Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (14 page)

Irish-American hostility toward abolition certainly is curious in light of their hero worship of Daniel O’Connell, one of the Atlantic world’s most eloquent critics of American slavery. But O’Connell’s own rhetoric helps to explain why the Irish in America came to resent the moral prodding of Anglo-Protestant abolitionists. For it was O’Connell who described oppression in Ireland as a form of slavery, and who often referred to the Catholic Irish as slaves.
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He was not alone. The language and imagery of slavery was constantly invoked to describe the plight of the Irish in Ireland as they struggled against Anglo-Protestant oppression. The popular nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Moore frequently drew on the language of enslavement in describing his fellow countrymen and their plight:

The nations have fallen, and thou still art young

Thy sun is but rising, when others are set;

And tho’ slavery’s cloud o’er thy morning hath hung

The full noon of freedom shall beam round thee yet.

One of Moore’s best-known works, “The Minstrel Boy,” narrates the death of an Irish warrior who, in his final act, tears the strings of a harp he carried into battle, rendering it useless:

Thy songs were made for the pure and free,

They shall never sound in slavery.
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The Irish were not unique in seeing themselves as little better off than slaves. Frederick Douglass visited Ireland on the eve of the Famine and was shocked to see living conditions on the island. “Men and women, married and single, old and young, lie down together, in much the same degradation as the American slaves,” he wrote, although he later added that while the “Irishman is poor . . . he is not a slave. . . . He is still the master of his own body.”
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Unlike slaves in the American South, however, the Irish found themselves without advocates in the Atlantic world, their plight ignored and their degradation worsened by the very people who condemned slaveholding. One of O’Connell’s aides, Richard Sheil, complained as early as 1824 that “the philanthropists of England pity the state of the African and yet were insensible to the condition of the Irish peasant.”
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Once in the United States, Irish immigrants continued to invoke the language of enslavement to describe their former condition in Ireland. The efforts of the Protestant-led Five Points Mission to remove poor or neglected Irish-Catholic children from their families and place them with Protestant families in the Midwest inspired comparisons with Southern slavery. The
Irish-American
newspaper carried a sensational report in November 1863 that Irish-Catholic children swept from the streets of New York were being offered “for sale” to Protestant families in Indiana. The paper blamed the “canting admirers of African ebony” for this outrage, linking abolitionists with the most heinous sort of anti-Irish activity. The same newspaper attacked an Irish landlord and abolitionist named James Haughton for speaking out against slavery in the United States, arguing that, as a landlord, Haughton “has white slaves in Ireland as uneducated and uncivilized as the colored race he wants to extend his sympathy to.”
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The harsh living conditions of impoverished Irish immigrants did little to soothe the sense of resentment and grievance that many felt after fleeing the Famine. The
Irish World
newspaper referred to the Irish in the United States and in Ireland as “the best abused people in the world,” a characterization that reflects the narrow mindset of many Irish-Americans who must have taken great pains to avoid reflecting on the indescribable horrors visited upon Africans and actual native Americans.
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It surely is a sad irony of history that the Irish narrative of their own perceived enslavement did not translate into sympathy for the enslavement of Africans—Daniel O’Connell aside. O’Connell once explained to Dagger John Hughes that he had no choice but to be an abolitionist, because he “was born a slave myself.” His followers in America, however, saw matters quite differently. They saw the face of their enslaver in the abolitionist preacher, reformer, and politician. Indeed, some Irish-Americans began to emphasize the transatlantic nature of abolitionism, arguing that British and American Protestants were in league not simply to end slavery but also to deprive Irish Catholics of political power. The
Irish-American
condemned what it saw as a conspiracy between “British philanthropists” and “certain insane abolitionists of this country.”
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In the Irish worldview, any combination between British elites and American abolitionists could only have dire consequences for Irish-Catholic immigrants. The Irish collective memory of Ireland, recounted in editorials and poetry in the Irish-American press, reminded them that they were exiles from a land where power had raised up one group, Protestants, at the expense of another, Catholics. What had happened in Ireland through patronage and discriminatory laws could happen again in the United States if the same hostile forces came into power. The Irish looked to Democrats to protect them not simply from the competition of free black labor but also from the power of a hostile Republican Party aligned with Know Nothings who were determined to strip them of patronage and influence.
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Irish-American skepticism of abolitionists blinded them to the moral imperative of the antislavery movement. When the
Freeman’s Journal
argued against the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the paper’s editors asserted that “it is not the business” of politics “to settle moral questions” like slavery. New York’s Irish neighborhoods simmered with resentment—of abolitionists, of the slaves they championed, and of the growing Republican Party—as the nation moved ever closer to a catastrophic conflict over slavery and the meaning of democracy. The Irish had no shortage of grievances with their adopted country, but none even approached the magnitude of the horrors to which slaves were subjected. Few if any of their leaders conceded this obvious point. Instead, spokesmen such as John Mitchel, an Irish political exile who escaped the prison colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) after his conviction on treason charges, expressed a yearning to settle on a plantation and own his own slaves. Mitchel founded a militantly anti-British newspaper in New York in the 1850s, but he moved to the South several years later. There he found people more in agreement with his view that slavery was a benefit to blacks and whites alike. Two of his sons died fighting for the Confederacy.
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The residents of Charleston, South Carolina, were fast asleep in the predawn hours of April 12, 1861, when the thunder of an exploding mortar shell signaled the beginning of civil war. More than thirty hours and three thousand rounds later, the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor surrendered to South Carolina troops under the command of General P. G. T. Beauregard. Americans now were at war—officially—with other Americans.

