by Niall O'Dowd
He left for America, became a gardener in a church garden in Emmetsburg, Maryland, and was given a shot at the priesthood after several requests by the head of the seminary there.
He had a stellar rise, especially given the fact that he had no network of powerful clerics or wealthy families to help him. After he became Archbishop of New York, he was one of the most powerful clerics in the country, and he enjoyed a level of power and influence beyond any New York church leader before or since. He was universally known as “Dagger Hughes” because of the dagger-like way he portrayed the Holy Cross symbol on his letters. It was also said that he was known as “Dagger John” because of the the stiletto-like cross he wore.
He was personally vain, wearing a toupee to cover his baldness, but also personally very generous to those in need. From the beginning, he knew that anti-Irish sentiment was out there. (James Gordon Bennett, a leading editor, described Irish witnessing church rituals as the equivalent of “passing gold rings through pigs’ noses.”)
A Whig rather than a Democrat, Hughes had close Republican connections, especially with influential editor Thurlow Weed and Seward. Seward remained one of the few American politicians partial to immigrants.
Those connections proved invaluable in framing Hughes’s response to the outbreak of Civil War. Hughes was keenly aware that the Irish Catholics did not approve of slavery but cared little for the slavery issue, given their own concerns as a beleaguered group. The level of commerce with the South, especially cotton exports through New York Harbor, meant there was strong business sentiment for the Confederacy.
The arch-proponents of slavery in the North, such as Samuel Morse, August Belmont (though he later recanted), George Curtis, and Samuel Tilden (who would later be cheated out of the 1876 presidential election) were not Irish. They were mostly virulently anti-Catholic, too.
Despite those considerations, however, Hughes never hesitated in supporting Lincoln. Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg notes that soon after war broke out “cheers and applause greeted the public reading of a letter of John Hughes, Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church of New York, declaring for the Stars and Stripes: ‘This has been my flag and shall be till the end.’ At home and abroad, the Archbishop would have it wave ‘for a thousand years and afterward as long as Heaven permits, without limit, of duration.’” It was hoisted over Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
It was deeply important to Lincoln that Hughes went so public with his support.
Hughes could be a difficult, paradoxical character who carried more influence among his Irish flock than any churchman. But there was never any doubt he was in charge. Thus, an alliance was hugely important to Lincoln.
“It is an understatement to say that John Hughes was a complex character,” wrote Monsignor Thomas Shelley, an expert on John J. Hughes. “He was impetuous and authoritarian, a poor administrator and worse financial manager, indifferent to the non-Irish members of his flock, and prone to invent reality when it suited the purposes of his rhetoric. One of the Jesuit superiors at Fordham with whom he quarreled said, ‘He has an extraordinarily overbearing character; he has to dominate.’”
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “He was feared and loved; misunderstood and idolized; misrepresented even to his ecclesiastical superiors in Rome, whose confidence in him, however, remained unshaken. Severe of manner, kindly of heart, he was not aggressive until assailed.”
Hughes never forgot he was an emigrant from County Tyrone; his family suffered massive injustice from the British, and he resolved to embrace his new country with all the passion and commitment he had once fit for Ireland before being driven out.
“I am an American by choice, not by chance,” he once said. “I was born under the scourge of Protestant persecution, of which my fathers in common with our Catholic countrymen have been the victim for ages. I know the value of that civil and religious liberty, which our happy government secures for all.” Lincoln was his man to ensure that continued.
Hughes was appointed coadjutor bishop in New York in 1838 and bishop in 1842; he was later named an archbishop. In 1844, Know-Nothing riots destroyed Catholic churches in Philadelphia. Hughes made clear he would not tolerate such atrocities in New York.
“If a single Catholic Church were burned in New York, the city would become a second Moscow,” he said, referencing the scorched-earth policy Russia devised to block Napoleon. In addition, he placed armed Ancient Order of Hibernian guards around Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street. The Know-Nothings slunk away after seeing the formidable army ready to fight them. “Dagger John” was not for trifling with.
In 1845, the first Irish famine survivors began trickling in, but it soon became a flood and then a tsunami. Hughes had the task of overseeing a massive increase in parishioners, most poor and starving, as well as a massive expansion of church schools, services, and charity.
Hughes had no illusion what he was dealing with. Eight hundred and fifty thousand destitute Irish arrived in New York City—one-hundred sixty-three thousand of them in 1851 alone. Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, helped found the Native American Democratic Association, which was set up to stop emigration from Ireland, demanding a twenty-one year residency before immigrants could vote and barring from office anyone who “recognizes any allegiance or obligation of any description to any foreign prince, potentate or power”—i.e., the pope.
Hughes knew full well the scale of the problem and the hatred being aimed at his desperate flock.
The Know-Nothings were thriving in the wake of the foundering Whig Party, which was deeply split over slavery. At its height in the 1850s, the Know-Nothings elected more than a hundred congressmen and eight governors, and controlled six state legislatures and thousands of local politicians.
Like famed nativist Samuel Morse, they wanted a twenty-one year wait for citizenship and Catholics barred from office.
Know-Nothing riots against Catholics in Pennsylvania had fully alerted Hughes to the looming hate-filled attacks. The Know-Nothings even had their own fake “Protocols of Zion.”
