Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Despite warnings that such embarrassing displays would not be tolerated in the future, Kerrigan and his men continued to treat their superiors with disdain while stationed in Arlington, Virginia. When Kerrigan’s commanding officer, Brigadier General John H. Martindale, came to review the regiment in mid-October, he found the soldiers untrained, unkempt, and uncooperative. Martindale upbraided Kerrigan, but the colonel refused to listen and stomped away. He ignored a subsequent order to return for an additional inspection the next day, so Martindale had the Bowery Boy arrested. The charges against him included “habitual neglect of duty” for failing to train his men; “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline” for allowing the soldiers to “engage in loud and unseemly disputes and brawls,” to appear at inspection “in a dirty and slovenly condition, with their pants partially unbuttoned in front,” and to keep their weapons and gear “in great filth and disorder”; leaving the inspection without permission; disobeying the order to return for the subsequent inspection; leaving camp at night without permission of his superior officer; “drunkenness on duty”; and “communicating with the enemy” while drinking at a roadhouse called Bailey’s Cross Roads.

  Kerrigan admitted leaving his post without permission but pleaded not guilty to the other charges. He also spared no expense in assembling a defense team, hiring Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a former U.S. Attorney General, as his counsel. Johnson convinced the court-martial tribunal to acquit his client of the final two charges, but it found him guilty of the others. Kerrigan could have been sentenced to a long prison term, but was instead merely mustered out of the army on February 21, 1862. He remained in Washington to complete his term in the House of Representatives, but as the Herald had predicted, the style of politics practiced in the Capitol did not suit Kerrigan’s talents. He was arrested on the House floor when he repeatedly tried, after the time for debate had ended, to speak against a bill that would fund the abolition of slavery in Missouri. He never held elective office again.8

  After the war, Kerrigan found other outlets for what the Times described as his “dare-devil” impulses. When word reached New York in June 1866 that several hundred Irish freedom fighters known as the Fenians had attacked Canada as revenge for the continuing British occupation of Ireland, “General” Kerrigan announced that he would raise a brigade of five thousand soldiers to assist in the assault. By this point, however, the invasion had been repulsed, and Kerrigan never made it to Canada.9

  Kerrigan could not have been deeply involved with the Fenians before their attack on Canada, otherwise he would have been with them at the border, rather than in New York City, when they crossed into Ontario and Québec. But in 1867 Kerrigan did become a central figure in an even more daring Fenian military operation: an attempt to invade Ireland itself to spark an uprising against the British. On April 13, the Jacmel Packet left New York Harbor carrying “Brigadier General Kerrigan” and his force of thirty-eight Irish freedom fighters. Once at sea, they patriotically rechristened the vessel Erin’s Hope. Despite the small size of its invasion force, the group believed it could succeed because the ship’s arrival in Sligo Harbor would coincide with an uprising by indigenous revolutionaries, who could make use of the five hundred rifles the Americans brought with them. On the evening of May 23, the crew sighted the Sligo coastline, but remained safely in the bay while awaiting the sign to attack.

  The signal never came. Apparently fearing that informants would compromise their plans, the Sligo Fenians had launched their uprising two months early, before Kerrigan and his men had even left New York. The revolt was a dismal failure, as the British quickly rounded up and imprisoned the leaders. At their contact’s suggestion, the Americans sailed southward, hoping to return when their Irish allies had regrouped. But the ship soon began running low on supplies. Some on board insisted that they had come too far not to strike a blow at the British, even a futile one. A majority, however, demanded they set sail back to New York. A couple of daring souls did go ashore in Sligo with their cache of weapons, but authorities quickly arrested them. Kerrigan returned with the bulk of the force to New York.10

