by Timothy Egan
Meagher was finished. Five days after the battle ended, in a letter to Major General John Hancock, he tendered his resignation as commander of “what was once known as the Irish Brigade.” There were no diplomatic niceties in this resignation note, no pander in the prose. Meagher was angry and indignant. He went through the casualties in the major battles, reminded the general of how his men had been sacrificed at Marye’s Heights and yet fought again last week. And when he’d begged for relief, a break for his men to recover, it was “never even acknowledged.” This “ungenerous and inconsiderate treatment of a gallant remnant of a brigade that had never once failed to do its duty” left him deeply depressed, he wrote. Still, he remained faithful to the Union cause, and offered to serve in any other capacity but one: he could no longer send Irishmen to their deaths.
The resignation was accepted on May 14. Meagher assembled his immigrant soldiers around him for a farewell to arms. He told of his life to date, how remarkable it was for a man who’d seen so much of the underside of history to be breathing spring air in 1863. On three continents, at every turn, someone had tried to take from him the things he loved about his native land. What he held dear, he told his men, was the locket the Irish carried when so far from home—memory, self-tailored to joy. He could summon happy faces going back to Waterford, the schoolmates at Clongowes Wood and cellmates at Kilmainham, and every kid he’d talked into leaving a tenement in Five Points to become an American soldier. Then he said goodbye, shaking hands and offering personal words to each member of the Irish Brigade.
New York was a steam bath on July 13, 1863, the street stones hot to the touch, the brick walls of tenements reflecting back a merciless sun. It had been this way for some time. Outside a four-story building at 677 Third Avenue, a crowd waited for fresh results of the first military draft in the United States. They smelled of sweat and liquor, and swore like a wretched choir. The Union, its fighting ranks badly depleted, was doing what the South had already done—forcing men to go to war. Congress had passed a conscription act in March. Now came the lottery, names spinning in a hand-cranked drum, then picked by a blindfolded clerk. When read and published, there were Kiernans and Kellys, McGees and O’Briens. Already, no city had given more bodies to the Union cause than New York. The fevered men clutching broken cobblestones and iron pipes outside the draft office shared the same surnames. They had poured out of the tenements, had come with knives and clubs to go with bricks and rocks.
The draft law, as long rumored, had allowed an exemption for the rich: for $300 you could buy your way out of service to the United States. Either that or come up with a substitute. Cold cash or a live man—that’s what it took to dodge a war that would claim more lives than any other American conflict. For many of the poor Irish cursing in the humidity on July 13, the price of freedom was equal to a year’s wages. For the well-off, it was a trifling. One of the New Yorkers who had hired a substitute to fill his place in the army was a philanthropist and active Republican—Theodore Roosevelt Sr. The decision haunted his son Teddy; the guilt would roll over into another generation of family warriors trying to make up for the missed call to duty. Newly freed blacks were not eligible for the draft, for they were not citizens. They could enlist, and many did. Or they could straggle along behind Union supply lines.
An hour before noon, a pistol shot was fired outside that Third Avenue location of the draft lottery. No one was sure where it originated. But it became a starter’s signal for the worst riot in American history. The mob pushed past police officers, broke windows with stones and clubs, and charged into the office. The lottery drum was smashed, the room set afire. Outside, telegraph lines were cut, and the rails of street cars were torn apart with crowbars. The cops who had tried to hold back the fisted crowd ran for their lives. One who stood his ground was the police superintendent, John Kennedy.
“That’s Kennedy!” came shouts of recognition. “Get him!” He was knocked to the ground and beaten senseless. When Kennedy tried to stagger away, he was mauled again and dragged to a puddle. His face was smashed into the mud, and he nearly drowned. A tailor’s shop nearby was ransacked, the Irish proprietor beaten to a pulp. A colonel in the Union Army, Henry O’Brien, was lashed and pummeled until he died. The Irish, at least those in uniform or owning a business, would not be spared the wrath of other Irish.
