Charles Stewart Parnell: The uncrowned contradiction of Ireland

A Wicklow granite stone marks the grave of Charles Stewart Parnell at Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery. Photo: Author’s collection

In the 1880s Irish politics fluctuated between agrarian crises and the promise of Home Rule. One politician above all dominated arguments: Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell’s rise to the top was spectacular, almost as rapid as his fall. Parnell had little interest in Irish culture or language though as he had acute insights into the “schizophrenia of the Anglo-Irish condition” with his class’s divided loyalties between England and Ireland. Parnell believed they could contribute to Ireland’s future. The irony of a Protestant landlord leading a militant Catholic anti-landlord movement was lost on no-one. But, said biographer Paul Bew in C.S. Parnell, he rendered significant service to the cause of Irish nationalism, and still remains a potent symbol.

The Parnell family were Cheshire Protestants established in Ireland during Cromwellian times with an estate in Queen’s County (Laois). Early Irish Parnells were undistinguished until Sir John Parnell, Charles Stewart’s great-grandfather, who sat in the Protestant parliament in Dublin and opposed the 1801 Act of Union. Charles Stewart called him incorruptible though glossed over his anti-Catholic Emancipation attitude. Sir John’s son William was a liberal who inherited the Avondale estate in Wicklow. He was a Westminster MP from 1817 to 1820, and wrote the novel Maurice and Berghetta which suggested the need for concessions to Catholics. His son John Henry inherited William’s liberal tendencies though died when Charles was just 13 years old. John Henry’s American wife Delia Tudor Stewart Parnell survived her husband by 40 years and became a more permanent anti-English influence on her son. She had republican leanings though her son was not impressed by the “so-called Fenians” who visited their Dublin home. Nevertheless, the political views of both parents allowed Parnell to rebel against his class without rebelling against his family.

Charles Stewart Parnell was born on June 27, 1846 at Avondale, in Wicklow’s Vale of Avoca. Aged six he was sent to Yeovil, Somerset to be educated at a girl’s school and in his teens he attended Rev Alexander Whishaw’s school at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. He then went to Magdalene College, Cambridge but never completed his studies. He returned to Avondale to become an Irish country gentleman, enjoying his dogs and horses. In a brief visit to America in 1871 he wooed Miss Woods (coincidentally Katherine O’Shea’s maiden name was Wood) but was rebuffed, his brother John noting that the jilting drove him into politics. The Ballot Act 1872 introduced the secret ballot which reduced the cost of electioneering while the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland prompted Protestant involvement in the Home Rule movement. By 1874 Parnell felt confident enough to approach Home Rule leaders. Though a poor public speaker with an English accent, he was nominated for the seat of Dublin. He was defeated but was successfully elected for Meath a year later, backed by the Catholic church. For the rest of his career Parnell uneasily reconciled his social conservatism with strident Catholic nationalism.

Irish politics was then dominated by Isaac Butt’s Home Rule League founded in 1873. In parliament Butt’s team was unfailingly polite but ineffective in progressing either home rule or land reform. Parnell’s election as a Home Rule MP two years later did not cause much excitement, one newspaper saying his convictions were awakened merely by a parliamentary vacancy. He came to public notice when he argued with Dublin’s Mayor over the distribution of funding to support celebrations of the centenary of Daniel O’Connell’s birth. It was an undignified squabble but it showed determination to be seen as a militant nationalist MP. Similarly at Westminster where he was mostly quiet in the early days, he attracted notoriety for defending Fenians who had accidentally murdered a policeman in Manchester.

By 1877 he was practising parliamentary obstruction. Butt had obstructed the Irish Coercion Bill of 1875 but Parnell and allies Joseph Biggar and John O’Connor Power widened the tactic to cover all imperial business. Despite Butt’s disapproval, Parnell was becoming the effective Irish party leader and he deposed Butt as president of the Home Rule Confederation. Dublin too was warming to him, giving him a rapturous welcome home, beginning a rapport with the capital that would last until his death.

O’Connor Power took him to Mayo and Parnell began to pay an interest in land reform, vowing to “reclaim the waste lands of Ireland”. Parnell noted the problem of smaller tenants was not cheaper rent, but more land. He wanted farmers to own their land but British landlords remained powerful in Westminster and seemed unlikely to co-operate. Parnell attracted the interest of American Fenian leader John Devoy. Devoy offered support for Parnell in fighting for land rights and an independent Ireland, though Parnell did not respond. In the West Michael Davitt led a new militant movement to advance the land issue. Parnell, Davitt and Devoy met in 1879 though at this stage Davitt described Parnell’s attitude as “friendly neutrality”. Parnell agreed that the land question was vital, but he thought it could be solved constitutionally within the United Kingdom.

That winter, wet weather, crop failures and falling prices threatened Ireland with another Famine, though this time the rural population would not passively accept disaster. Antipathy increased against landlords especially in the west. Davitt invited Parnell to speak in Westport and after the Irish National Land League was set in Dublin in November 1879, Parnell became its new president. He set off across the Atlantic on a fundraising mission, and his respectability attracted wealthy Irish Americans who were wary of Fenianism. In two triumphal months he visited 62 cities and first spoke of breaking “the last link” with England. It was also the first time people referred to him as the “uncrowned king of Ireland”.

He hurried home for the 1880 election which saw Gladstone’s Liberals defeat the Conservative government. The Irish Parliament Party was mainly successful in the west of Ireland, and Parnell was only narrowly reelected party leader by 23 votes to 18, in a nominal total of 59 MPs. The Land League committed to the removal of landlordism and Parnell tried to steer the party in that radical direction, despite his own ambiguous position as a landlord.

In the middle of the political storm, Parnell began his relationship with Englishwoman Katherine O’Shea, wife of Whiggish Home Rule MP Captain William O’Shea. Katherine (Katey to friends and Kitty to enemies) had lived apart from her husband since 1875. Aged 35, she entranced Parnell on their first meeting in 1880. The relationship developed quickly and he moved into her house in Eltham, south of London, though Parnell claimed he was married “to his country”. The relationship was common knowledge in London political circles by 1881 and Captain O’Shea lied when he said he was unaware of it. Katherine said her husband encouraged her. Bew believes O’Shea calculated that the relationship would bring him political advantage.

Most people in Ireland were blissfully unaware of the “Chief”‘s new status amid deeper worries. Agrarian outrages were increasing and calls for change heightened when the House of Lords rejected a moderate Compensation for Disturbance Bill to help evicted tenants. The peasant mood strengthened to refuse to pay rents. The government wanted to arrest Parnell for extremist rhetoric, but worried that no Dublin jury would convict him. In 1881 the government announced the arrest of Davitt. Parnell and his angry Irish MPs were expelled from parliament. With the Land League bent on revolution, Parnell stressed a parliamentary solution was still viable. He was happy when Gladstone introduced the “Three F’s” bill providing a fixed period tenure at fair price and for free sale of the tenant’s interest. Parnell tried to steer a course between peaceful support of the government position and potentially dangerous agitation. At a Land League meeting Parnell said they needed to “test the act” but decided tenants should determine fair rent not the land commission appointed by the government.

He was finally arrested in Dublin on October 13, 1881. Charged with “treasonable practices” he was taken to Kilmainham. He believed the timing was fortunate, as he wrote to pregnant Katherine. “The movement is breaking fast and all will be quiet in a few months, when I shall be released.” Parnell’s lieutenants were less sanguine and when they denounced the arrest, they were arrested too. The internees called for a general strike against rents and the government immediately suppressed the Land League, urged on by Irish Chief Secretary William Forster.

This only added to the agrarian outrages as secret societies took over, which Parnell predicted. By March 1882 violence was worse than ever in Ireland and the government was ready to compromise. Parnell was released on parole in April to attend his nephew’s funeral in Paris and went to Eltham where he saw Katherine and their dead newborn son. The mourning Parnell then returned to prison in Dublin, where he instructed Captain O’Shea to take a letter to Gladstone requesting the release of his comrades and modifications to the Land Act in return for a commitment to end outrages. This, Parnell said, would enable cooperation between the Irish Party and Liberals in parliament. Gladstone was delighted, especially with the prospect of cooperation, which Bew said was a promise O’Shea extracted out of Parnell. Nevertheless, the so-called Kilmainham Treaty had widespread support across Ireland. Forster resigned and on May 5 Gladstone appointed Frederick Cavendish as Irish Chief Secretary. A day later Cavendish was walking in Phoenix Park with his undersecretary Thomas Burke when both were stabbed to death. These murders wrecked the Kilmainham Treaty and instead of land reform, the government brought in a severe coercion bill. The devastated Parnell considered resigning but was persuaded to stay on. But he would become a more conservative nationalist with a new organisation behind him.

