A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “Sure do,” he said.

  “What sort of work you goin’ to do?”

  “I don’t rightly know. Not much work to be done around here. When Uncle Sam gets me my forty acres and my mule, reckon it’ll be time to work.”

  “How you eatin’ now?”

  “Why, at the Bureau. They tell us not to worry, Uncle’s goin’ to take good care of us.”

  “Don’t they tell you to work?”

  “They say I’s a free man now. Work when I want.”

  Dan glared triumphantly at me. I refused to be impressed. “Sure why shouldn’t he celebrate his freedom? Wouldn’t you? I can tell you, if we free Ireland, the whole country’ll be drunk for a week. He’s ready to work when he gets his land and mule.”

  Back at the Planters Hotel, we found ourselves at lunch with a group of new appointees to the Freedmen’s Bureau, just arrived by ship from Boston. They were two men and four women, all in their twenties or thirties. Red Mike Hanrahan held forth on what he had been hearing from his fellow reporters and from interviews about the pitiable state of the beaten Southerners. A Sister of Mercy at the hospital had told him stories of widowed women and children half starved in their fine houses, accepting charity with eyes swimming in tears. In the countryside the situation was no better. The Union Army had left the region a desert. Numerous great folk found themselves cooking and learning how to milk cows for the first time in their lives. Many people were living on cornbread and sassafras tea. Some were eating cowpeas—cattle food. Bands of Negroes were roaming the roads, casually stealing what they pleased, heading for Charleston, where they had heard they would be apportioned their forty acres and their mules.

  “That’s exactly what these people deserve,” said the oldest man in the Boston group. He had a narrow, supercilious face and a thin, fragile body. “They must expiate every drop of blood that was spilled by Northern men on the battlefields, and every blow of the lashes they inflicted on their helpless blacks.”

  “Did you fight on any of these battlefields?” Red Mike Hanrahan asked.

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t healthy enough. But I assisted where I could. On the Sanitary Commission. Buying bonds. Praying for victory.”

  “I think I can speak for a good many of the men who fought,” Red Mike said. “Most of them learned to respect the sincerity of the Rebs, even if we didn’t agree with them. We have no desire to grind them into the dust.”

  “I don’t think you Irish have the right to speak for anyone but yourselves,” the Bostonian said. There were sniffs and nods of agreement from his five companions. “Most of you were in favor of slavery from the start. You fought for the Union only because the pay was good.”

  Red Mike lunged across the table and seized the Bostonian by the throat. “You lily-livered Protestant son of a bitch,” he said. “You can’t insult the men I saw go up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg.”

  John O’Neil pried Mike’s hand from the Bostonian’s quivering esophagus, and the Yankee brigade withdrew from the table in shrill fury, vowing to charge Mike before the military commander of the district. “Go on,” Mike roared, “try it. But get the first boat out of here if you do.”

  They were typical of the employees of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Mike said, from what he had learned from his fellow reporters. The Bureau was doing noble work, feeding hungry blacks and some Southern whites as well, but its staff were all Southern-hating abolitionists from New England and the Midwest who were preaching race hatred and giving the blacks impossible dreams. There was no chance of them each getting forty acres and a mule. It was all wild Radical Republican talk.

  Over coffee, Mike and John O’Neil listened to our report of our visit to General Hampton. Combined with the news Mike had gathered, it convinced us that it was futile to recruit Southern Irishmen here. The few Mike and John had encountered were loath to consider leaving their homes and families while the country was in such chaos. So we boarded another steamboat and sailed on to Savannah. This was largely a repetition of Charleston, the city filled with Union troops and idle Negroes being fed by the government, the whites dazed in their splendid mansions fronting the palm-lined squares. The difference was our reception by the Union commander. He waved a telegram from Secretary of War Stanton forbidding him to let us address Union troops on “government property.” The commander extended this order to the vicinity of the camp and warned us that he would arrest us if we were caught persuading any of his men to desert. In vain we tried to explain to him that our appeal was directed to men whose enlistments would soon expire.

