Native Americans in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The 1776 Declaration of Independence was the settlers’ ultimate rebuke to the crown. Jefferson claimed they were the inheritors of Saxon freemen finding new lands. The 1783 Treaty of Paris laid down the borders of the new nation at the Mississippi River and Americans moved swiftly across the Appalachians.

Jefferson negotiated the right for US ships to moor on the Spanish bank of the Mississippi and demanded access to Florida’s waterways. Southern states claimed their territories ran all the way to the Pacific and settlers and war veterans purchased land west of the Mississippi. They were following James Madison’s 1787 Federalist paper advice on how to avoid an aristocracy. Madison’s solution was “extend the sphere” to dilute the threat of political conflict and factionalism.

South America took a different tack. In the 1820s Spain’s former colonies had won independence setting their borders along the old colonial boundaries, based on the old Roman law uti possidetis, “as you possess”. This self-containment became the guiding principle of 20th century decolonising nations and modern Africa remains mostly aligned on colonial boundaries. In contrast, the US thought it was one of a kind, “the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom,” said Jefferson. Its constitution transformed western lands into territories which in time could become states. America doubled in size thanks to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France (which had obtained the territory from Spain). The new frontier was the Rockies and once again Americans poured into new lands. These lands were not empty, but Jefferson wanted Native Americans to be assimilated into settler life and give up valuable hunting lands. If mass murder was required, then it was Britain’s fault having seduced the tribes “to take up the hatchet against us.” Settlers executed “removal” operations to drive Native Americans further west towards “the frontier”.

Wealthy Tennessee businessman Andrew Jackson flouted laws to enter Indian territory. Jackson believed liberty was the freedom to do whatever he wanted and led a militia to exterminate Tennessee’s Creek Nation, ordering his men to cut noses off corpses to more easily tally the dead, paying off tribal leaders, and concluding a punitive treaty with survivors. He subdued Florida’s Seminoles and Tennessee’s Chickasaws using the same tactics of “terrorise, bribe and legalise.” Jackson became a national hero by defeating the British at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans and now wanted to make all of North America white. In 1829 the aristocratic Founding Fathers lost control of the presidency to the outsider Jackson and his mandate to remove Indians, wage war on Mexico, and extend slavery.

Jackson was a believer in “small government” but ensured his government would enforce enterprise and property rights, including the right to own human property. The Age of Jackson was a radical empowerment of white men at the expense of black men who were denied the vote they had in some northern states since colonial times. Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act pushing Native Americans beyond the Mississippi and extinguishing their land rights. Settlers poured into Indian country, demanding military protection and prompting repeated cycles of forced removals. Indians must die out, said New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. “God has given the earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it,” Greeley said. In practice, speculators, railroads, ranchers and corporations claimed the best land for themselves.

By the 1830s attention turned to Texas, the northernmost part of Mexico. Spain founded Texas as a “slaver’s utopia” for Anglo settlers in the hope they would become a loyal buffer against American encroachment. But Mexico abolished slavery when it won independence in 1821 and the Anglo Tejanos revolted. In its time as a short-lived republic, Texas enshrined slavery in perpetuity and Galveston was the largest slave market west of New Orleans. Texans wanted to join the United States but its admittance would tip the balance of power to the slave states. Jackson protege and slaveholder James Polk won the presidency in 1844 promising to annex Texas to secure the frontier. In 1846 Polk declared war on Catholic Mexico, at the same time that “manifest destiny” was coined to described the belief Providence was guiding Anglo-Saxon Protestants across the continent. Migration west was a messianic mission.

In the war that followed, America’s armed superiority was overwhelming. They took Mexico City in 1847 and the following year the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferring not just Texas but Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado and southwest Wyoming to the US, some 100 million people in a half million square miles. The Jacksonian consensus kept together slave and free states as the border moved south and west. Settlers to Oregon, which also joined the union in 1848, didn’t want slavery or free blacks, passing laws to exclude them from the territory. But tensions over slavery could not be resolved and America waged war on itself in the 1860s. Millions of slaves were released in 1865 and Lincoln’s final legacy, his Freedmen’s Bureau, was a repudiation of Jacksonian politics as a federal initiative to resettle refugees, redistribute confiscated lands, levy taxes and regulate labour and the minimum wage. But new president Andrew Johnson hated it and believed ex-slaves should help themselves. Johnson ensured the southern planter class regained power and restored the Jacksonian myth of a minimal state and individualism. Thanks to more Lincoln legislation like the Homestead Act, which promised lots for working the soil, Americans looked west again. Native Americans were pacified in the 30 years following the civil war, and southerners were re-integrated into the federal army while Jim Crow laws were instituted across the south. The frontier, said late-1800s historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.”

Turner’s thesis held that America’s unique individualism gained strength “each time it touched a new frontier”. The frontier was not a physical border but a way of life. The American west encouraged an idea of political equality that seemed to go on forever, at least for white Anglo-Saxons. Turner ignored the removal of Native Americans and the invasion of Mexico and dismissed slavery as “an incident”. As America stood on the verge of global power, Turner’s ideas were expanded on by historians, economists, novelists and future presidents. Theodore Roosevelt celebrated frontier vigilantism and rough justice as “healthy for the community” while Woodrow Wilson justified the invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines as “a new revolution”. The myth of rugged individualism was used to define socialists and unionists as un-American. But it could only be maintained through ceaseless expansion.