Irish-Americans rallied to the Union cause after Sumter fell. By war’s end, one hundred and fifty thousand natives of Ireland—thousands of them from New York—had answered Lincoln’s call to defend the Union, regardless of their skepticism of abolitionists. More than fifty Irish immigrants from New York won the Medal of Honor for their bravery, easily the largest total of any immigrant group. The volunteers from New York marched through the streets of Manhattan on their way to transports that took them to small towns in the South, places with such names as Chancellorsville, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. They joined outfits like the Irish Brigade, commanded by the Irish-born Michael Corcoran, and quickly gained a reputation for bravery and determination, charging into battle with the cry of
Faugh a ballagh
—an Irish phrase meaning “Clear the way.” One of the brigade’s regiments, the 69th New York militia, caught the attention of an opposing commander who could not help but respect the troops’ courage under fire. Robert E. Lee called them “The Fighting 69th.”

Tammany followed suit, authorizing its own regiment to join the swelling ranks of blue. Its commander, Michael Kennedy, was among the war’s earliest casualties, falling at the first Battle of Bull Run. Tammany candidates for local office during the war were uniformly pro-Union—no hedging, no equivocation, no attempt to blame Republicans for the war. But Tammany did not speak for all New York Democrats, including Mayor Fernando Wood, who was now the head of his own breakaway political faction. Before the attack on Fort Sumter, Wood proposed that the city consider neutrality in the event of civil war. He beat a hasty and temporary retreat after Sumter fell, but when he campaigned for a new term in 1862, the mayor cast his lot with other so-called Peace Democrats. The war, he charged, was little more than a plot to sacrifice the lives of poor white people to benefit Southern blacks. Tammany’s official news organ, the
Leader,
charged that Wood was “heart and soul with the armed traitors of the South.” In 1862, Wood lost his reelection bid to a Republican.
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By early 1863, however, many of the young men who so eagerly volunteered for Lincoln’s army two years earlier were dead or maimed, and for what? The Southern rebels still were in the field, and, indeed, they had penetrated Pennsylvania. Fernando Wood staged public rallies to protest “war for the negro” after Lincoln transformed the conflict with his Emancipation Proclamation. Even the news of a great victory at Gettysburg did little to inspire New Yorkers who regarded the battle’s enormous casualty list—more than twenty-three thousand dead and wounded on the Union side—to be as significant as the outcome itself. The enthusiasm of 1861 gave way to the grim reality of industrial warfare, and in New York, Wood and other Democratic politicians denounced the war as a poor man’s battle, one that would benefit only blacks.
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. . .

