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.

James Stephens: Fenian Chief

James Stephens “Head Centre”. Courtesy: Library of Congress

English-born Irish revolutionary and writer Desmond Ryan took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and War of Independence. He was horrified by the civil war that followed and retired to England, where his books on Pearse and Connolly did much to humanise the 1916 leaders. As Ryan’s friend Patrick Lynch said, the Fenian tradition was a great influence and it was appropriate that Ryan’s final great book should be The Fenian Chief: a Biography of James Stephens. Stephens lived from 1824 to 1901 and grew up under the influence of the Nation and the Famine. Having taken part in the unsuccessful 1848 Young Ireland rebellion, he led his own revolutionary movement before being forced out and living most of the remainder of his long life in exile. The Fenian movement survived him and was Stephens’ outstanding legacy to Ireland and America.

Stephens was born in Kilkenny, the son of a Catholic auctioneer’s clerk. His mother disappeared from his life early on. Educated as a civil engineer, he got a job in the construction of the Limerick and Waterford Railway, aged 20. The growing famine from 1845 radicalised Stephens and he was attracted to Young Ireland and its Kilkenny leader, former city mayor, Dr Robert Cane. Stephens promised Cane to support “any serious call” but informed by his reading of the 18th century French and Irish revolutionaries he believed Young Ireland was wrong in its open methods and should have organised as a secret society. In the summer of 1848 Stephens and friends drilled with pikes until they were stunned by the news that Britain had suspended habeas corpus in Ireland. William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher and fellow Young Ireland leaders went on the run, arriving in Kilkenny on July 24. Cane told them the city was too poorly armed to support rebellion and they marched on to south Tipperary. Stephens attended a Kilkenny Tholsel meeting on July 26 to pledge support and made a well-received speech. “Treasure your arms as if they were the apples of your eyes,” he said.

There was a rumour of a police spy in Kilkenny and when Stephens challenged him, the man said he was Patrick O’Donohoe with a message for O’Brien from the Dublin clubs. Stephens was suspicious but resolved to take O’Donohoe to O’Brien. Dubliner P.J. Smyth recognised O’Donohoe and told them O’Brien was now in Cashel having failed to rouse Carrick-on-Suir. Stephens and O’Donohoe went to Cashel and found O’Brien but no revolution there either. Stephens remained hopeful and O’Brien appointed him his aide de camp. They detoured through small Tipperary mining communities, rousing the population before priests would emerge to dampen their enthusiasm. The aristocratic O’Brien was a poor revolutionary and failed to act on practical suggestions. According to Stephens’ later comrade Charles Kickham, who joined them at Mullinahone, O’Brien was “moving through a dream”.

The dream ended in the collieries of Ballingarry on July 29 when O’Brien’s ragtag army chased a 47-strong police force to Widow McCormack’s house and laid siege for several hours. The police were well armed and had five young children as hostages. O’Brien refused a plan to smoke them out. Panicky police killed two men and rebels returned fire. The exchange continued until they heard more police were coming. Stephens helped O’Brien escape and the Kilkenny man led the last of the firing against reinforcements before he was injured. Stephens dived into a ditch and escaped towards Urlingford. He was almost undone by a priest who stirred up an angry mob before someone recognised him. It left a lifelong distrust of the Catholic clergy, and the feeling became mutual.

Stephens headed towards John O’Mahony’s forces in Munster, which were still preparing for revolution. He found O’Mahony in Co Cork, their first meeting and they would become lifelong comrades. They found another ally, Michael Doheny, in Rathcormack Co Cork. While Doheny went in search of the missing Meagher and O’Mahony roused his men for one last failed battle, Stephens sheltered in safe houses. Doheny returned to say Meagher had been arrested and he and Stephens set off on the journey Doheny described in The Felon’s Track. Stephens covered his tracks by getting his friends to pronounce him dead. The Kilkenny Moderator had an obituary on August 19 announcing he had died of his Ballingarry wounds. A coffin filled with stones was buried at St Canice’s Cathedral graveyard. When Stephens returned to Kilkenny in 1856 many believed he was an imposter or a ghost.

Stephens and Doheny faced many difficulties as Crown forces crowded around the south of Ireland. They parted in September and Doheny escaped by boat from Cork to Bristol and on to France, eventually settling in America. Stephens also made it from Cork to Bristol after slipping on board a ship in the guise of popular poet Christabel’s servant. The Kilkenny Moderator spread the rumour he had escaped as a lady’s maid, which Stephens denied. Maid or not, he escorted Christabel to London before getting a passage to France. He would spend seven years in exile in Paris.

The penniless Stephens was joined in Parisian poverty by O’Mahony who fled Ireland after a failed attack on Portlaw barracks, Co Waterford. They lived together in a ramshackle boarding house near the Sorbonne, an unofficial embassy where other Irish rebels including John Mitchel, John Martin and Kevin O’Doherty would later stay. Stephens attended lectures in the Sorbonne, and found income as an English teacher and later a translator and journalist, while O’Mahony survived on family remittances and jobs at the Irish College.

They remained committed to armed revolution in Ireland. Paris was full of secret political societies which enrolled members into “brotherhoods”, a model which Stephens and O’Mahony later adopted. In Ireland in 1849 Fintan Lalor and others formed a secret society to plan another revolution. O’Mahony and Stephens refused to support it, believing it would fail. They proved correct but that rising supplied two future Fenian leaders in John O’Leary and Thomas Clark Luby. They also watched on in despair as Napoleon III seized power in 1851 signalling the end of the 1848 revolutions.

O’Mahony emigrated to America in 1854 where he founded the Emmet Monument Association with Doheny. Stephens got a job at Parisian paper Moniteur Universel where his column “Faits Divers” was an account of British intelligence. He could not get Irish revolution out of his mind and in 1856 he returned home. It seemed a country devoid of hope after ultramontane archbishop Paul Cullen hounded Duffy out of the country and Sadleir and Keogh destroyed an Irish political alliance in Westminster. Stephens was depressed by the lethargy he saw in Dublin and returned home to Kilkenny where he found his father and sister had died, the household “ruined and broken up”. He went on a long walking tour of Ireland to gauge support for revolution. In Limerick there was a cordial reunion with his Ballingarry boss Smith O’Brien, released from Australia. Stephens believed exile had sapped O’Brien’s constitution and when they reminisced O’Brien blamed the priests for the failure of revolution and believed he had been betrayed by Meagher and Mitchel. O’Brien said “respectable people” were antagonistic to Irish nationality, and Stephens would win his main support from the working class, unlike the more patrician Young Ireland. Despite O’Brien’s pessimism, the 3000-mile walk convinced Stephens of “the possibility of organising a proper movement” for independence. He acquired the nickname An Seabhach Siúlach, Irish for the The Wandering Hawk, anglicised as Mr Shooks.

In Dublin, Stephens met the dying 1849 veteran Philip Grey and through him, Thomas Clarke Luby, who would rank second in importance in the Fenians. Luby thought Mr Shooks looked seedy and he did not like his French socialist ideas. Nevertheless he was impressed by Stephens’ self assurance and saw him as “an able organiser”. By January 1857 they were friends and attended Grey’s funeral together where Luby made a halting speech. Both men’s lives were changed by an autumn 1857 letter from American exiles O’Mahony and Doheny. The letter expressed confidence in Stephens asking him to establish an Irish independence organisation. Fellow Kilkenny man Joseph Denieffe returned from New York with a vague commission from O’Mahony and Doheny’s Emmet Monument Association to seek Irish allies for a promised invasion force of 30,000 men. Stephens gave his reply to Denieffe to take to America. Stephens promised to organise a 10,000-strong army in three months with 1500 firearms but demanded £100 a month in return.

But America was in a recession and the Irish-American press was hostile to a new movement in Ireland. Doheny and other Irish leaders agreed to Stephens’ proposal, but Denieffe raised only £80 to take back to Ireland. Though Denieffe warned Stephens that American support was loose at best, Stephens and Luby founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day 1858. Members had to take an oath and there was an alphabetic scheme of organisation. Centre A led a circle, and under him were nine sub-centres led by B’s or captains. Each B had nine C’s or sergeants and each C had nine D’s or privates. The rule that members should only be known to their sections quickly broke down.

Stephens, Luby and Denieffe set off on a recruitment drive. Their biggest success came in Skibbereen, West Cork where they won over 100 members of O’Donovan Rossa’s Phoenix Society, and Rossa became an enthusiastic recruiter. Stephens had less success sounding out former 1848 man John Blake Dillon (Stephens tutored his children) and they also attracted the suspicion of the Catholic Church and Dublin Castle, both suspecting the existence of a new secret organisation. Wanted posters appeared for Luby and Denieffe and the Phoenix Society was also betrayed with Rossa and many of his men arrested.

Stephens decided to visit America, leaving the fugitive Luby in charge. While Stephens managed to convince O’Mahony and Doheny, he had little success with 1848 leaders Mitchel and Meagher. Stephens wanted them to approve access to Irish Directory money from 1848 fundraising. Doheny warned Stephens not to trust them though Stephens believed he could convince Mitchel, and especially Meagher whose heart was more “generous” and “noble”. Stephens did not have a high opinion of either but believed that if they held out they would be exposed as shams.