Confederate and union flags flew together as the cotton-growing states enthusiastically supported the invasion of Cuba in search of new tariff-free markets. Grandin said that 1898 war transformed the south’s “Lost Cause” of slavery preservation into humanity’s cause for world freedom. President McKinley, who served the union in the civil war, wore a Confederate badge on his lapel in a victory tour of the south after Spain was defeated. The dormant Ku Klux Klan reemerged led by 1898 veterans who draped themselves in high ideals of reconciled national history. Resurgent racists formed “rifle clubs” which were fronts for white terrorist organisations and got away with lynchings, property confiscation, disenfranchisement, arbitrary prosecutions and chain gangs. Wilson won his second presidency in 1916 on the white southern vote, purging blacks from federal jobs, re-segregating Washington and legitimising the KKK.

America’s move across the Mexican frontier took a new form. Capital replaced settlers as American investors took over the Mexican economy dominating oil production, railroads, agriculture and ports. Thousands of Mexicans were deported from their homelands and forced to work on large plantations. American courts sanctioned vigilantes like the Texas Rangers who killed thousands more in mass executions in border regions. When the First World War came, the Rangers, now an official branch of law enforcement, defined anti-war activity as anything from organising a union to trying to vote, and rounded up and deported thousands of strikers. After the war the rejuvenated KKK fixated on many threats besides African Americans, including jazz, immorality, high taxes, and increasingly Mexicans. Border clans infiltrated church groups, school boards, police and national guards and suppressed the Mexican vote to reinforce minority rule. The New York Times worried it was “open season for shooting Mexicans” along the Rio Grande. America’s growing xenophobia was encoded in the 1924 Immigration Act which favoured Anglo-Saxon migrants. Though Mexico was exempted due to the need for its cheap labour force, white supremacists took control of the new US Border Patrol and turned it into a “vanguard of race vigilantism.”

Not everyone was intoxicated by America’s limitless power. Socialist editor of the New Republic, Walter Weyl, blamed the frontier for American ills such as racism, class domination and corruption. American individualism was doomed to defeat itself, said Weyl, “as the boundless opportunism which gave it birth became at last circumscribed.” The Great Depression seemed to do exactly that and Franklin Roosevelt said in 1932 that America had reached “its last frontier”. It was facing an economic and ecological disaster with intensive strip mining farming practices leading to dust storms, forcing many to leave the land. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the government’s biggest intervention since the Freedmen’s Bureau, resettling families, offering work, planting forests and expanding national parks. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace said what was needed was “not a new continent but a new state of heart”. But Roosevelt appeased southern planters by ensuring that rural workers, mostly black or Mexican, were excluded from laws allowing workers to unionise so agriculturalists would keep their supply of low wage farmworkers. Mexicans who weren’t illegal and subject to imprisonment were unprotected by labour laws. As one sugar planter said, “We used to own slaves, now we just rent them.”

With the coming of the Cold War, leaders moved the frontier to new geographies. Life magazine said the frontier was on the Elbe between East and West Germany. It was also between the two Koreas, the two Chinas and increasingly, up the Persian Gulf. Defence budgets soared as did profits for US capital. Truman integrated the military and the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation. Libertarians worried about expanding government bureaucracy and harked back to the Jacksonian “frontiersmen” who broke loose from the economic controls “that restricted their energies.” Nobel winning economist James Buchanan hailed the role of the frontier in breaking up collective identities of “the nanny state”.

Martin Luther King had different concerns. He believed rugged individualism was a faulty foundation for national identity and America was indeed socialist, only its wealth redistribution was upwards. “There is,” King said, “an individualism that destroys the individual.” He said the Vietnam War would exacerbate America’s worst sentiments including racism while diverting funds from progressive legislation. Sure enough, the war strengthened the position of southern segregationists in Congress who threatened to withhold military funding to veto civil rights laws. In 1967 King looked “beyond Vietnam” to see America’s “giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism” and a political culture where profit and property were more important than people. The LA Times attacked King for “linking these hard, complex problems” which would lead not to solutions, but “a deeper confusion”. Angry soldiers displayed Confederate symbols at every opportunity in South East Asia while at home pro-war demonstrations marched on Pittsburgh with a large Rebel flag, now the banner of those that felt “stabbed in the back” as America tried to wind back white supremacy. When Floridian William Calley was convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre, Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign transformed him from a war criminal to a cultural wedge to weaponise southern grievances. Even in the 21st century Iraqi war, the Rebel flag remained a banner of “free-floating resentment” as Grandin calls it, hanging in the tent of Bagram torturers.

Nixon opened the floodgates to polarise the electorate, and following presidents would help create a permanent state of disequilibrium. None expressed the right to American limitlessness better than Ronald Reagan. His energy policy was “more, more, more” when it came to oil and gas, but the sunny sheriff of Washington also removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof. His state department eschewed human rights in favour of individual rights which could be deployed on behalf of people trampled by tyranny but also act as a racist dog whistle. Reagan pushed through deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, and granted free speech rights to corporations. His Cold War revival and support for anti-Communist insurgents kept his base happy while his libertarian government chipped away at welfare, public education and weakened unions. “There are no limits to growth,” Reagan said. “Nothing is impossible.”