On July 11, 1863, federal authorities in New York began the task of implementing the nation’s controversial new conscription law, which the Lincoln administration saw as the only option for filling the Union Army’s dwindling ranks. Few believed the draft would be popular, especially in New York, but there was little public sign of dissent as men wearing blindfolds pulled sheets of paper containing names of reluctant soldiers from a large spinning wheel. The following day was July 12—well remembered in Irish lore as the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1690, when the Protestant King William III defeated the Catholic King James II. It was a day when Irish Protestants throughout the Atlantic world marched in the streets to remember King Billy and to remind Irish Catholics of who had power and who did not.

That morning, the Sunday newspapers were filled with long columns of type listing the names of the new conscripts. Many of the names were Irish; most were from poor neighborhoods. The law allowed draftees to avoid service if they paid the government $300 or found a substitute. For most New Yorkers, the sum might as well have been $3 million. The war-weary
New York Herald
complained that the draft was patently unfair because “the rich could avoid it” while “the poor man . . . was compelled to go to war.” With the draft set to resume on Monday morning, there was a growing sense of resentment and anger in the downtown wards.
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As morning broke on July 13, and preparations began to resume the draft, great crowds of men and women, workers and boys, immigrants and native-born marched uptown toward the federal provost marshal’s office of the 9th congressional district, near Third Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street. Even before the first name was pulled from the wheel, the crowd claimed its first victim, Superintendent of Police John A. Kennedy. He was an Irishman, but an Irish Protestant, an Orangeman. Perhaps that was why Kennedy, who also was a member of the Republican-created Metropolitan Police Department, was beaten to a pulp. His life was spared when a low-level Tammany man named Johnny Ward intervened with the crowd.

Kennedy was lucky; hundreds of others were not. Mobs took over the city for four days—burning, looting, and lynching in a rage that still seems inexplicable. Not all the rioters were Irish, but by all accounts most were. So were many of the police and soldiers called into the streets to suppress what amounted to an all-out rebellion in the Union’s most important city. Mobs attacked the homes of abolitionists, the offices of Republican newspapers, an orphanage for young black children. Any symbol of Republican power, any advocate for the enslaved, any black man, woman, or child who ventured into the street reminded the rioters of every grievance, every slight, every injustice that they imagined or brooded upon or witnessed firsthand.

The blood lust truly was frightening, even in the midst of a war notable for its everyday carnage. A black man was strung up on Madison Street and left there to die. The home of the postmaster—an appointee of the federal Republican administration—was torched and burned to the ground. Two black children were shot to death on Thompson Street. An army officer named Henry O’Brien ordered his men to use cannon fire to disperse the mobs, leading to the deaths of a woman and her child. The following day, the mob extracted its terrible revenge: O’Brien was attacked near his home, and, over the next six hours, was beaten and tortured by men and women alike, dragged through the streets while still alive, and tortured again until, at last, he died.
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. . .

New York was spinning out of control. Former congressman Bill Tweed, recently named the city’s deputy street commissioner—a post that allowed him extraordinary control over the distribution of contracts and jobs—was a conspicuous presence during the worst of the violence as he gathered information, witnessed the carnage, and reported back to beleaguered civil authorities. His size and celebrity must have made his presence known even amid the chaos and disorder, but he was either courageous enough to put aside concerns about his safety or confident enough that the crowds would not turn on a Tammany man.

Tweed worked with the Republican mayor, George Opdyke, to convene an emergency meeting of the Democratic-controlled Common Council. He told the mayor that he was not safe in City Hall, that he needed to retreat to a place where he could be better protected. The point was driven home when mobs intent on destruction, if not worse, gathered outside the mayor’s residence on Fifth Avenue. One of Tweed’s Tammany allies, a judge, showed up and begged the crowd to leave the mayor alone. Amazingly, they did.