  Given Kerrigan’s Irish roots, one would imagine that he had risked his life on the Erin’s Hope out of dedication to the Irish cause. But he seemed willing to take adventure wherever he could find it. In 1870, the lifelong Democrat served as a mercenary of sorts for the South Carolina Republican party. Looking for a way to counterbalance the terror tactics of the Ku Klux Klan that prevented both black and white Republicans from voting, South Carolina’s Republican governor, Robert K. Scott, brought in Kerrigan and a band of his New York rowdies to fight back. After all, no one was more experienced than Kerrigan in the use of violence and intimidation at the polls. Whether or not Kerrigan actually came to blows with the Klan during his months in South Carolina is not known.11

  How Kerrigan supported himself in these years is a mystery. He probably filled his days with the usual sporting men’s pursuits, but he was no longer a significant player in city politics. Always the adventurer, he observed many battles during the Franco-Prussian War and toured Turkey in the mid-1880s as well. Later, he moved to Brooklyn. Even in his seventies, Kerrigan could not resist an exciting opportunity, traveling with another old-time Five Pointer to the Yukon Territory “as representative of a syndicate.” Kerrigan fell ill during the trip and had to have surgery upon his return. Tough to the end, he supposedly “refused to take an anaesthetic and never uttered a moan while the surgeons were at work.” He died a few weeks later, on November 1, 1899.12

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Civil War and the End of an Era

  “NO COERCION, NO CIVIL WAR”

  It is impossible to precisely gauge Five Pointers’ views of slavery. Except for the occasional reference to the issue by a Sixth Ward candidate for political office, we have no means of judging how the average neighborhood resident perceived the “peculiar institution,” except to suggest that Five Pointers’ views on the subject probably mirrored those of the city’s Irish, Catholic, and Democratic press. These papers consistently argued that both abolitionism and the more moderate movement to prevent the creation of additional slave territory threatened the survival of the nation. “We are totally opposed to Abolitionism in every shape;—not because we desire to perpetuate slavery, but to preserve the Union,” announced the Irish-American in 1853. “That slavery is inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence and our Republican Constitution we will not affect to deny,” its editors admitted four years later. But they argued that Americans had been “forced to accept the ‘Institution’ of slavery” as part of the compromises that created the nation, and that those pledges could not subsequently be broken.

  Many New York Democrats insisted that slavery was beneficial to blacks and whites alike. The Day Book, a Democratic paper aligned with Mayor Fernando Wood, asserted that “‘slavery,’ or negro subordination to the will and guidance of the superior white man, is a law of nature, a fixed truth, an eternal necessity, an ordinance of the Almighty, in conflict with which the efforts of human power sink into absolute and unspeakable insignificance.” Free blacks such as those in New York had been better off as slaves, maintained the newspaper’s editors, because now they were still subordinate to whites but were not guaranteed the subsistence of food, clothing, and shelter that slaveowners provided.13

  Catholic newspapers usually expressed their opposition to the antislavery movement in somewhat less repugnant ways. “None of us, North or South, pretend to think Slavery a blessing,” contended the New York Freeman’s Journal, a Catholic weekly edited by a non-Irishman but perceived in the antebellum years to be the organ of Archbishop John Hughes. “Its warmest defenders, if they are rational, say no more for it than that it is unavoidable in the nature of things; all would be rejoiced to see it abolished to-morrow, if it could be done safely, or consistently with a due regard for the rights and interests of all classes.” However, the Journal insisted that abolishing slave
ry would never be safe. To those who argued that good Christians must oppose slavery, the Journal retorted that not a single Catholic bishop in the United States had endorsed the abolition movement. Though nominally a non-partisan periodical, the Journal endorsed the Democratic opposition to Republican Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential race. “The Democratic doctrine is not that there is no moral right or wrong about slavery, but that it is not the business of the political power to settle moral questions,” the Journal noted approvingly, adding that only when a majority of Americans North and South could be brought by “moral suasion” to oppose slavery would it be appropriate for politicians to interfere with the institution.14