So it seemed to a triumphant America as the Berlin Wall and the USSR fell. Democrat Bill Clinton beat Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush in 1992 by channelling Reagan’s folksy optimism and outdoing the Republicans. Clinton supported free trade agreements, kept Wall Street unfenced, and increased military presence in the Gulf. While NAFTA destroyed Mexican small farms, American agribusiness kept their subsidies. Mexico’s vibrant dairy industry was destroyed as the country was overrun by American junk food, increasing obesity and malnutrition in tandem. Refugees eked out a living in the drug trade or migrated illegally across the border. They were joined by Central Americans whose economies were destroyed by American mining and biofuel corporations. NAFTA didn’t allow for freedom of movement of people and Clinton beefed up border operations with punitive immigration measures. Border patrol became the second largest law enforcement agency behind the FBI. Alarmed Republicans swung even further right spurred on by the growing power of Fox News, worried about undocumented migrants and “anchor babies”.

After 9/11 George W. Bush pledged to “extend the frontiers of freedom”. But Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters leaving America with huge military spending at a time of deep tax cuts. The long years of individualism led to increased racism and poverty, and war revanchism led to increasing fears around America’s borders. Violence against Latinos surged as vigilante groups like the Minutemen hunted for illegal immigrants in New York and other northern cities. “The border is no longer in the desert,” one Minuteman said, “It is all over America.” Backed by Fox News, they demanded a wall across the entire length of the border.

The rage of Nativists increased with the GFC followed by Barack Obama’s election. While the first black president packed “an emotional wallop”, his policies were moderate and he refused to think beyond 1990s-style Free Trade. Even that was too much for the growing Tea Party movement which merged with Minutemen in contempt for the political establishment while maintaining dominance over immigrants. The overseas wars raged on, and were mirrored at home by escalating massacres, school shootings and white supremacist rampages. The collapse of America’s military authority and the moral bankruptcy of the free trade growth model left Obama no outlet to rise above the polarisation. Nativists combined a “psychotropic hatred” of Obama with grievances over health care, taxes, war and especially migrants. As one border protest put it in 2014, “We can’t take care of others if we can’t take care of ourselves.” Two years later this community would vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

Trump won in 2016 by running a Jacksonian outsider campaign against the entire legacy of the postwar order. His border wall became a stick with which to demonise migrants. The wall offers the illusion of simultaneously recognising and refusing limits. Trumpism feeds resentment that America has been too generous while encouraging a petulant hedonism expressed in the right to own guns or “rolling coal” where truck engines are modified to burn extraordinary amounts of diesel as “a brazen show of American freedom” targetted against enemies like walkers, joggers, cyclists, and hybrid and Asian cars. America was becoming defined by what it hated.

According to Grandin, Trump’s point was not to build the wall, but to constantly announce it. The frontier is closed and Madison’s sphere can no longer be extended. America is at the end of its myth, but instead of a critical, resilient and progressive citizenry, it has ended up with conspiratorial nihilism, rejection of reason and dread of change. Life expectancy is declining while infant mortality is increasing. Only the super-rich are emancipated from the rules and still dream of new frontiers, with billionaires creating floating villages beyond government control and plans to industrialise space. Grandin says nothing will change until America accepts there are limits to growth. The choice he says, is between barbarism and social democracy. As Trump remains a good chance to win back power in 2024, it’s far from clear which way America will go.

William H. Seward: In praise of folly

William H. Seward, American Secretary of State 1861 to 1869. Library of Congress

In 1860 William Henry Seward was supposed to be president. It was the job the celebrated New York senator and former state governor had been training for all his life. Favourite to win the Republican nomination, the flamboyant Seward had cannoneers in place in his upstate home town ready to announce his successful candidacy and had prepared his victory speech to the Senate. But he was outmanoeuvred. At the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago the home state “rail splitter” Abraham Lincoln got the nomination. Devastated, it seemed Seward’s illustrious career was over. But his best days were still ahead.

Born in 1801, Seward had a wealthy and privileged childhood, thanks to his slaveholding father, as slavery was not fully abolished in New York until 1827. He graduated with first class honours from prestigious Union College, Schenectady, and trained for the bar, practising law with judge Elijah Miller. He married Miller’s brilliant daughter Frances, and she would be his intellectual equal for the rest of their lives. Another key partner was New York political boss Thurlow Weed, who would manage all Seward’s campaigns and become his closest ally. Seward was becoming bored with the law and was drawn towards politics. Weed shaped public opinion through his Albany Evening Journal which promoted Seward’s campaign for a seat in the New York Senate. Seward was elected in September 1830, aged 29. In 1834 Thurlow groomed Seward for New York governorship as the candidate of the new Whig Party, but he narrowly lost the ballot. “What a demon is this ambition,” the crushed Seward wrote as he returned to legal practice. He found success as a partner in a land-developing business until the Panic of 1837. The silver lining was that people blamed the Democrats for the financial crash. With Weed’s help, Seward succeeded in his second bid to be governor a year later. The youthful new Whig governor wanted to expand canals and railways, and wanted better schooling, including for the black and Irish population. He formed an unlikely alliance with Irish Catholic bishop of New York John Hughes to reform the school system, angering nativists who claimed Seward was “in league with the pope”. Having witnessed ill-treatment in the south, he was also strongly anti-slavery. The South branded him a “bigoted New England fanatic” when he refused to surrender fugitive slaves who arrived by ship in New York. Seward was re-elected in 1840 with a much smaller majority. Reading the signs, Seward decided not to run a third time and returned to law practice. He turned down an invite to be the new Liberal Party’s candidate for president in 1844. He defended black man William Freeman, charged with murder in Seward’s home town, Auburn. When Freeman was threatened with lynching, Seward vowed to remain his counsel “until death”. Even Weed doubted his wisdom but Seward persisted with a defence of insanity. The jury ignored his plea and sentenced Freeman to death. Seward was hated in Auburn, but the case made him famous nationally.

