We trudged to the Erie County courthouse, where a nervous judge set bail of six thousand dollars each for John O’Neil and the regimental commanders. The rest, including me, were released on our own recognizance, simply by promising to appear for trial when called. The courtroom was packed with Buffalo Irish, and we were well represented by skillful attorneys, who assured the judge that the bail for the officers would be paid within the hour. Someone among the spectators called out, “Three cheers for General O’Neil.” Instantly there were three tremendous shouts, which fairly rocked the courthouse to its foundation. The judge, who looked like he feared a lynching, hastily rapped for order and informed all the prisoners that they were discharged and free to go wherever they pleased.
The crowd within joined an even larger crowd of Irish outside the courthouse to escort John O’Neil and the other colonels to the Mansion House, the city’s best hotel. I could no longer bear to see or hear any more wasted fervor. I trudged forlornly back to my own more modest hotel, the Continental. I was almost there when an agitated Mike Hanrahan overtook me in a hack.
“I was lookin’ high and low for you in that mob,” he said.
“Where are they now? In front of the Mansion House, still cheering the O’Neil?” I said.
“Yes.”
“They’re fools, Mike. We’re all fools. Stupid Irish fools.”
“If you think you feel bad now, wait till you see the papers.”
He was right. I had only begun to drink the bitter brew of our humiliation. Mike had all the New York and Washington papers in the press room. There was scarcely one that had a line of truth in it. The Tribune was typical. It described the battle at Ridgeway in the lead paragraph as follows:
The Fenians were hiding in a bush. The British column at once attacked, the Queen’s Own firing the first shot. The fight now became general, the Volunteers driving the Fenians. There were a number killed on both sides. The Canadians behaved splendidly, rushing at the Fenians with the utmost gallantry. There were eight hundred Canadian Volunteers and one thousand Fenians. Sixty were taken prisoner and carried to Fort Erie.
“Did that bastard Pickens write that?” I cried.
Mike shook his head and pointed to a paragraph deep in the column, where few would notice it.
Another account: The Volunteers took a strong position but were destroyed by a Fenian feint. They were turned upon and driven from the field. The Volunteers retreated to Port Colborne with the Fenians pursuing.
“The paper preferred to copy the lead elsewhere and ignored its own reporter,” he said. “Look at this summary on the editorial page.”
He pointed to a column that began: “The Fenians have not only been defeated in their attempted invasion, but the force that was recently engaged has fallen into the custody of the United States.” From the next day’s paper, Mike showed me a column that told some of the inner truth. With the aid of “sundry leakages,” it reported on a presidential cabinet session on the Fenian question. Seward was described as desiring the president to sign a proclamation, but others argued against “drawing the Fenian fire” in the president’s direction. The Fenian was “an ugly animal to seize by the horns.” Instead it was decided to send a circular order to federal district attorneys and marshals to suppress the Fenians. But the attorney general, who worded the “delicate circular” with Mr. Seward’s help, “inadvertently” added “by direction of the president” to the order.
A clearer statement of Seward’s policy could not have been made, for those who knew the inner story. Not only had he destroyed us, he had alienated the Irish from Johnson, making a mockery of any hope of the president’s reelection on either the Democratic or National Union ticket.
Nearby, in the same edition, was a report of our forlorn hope in Congress. A representative named Clarke from Ohio had risen to ask for belligerent rights for the Fenians. Congressman Rogers of New Jersey had supported him. The majority dismissed it without even voting on it.
“Fools, we look like fools,” I said, crumpling the papers to a ball and flinging them to the floor. “The whole country’s laughing at us.”
“When they should be crying. Or roaring with rage,” said a voice from the door of the press room.
It was Dr. Tom Gallaher. He looked almost as bedraggled as the Fenians from the garbage scow. There was a great black-and-blue bruise on his cheek. The British had held him in jail for two days trying to disprove his story that he had come to Canada as a tourist and had been forced into doctoring the Fenians. He had gotten the bruise in the post office when he tried to stop a British officer from kicking one of our wounded men and a regular had clubbed him with the stock of his musket. The rest of his story was a continuation of this initial horror. The British had treated the wounded men abominably, forcing them to stagger out to wagons and climb into them. The officers kept telling them they had their choice of dying quietly or hanging.
“Even Michael Bailey?” I asked, remembering the letter he had given me for his wife.
“No, he died before morning.”
Tom was also privy to the fate of the sentries that Dan had abandoned. Most had fled up the river, found boats, and gotten safely across to the American shore, but a half dozen had thrown away their guns and retreated into the woods in back of Fort Erie. The British and Canadians had hunted them down.
“They made a sport out of it,” Tom said. They sent men into the woods to flush them out like deer, then shot them while they were trying to surrender. I saw one man, his arms up, yelling for mercy. They riddled him.”
He slumped in a chair. “Give me a drink of whiskey,” he said.
Mike poured him a hefty glass. “By this cup,” Tom said, raising it in both hands the way a priest lifts a chalice at mass, “I swear revenge. I didn’t hate them before. Not personally. Now I swear revenge.”
“No, Tom,” I said, remembering what hatred does to the mind and heart. He silenced me with a wave. In his strange scientific soul I think he welcomed hatred as an elixir.
