Alexei Navalny addresses a rally in St Petersburg 2012. Photo: public domain
In the opening scene of 2022 Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher asked Alexei Navalny the question now on many people’s lips. “If you are killed what message do you leave behind to the Russian people?” Roher knew Navalny wouldn’t like the question and indeed he was annoyed, complaining Roher is “making a movie for the case of his death” and later saying Roher would release the film “when he (Navalny) got whacked”. Navalny said he was ready to answer the question, “but please let it be another movie, movie number two” Let’s make a thriller out of this movie, said Navalny, “and in the case I would be killed, let’s make a boring movie of memory.” It’s a stunning and prophetic scene as I watched the documentary again this week, now updated with an opening black title saying “Alexei Anatolyvich Navalny 4th June 1976 – 16th February 2024” to mark his suspicious death in Russian custody this month, aged 47.
The documentary was filmed in the winter of 2020-2021 and Roher interspersed his interview with shots of Navalny in snowy Germany preparing to come back to Russia after his poisoning in 2020. On camera Navalny says he has bought a return ticket to Moscow on a flight with Pobeda, Aeroflot’s low cost subsidiary. There is a scene aboard the plane, where a gaggle of iphone-wielding journalists asks him if he feels like a hero. He responded, “I feel like a citizen of Russia who has every right to go home.”
The film switches back to a political rally three years earlier when the “handsome 41-year-old lawyer” Navalny accuses Putin’s regime of being corrupt thieves. Navalny was the face of the opposition in a country where opposition was, and is, not tolerated. Putin had banned him from running in the 2018 election and Navalny knew he had to get organised. He hammered Putin on Russia’s poor life expectancy and promised to end expensive wars in Syria and Ukraine. He was banned from state media, newspapers and conducting rallies but built his own outreach organisation with the help of wife Yulia, a small group of friends, and the power of the Internet. On Youtube Navalny exposed Putin’s own enormous personal wealth and his hidden island mansion near the Finnish border.
Such activities courted danger. In 2017 unknown assailants splashed dye in his face. There was a similar attack two years later when someone splashed a toxic liquid in his face. In December 2019 police raided Navalny’s office and confiscated papers. He was arrested but believed fame would save his life, later admitting he was “very wrong”. Two days before the 2020 poisoning he was in Novosibirsk to talk about corruption and where he filmed in front of apartments he called a “Russian ghetto”. He expected resistance and was surprised when there was no official reaction. However on the way home, he said, “I died”. The plane from Tomsk made an emergency landing in Omsk and he was rushed to hospital where government doctors claimed he had a “metabolic disorder”. Yulia arranged for a German air ambulance to transfer him but initially doctors would not release him, to allow time for the poison leave his system. Still unconscious, he was finally transferred to Berlin where German officials confirmed he was poisoned with a Novichok-like agent.
The Vienna-based Bulgarian Christo Grozev, chief investigator of investigative news organisation Bellingcat, said the Novichok nerve agent was Putin’s “signature poison” against political opponents and had been used in the Salisbury poisoning two years earlier. Although deadly, the signs wear off quickly leaving it to look like a natural death. Though Bellingcat had made its reputation on digital journalism using data brokers on the dark web to access confidential information, Grozev initially did not believe they could investigate a crime committed in Siberia without access to CCTV footage or official sources. Grozev was also suspicious of Navalny’s early flirtation with far-right nationalists though Navalry claimed he was forced to join “a broad coalition” to fight the regime. Navalny told Froher that politics in Russia would remain primitive while people fought for human rights, freedom of speech and fair elections.
With no other media prepared to investigate, Bellingcat finally took on the case. They knew that Novichok was produced at Moscow’s Signal Institute which had a front as a R&D centre for sports nutrition drinks. Grozev bought the phone records for the head of Signal and found that just before the poisoning he spoke to a FSB doctor and other operatives who travelled to Novosibirsk around the same time as Navalny. Grozev immediately contacted Navalny to tell him the news.
Navalny, now recuperating in a Black Forest village, was wary of Grozev but agreed to meet him. Grozev told him the FSB had been planning to kill him since 2017 and an elite team had been tracking him for three years. They decided to share their data with CNN, El Pais and Der Spiegel. As they worked towards a publication date, they decided to try to trap the suspects with prank calls. “Hi this is Navalny, you may remember me from trying to kill me…” Unsurprisingly the first few victims hung up. Then they changed tack, pretending to be a top government aide demanding information about why “things did not work out in Tomsk”. One victim recognised Navalny’s voice and hung up. They tried again with an FSB scientist Konstantin Kudryavtsev who “spilled the whole story”. To the stunned reaction of Navalny’s team, Kudryavtsev regarded it as a “job well done” and the flight emergency landing and the “textbook” antidote administered by a medic saved Navalny’s life. An overenthusiastic Grozev believed Navalny would become president after this. On December 14, 2020 international media published Navalny and Grozev’s findings, though not the Kudryavtsev revelations. Navalny told CNN he wanted to return to Russia to stop “this group of killers”. Russian state media rushed to condemn him but it did mean they were talking about him.