In New York he met Meagher who was “greatly struck” and promised to help release the funds though he warned Mitchel’s support was also crucial. They travelled to Washington together, Stephens unimpressed by Meagher’s “gourmandising”. Meagher introduced Stephens to President Buchanan whom he dismissed as “a Yankee development of the Artful Dodger”. Stephens went to Tennessee to visit Mitchel and told him he had 15,000 armed men in Ireland. Like Meagher, Mitchel was initially supportive and wrote letters to Directory members asking to give release funds. However, Mitchel said he and Meagher eventually “saw through” Stephens, possibly under Dillon’s influence. News of the Phoenix Society arrests did not help. Stephens ends his American diary in January 1858 with a cold letter from Meagher withdrawing support.

Nevertheless, Stephens’ trip to America was successful. He raised £600 and a new American wing which became known as the Fenian Brotherhood. The word Fenians came to describe both the Irish and American organisations. In America it was spearheaded by O’Mahony with support from Doheny and New York 69th Regiment leader general Michael Corcoran from Co Sligo. Concerned about capture in Ireland, Stephens returned to Paris in 1859 while Luby widened the recruiting net to Dublin. There was little sign of action and Irish Americans began to think the IRB was moribund. Relations between Stephens and O’Mahony became frosty as the former was frustrated by the lack of American funds while envoys from the latter got short shrift in Ireland. They met in Dublin in late 1860 where Stephens was unhappy with O’Mahony’s answers and blamed him for the organisation’s failures. O’Mahony returned to America, humiliated. Their organisation was saved by a spectacular turn of events in 1861.

Young Irelander Terence Bellew MacManus had, like Stephens, fought with O’Brien in Ballingarry. Like Mitchel and Meagher, he had escaped from Tasmania and lived out his life in obscurity in San Francisco. He remained an unrepentant revolutionary and when he died, aged 50, in January 1861 Fenians proposed to send his body to Ireland for burial with full honours. The hostility to this idea from secret society-hating Dublin Archbishop Cullen was initially matched by Stephens and Luby. They believed the occasion might be dominated by 1848 men such as Father Kenyon and John Martin who might be unwilling to link Young Ireland and the Fenians. But the IRB-dominated National Brotherhood of St Patrick organised the funeral and overrode a proposal for Kenyon to do the eulogy. No such problem existed in America, and McManus’s body was feted as it crossed the continent. In New York the non-Fenian Meagher had convinced New York’s Archbishop Hughes to conduct Mass in MacManus’s honour, something Cullen refused in his cathedral. Instead the body lay at the Dublin Mechanics Institute before 50,000 marched to the funeral at Glasnevin, with hundreds of thousands more lining the streets. The Fenian-inspired eulogy called for “faith and sheer resolve to do the work for which MacManus died.” Stephens was ecstatic. American delegates believed he had command of the country.

Though the civil war promised new opportunities, support for Fenianism in America waned after the funeral. Doheny’s death in 1862 was a blow and most Irish Americans preferred to fight for the Union rather than for Ireland. With little to do, Stephens tended his gardens in Sandymount and courted Dublin publican’s daughter Jane Hopper. His Fenian comrades saw this as hypocrisy as Stephens frowned on followers marrying while the revolutionary struggle went on. They married in a mostly empty church in November 1863, with John O’Leary as best man. Even O’Leary noted “a certain grotesqueness in the whole surroundings”. Nevertheless they remained together until her death in 1895. Stephens found new energy and started a newspaper in 1864, The Irish People, though after his opening article was panned as “all dashes, commas, and bosh” he passed editorship to O’Leary assisted by Luby and Kickham with Rossa as business manager. They quickly made the paper a force with the help of American money.

O’Mahony was unhappy with the subsidiary position of American Fenians and announced he would no longer be accountable to Stephens’ “dictatorial arrogance”. Stephens rushed across the Atlantic in March 1864 leaving an executive note naming Luby, O’Leary, and Kickham as leaders in his absence. This note became crucial evidence when later discovered by British authorities. Like the earlier tour, Stephens raised much money in America. But instead of healing the breach, Stephens watched on as dry-goods merchant William Roberts led what became known as the Senate Wing, to eventually displace O’Mahony and push for a Fenian invasion of Canada. Denieffe blamed Stephens and O’Mahony for failing to work “in harmony” though he held O’Mahony primarily responsible for his “imbecile pack” of hangers-ons. These included “Red Jim” McDermott who sold Fenian secrets including ciphers and the location of arms stores to the British consul. McDermott’s actions were matched in Ireland by Fenian informer Pierce Nagle.

With a potential army of battle-hardened post-war Irish Americans behind him, Stephens returned to Ireland promising that 1865 would be “the year of action”. Luby said it proved true, except it was the British who acted. In September they arrested Fenians in Dublin and Cork on Nagle’s advice, shut down the Irish People and found Stephen’s incriminating 1864 executive note. They were helped by O’Mahony’s hapless envoy to Ireland P.J. Meehan who lost introduction letters at a Dublin railway station toilet cubicle. The letters fell into the hands of authorities. Stephens was betrayed in November 1865 and arrested at his Sandymount home. He stunned a courthouse by refusing to recognise “British law in Ireland” (tactics since often repeated by extremist Republicans) and was imprisoned at Richmond Jail. Ten days later he was sprung from jail in an audacious move masterminded by Fenian John Devoy, and using a rope ladder escaped into the night. While his escape was celebrated in Irish songs and ballads, embarrassed authorities offered a thousand pounds for his capture.

Yet Stephens was depressed in hiding. The American split worsened and Roberts’ Senate Wing took control diverting Irish funds into a Canadian invasion. Stephens wrote to O’Mahony saying the Irish cause was “in serious peril” thanks to the “traitorous” Senate Wing but now that he was free again he promised to “hold our forces together”.

But Stephens was undermined by his own actions in Ireland. According to Denieffe (who was arrested but released without charge) Stephens called a meeting of Irish and American Fenian centres in Dublin two days after the escape to discuss when to begin revolution. Denieffe said everyone present except one was in favour of immediate action but Stephens endorsed the exceptor’s stance. “Stephens plainly did not want to fight,” Denieffe said. “I concluded then and there that Stephens’s work was done, and his usefulness ended.” Ryan says Devoy mentioned no such meeting and heavy police activity would have kept Stephens very quiet in this period. But Denieffe was not alone. John Mitchel was acting for the Fenians in Paris and frustrated at Stephens’s failure to set a date for revolution. Devoy pressed on with his work of subverting 8000 Irish soldiers in the British Army, planning to capture a Dublin barracks and swoop on Dublin Castle and Pigeon House Fort. He too was frustrated as Stephens counselled for delay because the American split had interrupted supply of funds.

Time ran out and in February 1866 the British suspended habeas corpus in Ireland, like they did in 1848. Many military Fenians were arrested, including John Boyle O’Reilly. Devoy held an urgent meeting with Stephens demanding action but again, the meeting decided on postponement. The city’s 8000 Fenians had only 800 rifles between them. Devoy was arrested a day later, and hopes of an 1866 rising disappeared.

Stephens escaped by ship to Scotland and went on to Paris where he met Napoleon III. French newspapers reported Stephens was heading to America where a 250,000-strong army would free Ireland “from the British yoke”. He arrived in America in April 1866 determined to end the Fenian split. But he was appalled by O’Mahony’s decision to embark on on his own Canadian invasion to head off Roberts. McDermott betrayed the plan and though 700 Fenians crossed the border to Campobello Island, New Brunswick they were easily repelled by the British Navy.

Undeterred, Roberts’ wing launched its invasion on June 1. A thousand Fenians crossed the Niagara under Colonel John O’Neill and ambushed Canadian militiamen at Ridgeway. They fought another skirmish at Fort Erie but were forced to retreat across the border after they were cut off by the US Navy. American president Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation requiring enforcement of the neutrality laws and the army was instructed to prevent border crossings. The failed invasions served only to galvanise Canadian confederation later that year.

Few Irish Americans would support insurrection in Ireland after the Canadian failures and Stephens was booed at meetings. A New York Times letter accused him of cowardice. A disappointed Stephens summoned New York Fenians to a December meeting to discuss rebellion in Ireland. He infuriated officers who demanded an immediate insurrection saying the Americans had not provided enough guns and money. One even threatened to kill him and they deposed Stephens as military chief of American Fenians. Thomas Kelly, who helped Stephens escape from jail, was now in charge. Stephens fled to Paris and would play no further part in the revolution. “Little Baldy has at last given up the ghost,” Kelly wrote derisively.