Seward first met Abraham Lincoln in 1848 after the Whigs nominated Mexican war hero and slaveholder Zachary Taylor for president. Both Seward and Lincoln spoke at a Boston rally. Seward demanded a Northern non-slaveowner be elected while Lincoln’s speech attacked Democrats. Seward said Lincoln’s speech was funny, but had pointedly avoided the slavery issue. They stayed the night at a hotel and had a long and thoughtful conversation. Lincoln admitted he was a “hayseed” and Seward had made him think about slavery issues.

Taylor’s election win helped Weed to convince the New York state legislature to put Seward in the Senate. Once elected, the celebrity Seward became part of Taylor’s inner circle. Weed remained worried about Seward’s outspoken support for black rights, as slavery bubbled to the top of the agenda. Seward was disappointed in the compromise of 1850 which admitted California to the union at the cost of strengthening the fugitive slave act, which he bitterly opposed. Then Taylor died suddenly and the new president was Seward’s New York political enemy, Millard Fillmore. The Whigs split north and south over the issue of slavery. They were badly beaten in the 1852 presidential election, and would never win another. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 was a further disappointment, allowing new territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.

A new political force emerged, the nativist Know Nothings who had not forgiven Seward for funding Catholic schools. Seward was up for re-election in 1855, and he needed all of Weed’s powers to cobble together a narrow majority in the state legislature relying on Seward’s anti-slavery credentials. Seward pledged allegiance to the new Republican Party in 1856 and considered running for president that year. Weed counselled against it saying the party was not yet organised enough to win. He was right. Eventual candidate John Fremont won much of the North but Southern votes helped elect Democrat James Buchanan. In 1857 Seward condemned the Supreme Court Dred Scott decision blaming Buchanan for the ruling which denied blacks basic rights. Six months later Seward made an even more incendiary speech saying that an “irrepressible conflict” between north and south was inevitable. He was proved right, but the polarising speech put off Republican moderates. They would eventually get behind Lincoln, who attracted wider notice in his spirited 1858 Illinois debates with Democrat Stephen Douglas.

As the 1860 election approached, Weed made a costly misstep. Certain that Seward had the nomination sewn up and fearful he might antagonise moderates further, Weed advised him to go on a European tour. Seward enjoyed meeting Queen Victoria, Palmerston, Gladstone, King Leopold of Belgium and the pope. He returned in early 1860 to tell the Senate only he could hold the union together. But other candidates had used his absence to advance their positions. There were three other strong contenders; Lincoln, Ohio governor Salmon Portland Chase and Missouri judge Edward Bates. Chase was so sure he would win, he did not even campaign. Bates was the oldest candidate at 64, but had a lifetime of distinguished service and was backed by the powerful Blair family of Maryland, who believed the westerner Bates alone could quell the southern secession movement.

There was also influential New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. Greeley long wanted political office but Weed and Seward offered no help. Greeley’s grudge against them increased in 1856 when they supported his rival, New York Times editor Henry Raymond, as governor of New York. In 1860 Greeley listed his grievances but Seward assumed his anger was temporary and ignored him.

In May 40,000 people attended the Republican Convention at the Chicago “Wigwam”. Seward had the most pledges and a change of rules strengthened his position as he now only needed a majority, not two-thirds of the delegates. Recognising Seward’s commanding lead, Lincoln’s strategy was to offend no-one. He courted conservative states worried that Seward’s candidacy might hurt their chances in state elections. Greeley added to the doubts, supporting Bates, and saying Seward could not carry key states including Pennsylvania. On the day of the ballot, Seward’s supporters chanted loudly when his name was read out. But Lincoln’s name got an even bigger hometown reception in this “trial of lungs”. In the first ballot Seward had 173½ votes, Lincoln 102, Chase 49 and Bates 48, with 233 needed to win. After two ballots it was Seward 184½ to Lincoln’s 181. The Blairs got behind Lincoln and he won on the third ballot.

Seward believed his shock defeat was “final and irrevocable” but pledged to support the Republican ticket. Weed went to Lincoln’s home in Springfield to plot strategy. Hopes of a win were increased as the Democrats split into northern and southern camps. Seward went west on tour to stump for Lincoln. Reporters marvelled at his ability to make speeches seem spontaneous. He met Lincoln in Springfield, one observer noting the president-elect was shy and awkward with a sense “the positions should be reserved.”

