Lincoln and the Irish

by Niall O'Dowd

  It is understood that under the guise of assisting needy persons to emigrate, a regular organization has been formed of agents in Ireland who leave untried no method of deceiving the laboring population into emigrating for the ostensible purpose of seeking employment in the United States, but really for recruiting the Federal armies.

  Throw yourself as much as possible into close communication with the people where the agents of our enemies are at work. Inform them by every means you can devise, of the true purpose of those who seek to induce them to emigrate. Explain to them the nature of the warfare which is carried on here. Picture to them the fate of their unhappy countrymen who have already fallen victims to the arts of the Federals. Relate to them the story of Meagher’s Brigade, its formation and its fate. Explain to them that they will be called on to meet Irishmen in battle, and thus to imbrue their hands in the blood of their own friends, and perhaps kinsmen, in a quarrel which does not concern them, and in which all the feelings of a common humanity should induce them to refuse taking part against us.

  Contrast the policy of the Federal and Confederate States in former times in their treatment of foreigners, in order to satisfy Irishmen were true sympathy in their favor was found in periods of trial. In the North the Know-Nothing party, based on hatred to foreigners and especially to Catholics, was triumphant in its career. In the South it was crushed, Virginia taking the lead in trampling it underfoot. In this war such has been the hatred of the New England Puritans to Irishmen and Catholics that in several instances the chapels and places of worship of the Irish Catholics have been burnt or shamefully desecrated by the regiments of volunteers from New England… . Lay all these matters fully before the people.

  If, in order fully to carry out the objects of the Government as above expressed, you should deem it advisable to go to Rome for the purpose of obtaining such sanction from the sovereign pontiff as will strengthen your hands and give efficiency to your action, you are at liberty to do so… . You will receive herewith a letter of introduction to our private agent in London… . You will receive herewith the sum of $1,212.50 in gold, to be applied to the expenses of your voyage and to your salary.

  I am very respectfully, etc.,

  J.P. Benjamin,

  Secretary of State

  Bannon was fit for the task. He felt he could sway the Irish bishops and clergy with stories of abuse of Catholic rituals and sacking of Catholic churches by the Union soldiers. The truth of the matter, that Bannon intended to wildly exaggerate such instances, was known only by him. Turning the tide of war by cutting off Irish recruits to the Union was a mammoth task, but all his life he had challenged the powerful, conventional wisdom. It was time to do so again.

  A native of Rooskey, County Roscommon, he was the son of a prosperous grain merchant, James Bannon, who had married Fanny O’Farrell, the daughter of a very wealthy businessman. John Bannon was born on December 29, 1829. The family opened a corn brokerage in Dublin and moved to James Street, close to where the Guinness Storehouse now stands. It was during the wake of Catholic Emancipation, and the Bannon family prospered in the new business environment that allowed Catholics to own limited property and businesses.

  Bannon attended the posh St. Vincent’s School in Castleknock and then studied for the priesthood during the Famine years, which did not seem to impact the prosperous family. After his ordination at Maynooth College, he had asked to come to St. Louis, where the local archbishop was fellow Irishman Peter Kenrick. He had been a co-founder of Bannon’s Irish high school in Dublin some twenty years earlier, before departing for America. Bannon would have a joyful reunion.

  St. Louis was where 10,000 Irish had decamped after emigrating, and there was a powerful Irish pulse in the city. Church-wise, it was at the center of the Midwest. Chicago was only eleven years old and a mere stripling; St. Louis was the center of power. For an ambitious young priest, it was a desirable posting.

  Father Bannon came from Maynooth in 1853, aged twenty-four, to minister to the large Irish population of St. Louis. The Irish enclave of “Kerry Patch” on the city’s north side was a hive of activity, as emigration from Ireland spurred the numbers ever higher. It was still a ghetto, however, where the Irish were segregated from the non-Irish of the city. Most non-Irish St. Louis natives considered it a place to be avoided.