  Unable to distribute handbills in the camp, we had to work with Irish-American soldiers in the ranks to organize a meeting in the city’s Forsyth Park. It was successful enough. We got as many promised volunteers as we had won in Charleston and sold more bonds. But a Union officer sat in the front row and wrote down everything that we said. Red Mike Hanrahan assured us that it was on the telegraph to Stanton the next day. I wrote a furious letter to Robert Johnson, accusing Stanton of trying to sabotage us.

  We boarded ship and sailed on to New Orleans. In material damage, this city had suffered less than Charleston and other cities of the Confederacy, but its demoralization was much more appalling. Its life was dominated by Federal soldiers and hundreds of Northern cotton jobbers. They filled the great rotunda of the once fashionable St. Charles Hotel, where the “princes of the Mississippi,” the wealthy planters from fine houses up the river, used to assemble. A few crestfallen ex-Confederate soldiers wandered among them, trying to sell cotton or—more often the case—their lands.

  Never before I had seen such exotic women—Spanish, Creole, quadroons, mulattos—as in New Orleans. They looked like creatures out of The Arabian Nights or The Travels of Marco Polo. Unlike the ragged women of Charleston and Savannah, these women wore the latest, most elaborate styles in all their silken and brocaded extravagance. New Orleans had been captured by the Union Army and Navy long before the war ended, and a fabulous trade in contraband cotton had been thriving for a year when the South surrendered. The influx of cash produced a city where gambling houses flourished and elegant brothels glittered on every third corner.

  We had high hopes in New Orleans. The Union garrison was commanded by General Philip Sheridan, the highest-ranking Irish-American in the Union Army and a friend of John O’Neil, who had served under him in Kentucky and Tennessee. I found the appearance of this famous soldier disappointing—he was small and squat with a massive chest and long, drooping arms—but there was a primitive, bristling energy about him as he sprang up from his desk to give O’Neil a cordial welcome.

  He was polite enough to me and Red Mike, but when O’Neil introduced Dan as a fellow cavalryman, Sheridan growled, “I don’t ordinarily welcome rebels to this office. But I’ll make an exception this once.”

  He turned away from Dan as it dawned on us that those cutting words were not spoken in jest. “Now what the devil are you up to, John?” he asked. Sheridan obviously had received a warning telegram about us from Stanton.

  O’Neil described our purpose and plans. Sheridan shook his head. “No, no, it’s all wrong, John. Can’t you see the danger? All this talk of Ireland and Canada. It takes Irishmen in the wrong direction. It makes us look like disturbers of the peace—or worse, like fools. We need to stop dreaming wild dreams and settle down to becoming Americans. Work hard and forget about Ireland. That’s what we should do.”

  “I must disagree, General,” O’Neil said. “As long as Ireland remains a place of slavery, we’ll never get the respect we deserve in this country.”

  Again I was hearing the fundamental argument that would break thousands of hearts, including my own. Sheridan was adamant in his opinion. He refused to let us address his troops, and he suggested that we leave New Orleans as soon as possible. He was unmoved by President Johnson’s letter. He obviously considered his telegram from Stanton more significant. We refused to be intimidated and told the general we would make our own plans and
abide by our stated purpose.

  “I have the power to put you on a steamboat in one hour, at the point of a bayonet,” Sheridan said. “I know what I’m talking about, goddamn it. I was the only Irishman in my class at West Point. I took insults all day long. Why? Because a lot of mangy louts with Irish names were brawling in the streets of Boston and New York. Their reputation made my life miserable. You’ll set us back fifty years with this damn nonsense.”

  Sheridan was typical of many Irish-Americans who had succeeded in America. He was ashamed of his slower countrymen and baffled by them. Essentially he wanted them to keep quiet and invisible, so Phil Sheridan could enjoy his glory undisturbed. I kept this opinion to myself. A mere woman could not contradict a general to his face. Not that John O’Neil or Dan or Red Mike said much. We went back to our hotel and sent a telegram to New York explaining our predicament.

