by Niall O'Dowd
“Dagger John” was aware of President Lincoln’s concerns: “My mission was and is a mission of peace between France and England on the one side, and the United States on the other… . I made it known to the President that if I should come to Europe it would not be as a partisan of the North more than of the South; that I should represent the interests of the South as well as of the North; in short, the interests of all the United States just the same as if they had not been distracted by the present civil war.”
Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg wrote that “the Archbishop became one of the President’s personal agents with full powers to set forth the Union cause in Europe. The Archbishop had interviewed the French Emperor, attended a canonization of martyrs in Rome, laid the cornerstone of a new Catholic university in Dublin built partly from moneys collected in America. In this tour of eight months over Europe the Archbishop spoke the pro-Northern views which he gave in a published letter to the pro-Southern Archbishop of New Orleans.”
However, Hughes, ever wary of the WASP hatred of Catholics, refused to side with them on abolition. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, Hughes regrettably wrote a statement read at Mass: “We, Catholics, and a vast majority of our brave troops in the field, have not the slightest idea of carrying on a war that costs so much blood and treasure just to gratify a clique of Abolitionists in the North.”
It seemed his hatred of the British and their New York equivalents, the Know-Nothings, blinded him to the horror of slavery as he focused relentlessly on building the Irish up so they could never be accused of being unpatriotic again.
The archbishop died on January 3, 1864. On January 13, President Lincoln paid fulsome tribute to Hughes in a letter to William Starr, administrator of the Diocese of New York:
Having formed the Archbishop’s acquaintance in the earliest days of our country’s present troubles, his counsel and advice were gladly sought and continually received by the Government on those points which his position enabled him better than others to consider. At a conjuncture of deep interest to the country, the Archbishop, associated with others, went abroad, and did the nation a service there with all the loyalty, fidelity, and practical wisdom which on so many other occasions illustrated his great ability for administration.
When John Hughes died, he left an incredible Catholic legacy. “When he came to New York in 1838, the diocese was ten times the size of the present-day Archdiocese of New York,” wrote Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley. “It included all of New York State and the northern half of New Jersey, an area of fifty-five thousand square miles, with about two-hundred thousand Catholics. In that extensive diocese there were only 38 churches and 50 priests, two Catholic schools and a few orphan asylums. There was not a single Catholic college, seminary, rectory, hospital, or other institution.”
Then came the Famine. “This rapidly growing Catholic population created an insatiable demand for more churches, schools, and charitable institutions,” Shelley wrote. “In 1859, Archbishop Hughes boasted that he had dedicated ninety-seven churches in the previous twenty years, an average of one new church every ten weeks. In the area that remained part of the archdiocese, he established no fewer than sixty-one new parishes.” In August 1858, Archbishop Hughes laid the cornerstone for the landmark St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.
Hughes’s role in the draft riots will be forever criticized, and rightly so. Perhaps he saw it as much more complicated than just Irish rioting.
The riot, said one writer, was “neither a Catholic insurrection nor a Catholic plot. The rioters being mostly Irish immigrants were, of course, Catholic… . But most of the police were Irish, too, and Catholic, and no police have ever worked harder or stood more resolute in the face of danger or showed more courage or devotion to duty than the police during those first three terrible days.”
One rioter actually wrote to The New York Times explaining his position: “You will no doubt be hard on us rioters tomorrow morning but that $300 law has made us nobodies, vagabonds, and cast outs of a society for whom nobody cares when we just 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 N … kill the slave-driving race and take possession of the South[?]”
History has judged Hughes harshly but correctly on the abolition of slavery and the draft riots, but Lincoln could have no complaint with the Irish archbishop as a seminal figure who called on the Irish to fight for the Union and the president many of them despised.
This was despite strong opposition from within his own church and the business community, as well as many pro-Southern newspapers.
But Hughes did not lack courage in that respect. Like Lincoln, he was fearless in pursuit of what he thought was right. Their partnership played a vital role in the Union success in the Civil War.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The President Pardons Some Irish, Not Others
Lincoln could show an unsympathetic face to the Irish, too. The draft riots, not just in New York, caused problems for Lincoln. Lincoln wanted 17,000 men from Pennsylvania, and the Molly Maguires, the militant Irish group working in dreadful mining conditions, were a clear target for recruitment.
On October 16, 1862, the draft list was published, and an initially peaceful protest became violent, involving many of the Molly Maguires. Unable to end the violence, Colonel Alexander McClure, friend to the president, asked Lincoln if the recruits could be openly lied to and told when they turned up for duty that the list was filled, which was not the case. Lincoln quietly agreed.
Shortly after the draft riots in Philadelphia, as remembered by doorkeeper Thomas Pendel, grandson of an Irish immigrant, an entire Irish family arrived for a petition hearing on the case of two breadwinners who were in jail after the riots. The jailed men were clearly Molly Maguire members who had taken part in the violence.