In October 1882 Parnell began the Irish National League with the support of the Catholic Church. Unlike the Land League, the National League’s focus was on national not agrarian issues. In 1883 the League arranged for a “tribute” to help the heavily indebted Parnell. A papal order of disapproval had the opposite effect with subscriptions pouring in, including from Irish church leader Archbishop Croke. That year too, Katherine had another baby, a daughter, who survived, and a second daughter was born the following year.

Parnell photographed in November 1881. Photo: Library of Congress

Thanks to the National League, Home Rule moved to the centre of the political agenda. In 1884 the franchise was widened, while Parnell introduced a watertight pledge for Irish members to support his objectives. In 1885 the League signed a “Concordat” with the Irish Catholic Church in which the church would support Parnell in return for Catholic control of the education system. Parnell’s dominance of the party was complete and with an election due, a strong, disciplined and united Irish party backed by the clergy, would hold the balance of power.

O’Shea had the ear of government minister Joseph Chamberlain and persuaded him that Parnell might settle for what was called “the central board scheme” which would devolve education and communication powers to an Irish board. Parnell was appalled and in a Cork speech demanded the “restitution of Grattan’s parliament”. The speech contained his most enduring phrase: “No man has a right to say to his country: ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further’ and we have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland’s nationhood and never shall.” The words are now on his statue and were often repeated by later nationalists, but Bew says Parnell had a narrow meaning and was marking out the maximum territory he could negotiate within. Grattan’s parliament (1782-1800) was Protestant only and not as independent as Parnell made out.

In June 1885 the Liberal government was defeated on the floor and a Conservative government took over with Lord Salisbury as prime minister. The Tories came to a temporary compromise with Parnell, agreeing to drop the coercion bill and passing the Ashbourne Act as the first step in creating a peasant landowning class in Ireland. After the Tories appointed pro-Home Rule Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carnarvon, Parnell issued a manifesto for Irish voters in Britain to vote Tory in the election, held in October. This was wishful thinking on his part as the balance of forces in the Tories remained strongly unionist. But it also reflected Parnell’s politics. Home Rule aside, he was a Tory.

In England Parnell’s manifesto prevented a Liberal landslide, though they still won 86 more seats than the Tories. But that was exactly the same amount of seats the Irish Parliamentary Party won, taking almost every Irish seat outside north-east Ulster. Tories were disappointed Parnell had not given them power and ended their flirtation with Home Rule. Parnell quickly tossed them out of office. Around the same time Gladstone’s son Herbert flew the “Hawarden Kite“, a press declaration from the family home that his father was considering an Irish settlement. Gladstone became prime minister again on February 1, 1886 and made a commitment for some form of Irish autonomy.

There remained one major fly in Parnell’s ointment. In January Captain O’Shea convinced him to support him as candidate for Galway city, against the advice of lieutenants Tim Healy, John Dillon and William O’Brien. There was almost certainly blackmail involved. Nevertheless Parnell survived the Galway crisis and began to lock horns with the new PM. Gladstone may have been converted to Home Rule, but he was also keenly aware of Irish Unionist resistance. Parnell persuaded him that the problem was southern Protestant landlords but neither took the Ulster Unionists seriously enough, who worried not just about “Rome Rule” but also losing access to free trade in imperial markets.

Gladstone came up with a credit scheme to pay out distressed landlords and linked a Home Rule Bill with a Land Bill. Though many in Ireland believed it did not go far enough, Parnell said it was a “fair solution” that would lead to autonomy. But the real problem was Gladstone’s own party, many of whom thought it went too far. Gladstone saw the bill might be defeated in a vote, while the even more conservative House of Lords was resolutely opposed. The land reform was abandoned though debate on Home Rule Bill continued. Tories complained Home Rule would lead to demarcation disputes and Protestants would suffer under a Catholic dominated parliament. Parnell reminded Westminster that London had the ultimate power, in the event of breaches. It was in vain, MPs including Joseph Chamberlain deserted the Liberals to join the new Liberal Unionist grouping and the Bill was defeated. In the July 1886 general election they helped bring the Tories back to power.

Parnell blamed Chamberlain for snatching triumph from his grasp. Chamberlain would link Parnell with agrarian crime which surged again in Ireland in 1887 but Chamberlain’s Irish contact O’Shea played his part too. Realising that the Home Rule failure had ended his hopes of a sinecure, O’Shea resigned his seat in Galway. The only thing restraining him from hurting Parnell was Katherine’s 93-year-old “Aunt Ben” who was expected to leave a large sum to her niece. If O’Shea was still married to her he could expect to get some of the money.

In 1886 new Irish chief secretary Arthur Balfour launched new and drastic coercion action. Meanwhile Tim Healy began a new “Plan of Campaign” for tenants to refuse to pay rent which would instead be put in an estate fund for use in the event of landlord retaliation. Parnell was opposed as he thought it would restrain the alliance with the Liberals and believed Home Rule was the more important objective. He was determining whether Irish MPs would sit on at Westminster after Home Rule. Initially leaning towards complete withdrawal, which might attract Tory votes, by 1888 he accepted that retention was needed, as many Irish questions would still be decided by London after Home Rule.

But his enemies were on the move. On April 18, 1887 the Times published a letter purporting to be from Parnell justifying the Phoenix Park murders. Parnell said the letter was a “villainous and bare-faced forgery” but opponents did not accept his version. Parnell returned to Ireland where observers worried over his health issues, but he remained remarkably calm. Tensions increased when Police fired on demonstrators at Mitcheltown killing three. Parnell explicitly disavowed political violence. Then the Times issued a second supposed Parnell letter urging people to “make it hot for old Forster and co”. Parnell demanded a parliamentary inquiry to settle the matter, but the Tories and Chamberlain gave practical aid to the Times and also investigated Nationalist crimes more generally. Taking place between 1888-89, the inquiry was loaded and took the view the Land League was a conspiracy. Towards the end Dublin journalist Richard Pigott was exposed as the forger, though Parnell was disappointed it was not O’Shea. Parnell gave evidence in May 1889 and in a poor performance misled parliament about his connections with the Fenians in the 1870s. “Parnell gave the impression that he knew nothing about the movement he was supposed to be leading,” one observer noted. Nevertheless his enemies had been exposed trying to dishonourably discredit him. In triumph, he met Gladstone at Hawarden before Christmas 1889, seemingly at the peak of his powers as Irish leader.

All that crashed around him barely a week later when O’Shea filed for divorce, citing Parnell as co-respondent. O’Shea had nothing to lose, as when Aunt Ben finally died she left her money to Katherine in a way that O’Shea could not touch. Parnell accepted the charge of adultery but said he followed a gentleman’s code of honour and never deceived O’Shea. Parnell now wanted to marry the mother of his two children and did not contest the action. He believed O’Shea could be “squared away” with a £20,000 bribe to confess his own adultery but he could not come up with the money. Bew said Parnell lost his “unique position of power and authority for the want of a ready £20,000 in 1890.”

Initially the Irish party rallied around Parnell, offering unequivocal support. Even when the divorce case started in November 1890, the bishops stayed silent believing it to be a political matter. It took the English “nonconformist conscience” to begin the rebellion. Many of Gladstone’s own supporters would no longer support an Irish alliance with Parnell at the helm. Gladstone sought out an intermediary, Justin McCarthy, to let Parnell know. However McCarthy either failed to contact Parnell or if he did, failed to impress upon him the import of Gladstone’s words, and even more remarkably failed to tell anyone else. Gladstone also sent his letter to English Liberal MP and Parnell’s friend John Morley, but he too failed to inform Parnell.

When the Irish Parliamentary Party met on November 25, Parnell and most others present remained unaware of Gladstone’s position. Parnell defended himself against O’Shea and appealed to party loyalty before being unanimously reelected to the chair. After the meeting Morley finally showed Parnell Gladstone’s letter. Parnell refused to resign. Gladstone then leaked the letter to the press. Parnell went on the attack and leaked details of his Hawarden meeting about Gladstone’s weak Home Rule proposals. But his argument about unreliable Liberals was undermined by his own alliance with the party. With the crisis growing, Irish party members called an extraordinary meeting over Parnell’s objections. Five party leaders including O’Brien and Dillon issued a manifesto repudiating Parnell. Parnell clashed with Healy over what exactly happened at Hawarden, and when Parnell supporter John Redmond referred to him as “master of the party”, Healy quipped “Who is to be the mistress of the party?” Parnell called Healy a “cowardly scoundrel”. Any hope of rapprochement ended and 45 members withdrew from the party room leaving Parnell with 27 followers. A few days later, the bishops called on Irish Catholics to repudiate Parnell.