On December 17, Navalny watched Putin answer questions about “that patient” (he never referred to Navalny by name), intimating he was receiving support from the CIA. “That doesn’t mean he should be poisoned (but) who cares about him?” Putin said, laughing. Four days later Navalny released the recording of the Kudryavtsev call and the video got one million views in the first hour. CNN said the video “punched a giant hole in the Kremlin’s narrative”.
Finally on January 17, 2021 Navalny was well enough to return home. A huge crowd attended Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport in anticipation of his arrival. “He is the symbol of Russian freedom,” said one woman. As the plane approached Moscow, police became more violent with mass arrests of protesters and journalists live on air. The captain told passengers they are not allowed to land at Vnukovo due to “technical issues on the ground”. Navalny shouts out, “I would like to apologise to everyone” to much laughter. The plane landed instead at Sheremetyevo Airport. Navalny disembarks, his last moments of freedom surrounded by a media scrum. “Truth is on my side and so is the law,” he told them. At passport control he was greeted by a posse of police officers and told to come with them. When Navalny demanded his lawyer come with him, an officer said that if he refused to come, they would use force. His wife kissed him goodbye and he headed off surrounded by police. After Yulia emerged from passport control, supporters in the terminal building chanted her name. “They are so scared of Alexei they had to lock down everything,” she told media. “Alexei was not afraid and neither am I.” Amid footage of a large protest in Moscow which police broke up, the film moves to its conclusion with a title saying Russia declared Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation an extremist organisation and Navalny “narrowly survived hunger strike” at Pokrol Penal Colony. He was sentenced 11 and a half years for fraud before a Russian court extended his sentence by 19 years in August 2023. “I perfectly understand that, like many political prisoners, I am sitting on a life sentence,” Navalny said after the show trial. “Where life is measured by the term of my life or the term of life of this regime.”
Sadly he was proved right the latter way. At the end of the documentary Froher repeated his question about what message he would leave behind. “(Do) not give up,” Navalny responded. He said that his priority as president would have been to prevent “this damn circle” of an authoritarian regime. Instead Russia descends into further circles of hell and Putin’s bloody war with Ukraine showing no sign of ending. Navalny believed his death would show how strong his movement was. With his funeral set for tomorrow, now is the time for the world to prove it. Let Navalny “movie number two” begin.
“Dr. Hughes, Bishop of New York / drawn on stone by Hoffmann from a daguerrotype.” Photo: Library of Congress
The extraordinary priesthood of Irishman John Hughes spanned almost 40 years through the entire time of the rise of American nativism. A quarter century of that time was as bishop of New York, the fastest growing city at a time of mass Irish Catholic immigration. Told time after time that the United States was a Protestant country, Hughes did more than most to prove it otherwise. While most Catholic bishops in America quietly accepted the status quo, Hughes took an aggressive stance, and he returned in kind what the nativists gave out, earning the enduring love of his parishioners. Hughes had long eliminated his Irish brogue and resembled more a well-tailored fighter than a clergyman, as biographer Richard Shaw said in Dagger John: the Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York.
John Joseph Hughes was born in 1797 near Augher, County Tyrone. His parents Patrick and Margaret Hughes were small Catholic farmers who raised their four sons and three daughters in a mainly Protestant area. When third son John expressed a desire to join the priesthood, they allowed him to study until the age of 17 when a poor year on the farm forced him to return home and be apprenticed at Favour Royal estate to study horticulture.
After two children died, Patrick emigrated to America and rented a farm in Pennsylvania. He sent word back to Ireland and John arrived in America with the family in 1817. Hughes believed he was leaving the petty persecution of Catholics behind him. He remained in Baltimore with one of his brothers and used his gardening experience to get a job on a plantation. He was released at the end of the planting season and found jobs in Emmitsburg, Maryland, 30 miles from where his family lived.