If the British were talking of hanging the wounded, they would almost certainly accord the same treatment to the sixty prisoners they carried away from Fort Erie in the tug that had fled the town during the skirmish with Colonel Dennis and his men. “Roberts and all the Fenians in New York must raise a storm of protest,” I said.
“We can’t get a word to them,” Mike Hanrahan said. “The army’s taken over the telegraph and banned Fenianism from the wires.”
I got rid of Tom Gallaher by asking him to deliver Michael Bailey’s letter to his wife. I took a bath and put on a clean dress and went to the Mansion House to find John O’Neil. An enthusiastic Irish bellboy proudly led me to “d’general’s” suite. I found the door barred by Margaret O’Neil. “He’s exhausted and needs rest,” she said.
I knew this was nonsense. He had gotten two days’ enforced rest on the U.S.S. Michigan. “Is Dan with him?” I asked.
Her nun’s conscience would not permit her to tell a lie. “Yes,” she said.
“They’re both drunk,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, letting me in. She sat down and picked up a scarf she was knitting. “Maybe when he sobers up he’ll realize how wrong, how foolish, this whole thing was. He’ll admit I was right all along.”
My pity for John O’Neil clashed with my dislike of his wife. “Is that all you have to say to a man with a broken heart?” I snapped.
“If you mean what I think you mean,” she replied, “John and I are not the slaves of our physical desires. We have agreed to restrain ourselves until he ends this Fenian business, one way or another, and we settle down to raise a family.”
“Where are they?” I said.
She pointed to a closed door. I threw it open and found my two heroes seated at a table, a bottle of Kentucky bourbon between them, getting drunk in the manner prescribed for disappointed Irishmen and gentlemen from Tennessee.
“What is the point of this?” I said.
Dan glared at me. “Go ’
way,” he said. “I don’ wanna look at you. For a’ leas’ a week.”
“I’ll be surprised if I want to look at you in a month and maybe a year,” I said.
“What else c’n a man do, Bess?” O’Neil muttered. “Ruin by pres’dent, m’friend.”
“You can use his so-called friendship to save the lives of your captured men.”
I told him of the British threats. He grew half sober. “Wha’ can we do?”
“Go to Washington directly and demand the great man’s help. Tell him it’s his one hope of holding the Irish vote. Even if that’s a miserable lie.”
“A’right. Get me the tickets. Tell Margaret. Dan boy, you mus’ come, too. Need you by my side.”
“I’ll be there, John,” Dan said in a voice that did not sound drunk at all. I suddenly wondered what game he was playing.
We went direct from Buffalo to Washington, a long, wearisome ride that took two nights and a day. We went straight to the White House and asked to see the president. In ten minutes, we were alone with Andrew Johnson in his office. The murdered Lincoln gazed mournfully down at us from the wall. Johnson’s great hero, Andrew Jackson, glared from the opposite wall. Between stood the living president looking weary and harassed. The confident glow had faded from his eyes, and the ruddy health from his cheeks.
Andrew Johnson embraced his friend O’Neil as he had on the first night, when he sent our hopes soaring so high. “John,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re all right. But what happened to all your bold plans? I waited five days to issue my proclamation. In five days, with the army you had, you should have been able to do anything.”
John O’Neil gazed at his old friend with astonishment and grief. “Andy,” he said. “They closed the border the night we went over, the first of June. We couldn’t get another man or gun across the river.”
Now it was the president’s turn to look astonished. “The first of June? I’d swear—”
He recovered with remarkable speed and began to lie. He was, after all, a professional politician. “You shouldn’t have let a few customs inspectors worry you, old friend. And you surely got enough men over there to do something. But—maybe there was some—some mixup. You know Congress has been giving me such a devil of a time I haven’t had a chance to sort out my cabinet, get rid of fellows I don’t trust.”
It was painful to watch him trying to conceal that he had no control of his government. He pounded O’Neil on the back and begged him not to lose faith in him. “If things went wrong, we’ll put them right next time, John. I need your help, the votes of your people in the elections this fall.”
With a sigh that was equally painful to hear, John O’Neil gave him up as hopeless. I had warned him on the train that recriminations would be a waste of time and would only lessen our chances of saving our captured men. “We still need your help, Mr. President. They’re threatening to hang sixty of our fellows.”
“What?” roared Johnson. He welcomed the plea as a godsent rescue from the need to make further explanations. He thundered and blew about war with England if they touched the hair of a Fenian head. He would summon his secretary of state that very morning and order him to make the strongest representations to the Canadian officials to pardon the captives and send them home, as the American government had done with the men they had taken into “protective custody” on the river. With a wink and a nudge he assured O’Neil that he need never worry about the indictment against him in the Erie County court. It would be quietly quashed in due time.
As we walked to the door, I told the president to give my regards to his son Robert. I intended it as sarcasm, but I almost regretted it when I saw the anguish I caused. “Thank you,” he said, his eyes downcast. “Robert—is out of the country. On a cruise. For his—his health.”
Outside, Dan McCaffrey looked back at the White House. “General Lee,” he said. “We should’ve fought to the last man. That’s all I can say.”