  Father Bannon saw the anti-Irish forces at work and became beloved for fighting back. He was eventually assigned to St. John’s Parish, a much more middle class area. In November 1860, Bannon’s St. John the Apostle and Evangelist Church, a solid brick structure that still stands today, was completed. Then came the Civil War.

  After the Civil War began, Bannon’s parish in St. Louis was occupied by Union forces, and he fled south where he joined up with the Rebel Irish units, becoming an army chaplain.

  If Bannon had stayed in St. Louis, he would very likely have become a bishop. His superior, Archbishop Kenrick, refused to take a position on the war, adhering grimly to a neutral role. We do not know what Bannon thought of slavery, but he certainly did not condemn it, and decided to go with the South with hardly a thought.

  Once in the field, though, Bannon was no ordinary chaplain. He knew that chaplains were, in his own words, “frequently objects of derision, always disappearing on the eve of an action, when they would stay behind in some farm house till all was quiet.” Bannon took to the field, on one occasion even helping fire a disabled canon. He absolved men from both sides.

  Father Bannon later wrote that on nights before major battles, he “would go up to a watch-fire and waking one of the men, call him aside, hear his confession, and send him to summon another. The whole night would be spent thus, in going from campfire to campfire. The men were always willing to come, generally too glad of the opportunity; some would even be watching for me. When the time came for advancing, I made a sign for them all to kneel and gave them absolution. I then went to the second line, or the reserve, till it was their turn also to advance.”

  Bannon was a heroic figure to Confederate troops. At six foot four with a long bushy beard, he stood out not only for his appearance, but for his bravery, too. General Sterling Price, whose men he served, remarked, “I have no hesitancy in saying that the greatest soldier I ever saw was Father Bannon.”

  His southern support was in the mainstream of Irish Catholic opinion in the South. The Catholic Church in the South had made its preference known right after the first act of the Civil War, the bombardment and surrender of the Union side at Fort Sumter. The Irish-born Bishop of Charleston, Reverend Patrick Lynch, had a Te Deum sung in honor of the great victory and called for all Catholics and Irishmen to enlist on the Confederate side.

  Not coincidentally, Bishop Lynch owned eighty-five slaves himself. He authored perhaps the most shameful defense of slavery and the right for white masters to rape female slaves ever by a member of the Catholic hierarchy. He defended flagellation and rape, said slaves enjoyed peace and security in the New World, and said that freed blacks lived idle, dissipated lives and plunged into drunkenness.

  In an historical analysis thesis for California State University, Joseph Bell noted that Lynch had excused the rape of young female blacks, saying white men would “seek their gratification whether slavery exist or not.” He stated that there was a positive side to this abuse. The fact that black women could be freely raped meant white women would be “exempted from its influence.” As a result, he said, “Nowhere in Ireland are white women so pure as (they are) in the South.”

  Crazy and racist bishops aside, the Scots Irish in the South certainly saw the war differently. They had taken advantage of slavery from the first days they landed in America in 1765. Betty Hutchinson and husband Andrew Jackson, father of the future president, saw emigration to the Carolinas as a way out of penury in Ulster. They left from Carrickfergus in County Antrim.

  One recruiting poster for Carolina colonization specifically offered the Irish slavery as a reason to come. One brochure noted that “five healthy neg
roes” could do all the work on a large plot of land. A letter from a Georgia planter from Northern Ireland stated, “I keep as plentiful a table as most gentlemen in Ireland… If any person can bring money to buy a slave or two they may live easy and very well.” President Andrew Jackson eventually owned over 150 slaves.

  In contrast, few Catholic Irish living in the South at the time of the Civil War owned slaves, having barely enough after the Famine to keep themselves fed and clothed. For those with more prosperous means, the results on owning slaves were more mixed. Irish historian and Civil War expert Damian Shiels has identified six of the top sixteen Confederate officers who were Irish-born as slave holders.

  Surprisingly, the main Irish advocate for slavery was John Mitchel, a hero of the abortive 1848 Irish Rising, who had escaped from the harsh confines of Tasmania after transportation and settled in the South. How he reconciled his love for the penniless Irish peasant and his obnoxious and extreme support for slavery has never been properly explained.