A handful of troops who’d been convalescing from wounds of Fredericksburg arrived to try to keep the peace. They were overwhelmed, losing their weapons, many knifed in the face or back. With stolen muskets, the mob went on a rampage through the center of Manhattan, setting fire to stores and breaking down the doors of townhouses. They shot at police officers and Union soldiers. A black man, William Jones, was grabbed as he walked toward a fruit vendor’s store. He was stabbed, beaten, a noose coiled around his neck, and he was strung from a lamppost. They burned him as he died. Now frenzied, blood on their hands, the mob moved to the Colored Orphan Asylum, on Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street. The rioters took the children’s bedding and clothing, then torched the orphanage. They cheered as walls collapsed and the roof crumbled. When fire crews arrived, they were stoned, and their hoses cut. Some of the firemen dropped their axes and joined the rioters. The 200 orphans who lived at the asylum were rushed out a back entrance, narrowly escaping death in the firetrap that had been their shelter. Nighttime brought more New Yorkers to a swelling river of rage, itinerant laborers joining Irish from the slums. They moved outward and uptown, toward homes of the rich, breaking in and looting, smashing chandeliers and fine china, setting fire to tapestries on walls and upholstered couches in sitting rooms. By the end of the day, much of New York was aflame, the city defenseless and lawless. Surely, many residents felt, this was a plot from the South.
The Confederate role, if any, was indirect. Earlier that month, the three-day Battle of Gettysburg ended with a loss for the South. But repelling Lee from Pennsylvania came at an unfathomable cost for the Union, almost 23,000 casualties. Throughout July, the names of the dead soldiers were published in New York papers—Irish names disproportionately, just like the draft. Meagher’s brigade was well known, but it was a fragment of his countrymen who fought overall. At Gettysburg, a remnant faction of the brigade, led by Colonel Patrick Kelly of County Galway, lost 200 of the 500 or so men still fighting under a green flag. In the days leading up to the riot, race-baiting Democrats fanned ethnic flames, and anti-Lincoln politicians worked up class rage.
The question of three years earlier—would the Irish fight?—had now become: whose side are they on? Some Irish voices, Thomas Meagher’s still among them, urged their countrymen not to listen to the demagogues trolling the tenements. Just weeks before the first names in the draft were called, Meagher had given a brisk defense of the president and the Union cause at a public lunch in New York, where he was awarded the Kearney Cross for valor. Most of those who heard him speak sat on their hands. He was in Washington the day the riots erupted, seeking a fresh commission to serve Lincoln.
The next day, a Tuesday, no black person in New York was safe. Burning the docks where African Americans labored, lynching dark-skinned men caught in the crush, the mob moved without any design save the unpredictable direction of rage. They attacked symbols of wealth: Brooks Brothers, the clothing store, was plundered. They attacked symbols of authority: the mayor’s residence was pelted with stones. And they attacked voices of emancipation: Horace Greeley was a target. The editor of the New York Times, Henry Richmond, manned a Gatling gun outside his building near City Hall. The mayor sent a desperate telegram to Washington, pleading for Union troops to save the city—it was in a “state of insurrection.” The secretary of war dispatched five regiments to Manhattan; they arrived on Wednesday and camped at Gramercy Park. In the midst of open savagery, Democratic politicians looked the other way, as did some clerics.
“You will no doubt be hard on us rioters tomorrow morning,” a man wrote the New York Times on the second day of anarchy, “but that 300-dollar law has made us
nobodies, vagabonds, and cast-outs of a society, for whom nobody cares when we must go to war and be shot down. We are the poor rabble, and the rich rabble is our enemy by this law . . . Why don’t they let the nigger kill the slave-driving race and take possession of the South?”
A more refined mind, that of the novelist Herman Melville, tried to understand what had brought his city to ruin. At night, listening to the sounds of shattered glass and gunfire, the writer sketched a few lines of verse. “All civil charms like a dream dissolve . . .”
On the third day, the mobs moved on to armories, including one that housed the 69th, and stole away with guns and ammunition. They attacked the Broadway headquarters of the Irish Brigade, where Major Horgan had lain in state on Christmas Eve seven months earlier. Protestant charities were burned, as were the homes of prominent Republicans. A Federal gunboat steamed to New York and anchored at the foot of Wall Street. On the fourth and final day, nearly 6,000 soldiers fought house to house, tenement to tenement on the Lower East Side, artillery to go with musketry. By week’s end, following the announcement that the draft had been temporarily suspended in New York, the city looked as if it had been shelled by Lee’s army. Officials put the death toll at 105, though it was later found to be closer to 500.