Yet Parnell returned to Dublin to a hero’s welcome. Anti-Parnellites had seized the offices of Parnell’s paper United Ireland, and a furious Parnell led a crowd which stormed the building and scuffled with opponents. It seemed to be therapeutic, Parnell telling Katherine it was splendid fun. “I wish I could burgle my own premises every day”. But few outside Dublin believed Parnell could turn around the Liberals to support him and Home Rule. His candidate was rejected in a North Kilkenny byelection, but he still refused to compromise. The last year of his life was war to the knife.

Parnellites lost two more by-elections but he remained undaunted. He married Katherine at Steyning registry office in Sussex on June 25, 1891 two days before his 45th birthday. The wedding was the last straw for the previously supportive Catholic Freeman’s Journal. Opponents questioned the wisdom of having a landlord at the head of a Home Rule movement and Parnell did not help his cause by saying the land question was exaggerated. Parnell spent one last desperate campaign in the west, though western smallholders were no longer behind him. A sectarian element emerged with many opponents saying a Protestant could never lead the Irish masses. Parnell addressed this head on in a Belfast speech saying that until the religious prejudices of Northern Protestants were conciliated, Ireland could never be united or enjoy “perfect freedom”. It is a truth that Ireland still grapples with today.

Parnell’s speech fell on deaf ears in the south and it was his last major intervention. Anti-Parnellites gloried in his physical deterioration and even hinted that he would commit suicide. Parnell spoke to hostile crowds in Athlone, Castlebar and Westport where a fiddler taunted him with The Girl I Left Behind Me. The Connaught Tribune saw Parnell as a relic and “all but a dead man”. In October he returned home to Brighton to be with Katherine. She recorded his last words as “Kiss me sweet Wifie, and I will try to sleep a little,” and he died on October 6, 1891.

Parnell’s death did not reunite the Irish party, contrary to most expectations. The split was too bitter, and the Anti-Parnellites were themselves divided. Supporter Augustus Moore said Parnell was not inventive, eloquent or resourceful but he was honest and earnest unlike those who “deserted him for Barabbas.” The party was reunited in the 20th century under John Redmond, and achieved peasant land ownership with the 1903 Wyndham Act, and finally won Home Rule in 1912. But it was never enacted due to the First World War, and more importantly, the resistance of Ulster’s Protestants. Not until late in life, did Parnell ever come to grips that two different peoples lived in Ireland. Though a Protestant, he could only identify with Southern Irish Protestants. Yet his Belfast speech was a transformative suggestion. Bew says it might stand better on his Dublin statue than “the windy blast of ‘patriotic’ rhetoric” which currently adorns it.

Famine in Ulster: Rise of the Orange Order

Detail from the Famine stain glass window at Belfast City Hall. Photo: Belfast City Council

In my last post, I talked about how history has judged Treasury Assistant Secretary Charles Trevelyan poorly when it comes to the Irish Famine. The post mentioned how Irish historian Christine Kinealy has led what became the post revisionist school of Famine researchers. Kinealy has written extensively on the Famine and founded Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. This post examines her 2002 work The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion, written after the 150th anniversary commemorations, particularly how the Famine exacerbated tensions between Ireland’s two major religious groups. Most of Ireland’s eight million population in 1845 were Catholic, but there were also one and a half million Protestants, mainly in the north-east.

Kinealy said the Famine was an all-Ireland experience, though it has rarely been seen that way in Northern Ireland. When the British government proposed a rate-in-aid tax on all Ireland in 1849, Northern Irish ratepayers opposed it as it would keep up “an army of beggars fed out of the industry of Ulster”. The Newry Telegraph claimed the blight did not cause distress in the north because they were “an industrious people who desire to work”.

These stereotypes were passed down to the 20th century. When the Free State government undertook a national survey of famine folk memories in the 1930s, the Northern Unionist government would not allow it in their jurisdiction. Even when in 1997 Belfast City Council erected a stain-glass window in memory of Famine victims in the city, DUP councillor Sammy Wilson called it Sinn Fein propaganda, saying there was no evidence of Famine in Belfast.

Kinealy disagreed, saying Belfast suffered acutely in the Famine. Mortality in Belfast and Lurgan workhouses in 1847 were among the highest in Ireland while a Quaker visitor to county Down likened it to the worse he had seen in west Cork. Ulster lost 17pc of its population to Famine, which was not far behind Connacht and worse than Leinster. As in the west, dependency on potatoes grew in the north in the early 1820-30s as the domestic linen industry collapsed. After the second failed harvest in 1846 the price of oatmeal skyrocketed in Belfast and by the end of 1846 the city’s mayor wanted the government to suspend the distillation of alcohol so grain could be used to feed people. There were food riots as hungry labourers demonstrated at bakeries demanding free bread and police arrested ringleaders.

The British government was aware of grain shortages and when the blight first struck, prime minister Peel took two measures in response. He created a Relief Commission, funded jointly by government and landlords and secretly buying Indian corn (the infamous “Peel’s Brimstone” which caused dysentery). Longer term Peel wanted to remove Ireland’s dependence on potatoes by repealing Britain’s Corn Laws. But he tied that measure to a coercion bill which was defeated in 1846, handing over power to Lord John Russell’s Whig government. Russell had similar ambitions for Ireland as Peel. Initially a minority government, it won outright power in the 1847 election but was dominated by a radical bloc which prioritised British land reform over Irish Famine relief. It led to a downgrade of Irish public works, which treasurer Charles Wood viewed more as a punitive tool for moral regeneration than a relief outlet. As Famine peaked in 1847, landlord-dominated relief committees often misapplied funding. The government moved to Poor Law relief supported by local taxation, which increased large-scale clearances. Many more voluntarily surrendered their holdings under the terms of a new Quarter Acre Clause, which denied relief to occupiers of more than this quantity of land, across Ireland.

The Famine coincided with increasing tension between Catholic and Protestants. The Orange Order was founded in the 18th century but was suppressed by the 1823 Unlawful Oaths Bill. In 1845 Peel decided not to renew the legislation and the Grand Orange Lodge reformed. It wanted the “Romish Emancipation Bill…entirely repealed, and the constitution restored to its original integrity” and immediately attracted a large membership. The Belfast Protestant Journal scolded those who did not support the July 12 marches for “fold(ing) their arms in cold indifference while the enemy has been invading.”

The Orange Order noted measures Peel had passed to placate the Irish Catholic Church and resented and feared the church’s growing political power. The Orange belief that Catholics were traitorous grew after the Young Ireland rebellion. The Young Irelanders had split from O’Connell over his alliance with the Whigs and were gradually radicalised by the Famine, Chartist agitation in Britain, and the wave of revolutions across Europe in early 1848. The ecumenical Young Ireland movement included several prominent Protestant leaders and seemed to be natural allies with the Protestant north. In 1847, Catholic Young Irelander Thomas Francis Meagher told a Belfast meeting that Repeal of the Act of Union would not result in a Catholic Ascendancy. But most Protestants rejected his overtures.

When July 12, 1848 came round, a pastor opened Orange Order festivities by demanding that Protestant Repealers among them should “immediately take the train to the asylum”. Later that month Young Ireland was driven to the precipice by the suspension of habeas corpus, and its revolution was a miserable failure. But its repercussions were significant. Rather than bringing Catholics and Protestants together as they hoped, it reawakened the Orange Order’s claim to be loyal and true defenders of Britain and contributed to a polarisation between those for and against the Act of Union. Belfast became the centre of unionism. In the south, conservative Catholic merchants and strong farmers had survived the famine and helped the Catholic Church strengthen its position under the ultramontane leadership of Dr Paul Cullen, for whom home rule was indeed Rome Rule. The rest of the century saw Ireland’s politics play out on religious lines.

The Famine was forgotten in the North. Even in the South it was consigned to folk memory. There were two standard 20th century texts: Robin Dudley Edwards and Desmond Williams’ The Great Famine (1944) and Cecil Woodham Smith’s The Great Hunger (1962). Taoiseach Eamon de Valera commissioned Edwards and Williams book, but was disappointed in its lack of nationalist zeal, it was well received by historians and became a bulwark of the revisionist school which depicted the Famine as inevitable. By contrast, Woodham Smith’s book was panned by historians as a “great novel” but became a hugely popular best seller.

The Northern Irish Troubles in the late 1960s contributed to constraint on the Famine as blaming the British government could be construed as support for the IRA’s campaign of violence. It was not until the sesquicentenery commeroration of the Famine (1995-98) that scholars such as Kinealy began to challenge the revisionism. Not coincidentally this was the time of the Northern Irish peace initiatives. Revisionist Irish historian Mary Daly said that the improving Northern Irish situation allowed Irish people to talk about aspects of history “we may previously have been uncomfortable with”.