  Yet, throughout Ireland today there are streets, squares, statues, and football clubs dedicated to Mitchel, an Irish revolutionary of the mid-nineteenth century famous for his newspaper The United Irishman and his book “Jail Journal” about his love for Irish freedom and his insistence on the common bond between Irish, Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter. None of his memorials mention his extreme embrace of slavery.

  As for most of the Catholic Irish in the South around the time of the Civil War, they despised the Know-Nothings, the powerful nativist group known for its hatred of Irish Catholics. They had far more traction in the North than in the South, as Secretary of State Judah Benjamin had pointed out in his letter to Bannon.

  President Lincoln and his Republican Party were linked to the Know-Nothings, though Lincoln himself adamantly rejected them. There was no doubt, however, that most leading Republican figures were paradoxically anti-slavery and also fiercely anti-Irish Catholic, which was enough for southern Irish to throw in their lot with their neighbors.

  The Irish American media also reported the destruction of southern towns and objected strongly to attacks on Catholic churches by anti-Catholic northern troops. In April 1863, there was outrage when a federal regiment from Maine destroyed a Catholic church and brazenly paraded in sacred vestments afterwards. The religious publication The Tablet warned that the continued attempts to “plunder, desecrate, and destroy Catholic churches in the south must end.”

  Besides, even the pope himself was conflicted. His hatred of Garibaldi, who united Italy and sacked the pope from the Vatican, was uppermost in Pope Pius IX’s mind. Garibaldi had made clear his pro-Union sympathies and had even offered to lead their army. He had been resident for a time in the United States and was favorably disposed to the Union.

  The pope was now back in the Vatican thanks to the French and appeared to tilt towards the Confederacy, partly as a result of Garibaldi’s sympathies.

  Many Confederates saw the pontiff’s support as critical. Catholic France had occupied Mexico and had 40,000 troops on Mexican soil. Could they come to the South’s rescue at the pope’s command? There was known to be a very large ultramontane streak of absolute fealty to the pope in the French ranks.

  Then there was Ireland, with pro-Union recruiters on the ground and the country still in the death grip of post-Famine poverty, exporting 15,000 to 18,000 people a month to America. Could the pope make a direct appeal to the Irish bishops to stop the flow?

  Truth was, as the Confederate leadership knew, the Irish recruits were making the difference in the war by sheer weight of numbers, signing up to Union recruiters off the boats in New York Harbor and Boston and points East.

  The Union recruiters in Ireland were not worried about how they lured some men into their army. Often, they signed them up for non-existent railroad construction and when the unlucky emigrants found they had been duped, they had little option but to sign up for the army.

  Another trick was to fill them full of drink at the harbor in Queenstown and sign them up when they were drunk. It could be a lucrative business; draft dodgers in the United States paid handsomely to have a hapless Irishman signed up in their place.

  The shanghaiing of Irish in Ireland and those arriving in America became a national issue, even in Britain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Off the Boat and Into the Arms of the Union

  In the summer of 1864, the British parliament heard testimony from, among others, Sir Robert Peel, Chief Secretary for Ireland. He said that between 20,000 and 30,000 Irish had been inveigled into joining up once they landed in America, lured by false promises.

  In many cases, Union recruiters in Ireland did the job. Also helping were very poor harvests in the early 1860s due to horrific weather, which drove many to the emigrant boats. Many were people who’d been evicted by their landlords.

  The deputy US consul in Dublin, William West, was an enthusiastic supporter of recruiting. As Susannah Bruce describes in her book The Harp and the Eagle, West suggested that the US government set aside a plot of land in America to be known as “New Ireland.”

  He said of “New Ireland,” “No doubt General Meagher would in due time be elected Governor if desirably located as to climate, etc. It would be a point d’appui for Irish emigrants, to which they would flock in thousands and thus regenerate themselves in a country and on a soil they could really call their own under a government as free as the air they breathe.”

  Meanwhile, his senior colleague, the Dublin US Counsel Henry R. Hammond, was worried the Rebels were also recruiting.