  We received an astonishing reply from Colonel Roberts. OBEY SHERIDAN’S ORDERS. WE HOPE TO PERSUADE HIM TO LEAD THE FENIAN ARMY IN ITS ASSAULT ON CANADA. It was another glimpse of William Roberts’s unrealism. Red Mike Hanrahan wired back: YOU’D HAVE A BETTER CHANCE OF PERSUADING THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

  We had no choice now. We had to abandon New Orleans and board a steamboat for Vicksburg. It was my first glimpse of the mighty Mississippi and the boats that plied her mud-silted waters. I came aboard expecting little in the way of comfort. Hardship was all we had known in the hotels of the South. They were in the same state of disrepair as Wade Hampton’s rented house in Charleston. We had eaten off chipped plates and drunk from cracked cups and slept in rooms with threadbare sheets and peeling wallpaper. The coastal steamers in which we had traveled thus far offered little more in the way of comfort or gentility.

  Boarding our steamboat, the Indian Queen, I thought for a moment I had been transported in a dream to the splendors of the Blossom Club or Chamberlain’s in Washington, D.C. Crystal chandeliers glittered in the dining room and main salon. The walls were aglow with blue and gold brocade, the rugs beneath our feet were inches thick. The dining room’s snowwhite tablecloths and gold-rimmed dishes and prompt service by smiling Negroes were the equal of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Our staterooms, though small, were appointed with every luxury.

  It was exhilarating to step from this palatial inner world to the deck and find yourself on the mighty Mississippi. Its breadth was not so striking just above New Orleans—only about a mile—but its muddy, implacable current reminded you of the immense journey it had made through the heartland of a continent. More remarkable was its serpentine course. Never have I seen such windings. Particularly at one of innumerable bends the great river was like a living thing, tearing away at the soft banks before our very eyes, an image of nature’s blind, furious energy.

  That night I discovered that our floating palace had another appurtenance of city luxury—the gambling den. After supper, Red Mike Hanrahan casually suggested to Dan that they go below and “buck the tiger” for a while. John O’Neil said he was tired and went to bed. I stayed on deck and watched the night come down on the great river. A redheaded Union officer found me and when music drifted out of the main salon, suggested a dance. One dance led to a dozen, and I could see he was growing amorous. I chilled his ardor by telling him I wanted to see how my “husband” was doing at cards and went down a deck to the gambling salon.

  The rambling salon was not much different from Chamberlain’s. Silent greedy-faced men flanked by ebullient women, winning and losing on the cards that emerged from the tiger-headed box. What shocked me was the pile of chips in front of Dan and Red Mike. They were playing very hard, and I did not know where they got the money. Dan was receiving a salary of $160 a month as a major in the Fenian army. Red Mike no doubt had a salary from the Irish-American, his newspaper. But there was four or five times Dan’s salary on the table in front of him.

  “Your luck is running strong,” I said.

  “Mine is,” Dan said. “Mike’s in a hole.”

  “But I’ll be out in a flash if that beast smiles at me,” Mike said.

  All bets were down. The dealer drew the fateful card, and Mike groaned as his cash was raked into the house pot. I watched for an hour, and Mike won very few rounds. He must have been down a thousand dollars by the time he quit in disgust. Dan left counting at least that much in winnings. He also brought along the woman who had been standing behind him, a brunette named Helen Shaughnessy. She had been born in New Orleans, and her father had been killed in the war, fighting for the South. She was going to Chicago “to get a husband,” she said.

  One look at her told me that she was long past the husband-hunting stage. At the bar in the main salon, she drank champagne as fast as Dan could pour it and whispered enticingly in his ear. As she said good night, she slipped her cabin key into Dan’s hand. I felt a jealous fury surge inside me. But how could I object? I went to bed in such a miserable mood, I all but forgot my original anxiety—that Dan and Red Mike were gambling with the money we had collected for the Fenian Brotherhood.

  The next morning, Miss Shaughnessy and Dan exchanged smiles and soft words at the breakfast table. She gushed about the generous reward Dan had given her for being his “luck.” If Chicago proved unpromising, she vowed to look him up in New York. I could only bite my nasty tongue and hope she fell overboard before the Indian Queen was a mile past Vicksburg.