Outside Emmitsburg was Mount St Mary’s Catholic college and seminary run by French priests John Dubois and Simon Brute. Hughes told them of his desire to become a priest but the school was overcrowded and Dubois turned him down. Hughes became a labourer in a nearby Catholic convent where he befriended the mother superior who supported his case to be admitted to Mount St Mary’s. Dubois finally agreed to hire him as a gardener and overseer of the college’s slaves in return for accommodation and occasional tutoring. Hughes kept his distaste of slavery to himself and eagerly took on the new job, studying at every opportunity.
A year later Dubois noticed the potential that the mother superior saw in Hughes and enrolled him as a full student in 1820, aged 23, ten years older than his classmates. Hughes was subject to teasing from students and treated with apprehension by teachers who were barely older than him. He had to look after the gardens and the slaves but his iron will made him stick at his studies. Under the tutelage of Dubois and Brute, he gradually transformed himself into a clerical leader at the school. In 1824 a new school building was destroyed by fire, sending the school into debt. Hughes and other seniors went on begging tours during summer recess, where he impressed anti-Catholics with the forceful defence of his religion.
In 1825 he was appointed deacon in Philadelphia where he found the church at war with parishioners. Belligerent Irish-born octogenarian bishop Henry Conwell constantly feuded with church lay trustees especially after he sacked controversial priest William Hogan. Trustees backed Hogan and Hughes arrived in Philadelphia to find his parishioners hated the bishop. Augustinian priest Michael Hurley encouraged Hughes to sermonise on real world events. When Conwell heard one of the young man’s sermons, he was impressed and took him on a tour of the diocese. The Armagh-born Conwell took a shine to the man from the neighbouring county and began to see him as a future bishop. After completing final studies at Mount St Mary’s he was ordained for the priesthood in Philadelphia in 1827, waved off by John Dubois, newly appointed as bishop of New York.
It was a difficult start to Hughes’s career as the internal war threatened to tear the church apart. When the irascible Conwell asked priests to back him sacking another popular rebel priest William Harold, Hughes initially declined to give support claiming he was new in the city but was pressured to give in. Conwell appointed Hughes parish priest of the cathedral of St Mary’s in place of Harold, but trustees backed Harold and would not pay the salary of Hughes or his assistant. Hughes worked on his own popularity as his confidence in his abilities grew. On Simon Brute’s advice, Hughes hit back saying that because parishioners would not fulfil their obligations, he and his assistant would return to their old parish, leaving St Mary’s without priests.
When reports reached the Vatican, Conwell was summoned to Rome while Harold was banished from Philadelphia despite appealing to US president John Quincy Adams. In 1830 Rome appointed Francis Kenrick coadjutor bishop to replace the ancient Conwell. Hughes put his head down and got on with administering to his flock. But he began defending Catholicism against attacks in the press, even anonymously rewriting the plot of an anti-Catholic fictional book. In 1829 he protested in his own name against an American article against Irish Catholic Emancipation just won by O’Connell. Hughes’s reputation as a preacher grew steadily and he was invited to speak in New York. He began to write incognito for New York’s paper the Protestant signing his missives “Cranmer”. The apparent anti-Catholic articles were popular but after a few months Cranmer told the opposition press he was Catholic and denounced the sponsors of the Protestant as “clerical scum”. The fight became ugly as Protestants accused a New York priest of being Cranmer and that priest hit back at the accusation, beginning an intra-Catholic spat. Hughes eventually backed off when reproved by his new bishop, Kenrick.
Though Kenrick and Hughes were never close, they respected each other and Hughes filled in for him when he became ill. Conwell was still making trouble and allied himself with the trustees of St Mary’s against Kenrick. Kenrick ordered Hughes to begin the task of building a new cathedral. With characteristic energy Hughes secured a vacant lot, an architect, and the money of a wealthy businessman who disliked trusteeism. He built St John’s which was consecrated in 1831. But Hughes was disgusted with Kenrick when the bishop accepted a demotion from Conwell, despite lacking authority to do so. Kenrick also backed away from using St John’s as his new cathedral. Hughes invited New York Vicar General John Power and the mayor of Philadelphia for the grand opening. Power used his sermon to attack Catholic enemies and the press blamed Hughes for the speech. When the Protestant eminence Rev John Breckenridge took Hughes to task, he ended up giving him widespread fame.
Like Hughes, Breckenridge was an attack dog for his religion, smearing Catholics at every opportunity in the press. When he offered to debate Catholic clerics, Hughes took the bait. Breckenridge wanted an oral debate but Hughes insisted it be conducted through the newspapers as he would not become a “theological gladiator for the amusement of an idle promiscuous, curious multitude.” With no Catholic papers to champion Hughes, he created his own, the Catholic Herald. The newspaper and the debate both began in January 1833. Hughes and Breckenridge argued over whether Jesus wanted his church to be Catholic or Protestant with, according to Shaw, a mixture of “heavy dogma and even heavier insults”. The debate raged on for months though neither man converted anyone to his cause.