A new Labor government in London also helped. British prime minister Tony Blair’s 1997 Famine apology was famously read out by actor Gabriel Byrne at a televised commemoration event in County Cork. “Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy,” Byrne quoted Blair. Kinealy said the apology acknowledged that the Famine was as much Britain’s history as Ireland’s. But Unionist deputy leader John Taylor said Blair’s apology was unnecessary and would lead to further demands. “The Irish mentality is one of victimhood,” Taylor said. Taylor’s words show Irish Catholics and Protestants share one thing in common: Old habits die hard either side of the border.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Repeal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

America’s frontier: The end of the myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William H. Seward: In praise of folly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John ‘Dagger’ Hughes, New York’s fighting Irish bishop

“Dr. Hughes, Bishop of New York / drawn on stone by Hoffmann from a daguerrotype.” Photo: Library of Congress

The extraordinary priesthood of Irishman John Hughes spanned almost 40 years through the entire time of the rise of American nativism. A quarter century of that time was as bishop of New York, the fastest growing city at a time of mass Irish Catholic immigration. Told time after time that the United States was a Protestant country, Hughes did more than most to prove it otherwise. While most Catholic bishops in America quietly accepted the status quo, Hughes took an aggressive stance, and he returned in kind what the nativists gave out, earning the enduring love of his parishioners. Hughes had long eliminated his Irish brogue and resembled more a well-tailored fighter than a clergyman, as biographer Richard Shaw said in Dagger John: the Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York.

John Joseph Hughes was born in 1797 near Augher, County Tyrone. His parents Patrick and Margaret Hughes were small Catholic farmers who raised their four sons and three daughters in a mainly Protestant area. When third son John expressed a desire to join the priesthood, they allowed him to study until the age of 17 when a poor year on the farm forced him to return home and be apprenticed at Favour Royal estate to study horticulture.

After two children died, Patrick emigrated to America and rented a farm in Pennsylvania. He sent word back to Ireland and John arrived in America with the family in 1817. Hughes believed he was leaving the petty persecution of Catholics behind him. He remained in Baltimore with one of his brothers and used his gardening experience to get a job on a plantation. He was released at the end of the planting season and found jobs in Emmitsburg, Maryland, 30 miles from where his family lived.

Outside Emmitsburg was Mount St Mary’s Catholic college and seminary run by French priests John Dubois and Simon Brute. Hughes told them of his desire to become a priest but the school was overcrowded and Dubois turned him down. Hughes became a labourer in a nearby Catholic convent where he befriended the mother superior who supported his case to be admitted to Mount St Mary’s. Dubois finally agreed to hire him as a gardener and overseer of the college’s slaves in return for accommodation and occasional tutoring. Hughes kept his distaste of slavery to himself and eagerly took on the new job, studying at every opportunity.

A year later Dubois noticed the potential that the mother superior saw in Hughes and enrolled him as a full student in 1820, aged 23, ten years older than his classmates. Hughes was subject to teasing from students and treated with apprehension by teachers who were barely older than him. He had to look after the gardens and the slaves but his iron will made him stick at his studies. Under the tutelage of Dubois and Brute, he gradually transformed himself into a clerical leader at the school. In 1824 a new school building was destroyed by fire, sending the school into debt. Hughes and other seniors went on begging tours during summer recess, where he impressed anti-Catholics with the forceful defence of his religion.

In 1825 he was appointed deacon in Philadelphia where he found the church at war with parishioners. Belligerent Irish-born octogenarian bishop Henry Conwell constantly feuded with church lay trustees especially after he sacked controversial priest William Hogan. Trustees backed Hogan and Hughes arrived in Philadelphia to find his parishioners hated the bishop. Augustinian priest Michael Hurley encouraged Hughes to sermonise on real world events. When Conwell heard one of the young man’s sermons, he was impressed and took him on a tour of the diocese. The Armagh-born Conwell took a shine to the man from the neighbouring county and began to see him as a future bishop. After completing final studies at Mount St Mary’s he was ordained for the priesthood in Philadelphia in 1827, waved off by John Dubois, newly appointed as bishop of New York.

It was a difficult start to Hughes’s career as the internal war threatened to tear the church apart. When the irascible Conwell asked priests to back him sacking another popular rebel priest William Harold, Hughes initially declined to give support claiming he was new in the city but was pressured to give in. Conwell appointed Hughes parish priest of the cathedral of St Mary’s in place of Harold, but trustees backed Harold and would not pay the salary of Hughes or his assistant. Hughes worked on his own popularity as his confidence in his abilities grew. On Simon Brute’s advice, Hughes hit back saying that because parishioners would not fulfil their obligations, he and his assistant would return to their old parish, leaving St Mary’s without priests.

When reports reached the Vatican, Conwell was summoned to Rome while Harold was banished from Philadelphia despite appealing to US president John Quincy Adams. In 1830 Rome appointed Francis Kenrick coadjutor bishop to replace the ancient Conwell. Hughes put his head down and got on with administering to his flock. But he began defending Catholicism against attacks in the press, even anonymously rewriting the plot of an anti-Catholic fictional book. In 1829 he protested in his own name against an American article against Irish Catholic Emancipation just won by O’Connell. Hughes’s reputation as a preacher grew steadily and he was invited to speak in New York. He began to write incognito for New York’s paper the Protestant signing his missives “Cranmer”. The apparent anti-Catholic articles were popular but after a few months Cranmer told the opposition press he was Catholic and denounced the sponsors of the Protestant as “clerical scum”. The fight became ugly as Protestants accused a New York priest of being Cranmer and that priest hit back at the accusation, beginning an intra-Catholic spat. Hughes eventually backed off when reproved by his new bishop, Kenrick.

Though Kenrick and Hughes were never close, they respected each other and Hughes filled in for him when he became ill. Conwell was still making trouble and allied himself with the trustees of St Mary’s against Kenrick. Kenrick ordered Hughes to begin the task of building a new cathedral. With characteristic energy Hughes secured a vacant lot, an architect, and the money of a wealthy businessman who disliked trusteeism. He built St John’s which was consecrated in 1831. But Hughes was disgusted with Kenrick when the bishop accepted a demotion from Conwell, despite lacking authority to do so. Kenrick also backed away from using St John’s as his new cathedral. Hughes invited New York Vicar General John Power and the mayor of Philadelphia for the grand opening. Power used his sermon to attack Catholic enemies and the press blamed Hughes for the speech. When the Protestant eminence Rev John Breckenridge took Hughes to task, he ended up giving him widespread fame.

Like Hughes, Breckenridge was an attack dog for his religion, smearing Catholics at every opportunity in the press. When he offered to debate Catholic clerics, Hughes took the bait. Breckenridge wanted an oral debate but Hughes insisted it be conducted through the newspapers as he would not become a “theological gladiator for the amusement of an idle promiscuous, curious multitude.” With no Catholic papers to champion Hughes, he created his own, the Catholic Herald. The newspaper and the debate both began in January 1833. Hughes and Breckenridge argued over whether Jesus wanted his church to be Catholic or Protestant with, according to Shaw, a mixture of “heavy dogma and even heavier insults”. The debate raged on for months though neither man converted anyone to his cause.

When Breckenridge heard Hughes was going to give a lecture he decided to end the stalemate and take him on in person. Bishop Kenrick disapproved of the debate and forbade the Herald from covering it. Breckenridge accused Hughes of being a foreigner, compared Catholicism to malaria, and blamed it for the Inquisition and the backward state of South America. Hughes hit out at English anti-Catholic laws, which he escaped and had become an American “by choice”. When Breckenridge fumed about hypothetical Roman influence, Hughes pointed to real and recent nativist attacks such as Samuel Morse’s influential anti-Catholic polemic and Boston mobs burning down a convent. Lives were jeopardised, he said, for the crime of worshipping God “according to the dictates of conscience”. The scrapper Hughes won the debate, as one contemporary noted, not by being superior, but by dragging his adversary down to his level. When the oral and written debates were put into book form with the approval of both men, Catholics rushed out to buy it. Hughes became a household name across America.

Hughes was attracting attention in Rome. The Vatican plan to make him coadjutor bishop to his old boss Dubois in New York was leaked to the press, and in 1837 American bishops confirmed the plan. After 12 years in Philadelphia, Hughes, aged 40, was moving to America’s largest city. His appointment was not popular. New York Catholics had wanted the city’s Vicar General John Power to get the job when Dubois was originally appointed and now Power missed out a second time. Catholic editor of the powerful New York Herald James Gordon Bennett described Hughes’s consecration as bishop in front of the city’s poverty-stricken Irish as “pushing gold rings through pigs’ noses.” Hughes ignored Bennett and got to work, determined to build a new Catholic college and seminary in the growing metropolis. Though Dubois suffered several strokes he jealously kept leadership decisions to himself. Hughes could see the diocese heading towards disaster. As in Philadelphia he argued with trustees. When trustees failed to apologise for sacking a Dubois-appointed priest, Hughes threatened to shut down the cathedral parish and withdraw his priests. The trustees backed down, and Hughes began to assume control, though Dubois remained a thorn. The Vatican finally ordered Dubois to stand down, making it look like it was his own decision. In his three remaining years of retirement Dubois never forgave his successor, always calling him Mr Hughes.