Lincoln listened, stone-faced. Pendel recounts the conversation thus from the two Irish ladies, described as “tall, gaunt women” speaking in broad Irish accents:
“Howdy, Mishter president. We’ve come to see yes sir, to see if yers wouldn’t pardon our men out of prison, sir.”
Pendel noted, “This was said in whining, woe-begone voices and well-tended looks of despair on their faces.”
The women continued. “We would like to have yers pardon ’em out of prison sir, so as to help support us, sir.”
Pendel writes, “The president sized them up. He was a great reader of nature.”
Then, in what must have been a patronizing Irish accent he replied.
“If yers husbands had not been resisting the draft they would not now be in prison; so they can stay in prison.”
Lincoln was capable of great kindness, too. Pendel says another Irish woman with her young daughter got an audience with the president.
Pendel recounts the conversation thus: “Mr. President, my husband is down sick in Fredericksburgh, and I would like to have him discharged for I have my husband and two sons, all three in the army and I need the help of one of them.”
The president said, “You make an affidavit to that effect and bring it back to me.” Lincoln was signaling that he trusted her and was not going to check the truth of her story with the relevant army records.
Three weeks later the mother came back, however, and said by the time she got to the hospital, her husband was dead.
“Now I have two sons, yet. I want to see if you don’t discharge one to help me get along and you can have the other one.”
The president repeated the request that she give a signed affidavit and immediately promised to get one son back to her.
The Irish woman stepped closer to the president. “Mr. President, may God bless you and may you live very long years.”
Afterward, Pendel recounts, Lincoln looked him straight in the eye and remarked, “I believe that old woman is honest.”
Lincoln encountered opposition from his own generals over his liberal pardon policy. Father William Corby, the iconic chapla
in of the Irish Brigade whose benediction to the troops marching to the battlefield at Gettysburg has gone down in history, recalled an extraordinary meeting with the president and, later, Lincoln’s commanding general at Gettysburg, George Meade.
The case involved a thirty-two-year-old Irish-born soldier named Thomas Dawson from the 19th Massachusetts regiment. Prior to emigrating, Dawson had served in the British Army and won the Victoria Cross, according to his clemency petition.
In April 1864, he was sentenced to die after he and two companions left camp and broke into a house, where they drank liquor they found there. He claimed to have blacked out but was arrested the next day and charged in the rape of a sixty-year-old woman.
Dawson asked for Corby to meet his spiritual needs.
It was soon obvious that Dawson was considered an excellent soldier by his own officers. All of them signed an appeal document, a highly unusual occurrence.
Corby was dispatched to the White House to make the case with Lincoln. After being ushered in and greeted warmly by the president, he made his case.
Lincoln, it was clear, found it a hard case to offer a pardon in. Despite his best efforts, Corby knew he was falling short; the crime was unacceptable to Lincoln.
Corby tried one last gambit, stating, “Since Your Excellency sees fit not to grant it (the pardon), I must leave his life in your hands.”
As Corby wrote, “This was too much. His (Lincoln’s) tender heart recoiled when he realized that a man’s life depended on his mercy.
“As I started across the green room to take my departure, he turned his own chair and throwing one of his long legs over the other said, “Chaplain, see here! I will pardon him if General Meade will, and I will put that on the petition.”
Corby departed, happy with the outcome, but Meade could not be convinced. It was obvious he felt Lincoln was too soft-hearted on such issues.
“Father, I know Meade said your mission is one of charity, but sometimes charity for a few means cruelty for many… . Besides, the president should have given the final and positive decision. I will not act.”
Thomas Dawson went to his death a few days later. He was one of three Irishman hanged for rape on the Union side out of a total of twenty-four.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Fear of Black/Irish Coupling Derails Lincoln Support
The polyglot nature of New York in the mid-1800s meant that many people and races who had never set sight on each other were now cheek by jowl in the slums.
Historian Lisa Orr wrote in The New York Times that black/Irish couples were far more common than many believed. Living side by side meant that it was inevitable that areas like the Five Points would feature multicultural relationships, the likes of which America had never seen.
A reporter for a New York paper in the 1830s lamented the “white women, and black and yellow men, and black and yellow women, with white men, all in a state of gross intoxication, and exhibiting indecencies revolting to virtue and humanity.” Orr wrote that “harmonious or not, most mixed-race marriages in New York were between Irish women and black men, and mulatto children were common.” The year 1850 saw a new racial category, mulatto, added to the census, to account for their offspring.
When the draft riots came, during a heat wave in the bleak middle of the Civil War, the mob that poured out of Irish neighborhoods were incensed they were being drafted while others escaped. The mob targeted mixed-race households, especially those containing Irish women who had children with African American men.
Using crude racism even for the times, opponents of Lincoln saw the perfect opportunity to counter the backing of men like Archbishop Hughes, Thomas Francis Meagher, and Michael Corcoran by tying Lincoln directly to this dreadful crime they called “miscegenation.” Their preferred weapon of choice was what we call today “fake news.”