But they were not and on November 6 Weed’s organisational skills got New York’s pivotal 35 electoral college votes to ensure a Republican victory, causing seven southern states to secede from the Union. Lincoln’s thoughts turned to a cabinet and he offered Seward the chief role of secretary of state. Seward baulked. He wanted a cabinet of former Whigs which he could dominate. Lincoln needed a broader coalition and knew he could not allow Seward to “take the first trick”. Lincoln also offered cabinet positions to fellow candidates Chase (Treasury) and Bates (Attorney-General). Like Chase and Bates, Seward eventually accepted, telling Frances “I will try to save freedom and my country”. With the new administration unable to take office until March 4, Seward established secret contact with outgoing attorney-general Edwin Stanton who was exasperated with Buchanan’s refusal to take the crisis seriously.

On January 12, Seward made a major Senate speech defending the union but offering compromise with the south. The seven confederate states elected Jefferson Davis as president but Seward hoped his conciliatory speech would keep Virginia in the union. It only increased his enemies among hardline radical Republicans. Lincoln travelled to Washington in March after a long tour of northern states. Seward warned him of an assassination threat as they passed through southern-sympathising Baltimore, Maryland, a threat also recognised by detective Allan Pinkerton (whose unblinking eye logo earned his profession the nickname “private eye”). Lincoln travelled incognito through the night to Washington, though critics accused him of cowardice.

Seward attempted to control Lincoln on arrival, taking him to see Buchanan at the White House, congressmen at the Senate, and top general Winfield Scott, with dinner that first night at Seward’s house. Seward almost threatened to resign when he heard Chase would be treasurer. When a reporter asked Lincoln why he had chosen a cabinet of enemies and rivals, the president replied: “We needed the strongest men of the party in cabinet…I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” As Doris Goodwin wrote in Team of Rivals, Seward, Chase and Bates were indeed strong, but “the prairie lawyer from Springfield would emerge as the strongest of them all.”

But Lincoln’s inauguration speech leaned heavily on Seward and was conciliatory to the south, calling on “the mystic chords of memory” to touch “the better angels” of the nature of all Americans. It was well received in Virginia, though further south was more belligerent. Lincoln pledged to defend South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, while Seward secretly negotiated to surrender Sumter to keep Virginia in the union. The South attacked the fort on April 12, triggering the civil war and the departure of Virginia to the Confederacy. Secretary of State Seward had to convince Britain not to back the south to feed its Manchester and Leeds cotton factories. He threatened war but Lincoln softened his message to London. Nevertheless Washington would not tolerate the British breaking the southern blockade.

Like all Northerners, Seward was devastated after the Union’s shock defeat in the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. But like Lincoln, he believed that organisation and experience would improve matters and their firm resolve was critical in restoring hope. Lincoln and Seward spent much time together and enjoyed each other’s company telling stories and jokes, though Mary Lincoln resented the relationship and distrusted Seward. Others had similar views believing Lincoln was dominated by Seward, not realising the president was his own man, something Seward himself grew to appreciate. Nevertheless Seward’s influence was shown in late 1861 when a Union vessel intercepted the British ship Trent on the high seas and arrested two Confederate envoys. Though Lincoln and most Northerners feted the Union captain, Seward realised an outraged Britain was serious about retaliation. Not wanting a second war, Lincoln endorsed Seward’s diplomatic strategy of surrendering the envoys without apology.

The first war was going badly in 1862 as top union general George McClellan habitually overestimated Rebel forces and was “outgeneraled” by Robert E. Lee. Lincoln made the decision to emancipate the slaves, but in cabinet deferred to Seward who thought it might seem like an act of desperation. He advised Lincoln to wait for a Union victory. Though the September 1862 battle of Antietam in Maryland was as best a very bloody stalemate thanks to McClellan’s timidity, it forced Lee to abandon his invasion of the north. It gave Lincoln the excuse to issue the proclamation, again accepting a Seward proposal to maintain black freedom beyond the war. The Antietam “victory” was temporary with Lincoln sacking McClellan and Lee regaining the initiative with a crushing defeat of Union forces at Fredericksburg in December. Political recriminations followed with many Republicans scapegoating Seward as “a paralysing influence” on Lincoln and the army. A powerful Senate delegation was urged on by the scheming Treasurer Salmon Chase who was plotting his own path to presidency in 1864. Lincoln soothed the delegation by telling them that decisions were unanimously agreed, and forced an embarrassed Chase into a public defence of cabinet. Lincoln rejected the resignations of Seward and Chase and scored a massive political win, saving his friend Seward from an attack that was really directed at him while solidifying his own position as master of cabinet and the party.

But the war remained stalemated in the east in 1863 despite a great victory at Gettysburg. There was also trouble on the home front. Peace Democrats, called Copperheads by opponents, were furious after Congress passed the Conscription Act for a mandatory draft. The act was flawed as draftees could be exempted if they paid $300 or found a substitute. Poor Americans, many of them Irish, believed this proved it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”. In July New York erupted into five days of draft riots with over a thousand deaths. Irishmen threatened to burn down Seward’s home in Auburn, where Frances still lived. She hid treasured possessions as a precaution but told Seward she was more worried about “poor coloured people…they cannot protect themselves and few are willing to assist them.” The ever buoyant Seward correctly believed the riots would pass and the country would not support the Copperheads. The Peace Democrats lost out in elections that year.