He did in fact say little else during our ride back to New York. In Baltimore he got off the train and bought a bottle of bourbon. He and John O’Neil drank it steadily for the next six hours. When we arrived in Jersey City, we had to help O’Neil off the train. Dan was thick-voiced but steady.
In New York we met nothing but confusion, ridicule, and clamor. Our president, William Roberts, had voluntarily surrendered to the federal authorities and was in the city prison, appropriately named the Tombs. He was issuing statements calling upon the Irish to revenge themselves upon Andrew Johnson. We learned from his friends at Moffat House that he had decided to make a martyr of himself after he read the obnoxious telegram from the attorney general ordering the arrest of prominent Fenians. But few martyrs are made by voluntary immolation. Roberts was only making himself—and us—more ridiculous.
The newspapers had settled into a systematic pattern of vilification and mockery. They called Roberts “the Carpet Knight.” The Herald, once our best backer, denounced us as “an armed mob, robbing and abusing women and children.” Another paper accused John O’Neil of being in the Southern army during the Civil War and starving Union soldiers at the Confederate prison in Andersonville. Harper’s Weekly published a long poem, “Feniana,” a single stanza of which is sample enough to limn its opinion of us.
Sing, Muse of Battles! In tones loud and cheery
The wonders of valor performed at Fort Erie!
How, led by O’Neil, the great Fenian host
Disperses a sentinel guarding the post;
How the custom-house banner is dragged to the ground
How the hen-roosts are captured for miles around.
If there is anything more disheartening, more dispiriting, more demoralizing, than the company of failed revolutionaries, I am unacquainted with it. For days on end we retired within our headquarters and did little but snarl and snap at each other. The vaunted good humor of the Irish vanished. Even Mike Hanrahan was a stranger to a smile. I scarcely saw Dan. He seemed to spend all his time with John O’Neil, who, as far as I could tell, spent all his time drunk. Dan seemed to have no interest in me. In fact he scarcely seemed able to look at me without loathing.
Another source of distress was Dr. Tom Gallaher. He haunted headquarters, urging everyone to continue the struggle. He was drunk a good deal and had given up his medical practice.
“We must strike back,” he told me. “Otherwise everyone will lose heart.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, which was the answer I gave to almost everything.
He seized me by the arm. “You need the kind of treatment I gave you at Ridgeway.”
“I do not,” I said, backing away from him, remembering the pain of his slaps.
“Or maybe the other kind of treatment I talked about giving you.”
I caught a glint of something very close to madness in his eyes.
“Tom,” I said, “you must stop drinking. You must go back to your patients.”
“The hell with them. Fat pigs all of them, stuffed with meat and money. Who should I talk to? You’re all like a collection of cattle, without brains or tongues. Is there no one with courage? I have a plan.”
“Talk to Dan McCaffrey,” I said, more to rid myself of him than from any real expectation of results. “If anything is done, he’ll have something to say about it. He was the brains of the army.”
Beyond the boundaries of my Fenian griefs lay larger personal sorrows. The first awaited me when I returned from Washington. It was a letter from my sister Mary, returning my thousand-dollar money order. She told me that Mother had died with the priest beside her, forgiving me and vowing to pray for me in heaven. Mary thanked me for the money but said she was determined to proceed with her plan to join the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at Limerick. I changed the name on the money order to “Archbishop McCloskey” and mailed it to him that day.
Annie was a more acute cause of anguish. I sought her out within a day or two of returning to New York. Her slattern of a landlady told me that she had departed, leaving no
forwarding address. I was forced to go down to City Hall and ask Dick Connolly if he knew where she was.
The city comptroller was himself no longer looking so debonair. Power and its harassments had hollowed his cheeks and put a few gray hairs on his heretofore sleek head. “Here’s the address,” he said with a bitter smile.
He scribbled it on a piece of paper. He began quizzing me about Fenian affairs, but I professed to know nothing and fled past his busy clerks and the horde of favor seekers in the corridor. The address was on West 25th Street. It was a comfortable-looking four-story brownstone. A Negro maid answered my ring. I asked for Annie. “She still in bed,” the maid replied.
At noon? I wondered. “I’m her sister. Could you tell her I called? I’ll be back at two.”
I was already fearing the worst when I returned from a walk to Madison Park, where I bought some oysters from a cartman for a cheap lunch. This time the Negro maid ushered me into a parlor that was furnished with opulent bad taste. An armless, headless statue of a naked woman, a poor imitation of the Venus de Milo, stood in a corner beside a great white piano. On the walls were paintings of naked gods and goddesses in gold scroll-work frames. The rug on the floor was deep red; matching red velvet draperies enclosed the front windows. The couches and chairs were all upholstered with some kind of white fur.
“Thank God—you’re back alive,” Annie cried, hurtling in the door as she spoke. She was wearing a dressing gown of blue silk trimmed with yards of lace and ribbons. It was the sort of outfit a lady wore in her bedroom, and it seemed particularly inappropriate in this overdone formal living room. She looked unwell, thin and frenetic, but there was so much makeup on her face, no one but a friend or relative would know it.
A Passionate Girl Page 40