The new leadership failed in a forewarned bid to steal arms from Chester Castle. In the subsequent March revolt in Ireland there were brief skirmishes in Dublin, Tipperary and Cork. It was so ineffectual MPs worried more about a revolution in Crete than a domestic uprising. In America Kelly’s men had one last throw, a ship called the Jacmel Packet they renamed as Erin’s Hope. It had 40 Fenians and 5000 arms aboard and planned to land in Sligo. Unable to track IRB men on arrival, they aroused British suspicions and left south before putting the Fenians ashore without weapons at Helvick Head near Dungarvan, Co Waterford on June 1. They were all arrested within a day but became nationalist heroes for being American citizens detained in Waterford jail without having committed any crime. The ship sailed towards England and running low on food eventually returned to America. The last gasp occurred in late 1867 when the three Manchester Martyrs were hanged for murder after an attack on a police van in which a police officer was accidentally shot dead.

Stephens watched it unfold from afar in Parisian poverty. He abandoned a plan to write a book about his experiences and remained silent. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870 he left Paris on the last train before the Germans invaded. He arrived in America a year later for another doomed attempt to regain leadership of the Fenians and its successor group Clan na Gael. Even old friends O’Leary and Luby told him a return to one-man rule was undesirable. He tried a commercial venture importing French wine but that failed and he returned to France in 1874, relying on the generosity of his dwindling supporter base to survive. Though destitute and in ill-health he continued to sign his letters “Chief Organiser, Irish Republic”. In 1882 the Dublin Irishman serialised his account of the 1848 rising and a year later another paper published his account of the 1856 Irish tour. Enemies were still at work. Devoy castigated his refusal to thank him after his prison escape saying he lost faith in him that night.

In 1885 Stephens was arrested in Paris as an accessory to Rossa’s dynamite campaign in England, though he opposed the campaign. There was protest in Ireland, worried that the French would hand him over to British authorities. Instead France expelled him to Belgium where he lived for two years until a change of government brought him back to Paris. Eventually on the intervention of Charles Stewart Parnell, the British government allowed Stephens and his wife to return to Ireland in 1891 after a 25-year exile. The Parnellite split that year prevented any thoughts of a parliamentary career and they lived in retirement in Sutton. Jane died four years later of pneumonia, aged 52. Stephens, aged 76, followed her to the grave six years later on March 29, 1901 following “an attack of weakness”. The wandering hawk was laid to rest in Glasnevin, his coffin draped in what Ryan incorrectly calls “the Fenian Tricolour“. Twenty years later that flag would become the flag of the Irish Free State, after a revolution Ryan took part in, and Stephens’s IRB, led by Michael Collins, did much to inspire. Stephens was proven correct in death. Ireland’s right to independence could only be won by armed revolution.

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.”

Patrick Cleburne: the Irish Confederate general who wanted to end slavery

Confederate Major General Patrick R. Cleburne. Library of Congress

Protestant Irishman Patrick Cleburne believed he had everything to lose if the North conquered the south in the American civil war. In the war he was the highest ranking Irishman on either side and was known as the “Stonewall of the West” for his fighting ability in Tennessee. But his proposal to free the slaves to enable them to join the Confederate army was a bridge too far and cost him his leadership position. Cleburne learned his military craft in the British Army and had emigrated to America during the Famine. He settled in Arkansas where he saw a parallel between the Irish quest for Repeal and the south’s constitutional battle to survive. He was killed at the battle of Franklin, while fellow civil war general, Waterford-born Thomas Francis Meagher defended nearby Chattanooga for the Union. I first heard of the Corkman Cleburne when researching Meagher. At the end of the war defeated Confederate leader Robert E. Lee said that Meagher, “though not Cleburne’s equal in military genius, rivalled him in bravery and in the affections of his soldiers”.

Four years younger than Meagher, Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was born on March 4, 1828 in Ovens, west of Cork city, the second son of doctor Joseph Cleburne and Mary Anne Ronayne, a wealthy landlord’s daughter. Mary died when Patrick was 18 months old and he was educated at a Church of Ireland boarding school. Patrick was 15 when his father died and he was apprenticed to a doctor in Mallow, expected to follow in Joseph’s footsteps. Mallow was the home town of Young Ireland leader Thomas Davis and Patrick would have attended the 1843 monster meeting in Mallow during O’Connell’s year of repeal campaign.

After two years apprenticeship, Cleburne failed his exam to enter the guild at the Apothecaries Hall. To avoid family embarrassment he enlisted as a private in the British army 41st Regiment of Foot. His early military life involved carrying out evictions and rent collection as the famine took a stranglehold. While the Young Ireland rebellion failed in 1848, Cleburne was posted at Spike Island in Cork Harbour, where Young Irelander John Mitchel began his exile. Cleburne watched on helplessly as his own stepmother was evicted a year later.

Aged 21 he bought his way out of the army and the family emigrated to America, arriving in New Orleans on Christmas Day. He was awestruck by the galaxy of nationalities and saw the South’s largest city’s least savoury tradition. “I went yesterday to see the slave market,” he wrote. “It is an unnatural sight to see our fellow creatures sold.” Cleburne settled in Arkansas in 1850 where he became a clerk later becoming a successful lawyer. The decade before the war in the cotton town of Helena on the Mississippi river crystalised Cleburne’s thinking on the South and its peculiar institution. He never owned slaves but like most Irish Americans, Meagher included, Cleburne accepted slavery as part of America’s legal framework.

The Know Nothing presidential campaign of 1856 posed a direct threat to Cleburne, Meagher and all Irish immigrants. The Democrat-voting Cleburne spoke out forcefully against the Know Nothing proposal to prohibit immigrants from voting in America. One night three Know Nothings waylaid Cleburne and a friend, demanding that the friend take back remarks where he said that Democrats who became Know Nothings were “mulattos.” They fired shots and as Cleburne fell, he drew his gun and shot dead one of the attackers. He was shot through the lungs and suffered from the effects of the wound for the rest of his life. Years later, he told his brother “my lungs have never been well since I was wounded…an hour’s debate in the Court House will sometimes fill my mouth with blood.”

The election of Lincoln in 1860 led to the secession of southern states. Cleburne wanted the Union to be preserved but if it couldn’t, he hoped “to see all the Southern states united in a new confederation.” He wanted this to be done peacefully but in a letter to his brother in 1861 he believed the North would engage in a “brutal and unholy war” to stop secession. Cleburne feared a defeated South would become a subservient colony like Ireland. He joined the local militia and quickly rose from regimental commander to a brigade and division leader. Within 18 months he was promoted to major-general. Cleburne distinguished himself in many battles including Shiloh, Stones River, Chattanooga-Chickamauga, and the Atlanta campaign. The Confederate Congress thanked him for saving the Army of the Tennessee at Ringgold Gap, Georgia in 1863 and grateful Confederate president Jefferson Davis called him the “Stonewall Jackson of the West.” He seemed destined for the highest honours until he made a controversial political decision.

When the North issued the Emancipation Declaration to free southern slaves, Cleburne believed the South had to respond. At Christmas 1863 he issued a memorial drawing on his Irish experience entitled “A Proposal to Make Soldiers of Slaves and Guarantee Freedom to All Loyal Negroes“. Cleburne said the South was heading towards defeat and subjugation due to three reasons: northern numerical superiority, the single source of supply of Confederate troops (ie white men), and the world’s dislike of slavery. Cleburne suggested that ending slavery would remove all three disadvantages and expose the Northern campaign as a “bloody ambition for more territory”. Cleburne said giving blacks freedom would tie them to their southern homes. “It is said an army of Negroes cannot be spared from the fields,” he said. “We believe it would be better to take half the able-bodied men off a plantation than to take the one master mind that economically regulated its operations. Leave some of the skill at home and take some of the muscle to fight with.” He believed white planters should sacrifice slavery to save themselves.

Though Cleburne had the support of his officers, these were dangerous and radical notions in a polity whose entire raison d’etre was slavery. The idea of arming slaves was abhorrent to many and some thought him mad. President Davis, a slaveowner, ordered all copies of the proposal to be destroyed. Only one copy survived and re-emerged in the 1880s.

Cleburne accepted the decision without complaint and served throughout the Atlanta campaign under John Bell Hood. Cleburne led his division into battle at Franklin near Nashville on November 30, 1864. Eyewitness Daniel Gowan said they were advancing when Cleburne’s horse was shot from under him and a replacement horse was struck by a cannonball as he mounted it. “He disappeared in the smoke of battle and that was the last time I saw him,” Gowan said. In an attack as bloody as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, Cleburne went in on foot and was killed near the Union breastworks at the head of his favourite Irish regiment, the 5th Confederate Infantry from Memphis.  

Cleburne statue at Ringgold, Georgia via Wikipedia.

A man named John McQuade found Cleburne’s body the following morning. “He lay flat upon his back as if asleep, his military cap partly over his eye,” McQuade said. His boots were gone and his watch and sword-belt were stolen. The only sign of injury was a blood-stained white linen shirt. His comrades remembered Cleburne saying once how beautiful nearby Ashwood cemetery was, and they buried him there. He was reinterred in Helena in 1870, where his grave still remains. Lee said Cleburne had Irish intrepidity and “in a field of battle, he shone like a meteor on a clouded sky”. But his fearlessness outside battle should be remembered. In 1864 there were few even in the north that would say that slavery was the Confederacy’s “most vulnerable point, a continued embarrassment, and in some respects an insidious weakness.” Cleburne’s statue at Ringgold Gap was designed by Ron Tunison, who coincidentally designed the statue for Meagher and the Irish Brigade at Antietam.