As the 1864 presidential elections approached, many still believed that Seward was the real power behind the throne. Supporting the abolitionist Chase, newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison worried that a “vote for Old Abe” would see Seward returned as acting president. Seward knew that was absurd having accepted Lincoln’s control of the cabinet. Seward’s son and secretary Fred said the two men had “grown very close and unreserved”. Their mutual faith helped sustain them through attacks from radicals and conservatives. Western hero Ulysses Grant came east to lead the attack against Lee’s forces unleashing a hideous struggle with 86,000 casualties in seven weeks but the front stalled in front of Richmond. Despite the poor battle news and Chase’s relentless backstabbing, Lincoln regained the Republican presidential nomination on June 7. The favourite for vice president had been New Yorker Daniel Dickinson but if nominated Seward would have had to resign because of the unwritten rule that two significant posts could not be allocated to one state. Weed and Seward threw their support behind Tennessee governor Andrew Johnson. No-one understood how fatal that decision would become.

Chase was forced out of cabinet, and the inner sanctum was Lincoln, Seward and Edwin Stanton, Buchanan’s attorney-general now turned Lincoln’s indefatigable war secretary. “The two S’s” developed an understanding to work together to support Lincoln to win the war and along with Chase’s Treasury replacement William Fessenden, were “the stronger half of the cabinet” according to Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay. Yet Lincoln’s hopes of winning a second term remained in the balance until September when Sherman captured Atlanta. Afterwards Seward paid tribute to the “wisdom and energy of the war administration” and said nothing was more important than Lincoln’s re-election. “If we do this, the rebellion will perish,” he said. The Democrat candidate was Lincoln’s former top general George McClellan but with the North finally winning the war, the opposition looked foolish for demanding peace. On November 8 Lincoln won all but three states though the popular vote was much closer. Soldiers voted overwhelmingly for their commander-in-chief. “To them he really was Father Abraham,” one corporal noted. Seward said Lincoln would take his place alongside Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and Jackson “among the benefactors of the human race”.

The North celebrated in early April 1865 when Rebel capital Richmond fell. But Seward could not join the celebrations, having been almost killed in a carriage accident when a horse bolted. He caught his heel on the carriage when jumping off, smashing his face on the pavement. Doctors diagnosed a broken jaw and a badly dislocated shoulder. When his condition worsened with fever, Lincoln rushed to his bedside. Wife Frances said Seward looked bad, but his mind was “perfectly clear”. As the secretary of state continued his painful recovery, the war ended with the surrender at Appomattox on April 9. Stanton woke Seward up to tell him the news. “You have made me cry for the first time in my life,” Seward told him.

Though Seward was still incapacitated five days later, Lincoln was in high good humour at a Good Friday cabinet meeting. “Didn’t our chief look grand today?” Stanton asked a colleague afterwards. Even Mary had never seen her husband so cheerful as they prepared to attend Ford’s Theatre that night. Meanwhile, Confederate-supporting actor John Wilkes Booth met with three conspirators to plot an audacious assassination of Lincoln, Seward and vice president Johnson. George Atzerodt, assigned to kill Johnson, became drunk and wandered off but fellow conspirator Lewis Powell came closer in his attempt to kill Seward.

Seward’s three-storey house was full of people that night. The bed-ridden secretary of state was on the mend and listened with pleasure at Fred’s account of the cabinet meeting. Seward’s daughter Fanny noted he fell asleep around 10pm and she turned down his lamps and kept a bedside vigil. Powell knocked on the front door and told a servant he had medicine for Seward. He pushed past the servant and met Fred on the stairs. Fred refused to let him pass. When it seemed the intruder was about to leave, he lunged at Fred with a revolver and pulled the trigger. It misfired but Powell savagely brought the gun down on Fred’s head, crushing his skull and leaving him unconscious. A soldier that Stanton had assigned to Seward’s bedroom heard the commotion on the stairs. As the soldier opened the door, Powell slashed him with a knife and rushed towards Seward. Fanny begged him not to kill her father. Seward woke to see Powell plunge the knife into his neck and face, knocking him to the floor and severing his cheek. Fanny’s screams brought another brother Gus into the room. Powell struck Gus on the forehead and hand though Gus and the injured soldier managed to pull the attacker away. Powell ran down the stairs, stabbing an incoming State Department messenger, before fleeing into the night.

Dr Tullio Verdi was first to tend to Seward and assumed his jugular was cut. However the knife was deflected by the metal contraption holding the patient’s broken jaw. Bizarrely, the carriage accident had saved his life. No sooner had Verdi dealt with Seward when Frances directed the doctor to Fred, who looked even closer to death. He then attended to the soldier and asked Frances, “any more?” Yes, she replied and took him to the messenger who suffered a deep gash near the spine. “All this the work of one man!” gasped Verdi. By now word spread that assassins had also attacked Lincoln. Booth used his knowledge of Ford’s to locate him in the state box. He shot from behind, jumped to the stage and escaped while shouting “Sic semper tyrannis”, Virginia’s motto, meaning thus always to tyrants.