When Breckenridge heard Hughes was going to give a lecture he decided to end the stalemate and take him on in person. Bishop Kenrick disapproved of the debate and forbade the Herald from covering it. Breckenridge accused Hughes of being a foreigner, compared Catholicism to malaria, and blamed it for the Inquisition and the backward state of South America. Hughes hit out at English anti-Catholic laws, which he escaped and had become an American “by choice”. When Breckenridge fumed about hypothetical Roman influence, Hughes pointed to real and recent nativist attacks such as Samuel Morse’s influential anti-Catholic polemic and Boston mobs burning down a convent. Lives were jeopardised, he said, for the crime of worshipping God “according to the dictates of conscience”. The scrapper Hughes won the debate, as one contemporary noted, not by being superior, but by dragging his adversary down to his level. When the oral and written debates were put into book form with the approval of both men, Catholics rushed out to buy it. Hughes became a household name across America.
Hughes was attracting attention in Rome. The Vatican plan to make him coadjutor bishop to his old boss Dubois in New York was leaked to the press, and in 1837 American bishops confirmed the plan. After 12 years in Philadelphia, Hughes, aged 40, was moving to America’s largest city. His appointment was not popular. New York Catholics had wanted the city’s Vicar General John Power to get the job when Dubois was originally appointed and now Power missed out a second time. Catholic editor of the powerful New York Herald James Gordon Bennett described Hughes’s consecration as bishop in front of the city’s poverty-stricken Irish as “pushing gold rings through pigs’ noses.” Hughes ignored Bennett and got to work, determined to build a new Catholic college and seminary in the growing metropolis. Though Dubois suffered several strokes he jealously kept leadership decisions to himself. Hughes could see the diocese heading towards disaster. As in Philadelphia he argued with trustees. When trustees failed to apologise for sacking a Dubois-appointed priest, Hughes threatened to shut down the cathedral parish and withdraw his priests. The trustees backed down, and Hughes began to assume control, though Dubois remained a thorn. The Vatican finally ordered Dubois to stand down, making it look like it was his own decision. In his three remaining years of retirement Dubois never forgave his successor, always calling him Mr Hughes.
Hughes consolidated power, publishing his edicts in the Freeman’s Journal, keeping Power as his Vicar General and purchasing a site near Harlem that became Fordham University. In October 1839 he travelled to Europe to find money to pay for his new prize. He met new pope Gregory XVI in Rome, the missionary-minded Leopoldine Society in Vienna, and convinced Parisian Sacred Heart nuns to open a school in New York. In London, he met Daniel O’Connell, whom he admired greatly, yet he took him to task over his criticism of slavery in America. Finally after an absence of 23 years, he returned to Ireland where he found “the stripes of their martyrdom were everywhere visible.”
Hughes returned to America with a new sense of purpose and a new war to face against nativists. Education in Manhattan was controlled by the unelected Public Schools Society which managed most government funding. They opposed funding for Catholic schools and ensured schools sung Protestant hymns and read from Protestant bibles while textbooks had an anti-Catholic bias. Irish and German Catholics kept their children away from schools and thousands of immigrant children roamed the streets. New York Whig governor William Seward wanted to change this situation, but Democrat Irish voters ignored him. When Hughes returned to New York, he demanded a “just proportion” of common school funds and began correspondence with Seward. The two men began a lifetime friendship.
While Seward urged reform of the school system, Hughes began to look at separate Catholic education. Hughes battled with the Public Schools Society in debates and in the New York capitol at Albany, using his caustic sense of humour to humiliate dour opponents. With elections coming, he endorsed independent candidates demanding change. Nativists were outraged but so were Democrats. Bennett dismissed him as the “Bishop of Blarneyopolis” and “Dubois’s gardener”. Though the Democrats won the election, those that opposed Hughes were voted out, and the bishop gained the reputation as an Irish Machiavelli, one ex-mayor calling him “Generalissimo”. Hughes privately admitted he went right to the edge of his “episcopal sphere”. Seward pledged to support Hughes’s changes to the school system in 1842 and later that year the first elected board of education ended the Public School Society’s monopoly. Yet in the moment of his greatest success, Hughes turned his back on public education and began creating his own Catholic schools, entrenching the idea of Catholic ghettohood within America.
