Lincoln and the Irish

by Niall O'Dowd

The manhunt was over.

  As for Doherty, he returned a hero and got his share of the reward, which was $52,550 when shared out among all the men on the manhunt. He was promoted to captain and stayed in the regular army until mustering out in 1871. He moved to New Orleans for a time, before returning to New York where he became an inspector in the street paving department. He was Grand Marshal of the New York Memorial Day parade and eventually retired in New York. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery after passing away in 1897.

  However his ancestral hometown in Sligo did not forget him, nor did a mysterious military figure. There is a grave to family members in Sligo and a tombstone inscription, which reads:

  In the beloved memory of Elizabeth Crawford Gribbin, first love and wife of Henry Doherty Esq. and their son Joseph and his sons Michael, Colonel Henry J. Doherty, and Captain Edward P. Doherty, The Brave Avenger of President Lincoln and their youngest daughter Catherine Tresa and to the memory of their eldest daughter Mary Anne Doherty who in fond remembrance has erected this monument in the year 1887.

  The “Brave Avenger” line was added by a mysterious General Kavanagh from America, who secured family permission. Many Americans visit the graveyard seeking relatives and are delighted at the West of Ireland connection to Lincoln.

  Borough Council graveyard employee, Brian Scanlon, told the Irish Independent newspaper that the cemetery attracts many US tourists:

  They don’t ask about the Lincoln connection. They call in, mainly during the summer, enquiring about their ancestors.

  I show them around and I often bring them to the Doherty grave and they’re delighted. They don’t expect to see such a strong connection in Sligo in the West of Ireland to Lincoln.

  Though buried in Arlington, Doherty has not been forgotten in his family’s native heath.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Lincoln and the Irish—Linked Forever

  In the end, America lost its greatest president, a man who saved the fragile flower of a democracy still much less than 100 years old when the Civil War broke out. At its greatest hour of need he was there, never wavering despite lesser voices chanting for conciliation with the South and change. His absence during the Reconstruction meant unfinished business on race, which continues to this day.

  At the Hampton Roads peace parley with Southern representatives in 1865, he was at his very best, demanding military surrender rather than a peace treaty that would allow wiggle room on slavery.

  He was immediately adamant that slavery must go, and he kicked the underpinnings of it from underneath them forever by ridiculing the Southern leadership’s inane view that slavery was good for black folk too, as they were less intelligent.

  His political skills were incredible, and his physical presence at six foot four, probably six foot seven with a stovepipe hat on, must have overwhelmed and dwarfed his opponents. His ability to relax people with his backwoods stories and an occasional Irish joke was legendary. His sense of mercy and conciliation registers far greater today, when we see so little of it practiced.

  After his death, there was talk of the South rising again but it was General Robert E. Lee who put an end to that. He had come around in the end to the belief that nothing more was to be gained by restarting the murderous battle. Six hundred thirty thousand dead were more than enough.

  Many were Irishmen, and Lincoln made clear in his dealings with Thomas Francis Meagher, Michael Corcoran, and Archbishop Hughes that he was indeed grateful. General Philip Sheridan had also played a huge role.

  But so too had the 150,000 Irish who fought for the Union. The war was simply not winnable without them.

  Lincoln stayed true to the Irish; as an utter outsider himself, that sense of the underdog likely drew him to the Irish. His own staffers complained about the “Mick Clique” around him, but he clearly reveled in the laughter and the country stories. He cared about their issues, supporting Famine relief when he was an unknown politician and ensuring their cause of Irish freedom was raised in Congress.

  Lincoln’s embrace of the despised Irish should never be overlooked, nor their role in helping him win one of the most important conflicts of all times, which, with a different outcome, would have transformed the world we live in even today.

  Lincoln’s greatness is never in question. Robert Lincoln O’Brien, writing in 1914 in the Boston Globe, summed up Lincoln and his meaning well:

  More than a million people a year now pour into the United States from lands beyond the seas, most of them unfamiliar with our language and our customs and our aims. When we Americans who are older by a few generations go out to meet them we take, as the supreme example of what we mean by our great experiment, the life of Abraham Lincoln. And, when we are ourselves tempted in the mad complexity of our material civilization to disregard the pristine ideals of the republic, we see his gaunt figure standing before us and his outstretched arm pointing to the straighter and simpler path of righteousness. For he was a liberator of men in bondage, he was a savior of his country, he was a bright and shining light.

  As for the revisionist view that he could have avoided a war, his words to Irish American judge Joe Gillespie, a close friend, shortly before he took over from Buchanan, ring true: “It is only possible upon(with) the consent of this Government to the erection of a foreign slave government out of the present Slave States.”

  Lincoln was never going to allow that, but it was a close-run thing. The Irish contribution to the success has long been underplayed, even down to the present day. Many came off the Famine ships and went to war for the Union and Lincoln. Even in Union ranks they sometimes faced hostility from men like General William Sherman. But they persevered. Archbishop Hughes told them the Union and Lincoln was everything to fight for, as did their heroes. One of their own, Philip Sheridan, was the bravest general in the war. Lincoln had kissed the Irish flag and stated, “God Bless the Irish.”

  So they fought. Fág an Bealach, which translates as “Clear the Way”—the old Irish war cry rings true for the American Civil War and the Irish contribution. The Irish helped enormously to “clear the way” for a deeply embattled president who ended up as America’s greatest leader. They deserve proper recognition for that.