Crowds were massing in the street. Despite fears for his own life, Stanton went to Seward’s and was shocked by the bloody scene. He then went to a house next to Ford’s where Lincoln lay dying, placed diagonally across a bed to accommodate his large frame. Stanton took control, taking witness testimony and orchestrating the search for the murderers. By the time Lincoln died at 7:22am on Saturday, newspapers had identified Booth as the assassin. Doctors withheld the news from Seward fearing the shock would kill him. On Easter Sunday Seward looked out the window to see flags at half mast. “He gazed a while,” a witness said, “then turning to his attendant, he announced. ‘The president is dead’.” The attendant denied it but Seward said in tears, “if he had been alive, he would have been the first to call on me.” Lincoln’s secretary John Hay said rarely was there a friendship in government “so absolute and sincere as that which existed between those two magnanimous spirits.”

Seward, seated second left, signs the Alaska Treaty of Cessation on March 30, 1867. Son Fred is farthest right.

Booth was killed in a shoot-out and Powell was caught and hanged. Against all odds, Seward and Fred both made full recoveries but the night of family horrors took its toll on Frances Seward. She collapsed and died barely six weeks later. Though disconsolate, Seward remained secretary of state for the full term of Johnson’s presidency. Seward failed to mediate the impeached union Democrat Johnson in his struggles against a Radical Republican Congress but he took great pride in what was originally lampooned as Seward’s Folly, the $7 million purchase of “Icebox” Alaska from Russia. Others would not see the sparsely populated 1.5 million sq km territory’s worth until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896. Seward was long dead by then. After retiring when Grant became president in 1869, he travelled the world accompanied by the faithful Fred. Seward died peacefully in 1872, aged 71, surrounded by family. His deathbed advice was “Love one another”. Pallbearer Thurlow Weed wept bitterly as his great friend was laid to rest at Auburn’s Fort Hill cemetery. On Seward’s gravestone was written “he was faithful”, his final words to the jury in the 1846 William Freeman case. Seward would have been delighted that fellow great abolitionist Harriet Tubman was buried here in 1913. Both were deeply committed to political equality and liberty.

Lutwyche Cemetery

I decided this week to cast my Brisbane city council vote in advance of polling day and that meant a long walk to the pre-poll office in Kedron Heights. It was an excuse to go somewhere new in my neighbourhood. I’d often passed Lutwyche Cemetery while driving up Gympie Rd but had never visited it. Though the graveyard has had no interments in three decades and is mostly ignored apart from the occasional dog walker, it remains a beautiful place, rich in history.

The cemetery and nearby suburb are named for 19th century politician and judge Alfred Lutwyche. Lutwyche was a NSW attorney-general who became Queensland’s first resident judge after it became a colony in 1859. He became the colony’s first supreme court judge two years later. Lutwyche lived in a grand house on Nelson St in my own next door suburb of Wooloowin and died in 1880. He was buried in St Andrew’s Anglican churchyard, though the cemetery named for him had just opened. Brisbane Cemetery (now Toowong Cemetery) had opened a few years earlier, but was already overcrowded and the growing city needed a second cemetery. In 1877 the Courier reported a council debate where “citizens of the village of Lutwyche” were lobbying for a public hall and reading room, and there was also “a sum on the estimates for a cemetery at Lutwyche”. Building began in the new year and by April the Church of England portion was consecrated. Five-year-old Walter Silcock was the first burial on August 4 that year.

During the Second World War, authorities built a War Graves section to bury 389 soldiers, both identified and unidentified. The remains of nine servicemen from the First World War were also moved to this section. The Imperial War Graves Commission erected the Cross of Sacrifice in 1950 using Helidon freestone.

The most famous of the First World War graves is William Edward Sing’s. Billy Sing was a sniper at Gallipoli who killed up to 300 Turkish soldiers. Born in Clermont to an English mother, he suffered racial prejudice on account of his Chinese father. He kept his head down, becoming a stockman and became an expert shooter. Recruiters agonised over his “unsuitable background” before accepting him into the army in 1914, aged 30. The rugged Gallipoli terrain was made for snipers such as Sing whose spotter was the later best-selling author Ion Idriess, and he quickly became deadly. The Turks assigned their best marksman against him in vain. Fellow soldiers witnessing Sing’s marksmanship dubbed him “The Assassin”. Later in the war he moved to the western front where he was not as effective, and was wounded in the trenches before gas exposure ended his military career. Suffering from injuries, he failed at farming and mining and remained in poverty after the war. He died in obscurity in Brisbane in 1943. This large memorial was unveiled for him at Lutwyche in 2016.

James Brennan was a little known Queensland politician who served in turbulent times. Brennan was born in Scotland and emigrated to Australia in his 20s, taking up mining at Gympie. He later worked for a meat export company in Brisbane and Townsville, and from 1902 managed a Rockhampton meatworks. In 1907 he stood for election as a Kidstonite for the seat of North Rockhampton. Former Premier William Kidston had left the Labour Party and formed his own party with support from moderates including fellow Rockhampton man Brennan. The election left Kidston as a minority premier but within a year he merged with Robert Philp’s conservatives, Philp briefly replacing him as premier. Brennan joined their new Liberal Party which held government under Kidston and later Digby Denham. Brennan resigned in 1912 when the seat of Rockhampton North was abolished. On retirement he moved to Wooloowin. He was buried here in 1917 next to his son William who died at Gallipoli.