In his letters Hughes signed himself off as✝️John. One non-Catholic correspondent interpreted the episcopal signature as “Dagger John”. The appropriately belligerent nickname stuck. Bishop Dubois finally died in 1842 and churlish Dagger John refused to lead the eulogies, claiming he did not know him well enough. It was not his finest hour, but there was no longer any doubt who was in control in New York. He travelled to Ireland in 1843 with Whig powerbroker Thurlow Weed and attended one of O’Connell’s monster meetings. He went on to Belgium where he was unsuccessful in getting financial help for his heavily indebted diocese and returned to America without funds.
Hughes walked into more Nativist resentment which became a political issue in the 1844 election. Nativist James Harper was elected city mayor and with violence on the rise, Hughes employed 3000 armed Catholics to guard church property. Religious rioting convulsed his old city of Philadelphia and churches were torched. Annoyed that Bishop Kenrick had fled the city, Hughes issued a blunt warning to Harper. “If a single Catholic Church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow”. The Nativist press were infuriated and some even blamed Hughes for the Philadelphia violence. Nevertheless, it was enough for Harper to call off a Nativist rally planned for New York.
Hughes’ pugilism made him the darling of the Catholic people but the hierarchy preferred the conservative Kenrick, and they made him the new archbishop of Baltimore. Hughes quietened down in 1845 and he returned again to England, Ireland and France, “shopping for religious personnel”. He won commitments from the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers to set up in New York and convinced French Jesuits to take over Fordham. He revisited his birthplace, conducting mass at Clogher as famine began to break out. Within two years hundreds of thousands of Irish would land on Hughes’ shore.
He returned to America as the Mexican War broke out and fielded an unusual question from president Polk: Could the church supply Catholic chaplains for the army? Yes it could, Hughes replied, and a grateful Polk invited Hughes to travel to Mexico to alleviate their fears that America wanted to destroy their religion. However the Nativist press looked in horror at this suggestion and Polk backed off.
Between 1840 and 1860 three million people emigrated to America, and 500,000 of them remained in New York, most of them Irish and destitute, congregating in crime-ridden slums of the Five Points. Numbers increased more still during the Famine, about 100,000 every year. This poverty-stricken invasion increased Nativist fears. Though the immigrants were nominally Catholic, Hughes believed they barely knew the rudiments of their faith, though “not by any wilful apostasy”. His job was to “knead them into one dough” and he organised financial deposits to Ireland, sponsored the Irish Emigrant Society, and helped charities and hospitals deal with the influx. During the election year of 1848, there was news from Ireland of the Young Ireland rebellion and Hughes contributed $500 to New York’s “Directory of the Friends of Ireland”. Hughes was distraught to hear the rebellion was crushed “not by the British Army but by a squad of policemen” and dismissed Young Ireland as “a set of Gasconaders”. He told the Directory to transfer his donation to the Sisters of Mercy to care for immigrant girls.
Thomas D’Arcy McGee was the first of the Gasconaders to arrive in New York after the rebellion. When McGee started a newspaper and blamed the church for the failure, Hughes called it “insidious poison” and banned Catholics from reading it. McGee accepted defeat and moved to Boston. Hughes was also suspicious when famous Irish priest Theobald Mathew came to town, due to the Protestant native of his temperance movement. Hughes laid down the law for Mathew not to work with the Nativists but to his surprise found him a humble man. The pair worked well together and Matthew’s extended visit was a success apart from wading into the growing slavery controversy.
As well as sparring with Bennett at the Herald, Hughes also jousted with New York’s other great newsman Horace Greeley of the Tribune, defending Pope Pius IX from accusations of cowardice after the pontiff was forced to flee Rome. Now in his fifties, the strain of his active and stressful lifestyle and poor diet were taking effect on Hughes and he was plagued by rheumatism. In 1850 he was promoted to archbishop of New York though fellow American prelates denied his wish to be made cardinal. Nevertheless at the height of his temporal powers, he went to the White House to meet Nativist Whig president Millard Fillmore (who ascended to the job after Polk died of cholera). Though America welcomed Hungarian patriot Lajos (Louis) Kossuth with open arms, Hughes took offence at Kossuth’s refusal to acknowledge Irish independence. “Smith O’Brien was as brave a man as ever Kossuth was, and Thomas Meagher was as eloquent; and these men were forgotten,” he said, referring to the Young Ireland leaders transported to Van Diemen’s Land.