Hughes consolidated power, publishing his edicts in the Freeman’s Journal, keeping Power as his Vicar General and purchasing a site near Harlem that became Fordham University. In October 1839 he travelled to Europe to find money to pay for his new prize. He met new pope Gregory XVI in Rome, the missionary-minded Leopoldine Society in Vienna, and convinced Parisian Sacred Heart nuns to open a school in New York. In London, he met Daniel O’Connell, whom he admired greatly, yet he took him to task over his criticism of slavery in America. Finally after an absence of 23 years, he returned to Ireland where he found “the stripes of their martyrdom were everywhere visible.”

Hughes returned to America with a new sense of purpose and a new war to face against nativists. Education in Manhattan was controlled by the unelected Public Schools Society which managed most government funding. They opposed funding for Catholic schools and ensured schools sung Protestant hymns and read from Protestant bibles while textbooks had an anti-Catholic bias. Irish and German Catholics kept their children away from schools and thousands of immigrant children roamed the streets. New York Whig governor William Seward wanted to change this situation, but Democrat Irish voters ignored him. When Hughes returned to New York, he demanded a “just proportion” of common school funds and began correspondence with Seward. The two men began a lifetime friendship.

While Seward urged reform of the school system, Hughes began to look at separate Catholic education. Hughes battled with the Public Schools Society in debates and in the New York capitol at Albany, using his caustic sense of humour to humiliate dour opponents. With elections coming, he endorsed independent candidates demanding change. Nativists were outraged but so were Democrats. Bennett dismissed him as the “Bishop of Blarneyopolis” and “Dubois’s gardener”. Though the Democrats won the election, those that opposed Hughes were voted out, and the bishop gained the reputation as an Irish Machiavelli, one ex-mayor calling him “Generalissimo”. Hughes privately admitted he went right to the edge of his “episcopal sphere”. Seward pledged to support Hughes’s changes to the school system in 1842 and later that year the first elected board of education ended the Public School Society’s monopoly. Yet in the moment of his greatest success, Hughes turned his back on public education and began creating his own Catholic schools, entrenching the idea of Catholic ghettohood within America.

In his letters Hughes signed himself off as✝️John. One non-Catholic correspondent interpreted the episcopal signature as “Dagger John”. The appropriately belligerent nickname stuck. Bishop Dubois finally died in 1842 and churlish Dagger John refused to lead the eulogies, claiming he did not know him well enough. It was not his finest hour, but there was no longer any doubt who was in control in New York. He travelled to Ireland in 1843 with Whig powerbroker Thurlow Weed and attended one of O’Connell’s monster meetings. He went on to Belgium where he was unsuccessful in getting financial help for his heavily indebted diocese and returned to America without funds.

Hughes walked into more Nativist resentment which became a political issue in the 1844 election. Nativist James Harper was elected city mayor and with violence on the rise, Hughes employed 3000 armed Catholics to guard church property. Religious rioting convulsed his old city of Philadelphia and churches were torched. Annoyed that Bishop Kenrick had fled the city, Hughes issued a blunt warning to Harper. “If a single Catholic Church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow”. The Nativist press were infuriated and some even blamed Hughes for the Philadelphia violence. Nevertheless, it was enough for Harper to call off a Nativist rally planned for New York.

Hughes’ pugilism made him the darling of the Catholic people but the hierarchy preferred the conservative Kenrick, and they made him the new archbishop of Baltimore. Hughes quietened down in 1845 and he returned again to England, Ireland and France, “shopping for religious personnel”. He won commitments from the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers to set up in New York and convinced French Jesuits to take over Fordham. He revisited his birthplace, conducting mass at Clogher as famine began to break out. Within two years hundreds of thousands of Irish would land on Hughes’ shore.

He returned to America as the Mexican War broke out and fielded an unusual question from president Polk: Could the church supply Catholic chaplains for the army? Yes it could, Hughes replied, and a grateful Polk invited Hughes to travel to Mexico to alleviate their fears that America wanted to destroy their religion. However the Nativist press looked in horror at this suggestion and Polk backed off.

Between 1840 and 1860 three million people emigrated to America, and 500,000 of them remained in New York, most of them Irish and destitute, congregating in crime-ridden slums of the Five Points. Numbers increased more still during the Famine, about 100,000 every year. This poverty-stricken invasion increased Nativist fears. Though the immigrants were nominally Catholic, Hughes believed they barely knew the rudiments of their faith, though “not by any wilful apostasy”. His job was to “knead them into one dough” and he organised financial deposits to Ireland, sponsored the Irish Emigrant Society, and helped charities and hospitals deal with the influx. During the election year of 1848, there was news from Ireland of the Young Ireland rebellion and Hughes contributed $500 to New York’s “Directory of the Friends of Ireland”. Hughes was distraught to hear the rebellion was crushed “not by the British Army but by a squad of policemen” and dismissed Young Ireland as “a set of Gasconaders”. He told the Directory to transfer his donation to the Sisters of Mercy to care for immigrant girls.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee was the first of the Gasconaders to arrive in New York after the rebellion. When McGee started a newspaper and blamed the church for the failure, Hughes called it “insidious poison” and banned Catholics from reading it. McGee accepted defeat and moved to Boston. Hughes was also suspicious when famous Irish priest Theobald Mathew came to town, due to the Protestant native of his temperance movement. Hughes laid down the law for Mathew not to work with the Nativists but to his surprise found him a humble man. The pair worked well together and Matthew’s extended visit was a success apart from wading into the growing slavery controversy.

As well as sparring with Bennett at the Herald, Hughes also jousted with New York’s other great newsman Horace Greeley of the Tribune, defending Pope Pius IX from accusations of cowardice after the pontiff was forced to flee Rome. Now in his fifties, the strain of his active and stressful lifestyle and poor diet were taking effect on Hughes and he was plagued by rheumatism. In 1850 he was promoted to archbishop of New York though fellow American prelates denied his wish to be made cardinal. Nevertheless at the height of his temporal powers, he went to the White House to meet Nativist Whig president Millard Fillmore (who ascended to the job after Polk died of cholera). Though America welcomed Hungarian patriot Lajos (Louis) Kossuth with open arms, Hughes took offence at Kossuth’s refusal to acknowledge Irish independence. “Smith O’Brien was as brave a man as ever Kossuth was, and Thomas Meagher was as eloquent; and these men were forgotten,” he said, referring to the Young Ireland leaders transported to Van Diemen’s Land.

Kossuth arrived in America on the same ship as exotic Irishwoman-disguised-as-Spaniard Lola Montez. Though she brought down the throne of Bavaria, and Kossuth failed to do the same in Hungary, he was greeted as the greater celebrity. Hughes had nothing to say about his nominally Protestant countrywoman, but he launched into attacks on Kossuth as a Red Revolutionary. Nativists were growing in confidence and attacked a Papal Nuncio on his visit to America; for once an ill Hughes was unable to defend him. Nativists organised politically as the Know Nothing party and won spectacular victories in the 1854 midterms, determined to prove America was a Protestant state. Hughes was up for the fight and clashed with New York State Senator Erastus Brooks over the wealth of the Catholic Church. When Brooks accused Hughes of being five times a millionaire, the archbishop sarcastically replied that Brooks had cheated him as one Know Nothing newspaper said he was worth $25 million.

Hughes need not have worried. The meteoric rise of the Know Nothings collapsed around 1856 as slavery became the major issue and northerners flocked to the new Republican Party. Fillmore was soundly defeated in the presidential election when he ran as a Know Nothing. Though a Whig, Hughes supported the successful candidacy of Democrat James Buchanan with his fellow Northern Irish background.

By now more Young Ireland rebels had landed on American shores. Meagher ran into trouble for comments supporting Kossuth. But it was nothing compared to the opprobrium fellow convict escapee John Mitchel faced when his new newspaper The Citizen attacked Hughes as a “bad prince”. Hughes kept a stony silence as Mitchel hung himself with pro-slavery utterances and left for the south where his extreme views were more welcome. Meagher stayed in New York and made peace with the archbishop assuring him of the duty he owed his religion and his country. Hughes was impressed with Meagher’s oratory and would eventually conduct the widower’s second marriage to a Protestant woman, and help her become a Catholic.

Hughes turned to his dream of building a grand new St Patrick’s cathedral to match those of Europe. He earmarked a site on Fifth Avenue but was frustrated by lack of funding and more pressing issues. In 1858 the time was ripe to lay a cornerstone. But after two slow years, workers went on strike and building halted until after Hughes’ death. It would not be completed until 1878.