  EPILOGUE

  Kennedy Retraces Lincoln and Gettysburg

  John F. Kennedy was fond of invoking Republican Abe Lincoln in his speeches. To those who disagreed with his Lincoln homages, he said, “Some may say that a Democratic candidate for the Presidency has no right to invoke the name of Lincoln. I disagree. Abraham Lincoln belongs to the ages, and he belongs to all Americans, regardless of their party.”

  Kennedy undertook a pilgrimage to Gettysburg as president to pay such a homage. On Saturday March 31, 1963, Kennedy, dressed in a blue jacket and driving a white Mercury convertible with the top down, headed a five-car convoy, which included four Secret Service cars, from Camp David to the Gettysburg battlefield, a distance of 26.2 miles.

  It had been almost one hundred years since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Kennedy doubtless felt he could be back again in November to deliver a speech marking that momentous anniversary.

  Accompanying him was his wife Jackie and oldest child Caroline, both of whom sat in the front seat. In the back was Red Fay, his Undersecretary of the Navy, but more importantly, a reliable Kennedy sidekick and later author of a fawning memoir about Kennedy called The Pleasure of His Company.

  Fay later recounted the visit. Along the way, they picked up local high school teacher and Gettysburg expert Jacob Sheads, who met the presidential party in a parking lot near the site of the battle and was astonished to find the president behind the wheel of his own car.

  There may not have been much need for Sheads, as Fay recalled. “The knowledge the president displayed about the Civil War amazed me. When we came to a certain area where a Boston or Massachusetts unit had fought, he recounted the battle with such detail I could almost see it taking place. I kept expecting a Kelly or a Murphy to come charging up the gorge.�
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  Sheads thought his well-planned itinerary would please the president, but JFK had other ideas, displaying his knowledge of the battlefield in such a manner that it drew Sheads’s admiration.

  After visits to several landmarks, Kennedy then drove to Rose’s Wheatfield, through which the Irish Brigade had charged on July 2, 1863, suffering grievous losses. The monument to the Irish brigade is on top of the Stony Hill/Loop area of the battlefield. Nearby is a monument to the Massachusetts 28th, an all-Irish regiment. On top of the monument is inscribed the Fenian battle cry “Fág an Bealach.” The guide asked Kennedy if he understood the words; Kennedy answered instantly, “Clear the Way.” Sheads realized that this was a man who knew his Irish American history.

  There is even video of Kennedy, taken by Deborah Deitsch Mason, a relative of Sheads. In it, Jack and Jackie are close together in the front seat, and he is pointing out landmarks. Poignantly, they are near the Eternal Light Peace Memorial. Sheads would later say that Jackie Kennedy got the idea for the eternal flame over her husband’s grave from the Eternal Light Peace Memorial at Gettysburg.

  Lincoln and Kennedy had many similarities. Both were avatars of a new age, both magnificent orators and inspirational examples for their fellow citizens. Both took on the battle for the rights of the widely despised black Americans. Both would die at the zenith of their careers from an assassin’s bullet.

  JFK even cribbed a few words from Lincoln in his inauguration on January 20, 1960:

  “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” [From Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, March 4, 1861]

  “In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course.” [From John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address]

  On that March day in 1963, their paths also crossed, the Irish American descendant of Famine emigrants and the country lawyer from Springfield. They both owed a great debt to the Irish: Kennedy, for helping elect him by voting in massive numbers, and Lincoln, for their role in helping him win the Civil War. Lincoln, although initially thinking of the Irish as foes of the Democratic Party, embraced them in the end as they embraced him, despite their fears of his alleged links to the nativist Know-Nothings.

  As for Kennedy, the Irish in the Civil War entranced him. Before the president’s visit to Ireland in June 1963, Letitia Baldrige Hollensteiner, the White House Social Secretary, remembers how determined Kennedy was to remind his ancestral countrymen of the importance of that involvement. She later wrote:

  I once found an old flag, an Irish Brigade flag which had been used during the Civil War by the Irish Brigade here in this country. He liked that very much, and we got it to give to the President of Ireland. He and Mrs. Kennedy spent a great deal of time deciding how it should be presented; how it should be framed, encased in glass, what the plaque should say. The President, being such an historian, insisted that the plaque tell the whole story of the flag. He made me check and recheck, and he said, ‘That sounds fishy. Something’s wrong with your facts. Get your facts straight.’

  There was one more moment of communion between the two most charismatic presidents. After JFK’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy immediately decreed that Lincoln’s funeral be the lodestar for her husband’s obsequies.

  Historians quickly studied how the White House had been enveloped in black in mourning for Lincoln, and the order of the funeral, such as who marched where and when, was also studied. One last-minute request Jackie made was for an eternal flame beside the grave. She said she wanted to light a flame at the climax of the service in Arlington that would burn forever in memory of her husband.

  She remembered the day when she and the president had visited Gettysburg. There, at the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, dedicated in 1938, she had seen an eternal flame. A similar one was built in Arlington over his freshly-dug grave in time for Jackie to light it on Monday afternoon. A final connection was made between two tragic presidents—one who had dared to dream and another to fight for the dream of democracy when it came to it.

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  Photo Credit: Fergus O’Dowd

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Niall O’Dowd is a native of Ireland who emigrated to America in 1979. He is founder of the Irish Voice newspaper, Irish America magazine, and IrishCentral.com, the largest Irish Diaspora site. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from University College Dublin and the Irish Presidential Distinguished Services Award for his role in the Irish peace process. His previous books include Fire in the Morning, about the Irish heroes of 9/11, and An Irish Voice, a memoir. In March 2018, he will be named as one of the ten most influential Irish-born people who came to America. He is the only current-day nominee.