As Lorraine Boissoneault pointed out in The Smithsonian Magazine, an “exposé” published by one Maria Monk, “who claimed to have gone undercover in (a) convent, accused priests of raping nuns and then strangling the babies that resulted. It didn’t matter that Monk was discovered as a fraud; her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies.” Catholic churches were being attacked everywhere. Archbishop Hughes was under siege.
In New York, the arch villain was William “Bill the Butcher” Poole (played brilliantly by Daniel Day-Lewis in the Gangs of New York movie about the period). The conspiracies were so virulent that churches were burned, and Know-Nothing gangs spread from New York and Boston to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis, and San Francisco.
Bill the Butcher terrorized Irish voters at the polls. There was serious physical violence including murder attempts when they saw Irish casting votes. One man had had enough—John Morrissey, an Irish-born prizefighter and adventurer, who challenged Bill the Butcher. Their first fight was broken up, but the gangs later clashed and Poole was shot dead by a Morrisey gang member. Poole became the first Know-Nothing martyr.
No person exemplified the working class racist more than Poole. 250,000 people came to lower Manhattan for the wake, and leading politicians and dignitaries showed up for the psychopath’s funeral.
Hughes knew his flock were terribly vulnerable. Slavery was an abstraction, mistreatment and attacks on his flock were not. “Most (Irish) move on across the country—those who have some means, those who have industrious habits,” he observed. “On the other hand, the destitute, the disabled, the broken down, the very young, and the very old, having reached New York, stay. Those who stay are predominantly the scattered debris of the Irish nation.”
The hatred of the new arrivals was intense. The diarist George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that “the gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle
and hardly their inferior in a moral sense.” Harper’s in 1851 described the “Celtic physiognomy” as “simian-like, with protruding teeth and short, upturned noses.”
Hughes combated all that while employing a vast army of priests and nuns to minister to the massive number of new members of his flock. His priests emphasized personal responsibility. He started temperance societies, founded what is now Fordham University, and opened an emigrant bank.
He also saved thousands of women from prostitution, and worse. He laid the cornerstone for the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral in what was then uptown New York, where there was consternation at the idea of dirty Catholics worshipping in the blueblood neighborhood.
Somehow Hughes thrived, and by the time of the Civil War outbreak, he was by far the most important clergyman in America. He performed an invaluable service for Lincoln by urging Irish to enroll in the Union army.
He did so, however, clear in his mind that the reason the Irish enlisted had nothing to do with slavery, but rather with finally disproving the Know-Nothings and those who claimed that the Irish were unfit to serve. None could question the Irish man’s patriotism after fighting for his adopted country, Hughes argued.
Hughes was keenly aware that Lincoln was deeply unpopular in Democratic New York; he lost the city heavily twice in elections.
That was not unconnected to the fact that the business of shipping cotton from the South through New York port was a $200 million yearly enterprise.
Author John Strausbaugh, an expert on New York history and politics, told author Dermot McEvoy on IrishCentral.com, “Principally, because of New York City’s long and deep economic ties to the international cotton trade, the majority of New Yorkers saw it in their personal interests to support the South and plantation slavery. They saw Lincoln as the candidate of the abolitionists, and were convinced he’d move to end Southern slavery if elected—despite his saying, many times and in many ways, that he had no intention of doing so. Thus many New Yorkers were hostile to him. New Yorkers voted against him 2-to-1 in 1860 and again in 1864.”
Strausbaugh had no doubt Hughes acted to help Lincoln despite having no argument with slavery. “He lashed abolitionism as a dangerous ‘mischief,’” wrote Strausbaugh. Hughes seemed to waver in moral authority when confronted with the evil of slavery. “Because Catholicism was so beleaguered in America at the time,” Strausbaugh told IrishCentral, “the Catholic Church was not very forthcoming about slavery, not wanting to make enemies on any side of the issue. The Church’s basic stance, which Hughes espoused, was that so long as slavery was legal in the South, owning slaves was not a sin, though mistreating them was.”
But Hughes remained crystal clear on the reason to back and support Lincoln as the freely elected president.
“If the country and the Government are not maintained by every sacrifice that is necessary to maintain them, then your United States will become a Poland—then it will become divided—then the strife will multiply across every border; every State or every section will claim to be independent and make itself an easy prey for those who will turn and appropriate the divisions of the people.”
So despite the hatred expressed towards Catholics by many in Lincoln’s party, Hughes saw that the Irish had no choice but to support him. Later, suspicious of Lincoln’s tactics, Archbishop Hughes warned [Meagher] of a rumor in the city that Lincoln was really prosecuting the war to free the slaves; if it was true, [Hughes] said Irishmen ‘will turn away in disgust from the discharge of what would otherwise be a patriotic duty.’”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fighting for Lincoln: General Michael Corcoran
The Irish Volunteer
When the Prince of Wales came o’er, and made a hubba boo,
Oh, everybody turned out, you know, in gold and tinsel too;
But then the good old Sixty-ninth didn’t like these lords or peers
They wouldn’t give a damn for kings, the Irish volunteers!