It seemed this was his last hurrah and in fading health he asked Rome for a coadjutor. But there was one last crisis to deal with. America was about to go to war with itself. As a former slave master, he was sympathetic towards slaves but was wary of northern abolitionist demands to immediately end the peculiar institution. Hughes believed that while the condition of slavery was evil, it exposed Africans to Christianity. Where slaves were introduced, he told abolitionist critic Greeley, it did not require “they shall be restored to their primitive conditions.” It did not help that abolitionists were mostly Nativists while Hughes worried for his constituents if four million freed slaves suddenly descended on northern cities. As Shaw wrote, the immigrant Irish could not yet afford the luxury of fighting for the freedom of others.

In 1860 Hughes was bitterly disappointed when his great friend Seward was denied the Republican presidential nomination by little known Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln. Many supporters blamed Seward’s defeat on his pro-immigrant stance with Thaddeus Stevens pointing the finger at the friendship with Hughes. Lincoln’s subsequent election led to a wave of southern secession and Hughes felt the crisis was “the greatest torture” in living memory. Having travelled extensively in the south, he felt no animosity to southern states, and apart from Seward, he expected little from Lincoln’s cabinet. He dreaded a “most ferocious war that ever dismayed humanity.”

Yet when the South attacked Fort Sumter, Hughes, like most Irish Northerners, rallied enthusiastically to the Union cause. He displayed the stars and stripes outside his cathedral and assigned a chaplain to Michael Corcoran’s New York 69th Regiment though he sought to dampen expectations of a proposed all-Irish brigade. He told Seward that brigades based on nationality would create “trouble among the troops”. Nevertheless he supported Meagher’s Irish Brigade once Lincoln approved it in late 1861. Hughes denied support of the war meant support for abolition. He told war secretary Simon Cameron that would turn Irishmen away “in disgust from the discharge of what would otherwise be a patriotic duty”.

Lincoln and Seward decided to use their important Irish American ally more actively in the cause. They sent Hughes and Thurlow Weed on a diplomatic mission to England and France. Hughes agreed enthusiastically but was not welcomed in London. It did not help they arrived as Britain and the North seemed about to go to war over the Trent affair. The Times called Hughes “anti English” while Puritan American ambassador Charles Francis Adams gave him only eight minutes of his time. The ambassador to France was equally unhelpful while the French were openly sympathetic to the South. Even in Rome, the pope was frosty towards his combative cleric but Hughes had a more welcoming time in Ireland where he was treated as a visiting head of state. However he embarrassed the anti-Fenian Dublin archbishop Cullen by saying the civil war was a training ground for Irishmen “becoming thoroughly acquainted with the implements of war.”

Hughes returned home as an American hero in August 1862. Seward gave him a banquet in Washington, and being a Friday, the main dish was fish. Hughes called it “the most delicate compliment” he had ever received. In New York he appealed for more Irish volunteers to fight in what he had correctly predicted to be a ferocious war. But Irish recruitment was slow thanks to the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Fredericksburg. Discontent at Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration was compounded by a new draft which wealthy non-Catholics could avoid by paying for substitutes. Hughes was in poor health by the time Irish Catholic anger erupted into the New York draft riots of July 1863, just as extensive casualty lists emerged from Gettysburg. Protests at a draft office turned violent and within days the city was alight, as what Shaw called a “pent-up volcanic force” spilled fire and blood across the city. Hughes was implored to stop the disorder among “his people.” He issued a vague statement deploring the violence but refused to blame the Irish. He placed posters urging New Yorkers to come to his residence where he would address them. Some 5000 people heard a visibly weakened archbishop say “I cannot see a rioter’s face among you”. It was his last public appearance. The riots ended only when the army arrived from Gettysburg to restore order.

As the war raged on into winter 1863, Hughes became bedridden with Bright’s Disease. His two sisters looked after him. Four days after Christmas he was told doctors had advised he should be anointed. “Did they say so?” he replied. It was his last words and he died peacefully on January 4, 1864. All bar the most fervent nativists mourned his passing. His old foe James Bennett called him one of America’s “purest patriots”. Over 100,000 crammed around the cathedral for his funeral where his successor, bishop John McCloskey quoted St Paul, “I have fought the good fight”.

Another biographer, John Loughery, wrote in 2018 that John Hughes deserved to be better known for what he accomplished in his time and for the issues his struggle raises. “A flamboyant, authoritarian leader, he had plenty of faults. He also had a clear-eyed sense of his mission,” Loughery wrote. “His goal was a people who saw themselves simultaneously as good Catholics, loyal Americans and proud Irish-Americans.”

Stamped from the beginning: A history of racist ideas in America

Kendi’s “tour guides”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB Du Bois and Angela Davis.

Ibram X. Kendi’s monumental Stamped from the Beginning chronicles how racist ideas became established in the fabric of American society. The title comes from Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s 1860 claim that America was founded by white people for white people and the inequality of white and black was “stamped from the beginning.” The book tells the story of racist ideas from the colonial era to the present through five “tour guides”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis. Blacks own 2.7 percent of American wealth but make up 40 percent of the jail population. America’s racial disparity is older than the United States but kept alive through constant reinvention by vested interests.

Bostonian Puritan Cotton Mather preached inequality in body skin while insisting the dark souls of enslaved Africans would become white when Christianised. His work was widely publicised during the Enlightenment and justified as a defence of slavery, including by Jefferson, newly independent America’s intellectual giant and third president. After Jefferson’s death Garrison spearheaded an emancipation push based on the racist idea that slavery had brutalised black people, making them inferior. Du Bois, America’s first professionally trained black scholar, believed Garrison but later converted to anti-racism. Davis was another black intellectual who suffered in the backlash to 1960s civil rights advances. Kendi says the popular idea of ignorant people producing racist ideas and then racial discrimination is false. He says racial discrimination leads to racist ideas which lead to ignorance and hate. Consumers of racist ideas believe that something is wrong with black people and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed and confined them.

Cotton Mather’s grandfathers John Cotton and Richard Mather brought Puritan racist ideas to America. Richard Mather was instrumental in the founding of Harvard, leaning on Aristotle’s theory that hotter climates produced inferior people. Using Aristotle and St Paul’s defence of slavery (“obey your earthly masters”), John Cotton produced New England’s first constitution in 1636 legalising “perpertuall servants.” When Cotton died, Mather married his widow while Mather’s son married his daughter and named their son Cotton Mather after the alliance. Young Mather was marked out for greatness following his father and grandfathers into the ministry, entering Harvard aged 11. He followed his father as Boston’s foremost Puritan pastor. Mather believed in witchcraft and supported the Salem trials and executions in 1692. He absorbed the idea of graded “races” with Europeans at the top. Mather supported slavery but believed black souls could be saved, which was not popular, because Christian slaves could sue for their freedom. His 1706 book on slavery The Negro Christianised influenced young Benjamin Franklin. As slavery increased in the 18th century so did slave revolts and severe anti-black codes, stripping free blacks from owning property. Gradually Mather’s ideas that blacks could be Christianised took hold, which one slaveholder said encouraged them to “become more humble and better servants”. Mather died in 1728 aged 65. As Kendi said he had produced the racist idea of “simultaneously subduing and uplifting” slaves. As Mather’s son and biographer put it, Mather had blessed blacks with the prayer “Lord Wash that poor Soul (and) make him white.”

Cotton Mather’s greatest disciple was Thomas Jefferson who grew up amid slave workers at wealthy Shadwell estate. He studied at Virginia’s College of William and Mary and graduated in law, following his father into the House of Burgesses. Though against slavery he used slave labour to build a plantation at Monticello, near Charlottesville. Jefferson joined the rebel Virginian legislature in 1774 protesting British debts, taxes and mandates to trade within the empire. In 1776 Jefferson attended the Second Continental Congress and drafted the independence document with its immortal line “All men are created equal”. It was unclear if Jefferson’s “all” included black people and he criminalised runaways in the Declaration of Independence. Samuel Johnson pointed out American hypocrisies saying the “loudest yelps for liberty (come from) the drivers of negroes”. But America gained a powerful ally in Adam Smith and his 1776 bestseller The Wealth of Nations which said wealth stemmed from productive capacity which Africa lacked. While Britain tried to crush the American revolt, Jefferson hid in Monticello and wrote Notes on Virginia (1781). Jefferson wanted to end slavery and acknowledged white prejucide but also said blacks were intellectually inferior. In 1784 he took up a diplomatic appointment to Paris while his slaves made Monticello profitable. He missed the Convention which omitted slavery from the new US Constitution but introduced the infamous “three fifths rule” which counted three-fifths of enslaved blacks (“other persons”) in the census, handing power to the South until the civil war. In France Jefferson also began a lifelong affair with his slave Sally Hemings with whom he had at least five children.