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.

Fanatic Heart: John Boyle O’Reilly

John Boyle O’Reilly’s Mountjoy mugshot in 1866.

Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel were not the only 19th century Irish revolutionaries to make their mark on Australia and America. Among those they inspired was County Meath man John Boyle O’Reilly. Like Meagher and Mitchel, O’Reilly was transported to Australia for conspiring in rebellion. Like Meagher and Mitchel, he escaped to America, and like Meagher and Mitchel, O’Reilly became one of the most important Irishmen in America. According to A.G. Evans’ biography Fanatic Heart, O’Reilly is remembered in Ireland as a patriot and poet, in Australia as a convict who made a daring escape, and in America as a journalist, poet and philanthropist.

John Boyle O’Reilly was born in 1844 in the shadow of the Boyne river near Drogheda. His home village Dowth is the site of a megalithic passage tomb of similar vintage to nearby Newgrange. Schoolteacher William O’Reilly married Eliza Boyle in Dublin before he took over Dowth national school. John was their third child. At his father’s feet John learned about Cromwell’s massacre of Drogheda, and the Battle of the Boyne at nearby Oldbridge. Ireland suffered an even bigger tragedy as John toddled around the house. The potato crop failed in 1845, then again in 1846, and a third time in 1848. Thanks to poverty, disease and British government negligence, one million people died while another million emigrated. The O’Reillys survived on William’s wages though it turned young John into a lifelong “implacable enemy” of England.

His older brother William was an apprentice at the Drogheda Argus. When William contracted tuberculosis, John took his place, aged 11. John spent four years at the Argus but was forced out after the proprietor died in 1859. The family sent John to Preston, Lancashire where his mother’s sister had married an Englishman. Preston was a Catholic town and O’Reilly enjoyed four years there, working at the Preston Guardian. After 12 months he enlisted with the 11th Lancashire Rifle Volunteers amid talk of a possible war with France. O’Reilly became interested in Irish history and returned to Dublin in 1863, as rumours of Fenian rebellion convulsed Ireland.

O’Reilly enlisted as a trooper in the 10th Hussars in Dublin, not as a potential agent provocateur but simply because he “liked soldering”. The Fenians appointed John Devoy to seek recruits from the army. Devoy estimated 8000 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were among 26,000 troops in Ireland. Devoy sought out O’Reilly as a popular member of the Hussars and enlisted him to the movement. With the American civil war ending, Fenian leader James Stephens said 1865 would be the year of action. He never gave the signal. Instead authorities raided Fenian paper the Irish People and arrested its leaders.

Informers attended the secret meetings that Devoy held with army recruits and tipped off police who arrested Devoy at the next meeting in March 1866. O’Reilly was not present but he was arrested at army barracks. His colonel shouted, “Damn you, O’Reilly! You have ruined the finest regiment in the service.” O’Reilly taken to Mountjoy prison and court martialed in June, charged with knowledge of a mutiny and not telling his commanding officer. Informers testified O’Reilly was part of a Fenian conspiracy. The defence cited O’Reilly’s good character but could not undermine the evidence. Aged 22, and was sentenced to death, commuted to 20 years penal servitude.

On September 4, O’Reilly was shackled with military prisoners and transported to London’s Millbank prison, now home of Tate Britain gallery. Millbank was a grim, silent place punctuated only by the clanging of doors and quarter hour chimes at nearby Westminster. Talking was forbidden even during the daily 15 minute exercise though prisoners secretly sent letters to each other. O’Reilly took comfort in Thomas A Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.

In April 1867 he was transferred to Chatham prison before being moved to Portsmouth and then Dartmoor in Devon. O’Reilly described the dreary moorside prison in his later novel Moondyne, “its two centuries of unloved existence in the midst of a wild land and fitful climate, had seared every wall-tower and gateway with lines and patches of discolouration.” By year’s end O’Reilly was on the move again – this time to the other side of the world, transported to Western Australia aboard the Hougoumont.

Though he did not know it, O’Reilly was on the last ever convict ship from Britain to Australia. New South Wales abolished transportation in 1840 and it lasted another 12 years in Van Diemen’s Land. Western Australia began taking prisoners in 1850 but faced pressure from anti-transportationists to end it. There were 280 convicts aboard the Hougoumont, all male, and 62 were Fenians. This caused alarm in WA especially after the “Manchester Outrages” where a policeman was accidentally killed after an attack on a police van, and three Fenians were executed. There were protests in Fremantle and settlers confronted the governor who told them their fears were exaggerated.

The ship left Portland in October 1867. O’Reilly was delighted to be reunited with fellow Fenians. Some would become lifelong friends including Denis Cashman who left a wife and three children in county Waterford. Their guards were surprisingly well disposed towards the Irish and relaxed rules on fraternisation aboard. The prisoners amused themselves with concerts, O’Reilly contributing poetry. Cashman said O’Reilly formed a conspiracy to capture the ship but was talked out of it by prisoners with lesser sentences.

He put his creativity towards a new project, a weekly newspaper. A priest helped secure paper, pens and ink. The first edition of the Wild Goose came out on November 9. That evening the concert was cancelled so O’Reilly could read aloud the handwritten eight-page paper to comrades. Cashman contributed artwork to the subtitle in Gothic letters “A Collection of Ocean Waifs.” The tone was literary rather than political and it hoped to “prove of interest to all to watch the changing flight of the flock.” Amid articles and poetry, a humorous “markets column” announced that biscuits were “getting livelier” while tea was “rather flat.” Co-editors O’Reilly and John Flood encouraged prisoners to stay true to Ireland “with the true unswerving love known only to exiles.”

Convicts loved it and the second edition was eagerly awaited a week later. O’Reilly wrote of an amusing mock trial of a prisoner tried by fellow convicts for stealing tobacco, “instigated by the devil and a love of plunder.” The offender was tarred and locked up in the toilet for three hours before being scrubbed with a hair broom. Flood encouraged Fenians to “fight life battle’s bravely out.” The last page stated that Fremantle was preparing a grand reception for the Wild Goose “by her feathered friend, the Swan.”

O’Reilly and Flood produced their paper every Saturday. Sometimes heavy seas made the going difficult as the Hougoumont sailed into the roaring forties, but the Wild Goose was always published on time, the sixth edition coming as they sailed within 3000 miles of Antarctica. The ship’s surgeon said the seventh edition would be the last as paper was confiscated in preparation for Fremantle. The last 16-page edition on December 21 was a “Christmas number” complete with ornate festive script. O’Reilly contributed a story called “Christmas Night.” He delayed the weekly reading of the paper until Christmas Day with a special dinner of “salt horse and plum duff” and a double ration of wine.

The captain demanded O’Reilly and Flood write a second copy for him, which they managed in heavy seas. Two mates also wanted their own copies keeping them busy until within sight of the Western Australian coast. On January 9, 1868 they docked at Fremantle, then a larger town than the capital upriver at Perth. The town was divided between those welcoming the convicts and those fearing the Fenians’ reputation. The convicts were taken by barge to prison and issued summer clothes. Civilians were assigned to work groups but 17 military Fenians including O’Reilly were kept in jail. O’Reilly was appointed orderly to the prison chaplain and after a month was sent 115 miles south to join a bush camp building a road at Bunbury.

In 1868 Bunbury was a busy export centre for timber and sandalwood. The new road would link Bunbury to Geographe Bay. The work camps were housed in tents and rude huts with hammocks for beds. They worked nine hour days under a baking sun with primitive tools, a wearying task, as O’Reilly wrote, with “no wages, no promotion, no incitement, no variation for good or bad, except stripes for the laggard.”

O’Reilly was marked out as a promising convict and was promoted to clerical assistant giving him respite from back-breaking work. He became a messenger to Bunbury and was attracted to his warden’s daughter Jessie. They had a brief but doomed affair. A note in his file said O’Reilly tried to commit suicide. He also attracted the dislike of an overseer, who punished him for a minor infraction, and he was not allowed letters for six months. One of the delayed letters was news of his mother’s death.

The harsh treatment awakened a desire to escape and he turned to Catholic priest Patrick McCabe for advice. McCabe thought escape was impossible but agreed to help. On an errand to Bunbury, O’Reilly met Irishman James Maguire who said McCabe would help Fenians escape aboard an American whaler. Over 40 convicts had escaped on whalers between 1850 and 1862 and British authorities thoroughly searched ships at port. When whaler Vigilant arrived in Bunbury in February 1869, McCabe paid the captain £30 and planned to smuggle O’Reilly aboard. One evening as O’Reilly was night constable on duty, he began his escape. Maguire and a friend escorted him to the mouth of the Collie River where they found a boat and rowed four miles silently past the town and its harbour police and beyond Bunbury’s estuary entrance into the ocean. They landed 12 miles north at a deserted beach north of Leschenault Peninsula near Australind. There they would wait a day or two for the Vigilant.