Kossuth arrived in America on the same ship as exotic Irishwoman-disguised-as-Spaniard Lola Montez. Though she brought down the throne of Bavaria, and Kossuth failed to do the same in Hungary, he was greeted as the greater celebrity. Hughes had nothing to say about his nominally Protestant countrywoman, but he launched into attacks on Kossuth as a Red Revolutionary. Nativists were growing in confidence and attacked a Papal Nuncio on his visit to America; for once an ill Hughes was unable to defend him. Nativists organised politically as the Know Nothing party and won spectacular victories in the 1854 midterms, determined to prove America was a Protestant state. Hughes was up for the fight and clashed with New York State Senator Erastus Brooks over the wealth of the Catholic Church. When Brooks accused Hughes of being five times a millionaire, the archbishop sarcastically replied that Brooks had cheated him as one Know Nothing newspaper said he was worth $25 million.
Hughes need not have worried. The meteoric rise of the Know Nothings collapsed around 1856 as slavery became the major issue and northerners flocked to the new Republican Party. Fillmore was soundly defeated in the presidential election when he ran as a Know Nothing. Though a Whig, Hughes supported the successful candidacy of Democrat James Buchanan with his fellow Northern Irish background.
By now more Young Ireland rebels had landed on American shores. Meagher ran into trouble for comments supporting Kossuth. But it was nothing compared to the opprobrium fellow convict escapee John Mitchel faced when his new newspaper The Citizen attacked Hughes as a “bad prince”. Hughes kept a stony silence as Mitchel hung himself with pro-slavery utterances and left for the south where his extreme views were more welcome. Meagher stayed in New York and made peace with the archbishop assuring him of the duty he owed his religion and his country. Hughes was impressed with Meagher’s oratory and would eventually conduct the widower’s second marriage to a Protestant woman, and help her become a Catholic.
Hughes turned to his dream of building a grand new St Patrick’s cathedral to match those of Europe. He earmarked a site on Fifth Avenue but was frustrated by lack of funding and more pressing issues. In 1858 the time was ripe to lay a cornerstone. But after two slow years, workers went on strike and building halted until after Hughes’ death. It would not be completed until 1878.
It seemed this was his last hurrah and in fading health he asked Rome for a coadjutor. But there was one last crisis to deal with. America was about to go to war with itself. As a former slave master, he was sympathetic towards slaves but was wary of northern abolitionist demands to immediately end the peculiar institution. Hughes believed that while the condition of slavery was evil, it exposed Africans to Christianity. Where slaves were introduced, he told abolitionist critic Greeley, it did not require “they shall be restored to their primitive conditions.” It did not help that abolitionists were mostly Nativists while Hughes worried for his constituents if four million freed slaves suddenly descended on northern cities. As Shaw wrote, the immigrant Irish could not yet afford the luxury of fighting for the freedom of others.
In 1860 Hughes was bitterly disappointed when his great friend Seward was denied the Republican presidential nomination by little known Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln. Many supporters blamed Seward’s defeat on his pro-immigrant stance with Thaddeus Stevens pointing the finger at the friendship with Hughes. Lincoln’s subsequent election led to a wave of southern secession and Hughes felt the crisis was “the greatest torture” in living memory. Having travelled extensively in the south, he felt no animosity to southern states, and apart from Seward, he expected little from Lincoln’s cabinet. He dreaded a “most ferocious war that ever dismayed humanity.”
Yet when the South attacked Fort Sumter, Hughes, like most Irish Northerners, rallied enthusiastically to the Union cause. He displayed the stars and stripes outside his cathedral and assigned a chaplain to Michael Corcoran’s New York 69th Regiment though he sought to dampen expectations of a proposed all-Irish brigade. He told Seward that brigades based on nationality would create “trouble among the troops”. Nevertheless he supported Meagher’s Irish Brigade once Lincoln approved it in late 1861. Hughes denied support of the war meant support for abolition. He told war secretary Simon Cameron that would turn Irishmen away “in disgust from the discharge of what would otherwise be a patriotic duty”.
Lincoln and Seward decided to use their important Irish American ally more actively in the cause. They sent Hughes and Thurlow Weed on a diplomatic mission to England and France. Hughes agreed enthusiastically but was not welcomed in London. It did not help they arrived as Britain and the North seemed about to go to war over the Trent affair. The Times called Hughes “anti English” while Puritan American ambassador Charles Francis Adams gave him only eight minutes of his time. The ambassador to France was equally unhelpful while the French were openly sympathetic to the South. Even in Rome, the pope was frosty towards his combative cleric but Hughes had a more welcoming time in Ireland where he was treated as a visiting head of state. However he embarrassed the anti-Fenian Dublin archbishop Cullen by saying the civil war was a training ground for Irishmen “becoming thoroughly acquainted with the implements of war.”