“Abraham Africanus” they called him, in the form of an influential pamphlet, the Facebook of its day, put about by “Copperhead” Democrats obsessed with ending the war by conceding the union. In the pamphlet, Lincoln does a pact with the devil to stay in power. The illustration of him shows him with a dark-skinned, goat-like visage.
A new word, “miscegenation,” was invented, a description of blacks and whites coupling. The pamphlet purported to be written by abolitionists who supported mixed-race couples. The real intent was to frighten the Irish off Lincoln forever.
The pamphlet stated, “The word is spoken at last. It is Miscegenation—the blending of the various races of men—the practical recognition of the brotherhood of all the children.” Just a year after the Emancipation Proclamation, it was calculated to further madden the anti-Lincoln voters.
A year later, a similar pamphlet appeared in New York. It had a very specific purpose, to drive Irish away from Lincoln by creating an appalling vista of black men and Irish women “miscegenating.”
It was entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, and it came out just as the 1864 election was looming large and the Civil War outcome was still uncertain.
Again, it purported to be an approving account of black/white breeding, but it very nakedly targeted the Irish as the ones whose women would most quickly desert them.
The pamphlet declared, “When the President proclaimed Emancipation, he proclaimed also the mingling of the races”; this was the killer blow the writers hoped to strike in forcing any Irish away from Lincoln.
The pamphlet advocated miscegenation between the Irish and blacks in order to strengthen the race.
“While science has demonstrated that the intermarriage of diverse races is indispensable to a progressive humanity, its votaries, in this country at least, have never had the courage to apply that rule to the relations of the white and colored races.” The pamphlet told the Irish that “notwithstanding the apparent antagonism which exists between the Irish and Negroes on this continent, there are the strongest reasons for believing that the first movement towards [interracial marriages] will take place between these two races.” The pamphlet added, “Indeed, in very many instances it has already occurred.” Miscegenation balls between blacks and Irish were envisaged in illustrations—there were even portraits of Lincoln graciously welcoming black men and women to such events.
“Wherever there is a poor community of Irish {here} they naturally herd with the poor negroes, and as the result of the various offices of kindness which only the poor pay to one another, families become intermingled and connubial relations are formed between the black men and white Irish women.”
The pamphlet warned, however, that Irish women would find Negro men irresistible. “The white Irish Woman loves the black man, and in the old country, it has been stated, that the Negro is sure of the handsomest among the poor white females.”
The fake “abolitionist, Lincoln supporters” who wrote the pamphlet went on to insult the Irish in ferocious terms.
“Why the Irish were lower than the Negro,” a “more brutal race and lower in civilization than the Negro” so that it would actually help the Irish to have sexual relations with blacks. “Fusion, whenever it takes place, will be of infinite service to the Irish. The Irish are coarse-grained, revengeful, unintellectual, with very few of the finer instincts of humanity.”
The pamphlet even claimed the Irishman was actually black:
[He] was originally of a colored race, and has all the fervid emotional power which belongs to a people born in or near the tropics. His long habitation north, however, and the ignorance in which he has been kept by misgovernment, have sunk the Irishman below the level of the most degraded Negro.
Take an equal number of Negroes and Irish from among the lowest communities of the city of New York, and the former will be found far superior to the latter in cleanliness, education, moral feelings, beauty of form and feature, and natural sense.
One of the evidences of degeneracy which has been pointed out in certain of the Negro races has been the prognathous skull, the p
rojecting mouth, the flat and open nostril. Yet this is a characteristic as true of certain portions of the people of Ireland as of the Guinea African. The inhabitants of Sligo and Mayo, portions of Ireland under peculiarly bad government, have developed these precise types of feature. The people have become thin-legged, pot-bellied, with mouth projected, head sloped, nostril distended; in short they exhibit all the characteristics by which we have marked the lowest type of the Negro.
It was dirty politics at its worst but even with the loss of New York, Lincoln emerged victorious. He had secured another term, the draft riots were quelled, and the Union army—with many newly-arrived Irishmen swelling its ranks—was winning the war.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The South Seeks to Stop Irish Migration
On September 4, 1863, not long after Gettysburg and with the tide of battle turning, a Confederate Irish-born chaplain, Father Patrick Bannon, received an urgent missive from Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State for the Confederacy. This came following a meeting Benjamin had with Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy:
Sir:
The Secretary of War having relieved you temporarily from service in the army and placed you at the disposal of this Department for the purpose mentioned in our conferences, I now proceed to give you the instructions by which you are to be guided.
The duty which is proposed to entrust to you is that of a private and confidential agent of this government, for the purpose of proceeding to Ireland, and there using all legitimate means to enlighten the population as to the true nature and character of the contest now waged in this continent, with the view of defeating the attempts made by the agents of the United States to obtain in Ireland recruits for their armies.