His companions went to find a former convict who lived nearby while O’Reilly searched for food. After he skinned and ate a possum, Maguire returned with water and provisions. They made a bed of tree branches and fell asleep exhausted. The following day they spied the Vigilant out to sea and rowed out to meet it. But the ship veered away. The men shouted in vain and the ship sailed out of sight. Bitterly, they returned to the shore and left O’Reilly to hide in the dunes.

Unknown to O’Reilly two other prisoners had escaped Bunbury on the same night as him. Police were everywhere and it was only by some miracle O’Reilly’s boat was not spotted as it passed the town. The two other men were later caught and when Police realised that O’Reilly was also missing, they combed the hills around the town, while he hid 12 miles away. The Vigilant was searched but the captain was worried that he might be followed and could not risk picking up O’Reilly.

In desperation O’Reilly took to his boat again and spent two days on the ocean. Remarkably he found the Vigilant again, but once more the ship veered away. O’Reilly rowed back to the dunes. He remained there for two weeks while McCabe and Maguire raised more money, this time to escape on the American whaler Gazelle. An English prisoner named Bowman blackmailed his way into the escape plans. Maguire took Bowman to the dunes where O’Reilly kept a suspicious eye on him. The following morning they rowed three miles to meet the Gazelle. This time O’Reilly was allowed to come aboard. Bowman joined him, though was not as welcome.

There remained dangers ahead. Gazelle was five months from home and British tentacles were everywhere on the seven seas. The ship sailed north and continued whaling with the occasional “gam” (meeting) with other whalers. O’Reilly was part of one whale chase and when the harpoon struck, the whale lashed out at O’Reilly’s boat, smashing it to smithereens. Second mate Henry Hathaway found him unconscious and head down in the water. He dragged O’Reilly up and punched him repeatedly to get the salt water out of him. O’Reilly convinced Hathaway to give him a second chance and they successfully dragged a whale aboard.

The Gazelle headed to the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues for supplies. Now part of Mauritius, Rodrigues was then a British colony. When they landed in July 1869, authorities boarded the ship with information an Australian convict was aboard. They identified Bowman and arrested him. O’Reilly was not taken but suspected Bowman would inform on him. Hathaway formed a plan, hiding O’Reilly in a locker and telling the crew that O’Reilly was suicidal. Hathaway shouted “man overboard” and when the crew found O’Reilly’s hat in the water, they were convinced he had drowned. The following morning Bowman returned with soldiers to identify O’Reilly only to be told he was dead. The crew’s distress was not faked. After the Gazelle left the island, sailors were astonished when O’Reilly emerged from the locker.

It was a narrow escape. When the Gazelle gammed with American cargo ship Sapphire in the Indian Ocean, O’Reilly swapped ship taking the identity papers of a deserted sailor. The Sapphire took her cargo of cotton to Liverpool where O’Reilly stepped ashore as seaman John Soule. Though tempted he did not return to nearby Preston and instead boarded the Bombay bound for America. O’Reilly looked longingly as they passed the coast of Ireland, the closest he would ever get to home. He docked at Philadelphia on November 23, 1869, “a political refugee” in his own words, finally beyond the reach of British authorities.

O’Reilly was welcomed as an Irish hero in a reception at New York’s Cooper Institute. He joined the Fenians but was disappointed to find a split between those who wanted to attack Canada and those who wanted action in Ireland. After a month he took the advice of friends and moved to Boston, where he lived the rest of his life. While relations between Irish and nativists in Boston had improved since the 1850s when Massachusetts had a Know Nothing governor, there were still tensions and O’Reilly wanted to ease them.

John Boyle O’Reilly later in life.

O’Reilly met Cavan-born immigrant Patrick Donahoe who in 1836 started the Pilot, which became Boston’s main Irish Catholic newspaper. Donahoe offered him a job and by April 1870 O’Reilly told his aunt in Preston he was establishing a reputation and lived “as a gentleman.” He covered that month’s Fenian convention in New York and supported John O’Neill’s plan for a third invasion of Canada. O’Reilly followed O’Neill’s army to the border and wrote about their poor morale and discipline. O’Reilly joined the revolution which was a disaster and he was arrested. Disillusioned, he wrote “Fenianism has lost its mystery” and its leaders were “criminally incompetent.” He resigned from the movement. From here on, O’Reilly’s loyalty was to America.

Within a year O’Reilly became editor of the Pilot. While diehard Fenians detested him, his strong views on Irish assimilation helped the paper increase circulation. O’Reilly’s reputation grew with forceful lectures. Within two years, he was a wealthy man. He married Irish American woman Mary Murphy in 1872. The Pilot office was rocked by three fires in the following 12 months that destroyed Donahoe’s fortune. O’Reilly survived the disasters and his literary career flourished. In 1873 he published a book of poetry Songs from the Southern Seas which he dedicated to newborn daughter Mollie. While the reception was mixed it gained an enthusiastic following.

After Donahoe went bankrupt, O’Reilly bought the paper in partnership with Boston Archbishop, John Williams. The Pilot went from strength to strength as did O’Reilly’s reputation as a prominent Boston Catholic. He was distracted by matters past when the Fenians resolved to free remaining Irish military prisoners in Western Australia. O’Reilly and Cashman (now the Pilot‘s business manager) met old Fenian friend John Devoy to discuss the plan. O’Reilly suggested they talk to Henry Hathaway about buying a whaler to pick up the fugitives. Hathaway arranged for Devoy to buy a ship called the Catalpa while O’Reilly involved Western Australian friend Father McCabe in the rescue. The Catalpa picked up six Fenians off Fremantle and survived a stand-off with a British naval vessel before returning in triumph to America in 1876.

In 1878 O’Reilly published Moondyne in weekly instalments in the Pilot. The novel was based partly on Western Australian bushranger Moondyne Joe and partly on his own life. Though melodramatic, it was well received. Its themes included penal reform, which O’Reilly promoted in the paper. He was a supporter of rights of minorities, including Native Americans, Jews and especially African Americans. He attacked New York police who threatened to resign if a black man was appointed to the force. He supported armed retaliation against southern lynching. “The negro is a new man,” he wrote, “and he can be a great man if he will avoid modelling himself on the whites.”

O’Reilly supported the Irish Land League in 1879 and met Parnell in Boston a year later. By then O’Reilly had published his third book of verse and was the father of four daughters. Though O’Reilly was an athletic man of immense energy his busy life began to affect his health. He complained of insomnia and overwork and he took time off on canoe trips, which he described in a book Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport. There was disappointment in 1885 when the British government turned down his request to visit Canada as an undischarged felon. O’Reilly knew he could never return to Ireland. He continued a punishing schedule of writing commissions and public engagements until illness in September 1889 forced convalescence in the mountains. He recovered and travelled to California in 1890 on a speaking tour, which added to his exhaustion.

O’Reilly returned to their summer house at Hull near Nantucket where he commuted daily to Boston to edit the paper. On the night of August 9, 1880 wife Mary asked him to go to the doctor’s for medicine. At midnight he arrived back with a doctor, who diagnosed nervous tension. O’Reilly had a second excursion at 2am after he spilled medicine. He returned with more medicine, the doctor advising he should take some himself. Mary woke at 3am and found her husband slumped in a chair. She couldn’t rouse him and sent for the doctor. O’Reilly rallied briefly before he collapsed and died, aged 46. The Boston Herald called it “heart failure” though the doctor listed a cause of death as “an overdose”. Suicide is also a possibility, given his prior attempt and his chronic overwork and pressure.

Cardinal Gibbons called his death “a public calamity” and former president Grover Cleveland hailed him as a “strong and able man”. O’Reilly was buried at the highest point of Boston’s Holyhood Cemetery, now marked by a bas-relief engraved on a basalt rock. There is also a memorial on the Fenway intersection to the “poet, patriot, orator.” According to A.G. Evans, O’Reilly helped change American perceptions of Irish-Americans, raised the consciousness of the Irish themselves, and was a Western Australian folk hero. In the last few weeks, Bunbury hosted a play on his romance with Jessie, Springfield Massachusetts’ John Boyle O’Reilly Club built a new pavilion, while Drogheda held a wreath laying in his honour. O’Reilly’s impact remains profound on three continents.

Torn between tribes: Father Mathew in America

Theobald Mathew (1790-1856). National Library of Ireland.

The Irish “apostle of temperance” Father Theobald Mathew led a mass movement that attracted a remarkable three million members in the early 1840s. His greatest challenge, and possibly his greatest success, came long after his Irish peak. In 1849, Ireland was worn out by four years of famine and Mathew’s temperance movement was in decline. Mathew was about to satisfy a long-held desire to travel to America where he hoped to regenerate the movement. He spent two years in the United States and fell foul of antebellum America’s greatest controversy, the slavery debate.

The American trip was a homecoming of sorts as the temperance movement began in the United States. In 1826 Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher (father of anti-slavery activists Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) initiated the movement with his six sermons on intemperance. The American Temperance Society began in Boston backed by Protestant clergy and laymen. They included Ulster-born pastor Joseph Penney who returned to Belfast in 1829 and persuaded Presbyterian ministers to establish the Ulster Temperance Society.