Charles Moffatt Jenkinson (1865–1954) was a political contemporary of Brennan. Born in Birmingham, England in 1865, Jenkinson emigrated to Australia in 1883 and worked as a sports journalist before becoming proprietor at the South Brisbane Herald. In 1902 he was elected to Wide Bay as an opposition MP and year later moved to the seat of Fassifern. Though dismissed as a “sanctimonious job hunter” by the Brisbane Worker, he refused ministerial office. The highlight of his parliamentary career was an eight-hour filibuster, though he later voted for time limits to deny this expedient to others. In 1912 he became a Brisbane city alderman and was elected mayor in 1914. He immediately set out his vision for a new city hall at Albert Square (now King George Sq) and the foundation stone was laid in 1917. Jenkinson retired from council in 1916 and helped establish the large wartime Queensland Patriotic Fund for army wives and children. He returned to the Herald and in 1922 was described as “one of the regulars at Ascot and Albion Park racecourses”. He died aged 94 in 1954.

One of Lutwyche’s better known graves belongs to musician Harold “Buddy” Williams. Country and western music emerged out of the Appalachian mountains in the 1920s and singers like Jimmie Rodgers became popular with the rise of radio. Born in Sydney in 1918, the young Williams heard Rodgers’ music at a Dorrigo dairy farm and started busking illegally on the NSW North Coast as “the Clarence River Yodeller”. He enlisted in the Second World War and was seriously wounded at the battle of Balikpapan in Borneo. After the war Williams toured with the rodeo circuit and took his own variety show across Australia. He achieved lasting fame when fan Bert Newton had him on his TV show in the 1970s. Williams died of cancer in 1986. He was regarded as Australia’s first country star influencing those who followed including Slim Dusty. Williams was buried next to his daughter Donita who was killed in a traffic accident in Scottsdale, Tasmania in 1948, aged just 21 months. His grave contains a drawing of a guitar and words from his song Beyond the Setting Sun.

Buried in the Catholic portion is Patrick Short, Queensland’s first native-born police commissioner. His Irish parents Patrick and Mary Keogh emigrated to Ipswich in 1855. Patrick senior ran an engineering and blacksmith’s works though he died in 1862 when his son was three. Starting in the building trade, Patrick junior worked in south-west Queensland before joining the police force in 1878 and was posted to St George. He married Irish Catholic Eleanor Butler in 1880 at Roma. There were rumours that year that members of the Kelly gang had escaped Victoria so Short was assigned to border patrol. Though talk persists to modern times that Steve Hart and Dan Kelly lived out their lives in southern Queensland, Short found no trace of them and went back to regular duties. In almost half a century of service, he rose through the ranks becoming chief inspector in 1916 and commissioner five years later. He retired to Clayfield in 1925. A horse lover, Scott helped develop the police stud at Springsure and like Jenkinson, was often found at Brisbane racecourses. He died in 1941, aged 81.

Though the war had ended, there was tragedy on February 19, 1946 when an RAAF Lincoln bomber crashed at Amberley Airport near Ipswich killing 16 airmen. The plane was flying RAAF men home from Laverton near Melbourne but overshot the landing strip. Witnesses said the pilot retracted the under-carriage and attempted to lift the plane for a second circuit but it failed to respond and crashed before bursting into flames. The sixteen are buried together at Lutwyche. “Individual identification was not possible”, according to the grave plaque.

Lieutenant George Witton was a Boer War veteran, and a co-accused of Harry “Breaker” Morant. Witton was born to a Warrnambool, Victoria farming family in 1874. When the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, patriotic Australian colonies including Victoria rushed to send troops to fight in the conflict on the side of the British Empire. Witton served as a gunner before the war before enlisting in the Victorian Imperial Bushmen. In South Africa in 1901 he was recruited for the Bushveldt Carbineers, an irregular mounted infantry regiment, reporting to fellow lieutenant Morant. After the Boers murdered a captured British officer, Morant and another lieutenant Peter Handcock found Boer soldier Floris Visser with the murdered officer’s papers. Though Witton objected, they killed Visser after a de facto court-martial. That was one of six “disgraceful incidents” including the shooting of six surrendered Afrikaners cited in a letter signed by 15 Carbineers, which led to charges of several officers. Morant, Handcock and Witton were all charged with Visser’s killing. Morant infamously testified they shot him under “rule 303” referring to the 0.303 inch cartridge used in British Army rifles. Morant and Handcock were sentenced to death for murder. Witton was convicted of manslaughter and released in 1904 after Australian government intervention. In later life he was a succesful pastoralist and director of a Biggenden cheese factory. He died of a heart attack, aged 68, in 1942. He published his version of events in Scapegoats of the Empire: the true story of Breaker Morant’s Bushveldt Carbineers in 1904, though the book was hard to get, with many believing it was deliberately suppressed. In 2010, the British Government rejected a petition to review of the convictions of Morant, Handcock and Witton.