He returned to America in 1790 to become George Washington’s first Secretary of State. He fought against Haiti’s slave revolt fearing it might inspire American copycats, calling its leaders “cannibals of the terrible republic.” Around this time, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which put cotton and slavery at the centre of the American economy. Jefferson became president in 1800 and his Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the size of America as slaveholders marched west into new lands. While Jefferson promoted the end of the international slave trade in 1808, it increased the demand for American slaves. Slavery helped the north’s factories and ports and powered America’s Industrial Revolution, sucking the life out of anti-racist movements. Jefferson retired in 1809, though all the presidents until 1841 except Quincy Adams were his disciples. The 1820 Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state which Jefferson worried would eventually lead to civil war.

In retirement Jefferson refused to condemn slavery though one enduring legacy was his promotion of the idea of colonisation. He suggested slaves guilty of plotting rebellion could be sent to the Caribbean or Africa. The idea was later taken up by the American Colonisation Society and Kentucky Whig Henry Clay who influenced Lincoln. The US colonised part of west Africa which they called Liberia, though few black Northerners would go there. In 1829 the ACS invited young Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison to give an address. Garrison hated slavery under the influence of Ohio Quaker journalist Benjamin Lundy and shocked the ACS by demanding emancipation not colonisation. In 1831 Garrison started abolitionist newspaper the Liberator and a year later wrote Thoughts on African Colonisation which condemned “the expulsion of the blacks.” Garrison’s ideas including the need for a cheap black workforce was the deathknell of the ACS.

Garrison inspired a printing revolution spread by railroads with abolitionist ideas printed on cheap rag paper determined to “awaken the consciousness of the nation to the evils of slavery”. Though 300,000 people joined Garrison’s movement by 1840, enraged slavers saw his tracts as an act of war. Congress led by South Carolina senator John Calhoun banned the post office from sharing them. In 1845 Frederick Douglass wrote his narrative of his escape from slavery, with Garrison writing a preface. By the end of the decade Free Soilers demanded slavery restrictions. In the Compromise of 1850 California was admitted as a free state, ending the balance between free and slave states but the Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened to criminalise abettors and deny Blacks a jury trial. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin strengthened the link between black slaves and Christianity but she wanted a return to colonisation, which president Fillmore endorsed. While Garrison and Douglass criticised Stowe’s racist ideas, her writings brought more abolitionist support than either of them.

In 1854 Democrat Senator Stephen Douglas pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, repealing the Missouri Compromise and leaving the slavery question for settlers to settle. The bill destroyed the Whigs and the Republicans contested the 1856 election against the spread of slavery. The 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision declared blacks were inferior and could not be citizens. Douglas fought the 1858 Senate election in defence of Scott while ex-Whig and now Republican Abraham Lincoln declared a vote for Douglas was a vote to expand slavery. Lincoln believed that slavery retarded non-slaveholding white southerners. Garrison hated most politicians but recognised anti-slavery votes could make a Republican president in 1860. Southern fears increased after John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. After Brown was hanged he became a martyr to the anti-slavery cause. The Democrats split over Kansas handing the election to Lincoln. Secession spread across the deep south and Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy. His vice president Alexander Stephens said their government “rested upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man”. Three weeks later, the Confederates bombed Fort Sumter. Lincoln said the civil war was fought to protect the union but Garrison knew it was a war to end slavery. Thousands of blacks fled north and the Union Army was forbidden to send them back. The Fugitive Slave Act was dead. Lincoln still believed in colonization and wanted blacks to move to Liberia. Douglass dismissed it as hypocrisy and as war progressed, colonisation talk died. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration on January 1, 1863 and wrote himself into history as the Great Emancipator. At a celebratory concert in Boston that day, the hero was not Lincoln. “Three cheers for GARRISON,” they shouted.

As war ended, thoughts turned to reconstruction including black civil and voting rights. While Sherman gave 40-acre land plots to blacks in South Carolina, other whites pushed back. New Freedman’s Bureau boss Oliver Howard believed blacks would remain dependent on their masters and refused to spend money on a “pauperising agency”. After Lincoln’s death, president Johnson restored Southern property rights. Emboldened Confederates barred black voting and instituted discriminatory codes which they justified because blacks were “naturally lazy, lawless and oversexed.” Former Rebel general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Nathan Bedford Forrest said violence was necessary to “keep the niggers in their place.” Republican Rutherford Hayes won the disputed election of 1876 by promising to stop interfering in the South. In 1879 Garrison called it an abomination and “bloody misrule” before dying four weeks later. In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the 1875 civil rights act, the last gasp of reconstruction. The era of intimidation began with Jim Crow laws. Between 1889 and 1929 a southern black was lynched every four days.

As W.E.B. Du Bois said, “the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back towards slavery.” “Willie” Du Bois was born in small town Massachusetts in 1868 and raised by his abandoned mother. Suffering racism at school he was determined to show the world “Negroes were like other people”. This was a time of Social Darwinism when Darwin’s ideas were used to show blacks were too weak to thrive in the modern world. The talented young Du Bois was not immediately permitted to attend Harvard but went to America’s top black college Fisk University in Nashville where he learned about assimilation and uplift suasion, the racist idea that blacks must change white minds about their abilities. “When you have the right sort of black voters, you will need no election laws,” he said on hearing of voter suppression laws. After graduating he achieved his dream and attended Harvard’s history doctoral program. He gained a scholarship to attend the University of Berlin in 1892. He studied two years in Berlin until funding ran out and he was not allowed to defend his economics doctoral thesis. Though he earned his history doctorate at Harvard in 1895, racist whites such as Franklin Roosevelt called him one of “a half dozen Negroes”which Harvard had made “a man out of a semi beast.”

Du Bois taught Greek and Latin at the African Methodist Episcopal flagship college in Wilberforce, Ohio. He believed white stupidity was the cause of racism and was determined to spread knowledge based on scientific investigation. Black intellectual Booker T. Washington was more acceptable to white minds as he wanted blacks to remain at the bottom in comfort, to “dignify and glorify common labour”. President Grover Cleveland hailed Washington the “new hope”. In 1896 the Supreme Court supported Washington’s segregationist ideas with the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v Ferguson stating Jim Crow laws did not violate the constitution. Whites ignored discrimination, preferring to focus on what was wrong with blacks.

In 1896 Frederick Hoffman released an influential theory that American blacks were headed towards extinction due to their immorality, law-breaking and diseases. Du Bois noted Hoffman’s native Germany had higher death rates than American blacks but no one was saying Germans were going extinct. But he had no answer to high black crime rates, which perpetuated the circle of more police, more arrests and more suspicions. He accepted Hoffman’s numbers as fact and believed it was a black problem to solve, pushing education and persuasion, reproducing the racist ideas he was trying to eliminate.

Booker Washington was at the height of his power in 1901 with his autobiography Up From Slavery which promoted personal responsibility, hard work, and “white saviours”. Du Bois scolded him for his accommodation though even that was too much for some racists. When president Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman said it would “necessitate our killing of a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again”. Roosevelt never invited a black person to the White House again. In 1903 Du Bois released his own book The Souls of Black Folk comparing humble, soulful Africans with hard, rational Europeans. Du Bois argued blacks were not allowed self-consciousness but could only view themselves through white eyes. He wanted them to see themselves as “both a Negro and an American.” Du Bois criticised Washington’s “Talented Tenth”, the top 10 percent of Black Americans which he said added to the prejudice. A white Nashville paper admitted Du Bois’s call to strike down Jim Crow made the book “dangerous to read”.

President Theodore Roosevelt believed lynching was the fault of black rapists while he dishonourable discharged a famous black regiment falsely accused of murder in the racist Texas town Brownsville. When Jack Johnston became the first black world boxing champion, newspapers fixated on his white wife. He became the most hated black man in America. His victory over white boxer Jim Jeffries sent racist mobs into frenzy. The US government succeeded where his opponents failed and arrested Johnston on trumped-up charges of transporting a prostitute across state lines. He fled bail and lived overseas for seven years before spending a year in jail.

Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910 as Social Darwinism was at its height and published the NAACP newspaper the Crisis promoting black ability including the first black millionaires. He encouraged blacks to vote for Woodrow Wilson for president but once in office Wilson supported southern segregationists. Wilson held a White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation which depicted post civil war blacks as evil rapists of white women. The film revitalised the Klan and prompted an increase in lynching which led to a great migration of blacks north during the First World War. Racist Harlemites feared a menace of “black hordes” and began a white flight that led to segregated communities across America. Du Bois attended the Paris Peace Conference and wrote how the victors opposed granting independence to African countries though black soldiers were well received in Europe. President Wilson worried the good treatment of blacks would “go to their heads”.