Hughes returned home as an American hero in August 1862. Seward gave him a banquet in Washington, and being a Friday, the main dish was fish. Hughes called it “the most delicate compliment” he had ever received. In New York he appealed for more Irish volunteers to fight in what he had correctly predicted to be a ferocious war. But Irish recruitment was slow thanks to the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Fredericksburg. Discontent at Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration was compounded by a new draft which wealthy non-Catholics could avoid by paying for substitutes. Hughes was in poor health by the time Irish Catholic anger erupted into the New York draft riots of July 1863, just as extensive casualty lists emerged from Gettysburg. Protests at a draft office turned violent and within days the city was alight, as what Shaw called a “pent-up volcanic force” spilled fire and blood across the city. Hughes was implored to stop the disorder among “his people.” He issued a vague statement deploring the violence but refused to blame the Irish. He placed posters urging New Yorkers to come to his residence where he would address them. Some 5000 people heard a visibly weakened archbishop say “I cannot see a rioter’s face among you”. It was his last public appearance. The riots ended only when the army arrived from Gettysburg to restore order.
As the war raged on into winter 1863, Hughes became bedridden with Bright’s Disease. His two sisters looked after him. Four days after Christmas he was told doctors had advised he should be anointed. “Did they say so?” he replied. It was his last words and he died peacefully on January 4, 1864. All bar the most fervent nativists mourned his passing. His old foe James Bennett called him one of America’s “purest patriots”. Over 100,000 crammed around the cathedral for his funeral where his successor, bishop John McCloskey quoted St Paul, “I have fought the good fight”.
Another biographer, John Loughery, wrote in 2018 that John Hughes deserved to be better known for what he accomplished in his time and for the issues his struggle raises. “A flamboyant, authoritarian leader, he had plenty of faults. He also had a clear-eyed sense of his mission,” Loughery wrote. “His goal was a people who saw themselves simultaneously as good Catholics, loyal Americans and proud Irish-Americans.”
Confederate Major General Patrick R. Cleburne. Library of Congress
Protestant Irishman Patrick Cleburne believed he had everything to lose if the North conquered the south in the American civil war. In the war he was the highest ranking Irishman on either side and was known as the “Stonewall of the West” for his fighting ability in Tennessee. But his proposal to free the slaves to enable them to join the Confederate army was a bridge too far and cost him his leadership position. Cleburne learned his military craft in the British Army and had emigrated to America during the Famine. He settled in Arkansas where he saw a parallel between the Irish quest for Repeal and the south’s constitutional battle to survive. He was killed at the battle of Franklin, while fellow civil war general, Waterford-born Thomas Francis Meagher defended nearby Chattanooga for the Union. I first heard of the Corkman Cleburne when researching Meagher. At the end of the war defeated Confederate leader Robert E. Lee said that Meagher, “though not Cleburne’s equal in military genius, rivalled him in bravery and in the affections of his soldiers”.
Four years younger than Meagher, Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was born on March 4, 1828 in Ovens, west of Cork city, the second son of doctor Joseph Cleburne and Mary Anne Ronayne, a wealthy landlord’s daughter. Mary died when Patrick was 18 months old and he was educated at a Church of Ireland boarding school. Patrick was 15 when his father died and he was apprenticed to a doctor in Mallow, expected to follow in Joseph’s footsteps. Mallow was the home town of Young Ireland leader Thomas Davis and Patrick would have attended the 1843 monster meeting in Mallow during O’Connell’s year of repeal campaign.
After two years apprenticeship, Cleburne failed his exam to enter the guild at the Apothecaries Hall. To avoid family embarrassment he enlisted as a private in the British army 41st Regiment of Foot. His early military life involved carrying out evictions and rent collection as the famine took a stranglehold. While the Young Ireland rebellion failed in 1848, Cleburne was posted at Spike Island in Cork Harbour, where Young Irelander John Mitchel began his exile. Cleburne watched on helplessly as his own stepmother was evicted a year later.
Aged 21 he bought his way out of the army and the family emigrated to America, arriving in New Orleans on Christmas Day. He was awestruck by the galaxy of nationalities and saw the South’s largest city’s least savoury tradition. “I went yesterday to see the slave market,” he wrote. “It is an unnatural sight to see our fellow creatures sold.” Cleburne settled in Arkansas in 1850 where he became a clerk later becoming a successful lawyer. The decade before the war in the cotton town of Helena on the Mississippi river crystalised Cleburne’s thinking on the South and its peculiar institution. He never owned slaves but like most Irish Americans, Meagher included, Cleburne accepted slavery as part of America’s legal framework.