All of it was sickening to Meagher. Had the rioters known where to find him, he might have been killed by his own people, he said—“torn limb from limb if they caught hold of me.” Failing to grab Meagher, the mob marched on the house of his top lieutenant in the Irish Brigade, Colonel Robert Nugent, wounded at Fredericksburg by a bullet to the stomach. They sacked his house, cursing him as a “nigger-lover,” and raised cheers for Jefferson Davis. In the colonel’s den, enraged men slashed a portrait of Meagher. The face of the general, the man who had been hailed a decade earlier as the Irish American savior—“a chief to unite and guide them”—was cut and trampled and burned in the bonfire of hatred in Nugent’s home.
19
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A Second Banishment
In just four days’ time, the reputation of the Irish in America, a standing that Meagher’s Brigade had built at the cost of much loss of life, was in tatters. The papers decried the “murderous Paddies” and “Celtic beasts” who became the ethnic face of the New York draft riots. Cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the immigrant poor as simians again in Harper’s Weekly, gutting stores for liquor, clubbing policemen, stringing up blacks. “I am sorry to find that England is right about the lower class of Irish,” wrote George Templeton Strong, the influential New York lawyer and diarist, a pillar of the city’s Episcopalian elite. “They are brutal, base, cruel cowards.” Further, he saw them as subhuman, as he recorded in his private notes—“creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community they infest.” He wanted them gone from the country. “For myself, personally, I would like to see war made on Irish scum.” There was talk among the powerful in Northern political circles of reviving the Know-Nothing Party. With class and religious passions stirred, Archbishop Hughes defended the mobs. But Meagher could not. He saw nihilism and numb-hearted violence for what it was. He had found the love of his life and a second cause to kill and die for in this city. And he would not rest his voice, at the age of forty, as New York smoldered.
Meagher had gone to war as an agnostic on slavery, something he shrugged off. “It cannot be changed,” he’d said. Now he was evangelical in his opposition to it, as he tried to find a larger meaning for the deaths of so many of his young countrymen he’d led to battle. The rubble in the streets had barely cleared when Meagher rushed to show a side of the Irish at odds with the thugs who nearly brought down the city. He put his voice and pen to work in defense of Abraham Lincoln and against slavery. To the Irishman in Dublin, he explained what was at stake in a country holding nearly half as many Irish as those who never left. Make no mistake, he told his readers in the old country: the great American conflict was a fight against “the Slave Lords, the kings and princes of the cotton fields and rice swamps.” He recalled how difficult it was as a Young Ireland revolutionary to praise the United States, the enlightened democracy that had thrown off the British Empire, while trying to ignore that country’s slavery—“the cancerous disease, the glaring disgrace of this great nation and a violent contradiction of the principles on which it was established.” He regretted not speaking out earlier, regretted the excuses, regretted looking the other way. And one more confession: the brig that brought him to New York in his long escape from Tasmania in 1852 had returned a runaway slave from South America to Georgia a year before. Same ship—one a passage to freedom, the other a voyage back to bondage. He remembered the saintly Smith O’Brien shaming him with a question: “How was it I could bring myself to be an apologist of the slavery existing in the South?”
How indeed. Ambition was the simple answer. Meagher never shied from the role so many of the Irish wanted him to play as their leader in America. His fellow exiles were Democrats—foes of abolition—and so was he, by his earlier silence. And even though he was still a Democrat, with an election barely a year away that could toss Lincoln from office, he would not betray his commander in chief. But going public with a new burst of feisty opinions came at great cost to Meagher’s standing. He was castigated in the Irish American press, called a fool, a Lincoln lover, a “negrophiliac,” among the printable epithets. So be it. He was done with all that. He wanted no more quarreling with defenders of slavery, or with those who would refight the fights of the Old Sod—scabs of history that had prevented a unified Ireland from going forward. “As for the great bulk of the Irishmen in this country, I frankly confess to an utter disregard, if not a thorough contempt of what they think or say of me.” He could scarcely say which was worse, the riots or the apologists for that mayhem. “To their own discredit and degradation, they have suffered themselves to be bamboozled into being obstinate herds.”