  In the spring of 1862 he noticed, “There are many Americans in Dublin at this time. Most of them are from the states in rebellion and strange as it may seem there are many here who give an attentive ear to their falsehoods they utter concerning the Rebellion.”

  So desperate were thousands to escape Ireland, they turned up at the consulates ready to accept free passage in return for enlisting in the US Army. Hammond pushed his government back in the US to allow such a scheme.

  The Irish exodus, their ability to fight hard and replace fallen divisions, made them an extremely critical fighting force in the last phase of the war. President Jefferson Davis was aware of this and had surprising Irish contacts himself.

  His daughter Winnie had an Irish nanny, Katherine, who had a deep influence on her. Winnie went on to write a biography of Robert Emmet and had as a guest at her eighteenth birthday dinner none other than Oscar Wilde. The Davis housekeeper was Mary O’Melia from Ireland, who stayed with the family through thick and thin. She was the constant companion of Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina.

  Mary O’Melia was born Mary Larkin in Galway in 1822. She married Matthew O’Melia, a sea captain, and had three children. Widowed, she came to America and found herself stranded in Virginia visiting when the Civil War began.

  Mary ended up running the Confederate White House. She helped Varina dress every morning and arranged the frequent receptions for high-level Confederates at the residence on the corner of 12th and Clay Streets in Richmond. She and Katherine doubtless kept Davis up with the news from Ireland of mass emigration and Union army recruitment.

  After Gettysburg and Grant’s relentless forcing tactics, Davis was simply running out of men. He knew the Union army was being resupplied every time a shipload of Irish emigrants sailed down the St. Lawrence bound for the East Coast.

  They were needed. Grant alone among Lincoln’s generals had grasped what the commander-in-chief called the “awful arithmetic”—the side with the greater numbers would eventually win. Jefferson Davis saw it too, hence the summons of Bannon. Stop the Irish and you could possibly stop Grant, too.

  Grant believed in “forcing the decisive battle, no matter how brutal,” as Adam Gopnik noted in The New Yorker review of a recent book simply entitled Grant, written by Ron Chernow.

  “Robert E. Lee was puzzled why Grant kept forcing men forward after the Battle of Cold Harbor, a seemingly pointless massacre of Union sol
diers and heavy casualties on the Rebel side. Lee did not grasp it was Grant’s clear tactic, a war of attrition that he with the most soldiers would inevitably win.

  “He could lose men and battles of this kind indefinitely and Lee could not,” wrote Gopnik. Unlike all the rest of Lincoln’s generals, Grant would never turn back or avoid an encounter with the enemy.

  Bannon’s moment had come. He had been at Vicksburg where General Grant had laid siege and forced a surrender. Vicksburg was the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River; therefore, capturing it completed the second part of the northern strategy, dividing the southern states and cutting them off from each other. Bannon escaped and made his way to Richmond, the Confederate capitol. It was desperate times; Gettysburg was lost and so was Vicksburg.

  In Richmond, Bannon was a man of profound importance and reputation. Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory, the only Catholic in the Confederate cabinet, saw him preach at Sunday Mass and asked him to meet with Jefferson Davis. The meeting occurred on August 30, 1864. It was very rare for Davis to meet lesser officials in person. For those he did entertain, he offered wine and juleps, told war stories from his days on the frontier, and often reminisced about Andrew Jackson, whom he had met as a young boy. With Bannon, however, he was all business.

  Davis asked him to go to Ireland to block the recruitment of Irish in whatever way he could. Bannon suggested that he also visit the pope; Davis agreed. Secretary of State Judah Benjamin drew up the necessary papers. There was no doubt the future of the Confederacy could depend on Bannon stopping the flow of Irish recruits. If the pope could be persuaded to back the Confederacy given his hostility towards the Union and their backing for his rival Garibaldi, well, hope might spring again. The French had invaded Mexico and were supportive of the Confederacy. England, too, might look again at diplomatic recognition if the Vatican supported the South. Bannon had a lot riding on his mission.