In 1835, Quaker William Martin set up a total abstinence society in Cork but was unable to draw Catholics into its ranks. Martin needed a Catholic priest at the helm to gain mass appeal and he contacted his friend Father Mathew, a popular Capuchin friar stationed in Cork for 20 years. Mathew grew up on a wealthy estate in County Tipperary with Anglican cousins and was more willing to collaborate with Protestants than most fellow priests. In 1838 Mathew became the president of the Cork Total Abstinence Society. He was an articulate and appealing spokesman and prospective teetotalers came from far and wide to take the pledge. Within 12 months the Cork group attracted 24,000 members and hosted eight reading rooms.

Mathew took his movement on the road, first around Munster and gradually around all Ireland. Limerick and Waterford reported a big drop in crime after Mathew’s visits. He was feted everywhere, many believing he had miraculous curing powers, which he denied with great embarrassment. Word reached America, the Boston Pilot noting “people flock to him in great multitudes, and the number of those whom he has induced to abandon the horrible vice of drunkenness is beyond calculation.” Watching carefully was Daniel O’Connell who praised Mathew’s movement as a “moral and majestic miracle”. Mathew was equally careful, determined to keep temperance apolitical to avoid offending Protestant supporters, British authorities and his clerical superiors.

Mathew refused to support O’Connell’s Repeal campaign but agreed in 1841 to sign the Irish Address, a letter from Dublin abolitionists urging Irish Americans to stand against slavery and “treat the coloured people as your equals.” Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was delighted but American Catholic bishops preferred to keep the Irish out of the slavery debate. They also worried about the suspiciously Protestant nature of the temperance movement, noting alcohol was a beverage “which the Sacred Scriptures do not prohibit, and of which the most holy persons have occasionally partaken.”

Nevertheless a Catholic temperance movement took off in America. Charles Dickens witnessed a temperance rally in Cincinnatti in 1842 and he was particularly pleased to see Irishmen “with their green scarves; carrying their national Harp and their Portrait of Father Mathew high above the people’s heads.” In June 1843, New York bishop John Hughes joined Whig powerbroker Thurlow Weed (both were close friends of Lincoln’s future Secretary of State William Seward) on a trip to Ireland where they were impressed by Mathew. They invited him to America, but he declined due to demands on his time in Ireland and Britain. A planned visit in 1844 was cancelled due to anti-Irish race riots in Philadelphia and New York.

Mathew was beset by financial issues. He ran up substantial debts having given away medals to those taking the pledge. He was briefly placed under arrest for having failed to pay money he owed to an English medal manufacturer. The press did not publicise the story out of deference though eventually word of his plight got out and Mathew Relief Committees began around Ireland.

As Mathew got his affairs in order, the potato blight struck. When famine worsened, Mathew set up a soup kitchen in Cork, one of the worst affected counties. He testified before parliament and told Treasury secretary Charles Trevelyan that men, women and children were “gradually wasting away”. Trevelyan refused to consider government action that might interfere with all-important market forces. Mathew also corresponded with Thurlow Weed and American bishops. In 1847 he told Americans the worst of the Famine was ending and he was considering a trip across the Atlantic. Mathew obtained an annual pension of £300 from Westminster, which annoyed Irish critics already unhappy at his lack of support for O’Connell. He was overlooked for bishop of Cork because he was “beholden to the British government.”

In 1848 Mathew’s optimism over the Famine proved unfounded with a third potato crop failure in four years. Mathew postponed America once more. Despite his pension, he was still debt-ridden. “I could not resist the cries of my fellow creatures, suffering from extreme want and wrung with tormenting hunger,” he told one correspondent. After Mathew suffered a stroke, many believed he would never make it to America. But his health returned and supporters raised money for the journey. He finally set sail in spring 1849, hoping that American funds would revitalise his organisation.

Though Bishop Hughes had previously invited Mathew over, he now expected the visit to cause problems due to increasing anti-Irish attitudes. He told his archbishop that he would do his best to keep Mathew “out of the hands of the Philistines” meaning Protestant temperance advocates, who were also advocates of abolition. Hughes favoured neither outcome and made sure that Mathew visited mainly Catholic schools and institutions in his diocese. Though Matthew suffered an archbishop’s rebuke for attending a non-denominational meeting, the visit was a success and he administered the pledge to 20,000 New Yorkers.

After Mathew went to Boston and met the city’s whig mayor and Lyman Beecher, Boston’s Catholic bishop lamented Mathew sharing a stage with “sectarian, fanaticks, calvinist preachers and deacons.” Garrison was also keen to see him. His Liberator newspaper said abolitionists would hold a great rally to commemorate West Indian Emancipation and invitations went out to Ralph Waldo Emerson and “FATHER MATHEW, the distinguished philanthropist of Ireland”. Mathew turned down the invite claiming the slavery of liquor was battle enough for one man. Incensed, Garrison savaged Mathew. “In Ireland, you professed to be an uncompromising abolitionist..but now that you are on American soil you have signified your determination to give the slave no token of your sympathy.” Irish Americans papers supported Mathew and then Senator for New York William Seward said Garrison was bullying a great philanthropist.

Mathew ran into more trouble when he went south. He was looking forward to meeting Georgian temperance advocate, Judge Joseph Lumpkin. But when Garrison revealed Mathew had signed the 1841 Irish address which referred to slavery as “that foul blot upon the noble institutions and fair fame of your adopted country”, Lumpkin asked Mathew if he still held those opinions. Mathew did not repudiate the address, although he pledged “not to interfere . . . with the institutions of this mighty republic.” This was unsatisfactory to Lumpkin who widely publicised Mathew’s apparent anti-Southern attitude.

Mathew stopped in Washington where Congress was bitterly divided over whether to admit California as a free state. The Whigs honoured Mathew with a seat on the floor of Congress, a symbolic gesture normally approved unanimously. Even though Mathew had rejected Garrison, Southern senators including future Confederate president Jefferson Davis attacked Mathew as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” trying to unite the Irish with the abolitionists “in their nefarious designs” against the South. Northern senators said Matthew was here to speak on temperance not slavery, and a majority voted to grant Mathew the seat.

Mathew continued south despite the row, hoping warmer weather would be good for his health. He pledged 2300 people in Georgia, though Lumpkin disinvited him to the state’s temperance convention. In two months in the south’s largest city, New Orleans, Mathew pledged 14,000 of its 20,000 Irish residents. He continued a gruelling schedule in Arkansas and then St. Louis. He hoped to visit Indian missions in Texas but in March 1851 suffered a severe stroke in Nashville. He needed to go home and recover.

The abolitionist press was as critical as the southern press and ran articles questioning whether Mathew planned to use temperance funds for his mission or to finish building a church in Cork. But Hughes had put earlier suspicions aside. He invited Mathew to preach in his New York cathedral where he administered the pledge to 4000 people. As Mathew departed for Ireland in November 1851, the impressed New York Herald noted he had visited 25 states, 300 cities and had added half a million people “to the long muster roll of his disciples”. Garrison was unmoved: “It is said that Father Mathew is soon to return to Ireland. Pity he ever left it.”

Mathew was gravely ill and no more financially secure than when he arrived in America. Although he lived for five more years, he never fully resumed temperance work. Yet his mission was a success and many converts would lead the American temperance movement in the following decades. Even the Catholic bishops became firm supporters. One American bishop admitted “we all have reason to rejoice in the fruits of his mission amongst us although we were all prejudiced more or less against him before his arrival.” While he angered abolitionists and pro-slavery partisans alike, Mathew could never have pleased both sides. The 1856 Kansas Nebraska Act led to “popular sovereignty” which enabled states to decide on the issue of slavery for themselves. Radicals like Garrison and Lumpkin would ensure that nothing could stop the inexorable separation and march to war.

Lola Montez: an extraordinary life

Lola Montez arm in arm with Cheyenne chief Light in the Clouds (1852). Photo: Collection of Gail Dane Gomberg Propp

Lola Montez is a name many people remember without knowing quite why they remember it. I was dimly aware of her as a famous 19th century dancer but was drawn to her recently when I discovered she was Irish. Fellow Irishman Thomas Francis Meagher was also drawn to her when she lived in the mountain mining districts of California in the winter of 1854. Meagher “walked through five feet of snow” to pay respects and found Montez with her arm in a bandage, “her pet grizzly bear having given her a slap of his paw the day before, as she was tenderly helping him to a lump of sugar.” I assumed it was a fanciful story but her biographer confirms it was true. Bruce Seymour’s Lola Montez A Life said Montez’s pet bear tried to maul her before someone clubbed it over the head. A notice later appeared in the local paper announcing “Grizzly for sale.” It was one of many great stories of a most colourful life.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography primly calls Lola Montez a “dancer and courtesan” but she was a lot more besides. When she died in 1861, she was probably the most well known woman of her time after Queen Victoria. Stories swirled about the mysterious woman variously called a beautiful Spanish noblewoman, an Irish slut and a native New Yorker. She was twice a bigamist and constantly fighting with the law. She charmed packed-out theatres in Europe, America and Australia and was loved by kings and composers. She caused a revolution in Bavaria and was made countess. She was a handy shot with a revolver, and armed with a whip and vicious temper, she intimidated more men than any woman of her time. She was the first white woman to be photographed arm in arm with a native American and the first woman to be photographed smoking. She was a brilliant self-publicist and walking headline, and though given to outrageous lies, some extraordinary portion of what she and others said about her was true.