The Know Nothing presidential campaign of 1856 posed a direct threat to Cleburne, Meagher and all Irish immigrants. The Democrat-voting Cleburne spoke out forcefully against the Know Nothing proposal to prohibit immigrants from voting in America. One night three Know Nothings waylaid Cleburne and a friend, demanding that the friend take back remarks where he said that Democrats who became Know Nothings were “mulattos.” They fired shots and as Cleburne fell, he drew his gun and shot dead one of the attackers. He was shot through the lungs and suffered from the effects of the wound for the rest of his life. Years later, he told his brother “my lungs have never been well since I was wounded…an hour’s debate in the Court House will sometimes fill my mouth with blood.”
The election of Lincoln in 1860 led to the secession of southern states. Cleburne wanted the Union to be preserved but if it couldn’t, he hoped “to see all the Southern states united in a new confederation.” He wanted this to be done peacefully but in a letter to his brother in 1861 he believed the North would engage in a “brutal and unholy war” to stop secession. Cleburne feared a defeated South would become a subservient colony like Ireland. He joined the local militia and quickly rose from regimental commander to a brigade and division leader. Within 18 months he was promoted to major-general. Cleburne distinguished himself in many battles including Shiloh, Stones River, Chattanooga-Chickamauga, and the Atlanta campaign. The Confederate Congress thanked him for saving the Army of the Tennessee at Ringgold Gap, Georgia in 1863 and grateful Confederate president Jefferson Davis called him the “Stonewall Jackson of the West.” He seemed destined for the highest honours until he made a controversial political decision.
When the North issued the Emancipation Declaration to free southern slaves, Cleburne believed the South had to respond. At Christmas 1863 he issued a memorial drawing on his Irish experience entitled “A Proposal to Make Soldiers of Slaves and Guarantee Freedom to All Loyal Negroes“. Cleburne said the South was heading towards defeat and subjugation due to three reasons: northern numerical superiority, the single source of supply of Confederate troops (ie white men), and the world’s dislike of slavery. Cleburne suggested that ending slavery would remove all three disadvantages and expose the Northern campaign as a “bloody ambition for more territory”. Cleburne said giving blacks freedom would tie them to their southern homes. “It is said an army of Negroes cannot be spared from the fields,” he said. “We believe it would be better to take half the able-bodied men off a plantation than to take the one master mind that economically regulated its operations. Leave some of the skill at home and take some of the muscle to fight with.” He believed white planters should sacrifice slavery to save themselves.
Though Cleburne had the support of his officers, these were dangerous and radical notions in a polity whose entire raison d’etre was slavery. The idea of arming slaves was abhorrent to many and some thought him mad. President Davis, a slaveowner, ordered all copies of the proposal to be destroyed. Only one copy survived and re-emerged in the 1880s.
Cleburne accepted the decision without complaint and served throughout the Atlanta campaign under John Bell Hood. Cleburne led his division into battle at Franklin near Nashville on November 30, 1864. Eyewitness Daniel Gowan said they were advancing when Cleburne’s horse was shot from under him and a replacement horse was struck by a cannonball as he mounted it. “He disappeared in the smoke of battle and that was the last time I saw him,” Gowan said. In an attack as bloody as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, Cleburne went in on foot and was killed near the Union breastworks at the head of his favourite Irish regiment, the 5th Confederate Infantry from Memphis.
Cleburne statue at Ringgold, Georgiavia Wikipedia.
A man named John McQuade found Cleburne’s body the following morning. “He lay flat upon his back as if asleep, his military cap partly over his eye,” McQuade said. His boots were gone and his watch and sword-belt were stolen. The only sign of injury was a blood-stained white linen shirt. His comrades remembered Cleburne saying once how beautiful nearby Ashwood cemetery was, and they buried him there. He was reinterred in Helena in 1870, where his grave still remains. Lee said Cleburne had Irish intrepidity and “in a field of battle, he shone like a meteor on a clouded sky”. But his fearlessness outside battle should be remembered. In 1864 there were few even in the north that would say that slavery was the Confederacy’s “most vulnerable point, a continued embarrassment, and in some respects an insidious weakness.” Cleburne’s statue at Ringgold Gap was designed by Ron Tunison, who coincidentally designed the statue for Meagher and the Irish Brigade at Antietam.
Woolly Days 