  Irish Americans frequently justified their opposition to abolitionism on the grounds that it would hurt the movement to liberate Ireland. Daniel O’Connell, who fought to repeal the Act of Union that had bound Ireland politically to the United Kingdom, spoke out against American slavery in the early 1840s. “The black spot of slavery rests upon your star spangled banner,” O’Connell wrote, “and no matter what glory you may acquire beneath it, the hideous, damning stain of Slavery remains upon you; and a just Providence will sooner or later, avenge itself for your crime.” After O’Connell’s repeal movement fizzled, many Irishmen cited his diversion into abolitionism as the cause. The Irish-American claimed that his statements on slavery “WERE THE FIRST—THE VERY FIRST—CAUSES OF THE DIVISIONS” which fractured the repeal forces. “American sympathy was a ‘mighty fact’ before then,” but subsequently, “division, disunion, distrust, contention, [and] personal bitterness” doomed the repeal movement to failure. Besides, argued many Irish Americans, the Irish were as much slaves to the English as African Americans were to their masters in the South. Abolitionists ought to focus their attention on the 6 million white slaves in Ireland, insisted the Irish-American, before interceding on behalf of the 3 million black slaves in the United States.15

  Thomas Nast’s “This Is a White Man’s Government” perfectly captures the image most Americans had of Five Pointers. Nast, who supported Republican Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency in 1868, depicts what he believes to be the three main sources of support for Grant’s Democratic rival. On the right is August Belmont, representing the greed of Fifth Avenue financiers and other unscrupulous capitalists. In the center is Nathan Bedford Forrest, a leading Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War and self-proclaimed founder of the Ku Klux Klan afterward. On the left is a Five Points Irishman drawn with simian features. The burning building just behind the Five Pointer is the New York Colored Orphan Asylum, burned by the predominantly Irish-American rioters during the 1863 New York Draft Riots. Harper’s Weekly (September 5, 1868): 568. Collection of the Library of Congress.

  Irish Catholics also frequently alluded to abolitionists’ prejudice against them to justify their refusal to endorse the anti-slavery movement. “Irishmen have no [more] bitter enemies, Catholics no fiercer foes, than are nine-tenths of the American Abolitionists,” insisted the Freeman’s Journal in 1843. “Dark, sullen, ferocious bigots as they are, they abhor the name of Ireland and Catholicity.” In the mid-1850s, when the Know Nothing party scored major electoral victories in the Northeast where abolitionism was strongest, the Irish-American asked why “the citizens of New England, who spend their money, their time, their talents, in endeavoring to make the negro free, are so opposed to the ‘foreigner’?”16

  One factor that the antebellum Irish never mentioned when explaining their opposition to abolitionism was economic competition from African Americans. It is a staple of writing on the Irish that their opposition to the anti-slavery movement was based on a fear that freed slaves would take their jobs or drive down their already low wages. Yet not a single New York Irish or Catholic periodical surveyed for this study mentioned such a fear. Given the strict segregation of African Americans in the New York antebellum workplace, it really was not an issue. Five Points African Americans worked primarily as chimney sweeps, sailors, waiters, or street peddlers. Even in this last field, the only one populated by significant numbers of antebellum Irishmen, African Americans typically traded items such as buttermilk that whites did not usually sell.

  The extent to which Five Pointers discussed the slavery issue is impossible to determine. By the late 1850s, Congress and the entire Democratic party were divided over the issue of slavery in Kansas, with the Buchanan administration supporting the “Lecompton constitution” that would allow slavery there, while another faction led by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas opposed it. The Irish-American admitted in early 1858 that Kansas, Douglas, and Lecompton “engage thought, talk, and writing, North and South. . . . Few sounds are uttered without these all-absorbing names being heard.” This was undoubtedly the case even in the Sixth Ward, because whether one supported Buchanan or Douglas on this question determined party nominations and even many patronage appointments. Five Points politico John Clancy could often be found at the Sixth Ward’s Ivy Green saloon regaling patrons with his enthusiasm for the “little giant” from Illinois.17