We love the land of Liberty, its laws we will revere,
“But the devil take nobility!” says the Irish volunteer!
General Michael Corcoran, the third Irishman who heavily influenced the Irish to fight for the Union, knew Lincoln personally, but he never undertook secret diplomatic missions for him, and neither would he become as famous as Thomas Francis Meagher or Archbishop Hughes.
But by one symbolic act, he became an instant Irish hero and the toast of Irish New York, and a magnificent recruiter for Lincoln.
Today, a statue to Corcoran stands just off a rural road in Ballymote, County Sligo. It was unveiled by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2014, and the statue shows Corcoran sitting astride a horse, riding towards battle perhaps; American and Irish flags fly proudly.
Bloomberg’s speech is interesting and utterly anodyne, leaving out any reference to Corcoran’s most famous act of refusing to march his Irish unit before the Prince of Wales during a visit to the US in 1860. Even in today’s world, his advisors would clearly think it might be too personal.
Corcoran was arrested and held for court martial. The proceedings had actually begun when the Civil War broke out. The Know-Nothings and the WASP media pounced. The reaction was swift, flowing in from coast to coast, with every criticism of the Know-Nothings paraphrased as “What an insult to the monarch, those dreadful Irish, see they have no intention of showing loyalty to the US.”
But his refusal to march and dip the flag made Corcoran an immediate hero. The Irish flocked to him.
Corcoran also had one major secret known only to a few. He was the top Fenian in America, ordained as such by Fenian founder John O’Mahony. The secret Irish army would ultimately attract tens of thousands of Irish, ready to use the Civil War as their learning ground for the much more important battle to drive the British out of Ireland. The Fenian leader Corcoran held powerful sway.
Irish Union soldiers may have been uncertain about their allegiance to Lincoln, but there was no question that on the issue of Irish freedom they were utterly united. The Famine had seen to that.
So Corcoran was much more than an Irish leader in the army. He was the top Fenian, the man among others plotting an invasion of Canada and forcing the British to concede Ireland in exchange for their Canadian dominion.
(That invasion of Canada actually took place after the Civil War on June 1, 1866 and after Corcoran had died. It was headed instead by General John O’Neill, with a thousand hardened Irish Civil War veterans. After defeating the British at the Battle of Ridgeway, O’Neill realized two other units and thousands of men had never crossed. He had won the only Fenian battle against the British ever, and he made an honorable decision to retreat. He later founded the town of O’Neill, Nebraska, and populated it with immigrant Irish. It exists to this day.)
When Fort Sumter was shelled and surrendered, Corcoran, a highly-prized military man, was suddenly freed and immediately set about raising an army to go south. Unlike Meagher, he had no fleeting doubts about where the right side lay. He was never a slave proponent, and the freedom of his beloved Ireland could be at stake. He developed a friendship with Lincoln who, as in the case of Hughes and Meagher, saw him as a valuable ally.
Meagher was convinced by Corcoran to be a Lincoln man. After a brief struggle with his conscience, as he had many friends in the South, Meagher joined up.
Corcoran was a marvelous recruiter for the Union. Five thousand applied to join him, although he was only looking for one thousand. Meagher was among them. The Irish Brigade and the Fighting 69th were coming to fight for Lincoln, no sure thing at the commencement of hostilities. It was great news for the Commander-in-Chief.
Corcoran was a friend of Meagher’s who had also fled to the US after the 1848 Rising, although he was part of a different revolutionary group, the Ribbonmen, rather than the Young Irelanders.
Rail thin and standing well over six feet tall with a military bearing, Corcoran struck quite the figure. He joined the Revenue Police part of the British military machine, charg
ed with closing down illegal drinking dens. He got the best military education the British could give.
The British were in relentless pursuit of the Ribbonmen, penniless tenant farmers in the Ulster area who organized secret meetings and targeted landlords throwing Irish peasants off their land. Corcoran, known universally as “Mick,” was actually a double agent for the Irish side, after joining the British revenue police and reporting back all their activities to the Ribbonmen. He went on nighttime raids against rack-rent landlords while working for the British during the day. He must have been found out. Corcoran left Ireland abruptly, sailing out of Sligo Bay on August 30, 1849. He was clearly a man on the run.
After emigrating, Corcoran built a spectacular career in New York as a shrewd political operator who delivered the Irish vote. He achieved a patronage gift as a postal service senior staffer, and when war came, his background as a military man with his Irish experience resulted in him quickly climbing the ranks to colonel in the New York 69th militia.
Unlike many others, including Meagher and John Mitchel from the 1848 Rising, he never gave up on fomenting revolution in Ireland itself.
On October 11, 1860, came his moment of glory. He was the commander of an all-Irish unit that was asked to take part in a parade as part of a grand welcome to the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.
Colonel Corcoran refused. “I cannot in good conscience order out a regiment of Irish-born citizens to parade in honor of a sovereign under whose reign Ireland was made a desert and her sons forced into exile,” he said. “In the Prince of Wales, I recognize my country’s oppressors.” When asked to attend a military ball for the prince, he curtly responded, “I am not desirous to attend such a festivity.” This added fuel to the fire.