This was from a private letter, sent to a brigade officer in the Union Army. But when it was later published in the New York Times and other outlets, the target put on Meagher by the Irish was as big as the one the Know-Nothings had placed on him. Meagher became a pariah among his people—at least those who wielded a pen. A decade earlier, the Irish American had proclaimed, “All honor to Thomas Francis Meagher.” Now that paper viewed him with “contempt” and shed no tears for his “fall from the high position he once held in the esteem and affection of his countrymen.”
He visited Lincoln in late November 1863. The president had been in bed for much of the prior two weeks. He had looked ghostly, people noticed, when he rose to speak the 272 words of the Gettysburg Address on November 19. On the train ride back to Washington, he felt feverish and weak. Headaches and back pain plagued him over the next few days; his temperature spiked and a scarlet rash appeared on parts of his body. His doctors diagnosed the illness as a form of smallpox. On the twenty-sixth, the day he met Meagher and a fellow Irish officer, one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries wrote, “The President is quite unwell.” Meagher, a general without soldiers, meant enough to Lincoln that he was the only guest the sick president consented to see over the course of several days. He had tried, like Meagher, to slough off the hatred that came his way in the first year of liberation for slaves. “Abraham Africanus,” his opponents called him—a dictator, a king, a tyrant. The two men discussed a future role for Meagher in a war with no visible end. Lincoln would try to find something for him. His commander in the west, Ulysses S. Grant, had taken Vicksburg in Mississippi that year as part of the largest amphibious operation conducted by an American force. He had shown the kind of steel that Lincoln was looking for in a general in chief. Maybe Grant had a position for him.
While pursuing another run with the Union Army, Meagher did not forget about Ireland. The heavy losses of the brigade had torn him up. His belief, unshakable through a half-dozen major battles, that he was a warrior with two destinies, had never left him. But by mid-1863, it was hard to see how an army of Irish veterans in America could defeat t
he British Empire. He could stew and drink and find like-minded lost Irish souls to commiserate with. Or he could revive the fight in his heart. So, at the very time the Irish American and other papers were attacking Meagher, he was negotiating to become a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish nationalist group whose members were well represented among the ranks of police officers and military members throughout North America. When the Fenians were founded a few years earlier, Meagher had resisted joining, mindful that a political career in the United States would require him to reach beyond the Irish masses in Boston and New York. Four years later, after the deaths of so many of his countrymen, after being pilloried by Catholic clerics and press bullies who claimed to represent the exiles, Meagher had lost his hesitation. Free of caring about the fickle winds of public opinion, he took the oath. “I, Thomas Francis Meagher, solemnly pledge my sacred word of honor as a truthful and honest man that I will labor with earnest zeal for the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of England and for the establishment of a free and independent government on Irish soil.”
A fellow Fenian, Michael Corcoran, hosted Meagher a few weeks after the Lincoln visit—the two best-known Irishmen in America, together again. Freed in a prisoner exchange in 1862, Corcoran had founded the Irish Legion—separate from Meagher’s brigade—and had stung the rebels in a series of smaller battles in Virginia. Like Meagher, he was a brigadier general. The two friends made plans to celebrate Christmas with their wives near a winter camp at Fairfax Court House. Corcoran had been complaining of headaches. His doctors said he had never fully recovered from the privation he suffered at the hands of his Confederate captors. On the morning of December 22, 1863, the two officers rode off to the train station, Meagher on his way to New York to pick up Libby and Corcoran’s wife and escort them to Virginia for the holidays. Riding back to camp, Corcoran fell from his horse and tumbled into a ditch. His went into convulsions, his face bruised and red. He died hours later, most likely from a burst blood vessel in his head—a stroke. A County Sligo man, he had survived the Great Hunger, a threatened court-martial after he snubbed the Prince of Wales in New York, the Battle of Bull Run, dark months in a Confederate cell and fresh battles in the South. Michael Corcoran was thirty-six at his death. Meagher was inconsolable; he felt as if he’d lost a sibling.