  As the 1860 presidential election approached, sectional issues continued to loom large in Five Points political discussions. The attack on Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by South Carolinian Preston Brooks in 1856, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and Buchanan administration support for slavery in Kansas in 1858 all helped convinced most northerners to support Lincoln and the Republican party in 1860. Yet Five Pointers cast few votes for the rail-splitter from Illinois. Despite his visit to Five Points earlier in the year, Lincoln captured just 12 percent of the Sixth Ward vote in 1860, and an even smaller proportion of the ballots cast in the Five Points election districts.18

  Five Pointers were deeply ambivalent as southern states began preparing to secede after Lincoln’s victory. Most of the neighborhood’s Irish-American residents probably opposed the breakup of the Union, yet Five Pointers were very reluctant to go to war to stop it. The Irish-American’s editors, for example, did “not believe that this Confederation can be held together by armed force. Even if it could be, it would not be worth the trouble.” Clancy, still in control of the Leader, echoed a similar theme, recommending “no coercion, no civil war.” After the attack on Fort Sumter, when most New Yorkers felt it their patriotic duty to defend the Stars and Stripes, neighborhood residents were distinctly unenthusiastic. When the New York state assembly voted to approve the enlistment of thirty thousand New York volunteers to defend Washington and resist southern aggression, only 6 of the 108 assemblymen opposed the measure. One of the six was Five Points’ representative, William Walsh.19

  The secession winter and first months of the war played havoc with the New York economy. Business ground nearly to a halt as anxious merchants and manufacturers cut back on orders and production. The Herald described the suffering of the unemployed poor as “unprecedented.” “Thousands of persons, both male and female, were suddenly deprived of employment,” concurred the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Sectors of the economy that had once traded heavily with the South (such as the garment industry) were especially hard hit. The war also crippled the relief work of local charities. “Our wardrobes are empty,” complained the journal of the Five Points Mission in August 1861. Donations of new and used clothing plummeted as northerners instead hoarded garments or directed their castoffs to organizations assisting veterans and their families.20

  By the second half of 1861, employment began to pick up, especially after the Confederate victory at the first battle of Bull Run in July convinced northerners that the war would not be a short one. But by 1862, prices skyrocketed while wages for the poor remained relatively stagnant. The retail price of tobacco and whiskey tripled. Food prices also jumped. Tenement rents fell, however, as the precipitous decline in immigration combined with the departure of so many for the battlefields reduced demand.21

  It is impossible to determine precisely how many Five Pointers enrolled in the military during the first years of the war.
Enlistment records do not record the recruits’ street addresses, and few residents had names unique enough to make their identification possible among the thousands of New York soldiers. Subsequent reports that elections in the Sixth Ward were quiet because those usually engaged in “tipping over ticket boxes . . . are now off to the war” indicate that some of the more rowdy Five Pointers must have enlisted. By the middle of the war, recruitment bonuses became quite substantial, in some cases equaling what a Five Points laborer might earn in six months or more. Irish pride also probably drew some into the army. The all-Irish Sixty-ninth New York Regiment overflowed with volunteers when famed Irish patriot Michael Corcoran became its commander. One, thirty-year-old Johnny Stacom, was an Ivy Green bartender and aspiring politician allied with Brennan and Clancy. He enlisted after the bombardment of Sumter. On April 23, 1861, after receiving a blessing from Archbishop Hughes at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street, the unit marched proudly to the ferries that conveyed the soldiers on the first leg of their journey to Washington. Thirty-eight members of the regiment were killed at Bull Run. Having completed their three-month tour of duty, the Sixty-ninth returned to New York for a heroes’ welcome. Some members reenlisted in a new “Irish Brigade.” Others had had enough of army life. Stacom waited until 1864 before volunteering for another three-month stint in the Irish unit, spending his entire uneventful ninety days besieging Lee’s forces at Petersburg, Virginia.22