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.