Du Bois’s post-war essays Darkwater argued the belief that blacks were sub-human had no factual basis. White reviewers slammed it as a “hymn of racial hate”. Flamboyant Jamaican Marcus Garvey led a new African solidarity movement. Du Bois admitted Garvey was extraordinary, but opposed Garvey’s introduction of Caribbean colour politics into America. When racist president Warren Harding opposed racial amalgamation in the south, Garvey hailed his support of racial separatism while Du Bois was appalled. Garvey was silenced by mail fraud and was eventually deported.

During the Depression, Du Bois realised that trying to persuade powerful racists was impossible and became an ardent antiracist socialist. FDR’s New Deal was racially discriminatory to secure Congress approval of Southern Democrats but was attractive enough to take black votes from the Republicans. By 1934 Du Bois supported Garveyite segregationist positions of black institutions and saw comparisons with the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. When America joined the Second World War, Du Bois backed the black American “double V” campaign against racism at home and fascism abroad. At war’s end he attended the United Nations conference in San Francisco and was feted by black African leaders determined to forge independence with American help. But the situation remained dire in the south. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo called on “every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls.” Six thousand years had proved black inferiority, Bilbo raged.

Scientists had other ideas and proved that skin colour had no effect on intelligence. The Truman administration promised to move towards black civil rights, worried about America’s international reputation. However the McCarthyite witchhunt equated black activism with Communism and the 82-year-old Du Bois was arrested in 1951 before being exonerated. His passport was revoked to stop him from making embarrassing revelations overseas. The Supreme Court finally overturned the odious “separate but equal” segregation in 1953’s Brown v Board of Education, Du Bois saying, “I have seen the impossible happen.” Southern white politicians railed against the decision saying it promoted “hatred and suspicion” where none existed before. It led to the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott with its young figurehead Martin Luther King, whom Du Bois called an American Gandhi. A year later Arkansas deployed the national guard to stop school desegregation forcing Eisenhower to send in federal troops. Now approaching 90 and with his passport returned, Du Bois toured the Communist world. He told Mao that American blacks were not diseased, but merely lacking income. Du Bois was still alive to read King’s letter from Birmingham Jail which said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Du Bois died aged 95 on August 27, 1963 one day before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins told the Washington meeting that Du Bois was “the voice calling you to gather here today.”

Angela Davis also experienced racism growing up, born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. Educated by radical parents she studied at Massachusetts’ Brandeis University where she was electrified by lectures from author James Baldwin and activist Malcolm X. X argued that whites weren’t born racist but the American “political, economic and social atmosphere…automatically nourishes a racist psychology”. The Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought enfranchisement but also a change in racist tactics. Media warned of “a time bomb ticking in the ghettoes” and black riots in depressed neighbourhoods were an excuse for police crackdowns. Like Du Bois, Davis did post grad studies in Germany but returned to California intoxicated by new black movements. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee dedicated to nonviolent, direct action while completing her doctorate at UC San Diego. After King was assassinated, she joined a massive rally in Los Angeles where she blamed racism for the killing but she urged against confrontation with the well-equipped LAPD which recruited many officers from the deep south.

In that year Richard Nixon studied the racist tactics of Alabama governor George Wallace. Nixon’s law-and-order “southern strategy” of demeaning blacks without mentioning race helped win the presidential election. Emboldened Republican governor of California Ronald Reagan tried to fire Davis from her teaching position at UC though the state’s Superior Court ruled his anti-Communist regulation was unconstitutional. She was sacked again in 1970 after attending a rally to free two Jackson brothers who were sentenced to life due to black power activism in jail. That August another of the Jackson brothers took a judge hostage at gunpoint before police opened fire killing him and the judge. Ownership of one of Jackson’s guns was traced to Davis and she was charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, facing a death sentence if found guilty. She went on the run. J. Edgar Hoover placed her photo complete with famous Afro on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list. She was arrested in New York in October and extradited for trial in California. Amid calls of “Free Angela” the prosecution alleged her gun ownership, flight, and words of love for Jackson in her diary constituted first degree murder. The jury did not agree and acquitted her in June 1972.

Davis put her energies into black incarceration saying jail only created crime. Her old enemy Ronald Reagan had other ideas. In the 1980 election campaign, Reagan emulated Nixon by not mentioning blacks but his promise to restore state rights helped win southern white votes and with them, the presidency. He cut social programs, the New York Times noting that much progress against poverty made in the 1960s and 70s had been “wiped out”. In 1982 Reagan issued a devastating law enforcement executive order to “mobilise all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country” despite few Americans viewing drug usage as a major problem. Davis ran as vice president for the US Communist Party in 1980 and again in 1984 where she condemned Reagan as the most racist and sexist president in history.

Reagan’s War on Drugs targetted drugs used by blacks such as marijuana and crack cocaine aided by racist stories in the media while the mostly white users of cocaine were ignored. Although blacks and whites used drugs in equal numbers, blacks were twice as likely as whites to face prison for usage, especially in heavy-policed inner cities, feeding the stereotype of dangerous black neighbourhoods. The prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000 due entirely to stiffer sentencing policies. Reagan was less willing to fund a war on unemployment which might have reduced violent crime. Millions of blacks were hauled into the justice system where they could not vote, affecting countless close elections in the years to come, including the 2000 presidential election. Drunk drivers, three-quarters of which were white, killed more people than urban blacks, yet were not demonised as violent criminals nor was there a war on drunk driving.

George H.W. Bush tapped into the anti-black formula to win the 1988 election. He was losing in the polls until he released an ad complaining that black murderer Willie Horton had raped white women while on bail. Bush supported the 1987 Supreme Court judgement McCluskey v Kemp which ruled that the racially disproportionate impact of Georgia’s death penalty did not justify overturning a death sentence. One academic called it “the Dred Scott decision of our time”. Davis agreed, complaining blacks were suffering the most oppression since slavery. President Bush condemned the Rodney King video in 1991 but did not retreat from his tough-on-crime stance. Bill Clinton beat him in 1992 by promising more of the same. Davis was a rare voice denouncing the law and order argument which was leading to more police and more prisons.

The Republicans moved further right with the racist mandate of blacks needing to take “personal responsibility” for their socioeconomic plight and racial disparities, dusting off theories of lazy and dependent blacks. Clinton supported the idea ahead of the 1996 election with a bill limiting welfare programs. Republicans were outraged when UC honoured Davis with a prestigious professorship in 1995 decrying her reputation for “racism, violence and communism.” A year later California banned affirmative action and the percentage of African Americans at UC went into decline.

By 2000 Davis lamented that there were two million prisoners in America, half of them black. She imagined a world without incarceration in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? which noted criminals were fantasised as people of colour. Though the idea of race was exposed as factually incorrect and Clinton said people were “99.9 percent the same”, people focused on the supposed 0.1 percent difference. George W. Bush won the 2000 election when his brother Jeb denied tens of thousands of black legitimate votes in Florida. Bush promoted the racist standardised testing tying education funding to test scores, blaming victims for being left behind, and took voter suppression methods to Ohio to retain power in 2004. The racism of Bush’s America was exposed by the double tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, first the black lives lost unnecessarily and then the prime real estate cleared away for gentrification.

Barack Obama emerged as the electrifying keynote speaker in the 2004 Democratic convention and cemented his reputation with his memoir Dreams From My Father. Following Du Bois, Obama noted that only white culture could be deemed objective and non-racial. Obama’s 2008 opponent Joe Biden fed the stereotype by calling him “the first mainstream African American who is bright and clean” while Michelle Obama was depicted as an “angry black women” for saying her people were hungry for change. When reporters found no dirt on the Obamas they condemned his support for Pastor Jeremiah Wright for attacking the American prison system and preaching American terrorism abroad led to 9/11. Obama saved his campaign by abandoning Wright’s “distorted view” and pacified racists by blaming blacks’ “own complicity” in their problems. Still, the 64-year-old Davis gave her first ever vote to the Democrats in that election, enraptured by the pride of a black victory.

Hatred against blacks did not disappear with Obama’s victory. Despite claims America was “post racial”, there was a rise in police shootings of black people and murders of black people leading to Dylann Roof’s shooting dead nine Charlestonians in southern America’s oldest AME church in 2015. Kendi’s book came out a year later. The issues remain the same as that confronted Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB Du Bois and Angela Davis. The Black Lives Matters movement rejected the racism of six centuries but right wing pundits blamed blacks for the rise in violent racism. In the age of Trump, Republican administrations passed electoral laws to disenfranchise Black voters, and banned teaching the history of how southern states maintained white power through systems of racial disenfranchisement. Lawmakers won’t change racist policies for fear of discriminating against whites. But supporting prevailing bigotries is only in the interest of a tiny group of ultra rich WASP males. The rest of us need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves, Kendi says.