This wild life was a remote possibility for a girl born in Ireland in 1821. Her mother Eliza Oliver was the illegitimate daughter of Protestant MP and sheriff of Cork, Charles Silver Oliver. Her father Edward Gilbert was an ensign in the 25th Foot Regiment when he met and married Eliza. Though Grange in Sligo claims the birth of Eliza Gilbert, Lola told the King of Bavaria she was born on February 14 in Limerick and for once she may not have been lying, Certainly her mother’s brother lived in Limerick.

Gilbert was stationed in Sligo and Boyle for two years before being transferred to the 44th Foot in India. The young family travelled across the ocean and up the Ganges but Ensign Gilbert died of cholera in Patna. The widow returned to Calcutta where she married Scottish lieutenant Patrick Craigie. Craigie was concerned about his stepdaughter growing up wild amid the lushness of India and aged six, Eliza junior went to Scotland to live with his father, a former provost of Montrose. There she gained the reputation of an exotic creature with a love of fun and mischief. Aged 11, she went to Sunderland with Craigie’s sister Catherine Rae and her husband who were establishing a boarding school. A year later Craigie arranged for his old commander General Jasper Nicolls to look after his stepdaughter. Nicolls enrolled her in school in Bath where she received a fine education.

Her mother returned from India in 1836 accompanied by Wexford-born lieutenant Thomas James. She intended to marry 16-year-old Eliza off to a wealthy 64-year-old widower in India. Eliza was horrified and the reunion with her mother was a failure, but Eliza’s budding beauty attracted Lieutenant James and the pair eloped to Ireland. They married at Rathbeggan, Co Meath on July 23, 1837, took lodgings in Dublin and visited the James family seat near Mt Leinster. Eventually James returned to his regiment in India. The marriage unravelled on the long sea voyage and the relationship was rocky by the time they arrived north of Delhi in 1839. She left James and decided to return to Britain.

En route she met Lieutenant George Lennox, nephew of the Duke of Richmond. Ladies aboard were scandalised as Eliza and Lennox openly fraternised and spent evenings in his cabin. They arrived in Portsmouth arm in arm and Eliza established herself in London as Lennox’s mistress. The affair lasted barely a summer but long enough for Lieutenant James in India to find out and sue for divorce.

Eliza decided to go on stage. Lennox gave her contacts in British theatre and, too old to learn ballet, she became a Spanish dancer. She travelled to Spain and learned some of the language, culture and dance. While she was away the Consistory Court granted the divorce but granted neither party the right to remarry. The decision would have consequences but for now the excitement was the emergence of an exotic unknown beauty.

Returning from Spain, Eliza befriended nobleman the Earl of Malmesbury who provided money to get her started. He lobbied for her stage debut, a dance at Her Majesty’s between the acts of the Barber of Seville and began a publicity blitz. She was billed as Spanish noble Lola Montez who would dance El Oleano which had steps called “death to the tarantula.” On stage Montez slowly captivated her audience as she mimed the crushing of the tarantula. It was a sensation in the auditorium which demanded an encore. The press lauded Lola and her “spider dance” as the talk of London. When one paper noted that the supposed Senorita was actually Mrs James, Montez began a tactic she would frequently reuse, an indignant letter to the editor, which claimed she was a native of Seville who never before “set foot in this country.” When the unabashed newspaper threatened to drag in nobles to unmask her, the theatre manager refused to renew her contract. Montez decided to continue her career on the continent.

Her first performance in Dresden was underwhelming, the locals preferring opera to dance, but she charmed many young men who gave her introductions to Berlin. At Berlin’s Royal Theatre she danced El Oleano in front of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV to mixed acclaim, with flowers on the stage but hisses amid the applause. The King was impressed, however, and when his brother-in-law Czar Nicholas I of Russia arrived in Berlin, Lola privately entertained them at his palace. Lola overstretched a few days later by gatecrashing the VIP section of a grand parade for both monarchs. When a gendarme tried to escort the mounted Lola from the restricted area she lashed out with her whip and was allowed to stay where she was.

Montez was charged with assault of a gendarme but she tore up the legal summons which led to a more serious charge of judicial contempt. The matter never came to trial and proved a goldmine of publicity for the dancer who continued east towards St Petersburg. First she went to Warsaw, then a Russian satrapy, where she charmed critics at the Grand Theatre. However she argued with theatre director and gendarmerie chief Ignacy Abramowicz, who was alarmed at the politics she spoke with new Polish friends. Abramowicz paid infiltrators in the crowd to boo and hiss her and she denounced him from the stage to great applause. Abramowicz expelled her from Warsaw. She then conquered the stage in Stettin, Danzig, Konigsberg and Riga before arriving in St Petersburg where her Polish reputation had preceded her. Though Nicholas I had seen her in Berlin, he forbade his subjects the same privilege and his newspapers refused to mention her. Her plans in disarray she went back to Berlin, where she met Hungarian musical genius Franz Liszt.

Liszt, then 32, was at the height of his powers as a performer and met Lola following one of his concerts. They quickly took up together though for once Lola was not the centre of attention. In Dresden they attended a Richard Wagner opera but Wagner took a dim view of Lola whom he called “a heartless, demonic being.” Lola also introduced a young piano-playing fan of hers named Hans Von Bulow to Liszt and the young Von Bulow would become a lifelong student of Liszt. Like Lola, Von Bulow would run foul of Wagner, who stole his fiance.

Lola was expelled from Dresden for slapping a friend of Liszt on the face. She and Liszt split up though they remained friends. Lola moved to Paris where it was easy for a woman of wit and intelligence to make friends and she was soon bosom buddies with the Jockey Club, a notorious group of wealthy men who attended races and theatre. A theatre critic friend of Liszt began a successful campaign to get her onstage at the Opera where she danced l’Olia (El Oleano). The theatre was packed out with ballet lovers and Jockey Club members. While the latter applauded loudly, those who understood dance found Montez too unorthodox though undeniably beautiful. Lola won a second and third billing but was criticised in the press. One critic who knew Spain said Mme Montez had “nothing Andalusian about her except a pair of magnificent black eyes.”

Lola was lost to the Opera but stayed in Paris. She took dancing lessons and learned to become a top pistol shot. She moved in with wealthy Alexander Dujarier who ran the newspaper La Presse. Dujarier assisted her in getting a new dancing gig. She had wild support from the audience but again critics complained. Unsurprisingly La Presse was an exception, saying she got away with breaking the rules. She was on the verge of success in Paris when tragedy struck. Dujarier got into an angry exchange while gambling and his offended opponent demanded satisfaction. They met in a duel; Dujarier shot first and missed but his opponent did not. Dujarier died. The bullet also killed Montez’s Paris career as the theatre lost interest in her without her patron.

Lola went back on tour. In Bonn she accompanied Liszt to a dinner where a brawl started. When Liszt toasted the English, Dutch and Austrians in the audience, an angry Frenchman screamed that he had forgotten them. An Englishman yelled back sarcastically, “What about the Emperor of China” and although the host Professor Wolff tried to calm matters down, the din of angry voices rose until Lola, the only woman present, climbed on the table and shouted, “Speak, Professor Wolff, I pray you!”

Lola returned to Paris for the Dujarier murder trial. In testimony she called herself “an artiste of the dance” and said she would have stopped the duel had she known. When asked how she would have done that she replied, “I would have sacrificed myself.” Though the murder was obvious, the jury would not convict a duellist. Lola left Paris in the arms of new English lover Francis Leigh and they travelled to fashionable resorts in Belgium and Germany. They parted company and she was seen with a Russian nobleman but that didn’t last long either. In Munich for Oktoberfest she met her next major conquest.

King Ludwig I of Bavaria was 60 years old and had been on the throne for 20 years having turned a near bankrupt kingdom into one of the most financially sound realms of Europe. He was hard of hearing which made him distrust those around him but he was an enthusiastic poet and a patron of culture and turned Munich into a centre of art and design. Though married to Queen Therese with eight children, Ludwig maintained freedom to have affairs and his court artist Joseph Stieler painted all his mistresses. In 1846 a courtier gave him the petition of a Spanish dancer who wanted to perform in Munich but noted her chequered history. Ludwig was intrigued and granted her an audience.

Stieler’s portrait of Lola.