  We debarked at that city in the early afternoon. It was a spectacular sight on its lofty bluff above the junction of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, but on closer inspection it was a battered wreck. Houses and churches and other public buildings were riddled by the Union bombardment during the bitter siege that preceded its capture in 1863.

  We hired a wagon driven by a ragged white man and pulled by a half-starved horse to get us up the steep hill to the town. After a miserable lunch of some thin soup and gray undeterminable meat at our hotel, we sallied forth to find the Union commander and see the sights. The heat was brutal August at its worst. We had scarcely set foot into Main Street when around a corner came four blue-clad Union soldiers. Hardly a surprising sight, until we focused our eyes on their faces. They were various shades of African—my first glimpse of the thousands of black soldiers in the Union Army.

  Four abreast, they bore down on us with unbroken strides. We trimmed to one side of the walk, as people do on crowded streets in New York, but this was not good enough for our oncoming friends. They continued to occupy the whole sidewalk and barged into Red Mike, sending him staggering into the dusty street.

  “What the hell?” growled Mike.

  Out of a store and across the street charged two white men dressed in darker blue uniforms with hard rounded hats—policemen. One of them, a squat, broad-shouldered fellow built on the style of General Sheridan, shook his club at the black soldiers. “Do that once more and you’ll be the sorriest nagur in Mississippi,” he said in a brogue as thick as any I ever heard in Ireland.

  “Blow it out you ass, Mike,” said the biggest of the black soldiers, a mountain of a man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.

  The blacks continued down the street, resuming their four-abreast progress, forcing two or three other whites into the gutter. The two policemen looked after them, muttering. We introduced ourselves and explained our mission. “Devil an Irish soldier you’ll find about here,” said the squat policeman, whose name was O’Connor. “They’re mostly as black as those that just shoved you into the dust. But there’s a hundred of us hired to police the town, and scarcely a one’s not Irish.”

  “There’s one or two Welshmen, I think,” said O’Connor’s smaller partner. “They’re just as crazy as an Irishman. You’ve got to be mad as moonshine to take this job.”

  They were all ex-Union soldiers, hired by the military government. The Federals had done the same thing at Memphis and other river towns, including New Orleans. The white Southerners disliked this Gaelic constabulary at first, but the policemen were beginning to win them over by showing they had no prejudice against
them.

  “All would be dandy, if it wasn’t for the nigger soldiers,” O’Connor said. “Sure the government made the greatest mistake of its life putting them buggers into the uniform of the Union.”

  “Why shouldn’t they fight in a war for their freedom?” I said.

  O’Connor gaped at me in astonishment. “Is she Irish, or one of them nigger-lovin’ Freedmen’s Bureau Republicans?”

  “I’m as Irish as you’ll ever hope to be, you lummox,” I said. “Two months out from County Limerick.”

  “Well, someone better explain America to you, me darlin’. You’ll find damn few Irish who’ll be cheerin’ on the Fenians if you come at them with this muck about glorious fightin’ niggers.”

  He strode off, leaving me almost breathless with anger. I was hardly soothed when John O’Neil said, “He’s right, Bess,” and Red Mike and Dan agreed with him.

  “Are we to be laboring to free the Irish so they can hold their heads up before the world while we cast aspersions on another race, barely free of the chains of slavery?” I said.

  “I’ll cast aspersions on anyone who shoves me off the sidewalk into the dust,” Red Mike said.

  Dan just stood there, shaking his head. I saw how futile it was to argue with them. We visited the military commander of the town, a regular army colonel from New Jersey. He confirmed that the Irish in the garrison were few but said he had no objection to our staging a Fenian rally and even suggested the theater on Main Street. We managed to muster a crowd of four hundred, many of them policemen and their wives, and we sold five thousand dollars’ worth of bonds. The policemen were well paid and had money to spare.

  While I was speaking, there was a disturbance in the rear of the theater. Someone started singing a Negro song, “Shoo Fly Don’t Bother Me,” and there were cries of “Throw the bugger out.” As our rally ended we heard the same voice roaring out another song. People were leaving the theater when two shots rang out. There was a rush to the street. There we found Officer O’Connor standing pistol in hand over the sprawled body of a blue-coated black soldier.