Though Lola dressed to impress, her first meeting with Ludwig was unexceptional. He told her to speak to the theatre director though reserved a final decision for himself. When the director pointed out that Lola’s notoriety might improve box office takings, Ludwig agreed on the condition Lola danced in Spanish costumes. Ludwig was in the royal box as Lola made her debut. Audiences and critics were divided but the king was enchanted, caring less about her technical skill than her fiery spirit, beautiful face and magnificent body. He demanded Stieler do her portrait as an excuse to meet her every day. While the painter worked, the king and the dancer spoke together in Spanish. Ludwig was giddy with love and she promised to stay in Munich with him. Though they had no sex, Lola considered herself his official mistress with gossips believing she was a secret British agent. Her imperiousness added to disquiet especially after Ludwig granted her a permanent seat in the theatre’s royal enclosure. She assembled her own court of young male admirers and she spent Ludwig’s money as quickly as she got it. The king’s friends plotted about how to get him out of her grasp but opposition to her merely stiffened his resistance.

Lola was her own worst enemy and gradually became a pariah in Munich. One day she flew into a rage when one of her young beaux stood her up and she rang every bell in a building looking for him shouting “I am the king’s mistress”. The news scandalised the city. When police investigated, Lola claimed someone had impersonated her to blacken her reputation. Ludwig believed her version. He decided to give his “Lolitta” a large annual income as long as she didn’t marry. His advisors’ fears worsened when she intervened in a pay dispute with teachers and even announced the settlement ahead of the official department.

Officials tried to bribe her to leave Bavaria. She refused, which convinced Ludwig she did not love him merely for his wealth, though he was perturbed by her young male acolytes. Citizens opposed his plan to grant her Bavarian citizenship and graffiti appeared on city walls: “Montez you great whore, your time will come soon.” Her home was surrounded by a mob which police dispersed. After a crown minister called her “the unspeakable female” Ludwig sacked his government. Rumours began that Lola was now the power behind the throne. Mobs attacked the palace leaving Ludwig shaken but when the dowager empress of Austria suggested he abandon Lola, Ludwig told the grand dame to mind her own business.

When London papers unmasked Lola’s past she sent letters to papers across Europe saying she was from Seville, “my mother a lady of Irish extraction…which I suppose is the cause of my being called Irish.” In Wurzburg she attacked a sentry who tried to pick up her lapdog, leading to more hostility. Ludwig remained hopelessly in love and made her the Countess of Landsfeld. The British Ambassador told London that the King was now deeply unpopular.

Lola’s hopes to become a dignified countess were undermined by drunken young male friends who lifted her on their shoulders before she crashed into chandeliers and fell to the ground unconscious. Stories of half-naked men flooded Munich. She was whistled and jeered in the streets and chased into a church while her acolytes were attacked. The military guarded her house and the palace while the King shut down the university. Rioters became more violent shouting “We want Lola Montez out of Munich”. The King’s sister begged him to comply. Finally Lola stormed out of her house armed with a pistol and fled in a carriage, the news greeted with jubilation. They cheered Ludwig but he was heart-broken. He ordered Lola to seek safety in Switzerland and considered abdication.

In February 1848 uprisings spread across Europe from Paris. The unrest continued in Bavaria despite Lola’s departure with people demanding liberal government. Not having heard from Ludwig, Lola disguised herself as a man and returned to Munich. Someone saw through her false beard and she was arrested. Ludwig hurried to police headquarters. They talked alone for three hours before he convinced her to return to Switzerland. Word spread that Lola was back, many believing Ludwig had connived her return.

Officials proposed a constitutional monarchy. When Ludwig could not agree, he abdicated in favour of his son Maximilian. Lola asked him to join her and also asked for money to finance her extravagant lifestyle. With unrest growing, Ludwig worried he would be barred from returning. He stayed in Munich, reluctantly paying Lola’s bills. At year’s end she moved to London, her spell on the king broken. In 1849 she met 21-year-old barrister’s son George Trafford Heald, eight years her junior. He proposed marriage and once Lola was satisfied with his family wealth, she accepted. She asked for Ludwig’s permission (and continuation of her allowance) though the king was angered to find out she did not wait for the answer.

Lola signed the marriage register as Maria de los Dolores de Landsfeld, a widow from Seville. Heald’s sister considered her a shameless gold digger and found out Captain Thomas James was still alive. On August 6, police arrested Lola for bigamy. She gained bail at a packed court hearing and immediately left for Italy with Heald. Facing the possibility of jail, Lola skipped bail. Their relationship quickly unravelled and he returned to England alone. Moving to France, Lola regained Heald’s affection while continuing to soak Ludwig’s purse. With mounting bills Heald abandoned her a second time. Lola lived alone in Paris and wrote a very unreliable memoir.

Lola smoking a cigarette in Boston 1852.

Lola decided to go back on stage. She made a successful return at Boulogne then Brussels before heading to Prussia where the police director banned her as a dangerous liberal. She returned to France before taking her tour to America, sharing a liner with Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, whose celebrity status outshone her own on arrival in New York. There she met impresario Thomas Barry who prepared her to perform. They reworked the spider dance to become a pas de deux with American dancer George Washington Smith. The Broadway Theatre was packed on December 29 for her debut in a Tyrolean opera that lasted only 40 minutes. While some critics panned her dancing even they admitted Lola held her audience. She did great business for three weeks. She moved to Philadelphia and posed for a photo with Cheyenne chief Light in the Clouds who had just met the president. She was also photographed in Boston smoking a cigarette and though unflattering, it is probably the first ever photo of a woman smoking.

Her tour moved to Richmond, where her support for states’ rights was popular. In some towns there were protests at her “indecency” and the publicity usually added to the box office takings. On May 25, 1852 she made her acting debut in “Lola Montez in Bavaria”, a loose rendition of her time with Ludwig, which was successful though one critic called it full of “unsubstantial puffs”. It led to other dramatic roles which she took south, including a long run in New Orleans. There she was arrested for assaulting her servant over a wages row and Lola drew a dagger and kicked police. After she dramatically attempted suicide by drinking from a vial labelled poison, police reluctantly let her go though she faced charges a month later. There she took over from her lawyer and harangued attorneys and witnesses alike. Once again she jumped bail to Panama, bound for California.

Montez arrived in San Francisco in May 1853 and played to packed houses, though ladies were not recommended to attend as her dance obliged her to search for the spider “rather higher in her skirts than was proper”. Believing Heald was dead and James didn’t count, Lola re-married again; this time as “Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Landsfeld” to Patrick Hull, a San Francisco newspaper editor whom she befriended at sea. In Sacramento, she stormed off stage when the audience laughed at her. The following night police threatened to arrest unruly theatregoers. She made a speech where she said she loved America and was loudly applauded.

Lola then fell in love with a place, Grass Valley, a mining community in the mountains, where the air was similar to Simla in India. She and Hull soon parted, possibly after she found out Heald was not dead. She made Grass Valley home. Admirers came to visit, including Thomas Francis Meagher, and she was free of the need to pretend she was Spanish, though the grizzly had to go. She heard about Australia’s gold rush (Meagher may have listed its attractions) and decided on a tour down under with a company of California stage veterans.

Lola arrived in Sydney in August 1855. Although the Sydney Morning Herald primly ignored her, another paper The Empire assured readers her play would not affect public morals. After her first performance mainly to men, she appealed for women to attend, which they did in increasing numbers. Sydney was a success though she was plagued with ill health. She sacked her California support crew who tried to slap a writ on her as she left the city, a row which finally got the Herald‘s attention. There was more success in Melbourne, Geelong and Adelaide and an inevitable letter to the editor after criticism of the spider dance. There was more free publicity when a pastor demanded her arrest for indecency. She inaugurated a new theatre in Ballarat though she threatened to whip local newspaper editor Henry Seekamp after he published a critical letter. Seekamp grabbed his own whip and the two traded blows in a hotel and pulled each other’s hair before being dragged apart. Lola’s latest whip exploits quickly sped around the globe and did nothing to dampen theatre crowds. Her run in Ballarat came to an end when a woman, incensed at Lola’s criticism of her tour manager husband, whipped her without warning causing severe bruises. Lola appeared next in Melbourne “against medical advice” as the promotion material put it. Lola abandoned plans for an Asian tour and decided to retire again to America. On the way home her actor lover Frank Folland disappeared off the boat into the ocean, with rumors that it was suicide over endless quarrels with Lola. His death deeply affected Lola and she found spirituality.

She returned to New York where she took to the lecture platform charming audiences with her wit and style. She reminisced on her life and praised Ludwig as “refined and high toned.” The Boston Post wrote “she talks vastly better than she dances.” Being Lola, there was more drama when she travelled to France to marry an Austrian nobleman only to find out he was married with five children. She returned to America to continue her career as a respected lecturer. In 1860 there was time for one last tour of Britain and Ireland (she was due to perform in Meagher’s Waterford but went to Manchester instead). She took a pro-Democrat position and defended slavery which did not go down well and she fell ill in London before returning to New York. As America edged towards war she suffered a stroke. Though papers reported she was dying she lived on until January 17, 1861 when her lungs finally failed her. She was buried in New York’s Green-Wood cemetery where Meagher’s wife would join her in 1906 as would a statue of Meagher himself a century later, though Lola’s own epitaph is illegible. In Bavaria, Ludwig had outlived her and took “great consolation to hear her dying as a Christian.” Not regarded as a feminist hero, Lola Montez fought primarily to free her life from prejudice and restrictions. But as her biographer Seymour says, that meant “blazing trails other women could follow.”